Hello there! 👋

Cherry blossom season has hit Greater Vancouver and I have gotten my camera out for the first time in a while. So many different kinds of flowers have been blooming, it is wonderful! Kelowna does not get this many flowers. I only remember how it kinda transitions from a dark, wet brown to a light, dry brown. Basically two tone seasons.

With spring, festival season has begun. In fact, just a little while ago I just got back from the Spring Fair at my younger daughter’s school. Her dance team performed for the crowd while my older daughter put out a craft booth in the fair market to sell some of her work and make some cash (to buy anime merch probably…).

The good spring weather has seen us visiting nearby communities and participating in different activities (including archery). There are some trip reports and photo albums linked below.

👋 Hello there!

With one last push — a week in Japan, driving a moving truck over two mountain passes, and four days at a conference in Seattle — I finally moved into our new house, ending a 5 year long journey.

We had been planning on moving during Spring Break and I had mostly taken the month off to do the move and spend some time with the kids. But I still had some excellent opportunities that I just had to take up. (I am always up for a good opportunity to meet new people and learn new things!)

Now there is a feeling of finality. Back in 2020 we left our house in Kelowna — the longest I have ever lived in one place, 8 years — to become somewhat nomadic. Twelve moves later we are now settled. The epilogue of the last few months in Surrey is turning to Chapter 1. What will this new story bring?

Hello there! 👋

Sitting in YVR right now, about to board a plane to Tokyo. I am flying over there for a week of client work. Can’t believe it has been less than a year away and I am already returning to Japan 😅. I will post some pictures on Flickr, no doubt.

In the meantime, February has been about juggling a super busy professional calendar with renovations on the new house. I am very excited to finally move in next month. It was February of 2020 that we left the house in Kelowna in which we lived for 8 years. That house is the one my kids cherish as their “childhood home.” Since then we have lived in 6 cities, moving multiple times even within those cities. If you count the temporary places we stayed (not hotels but places where we payed rent), this final move will be our twelfth (12) in the past 5 years. Really looking forward to some stability… to standing on the lawn in front of a house that I own, holding a garden hose, in shorts and black socks with sandals, and completing the long transformation into my own father.

But for all that talk of stability, March is still a whirlwind of activity: a week in Japan, one day of rest then a few days in Kelowna to get the last of our stuff from my brother’s crawlspace (and also to play the last session of Curse of Strahd in person), moving into the new house, and then immediately afterwards I will be in Seattle for the ATmosphere Conference where I look forward to meeting a bunch of the devs from the atproto ecosystem. If you are interested in open social networks, this is one conf you don’t want to miss!

Hello there! 👋

Hope you enjoyed Lunar New Year! I have been eating 年糕 Nian Gao (Chinese New Year Cake) for days, and not stopping! I have much to celebrate. My oldest daughter survived pneumonia, missing two weeks of school… and we bought a house! There is a short commemorative post below, as well as one about finding community. We have been here for 6 months and I think we are settling in nicely.

Gonna keep this one short. 2025 is coming fast (on many fronts!), there has been some bad news amongst the good, but in general I am feeling very positive about this one. I wish you many happy returns!

/ck

Hello there! 👋

Happy Holidays! I hope you are having a restful one.

This is our first winter break back in Canada. This area is a bit more Xmassy compared to Osaka, and we did the whole present thing properly. Despite not having any snow, it has been the most Xmas feeling for the past few years.

Other than visiting family and checking out some local sites including a movie set for holiday films and an exotic pet rescue center, I’ve been using the holiday time to catch up on some blogging backlog. Plus I have my annual roundup. All is linked below, so I won’t keep you. Tons of words there if you want them.

Hello there! 👋

It is -1ºC here in the Okanagan. I woke this morning to light coating of snow all over everything. I am here just for a few days visiting friends and family. ‘Tis the season I suppose.

There is a lot of connecting going on this month, whether with old friends and family or new friends in Vancouver and Seattle (see link below). And with the Trump election and Co-President Elon we have seen a huge exodus from Old Twitter to Bluesky. I have been re-connecting with friends I haven’t seen for the two years I was off Twitter! Bluesky is lots of fun. I have been collecting some tools on my Linkat (which is built on AT Proto, the protocol that Bluesky runs on). You can find me 🦋 @chadkoh.com

All this connecting and building relationships is very welcome for someone like me who has just moved to a new city. Considering the tattered social fabric of North American society, it is sorely needed. I am very happy to be engaged in a lot of community building, and will continue to do so as we move into a more repressive political climate. People are looking for meaningful connection but sometimes are scared to say, so I am trying to remember to reach out to those around me. Connect with someone new! And introduce me! Let’s build up those networks of solidarity. 💪

Hello there! 👋

The leaves are changing, it is still quite warm, we experienced another atmospheric river, and then went through a nail-biting election where climate-deniers almost won! We’ve had elections in Japan, elections in BC, and of course a whopper of an election next week. How’s your electsomnia doing?

