Year: 2021
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New writing elsewhere, by me (2021 edition)
In the spring of 2021 I set myself a goal to pitch more publications and get more of my writing out there. Things got in the way, and well, since the summer I have not been doing as much writing as I wanted. Below is a roundup of everything I did submit this year, which…
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2021 in Books
With just a couple days to spare, I made my Goodreads Reading Challenge of 40 books. It was a close thing, but I was able to make it up in the final months of the year. Here is how the numbers breakdown by genre: 7 fiction books 8 general nonfiction books 10 books on Buddhism…
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Continuing a Japanese porcelain legacy — Review of The Art of Emptiness
In the mid-seventeenth century the nobles of Europe were thrown into an addiction crisis. With the fall of the Ming Dynasty, and the chaos that ensued, where were they to get fine porcelain to decorate their palaces? As luck would have it, a new source of kaolinite — the key mineral in the manufacture of…
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Interviewing Superintendent Kubota
This month I was in Unseen Japan for a piece called How Schools on Remote Japanese Islands are Fighting Depopulation→ In that article I detail the genesis of the study abroad program my family and I went on for our year on Iki Island (see FAQ). In writing the article I had the pleasure of…
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My year on Ikijima, a remote Japanese island
Between May 2020 and June 2021 I moved my family to the remote island (ritō 離島) of Ikijima. To find out why, check the FAQ. Three months after leaving Japan and returning to Canada, I would like to reflect on that year. Real quick though, in case you don’t already know: What are Japan’s Remote…
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Meditation stats snapshot
It has been a while, so I took a bit of a snapshot of my meditation tracker data on Insight Timer today, exporting it into Numbers for some visualization. Some quick stats: 930 Total sessions 14,800 Total minutes 753 Days with at least 1 session Timer 37% Guided meditations 63% Meditation 99% Chanting 1% Consecutive…
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Antiracist baby in Japanese
In the community we lived in on Ikijima there is a kids club that meets every Friday after school. A local non-profit put together a small office out of bits of wood and corrugated plastic to do its work. It had a concrete floor and big table in the center for meetings. There were strategic…
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A bumpy ride into the electric car future
So, we bought a thing. When I asked the dealer to take a photo he said “Do you want the big bow?” and I was like “Yes please sir I would very much like the big bow!” It is a Nissan LEAF, a fully electric vehicle. This is our first electric vehicle. In fact, it…
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A systematic culture of failure
Okay, what follows is a rant full of wild generalizations about Canadian “culture.” While on the one hand all I really want to do is vent about how terrible our experience was moving back to Canada (under both emergency and pandemic conditions), I also think the experience uncovered a fundamental truth about how society works…
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Driving Iki: Indōji to Hara-no-tsuji, the ancient Yayoi settlement
(This is the first of a video series driving around Ikijima. I will be uploading more vids as I edit them.) Iki is just a small island, only 17km long and 14km wide. Many of the attractions are outdoors, so when people visit, I would often take them on driving tours like this. On a…