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…
Date Archives 2021
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…