I got back from Germany on the 10th (see blog below). It was a lovely first experience in “Middle Europe”. Previously I had only been to the edges: Lisbon and Istanbul. Germany was a pretty easy travel experience — I didn’t get sick once! It is easy to get around, they have poutine, and of course Germans speak very good English. I spent most of my time meeting people, mostly non-Germans residents, asking them about how Berlin has changed over the past few years. Soon I will write about my findings.

Since getting back though, I have had some Very Good Things happen that I have to keep under wraps for now. Suffice it to say, I have made excellent progress on this next chapter. It’s going to be busy few months but I am super happy and content with life right now.

Guten Tag from Mannheim 🇩🇪 Germany! 👋

I’ve been in country for a couple of days visiting friends and exploring before heading up to Berlin for Causal Islands. If you check my Flickr I have been posting a lot of selfies in front of old and elaborate things. (As an old and simple thing, the contrast is stark! 😜)

Usually I send these missives out on the last day of the month, but I am sending this one a little early since back in Canada tomorrow is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a day of reflection that I will participate in on this side of the Atlantic. 🟧 🪶

This is a double-issue of the newsletter since I was too busy to send one in August. Visitors came to the coast and we spent nearly two weeks in the Okanagan with friends and family. There was the Powell Street Festival and the Armstrong Fair and a visit to Vancouver Aquarium. We had school supplies and a car to buy! Then, as we got into September, and the kids started at their new schools (and Japanese school!), things started to settle down. The move to Canada is almost complete — the 18 boxes we sent on the ship are to arrive next week!

Hello from Canada! 🇨🇦 👋

We made it here safely — all together. Last time I wrote about my wife’s visa plot twist: Immigration Canada was not satisfied with the print quality of the visa document (the text didn’t line up straight) and so cancelled the visa requesting we fly to Manila to get a new one. A few phone calls and some chewed nails and they re-activated the visa, and we were safely able to travel, crossing three borders and nobody giving the crooked visa the side eye once! It was all stress but no problem, and had we done what they said, we would have had to spend at least $5000 on rebooked flights and hotel rooms while waiting for a reprint. Dodged a bullet there.

Anywho, we landed in Canada, ate poutine, moved our stuff into the new condo, and went ice skating. As you do 🇨🇦 🦫 🫎

Of course, just as I recovered from the jet lag and the move, I immediately spent 9 consecutive days commuting to downtown Vancouver to participate in the Internet Engineering Task Force Meeting. That was very enlightening and I still have a lot of follow up and reporting to do.

Hello there! 👋

We are in the final days. In a little over a week I will be heading back over the Pacific Ocean to the Greater Vancouver Area, while far below on a ship 18 boxes full of everything will be following along.

In the past when we left Japan we could always leave some stuff at my parents-in-law’s. But with no one left here, we have to take everything. (Believe me, we got rid of a lot more than what ended up in these boxes!). It is my first “root-and-branch” international move, the biggest ever.

Hello there! 👋

Last time I emailed you I was up at an old gold-mining village at the top of a mountain in northern Taiwan. This month I have finally started to put some words together about our trip to the beautiful isle of Formosa. Links below.

May saw me shifting gears into house-moving mode as we are just a month and a bit out of transitioning back to Canada full-time. So much planning, so much scrambling. May is a lovely month in Osaka, not yet muggy with perfect blue skies. Gonna miss this.

I look forward to meeting up with friends, old and new, as I re-integrate into the community in Canada. I will be at IETF120 in July and working with the local DWeb community to organize on some events surrounding that. Then in the fall I plan to be at Causal Islands Berlin. Looking forward to meeting everyone!

