Month: May 2025

Ikigai生きがい The short translation: “The purpose of living.” More nuance: What gets you out of bed in the morning. What you are good at that you love and is needed by the world.  Embedded in the word is the belief that everyone has an ikigai. You just need to find it. Ichi go ichi e一期一会…

Yesterday I checked the weather for today. 100% chance of rain. Radar showed a huge mass moving in and sitting right on top of us. No stinkin’ rain would keep us from enjoying the day. But obviously we didn’t want outdoor expeditions.  After breakfast we headed to the front desk to inquire about umbrellas. The…

Wet day in Tokyo.  It started to rain about the time we left our hotel and now that we’re back it’s still coming down.  So we went with the big indoor option, the Tokyo National Museum.  The permanent collection had a thousand-year-old Buddhist guardian statues carved out of wood. Then there was Wisdom King Fudo.  The exhibit card read:…

Late Thursday afternoon we took part in a ritual of post-modern madness after surfacing from the Shibuya subway exit.  I felt it was a way of balancing Japanese extremes.  A few days into our trip we hiked to a deserted mountain temple and yesterday, towards the end of our journey, we joined the welter of humanity piling…

Grubb has mentioned how phenomenal public transportation is in Tokyo. Before we realized the ease with which we’d be able to zip around, we started mapping all the places we thought we’d like to go and organize our day around places that were relatively close to each other. Threw that idea out the window. Here…

The interior of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo is off limits to the public, The inner grounds can be visited by joining the official tour. Only offered twice a day in Japanese with English audioguides available. The application process for the tour must be completed at least four days ahead but you’ll be lucky to…

Today we tubed all four points of the compass in our Tokyo circuit without missing a beat.  It seemed like every time we figured out which subway line to take to our destination we were barely finished descending the stairs before the train appeared.  In one instance the doors were closed as we approached and the conductor…