Hello there! 👋

I am writing you from a small, former gold-mining village in the mountains at the northern tip of Taiwan. We have been here for a few days, touching down in Kaohsiung in the far south, traveling north to Tainan and then Taipei, and now here in Jiufen. Now a tourist destination, the town of Jiufen is a series of switchbacks and houses clinging to the mountainside, overlooking the foothills and the sea. There is a famous teahouse which served as one of the inspirations for the bath-house in the Ghibli film Spirited Away. We had a very relaxing tea experience, reminiscent of the Japanese tea ceremony, in a different tea-house with a wrap-around balcony that hangs out over the valley. Gentle music played as we watched the wind push tufts of clouds upward and over the verdant mountain ridge above us.

I haven’t had much time to do my month-end reflection and write a proper newsletter. A lot happened in April — I will have to catch you up at the end of May. But let me take a moment and just talk a little about photography.

Hello there! 👋

I asked a bunch of my friends “What are you into these days? Or, if you had the resources, what would you like to get into?” It actually kicked off a deep conversation with branching lines of inquiry about how to judge the value of doing a thing, aligning hobbies to your personal politics and values, and whether or not one should find meaning in work. Effectively, we were having a discussion about eudaimonia.

Many of my friends and people I follow online make things. They are woodworkers, painters, musicians, gardeners, sailors, hackers building crazy custom keyboards or low-power permacomputing operating systems, or a million other things! I don’t really make anything with my hands, as I tend to live in a world of ideas… this is something I would like to change, I think. This month I have been particularly bad at making anything. I’ve mostly been consuming: 4 books and watched 5 movies, which is crazy for me, and never even wrote a single blog post!

The lack of making was not the only reason for considering the topic of a new hands-on hobby. As I prepare to return to Canada, to a new community, I am imagining different futures. We are house-hunting still so I am not sure where I will be, nevermind who I will be for this next chapter of life. The philosophical exchange with my friends drifted from one possibility to another. Humans have been discussing eudaimonia for nearly 25 centuries, so we obviously weren’t able to solve that particular issue. But we did come to some conclusions that I would like to submit for your consideration and comment.

Hello there! 👋

First time writing this letter on Leap Day. I actually rebooted this newsletter in mid-2020. On that last Leap Day we were 10 days away from moving to Iki Island. We had handed over the keys to our little house in Kelowna and began a nomadic life that we never expected to last this long. This month, in 2024, we just handed over the keys to our apartment in Kyoto. Yes, after 18+ years in the family, the Kyoto apartment is now sold and passed on to the next family. That was probably the biggest task of the estate cleanup after the passing of my father-in-law. We are clear to return to Canada.

And thus this month we had a call with a real estate agent in Vancouver who has started sending us a steady supply of potential apartments in the Lower Mainland (which is what we call Vancouver and its surrounding suburbs). I look forward to the day when I can just live in the moment and not have to worry about the next move…

Anyways, shall we talk about the past for a moment? Below are some links to some spring adventures I got up to. Getting out of the house and connecting with new people and old friends (including some Ritsumeikan people I hadn’t seen for more than a decade) was a theme for the month. Also, I had lots of feedback about my last newsletter note on FUN which has been as surprising as it has been gratifying! There is more in that vein we should explore.

HNY! 🎊

I was chatting with a recently retired COO of a transnational tech company about how to level up as an operations person. She gave me some excellent advice that I mulled over a lot over the winter break. Basically, the most important thing for peak performance is energy. And the way to generate energy is to make sure there is enough FUN in your life. Then you will have the fuel to lean into whatever the problem of the moment is.

Each of the last few years have been full of hardship piled upon my self-ascribed ascetic practices. “Maybe, just maybe…” I thought to myself, “What if I just took a break?” Low commitment. Make room for fun… And that has been January for me.

Rather than ensuring every minute is productive I spent some time looking at the sky. Rather than listening to podcasts while commuting or doing chores to ensure every possible moment is packed efficiently with learning, I bopped to some music. I went to a concert with my wife and watched Forrest Gump with the family (first time since it was in theatres in the 90s! Still holds up 😭🥰). I didn’t spend my evenings poring over academic tomes, but read manga and heartwarming tales of forest robots serving tea.

Hello there! 👋

Oh I really needed this winter break. In October we moved to Osaka, in November I went to Turkey, and in December I hit a large milestone that I can’t talk about right now so just wait until the next newsletter. 😉

My last day of work was the 22nd. Since then I have been trying to focus on wrapping up personal projects. I haven’t completed everything I set out to, but that’s okay — I also set the goal of being kind to myself. I had a couple of very low days where my body just decided that it was time to shut down. That’s okay. I should probably make more room for those kinda days in 2024.

We have done a couple of day trips, but most of the time has been spent around home. Last year we were in Malaysia (see my posts Truly Asia part 1 and part 2) which was a fun adventure, but this year we just needed to take it slow. I am glad we did. I am back to the office the day after tomorrow.

Hello there! 👋

I have been enjoying our new apartment in Osaka. Although just a few minutes from the busy city center, we are in a pocket of the city with many trees. There is a river famous for its cherry blossoms in the spring that I can see Osaka Castle from. I bought a bike which has extended my exploration range. it doesn’t have the historical feel of Kyoto of course, but it is very convenient. The kids are closer to school and friends which makes them happy.

I spent the middle of the month in Türkiye where I met my old pal and former co-blogger Chris Gunson. We walked all over the city as detailed in the blog post below, and even crossed over to the Asian side of the world’s only transcontinental city. So now I have been to the edges of Europe, but never anywhere in between! It is good to have goals.

Now that I have returned to the other edge of Asia, I am getting into year-end wrap-up mode, getting reflective by answering the 40 Questions survey linked below. The other major happening this month: I bought our tickets to fly home to Vancouver! Yes, we will be leaving Japan on July 8 2024. The countdown has truly begun.

Hello there! 👋

This month I moved… twice!

First was moving my writing to a new platform. I have been on WordPress for a long time, and my previous 774 posts will stay there as an archive. I wanted something that was a little more lightweight and a bit better integrated with social media. After a long time of assessment I finally decided to set up a Micro.blog at micro.chadkohalyk.com. This way I can own all of my “tweets/skeets/posts” as well as my long form writing in one place. It is “indieweb as a service” which I really like.

Secondly, we moved house! The Japan exit plan is now in full motion. We are in a rental apartment in the Miyakojima area of Osaka. The Kyoto apartment has been cleaned, staged, and listed for sale. Already my mind is on the next move as I have put in the order for tickets to fly back to Canada on July 7th, 2024. We still have a couple of loose ends to tie up in Nagoya and Hokkaido but in a few months everything will be tidied up for leaving Japan (for good?).

Hello there! 👋

We found a new apartment in Osaka. We will be moving in about three weeks and putting our Kyoto apartment up for sale.

September has been somewhat ironic: I guided two parties from Canada around “my home” of Kyoto, visiting treasures like the Kyoto State Guest House (taking a few new photos). At the same time we were interviewing real estate agents and preparing to leave.

Only a few weeks remain, and I am feeling a bit melancholy. Jiji and Baba bought this apartment 19 years ago. It has been in our lives for a very long time, and now it is time to say goodbye. We are really pulling up our roots here in Japan as we prepare to move back to Canada next summer.

Hello there! 👋

It is the end of summer and the long, long, shared parental nightmare of “summer break” is now over. The children are no longer moping about complaining of being bored and consuming endless hours of YouTube. They started back at school earlier this week (to the relief of all parents!).

And it isn’t like we didn’t do anything… we travelled Iki Island, visiting the beach and old friends (the photos I promised last month are linked below). We also had visitors. Some of my best friends from Kelowna are here now, visiting us in Kyoto. I took them to the Kyoto State Guest House, “a national facilities to receive foreign dignitaries, such as monarchs, presidents and prime ministers, from countries all over the world.“ There is a photo gallery and a writeup linked below. The Kyoto State Guest house is “the place that offers the finest hospitality where the best essence of Japanese traditional skills are integrated.” Only the finest for my friends!

While the kids were playing video games, having sleepovers and going to movie theatres with their friends, I have spent quite a bit of time planning. This fall is going to be a busy one and I am trying to get ahead of things. Some chapters are ending, so I better have the outlines for the next ones.

Hello there! 👋

Summer break is in full swing, and so we are taking advantage of a break in school to make some trips, and get out of the heat of Kyoto (which clocked 42ºC in RealFeel today). At the beginning of the month we escaped northward, to Tohoku, where it was a balmy 22ºC and dry. Lovely!

However, summer also means matsuri time, and one of the major three festivals in Japan is Gion Matsuri here in Kyoto and we couldn't miss it (and neither did the 150,000 visitors we had this year!). This festival has been warding off disease and pestilence since 869. A few dozen neighbourhood floats, each weighing tons, are hauled around the city over the period of a month. It has a very distinct type of festival music, very konchiki kon. This year we were able to go into the Ōfune-hoko, a large boat float, while they were playing! It was crazy loud. Photos and videos linked below.

Last week my wife took our kids over to Korea for a week. I stayed home to work, but it also gave me the time to finish off some blog posts linked below.

Hello there,

On March 11th 2011 I was working at the Apple Store in Richmond. My wife and our 2 year old daughter were in Japan for a bit of a spring break. When I heard the news of the triple disaster in Tohoku – a 9.1 earthquake triggering a tsunami that took out a nuclear power plant – I was frightened for my family. Lucky for me they were okay. Tragically there were 19,759 deaths, 6242 injured, and 2553 people declared missing. Four years later there were still 228,863 people living displaced from their homes or in temporary housing. Even today, Japan still has not recovered from the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Tomorrow I will get on a plane with my family bound for Aomori. From there we will spend the next week working our way southward, visiting various memorials and seeing the ongoing recovery efforts of towns that were washed away along the coast. It is an important historical event that Japan is still dealing with, and we want to make sure to pay our respects while we are here in Japan.

Hello there,

I am sitting on the deck of a small cabin at Bodega Ridge, on Galiano Island about 1.5 hours from Vancouver. I have been here all this week on corporate retreat. Now I am taking a break enjoying the chirping of the birds, squawking of ducks, and croaking of the frogs as I reflect back on this month.

May has been a month of connections. We started the month with a three-day basic archery course with me and my two daughters, which was a lot of fun (post below). We had two visitors to Kyoto from Kelowna! After a long hiatus I joined a web developer meetup in Kyoto for the first time. With Asian Heritage Month in the Okanagan my family hosted a movie night from Japan (we watched One Big Hapa Family which I have blogged about previously). And just last week I flew here to British Columbia to spend a week in-person with all my company teammates surrounded by the beauty of the Gulf Islands, and meeting some cool people on the island doing computer art, building tree-mounted internet architecture, shoemaking and tiny house-building, and a particle physicist teaching data science online and making glider sails.

Hello there! 👋

The month of 🌸 cherry blossoms underlined a new season for us here in Kyoto as we closed the books on a significant number of chores. It has been a year since we came to Kyoto! And finally finally we are starting to settle into our life here. So much so that I was able to actually start meeting people. I spent a weekend playing games at a friend’s BBQ restaurant, took a photowalk with someone in Arashiyama (photos linked below), and had a mini meetup at the Kyoto Maker Faire — all with people I had never met IRL before.

Social interaction was the theme of the month.

I popped up to Tokyo and met with the nascent Japanese Bluesky dev community! You might have heard of the new Bluesky social app. The Bluesky crew are friends of Fission so I attended their very first meetup ever (and ended up getting roped into translating! 😅 Check out this article Japanese tech media article to see yours truly photographed awkwardly holding a mic). Since then I have spent wayyy too much time on social media going back and forth between Bsky and Mastodon posting my photos and following the “uncivil war” happening in decentralized social networking land this past couple of weeks. I have largely stayed out of the fight since I can see the perspectives of both sides. Can’t we all just get along and admire my cute new avatar? It was made by an illustrator who came to the Bluesky meetup. Although I am a bit social’d out, one thing all this online networking gained me this month is lots of good links for sharing below. 💎💎💎

Hello there! 👋

I am on day 11 of living out of my suitcase, traveling around Kyushu. Spring break! For the first week we did a family trip to Kagoshima, Tanegashima, and Kirishima Hot Springs at the far south end of Japan. (I have uploaded some of the photos, see links below.) Then the family went home and I stayed back here in Kyushu, working remotely while catching up with friends and visiting some historical spots to continue my (long-suffering) book research. I spent a few days in Kagoshima photographing the volcano, and then went up to Fukuoka to hit the city museum. Now I am down in Karatsu after taking a tour of some Mongolian horde invasion sites on the Itoshima peninsula. It was such a gorgeous sunny day!

Okay, enough throwing place names at you. The point is, I am touring about and having fun. Lots of materials have been gathered, but I haven’t had time to blog about them, so this month’s update is a little light. Check out some links below.

I will be back in Kyoto on the Sunday. I love living in Kyoto, it is a very special city in the world. But there is something to be said about waking up to the sound of waves… it is just so amazingly healing ❤️ 🌊

Hello there,

After a hectic couple of months of travel, February has been a time to regroup. (Also, my Japanese visa is about to expire so I can’t go overseas until I get my new residence card in a couple of weeks 😅). But not being able to go anywhere has coincided with a bit if a breakthrough on the emotional front. The stormy seas of mourning and seemingly endless demands of estate management administrivia have subsided significantly. I feel like the spring sun has given me time to focus on my own stuff. This not only means I have been processing my back issues of the Literary Review of Canada and Mekong Review, but doing chores that have been on hiatus for months, catching up on my studies, writing some blog posts (see below) and spending some quality time with my family. I even got to see Phantom of the Opera! (which was creepy as heck!).

My impulse to explore has not dampened, of course. I have turned my attention to investigating the ancient sidestreets and back alleys of Kyoto, trying to find the best/weirdest coffee places. I successfully discovered a roaster in an old Japanese house, another in a stairwell, a cafe that sells vegan doggie treats at the counter, and a place that serves Turkish tea but is only open on Tuesdays (I need to write more about why he is only open Tuesdays). The weather is trending towards spring and I so enjoy walking the streets of this city.

As with all things, this calm will not last. Next month I am off to a remote island in southern Japan where firearms were first introduced in the 16th century, and since the 20th century has been used by the Japanese space agency to launch rockets into orbit! It'll be a blast!

Hello there,

The last few months have seen me on more than a few airplanes: Lisbon in October, Malaysia in December, and just yesterday I returned from more than two weeks in Vancouver. I don’t know about you, but every time I travel I always ask: “could I live here?” Buried in that question are all sorts of personal assumptions and comparisons.

Vancouver is a pretty easy one for me. I lived there for four or five years in the past, have many good memories, and a small group of resident friends and family. I love its multiculturalism, but wish it had better weather. Although I have visited a few times in recent years (ie you may recall my adventure picking up my electric car) this time was the first that I spent in East Van, infamous for its large unhoused population and as a new front for gentrification. It put me in mind of how cities around the world can feel.

Compare, for example, Kuala Lumpur. This is a highly developed and populous city in a youthful country that has seen decades of continued development. It was fascinating to be in a country “on the up” (yes, this is very broad strokes) especially coming from Japan which has been on a slow but steady decline for the past 30 years or so. KL has the standard signs of a developing city: lots of ongoing construction, shiny “modern” buildings and fancy condos side-by-side with older buildings from a previous generation that may or may not be slated for destruction… yet. While in Vancouver I stayed in a new tower which felt like an island relative to the surrounding neighbourhood. It struck me how similar the experience was… almost like I was merely in a colder KL. (And I deign to call KL “developing”?!)

Happy New Year!

It is the last day of the year and I am tired. It is almost midnight and I am watching New Year’s Eve Japanese TV and eating snacks. At 6am this morning we landed in Japan after spending two weeks in Malaysia.

My kids have a long winter holiday this year. Rather than just having them sit around the house consuming YouTube for hours on end while I am at work, we decided to fly early to Kuala Lumpur. For the first week I worked remotely while my wife and girls relaxed at the pool, checked out the neighbourhood, and ate awesome Malaysian food. At night we would go out together. The second week I was on my holiday so we switched into full tourist mode. By then we were used to the temperature and daily life, and had a good headstart on our winter holiday. What a great benefit to working remotely!

Now that we are back, I have to go through the 1036 photos and do a trip report. I will post that in the new year. In the meantime here are a few random things I would like to share as we close out 2022.

Hello there! 👋

The theme for the past month must be “social.” Firstly, I basically left the Twitter dumpster fire and started using my Mastodon account full-time. I forward my Masto posts to Twitter so I still have a presence there, but I basically never log into Twitter anymore. Only about 10% of the people I followed on Twitter have moved over, but since they are the most active users my timeline is pretty full. Plus I am discovering all sorts of other interesting people. It is a nice vibe! You can follow me @chadkoh@indieweb.social. I plan on changing to cosocial.ca when that gets stood up (I am going to an organizer meeting later this week). The demise of Twitter has re-ignited interest in decentralized software which has been a boon for my company which makes decentralized protocols (more on that below).

The socializing has not been limited to online. As the borders have opened and domestic tourism incentive campaigns have fired up we hosted a series of visitors to Kyoto. I met a couple of cool new friends visiting from Tokyo and Germany. An old friend from Australia came, and we had two sets of visitors from Iki, our old island home! One was a family that we took on a walking tour of Nara, guided by the father of a friend from back in Kelowna. 'Tis truly a small world.

Speaking of old friends, I spent a few days up in Tokyo visiting some mates from back in the day when I lived in Kyoto more than 15 years ago. While there I took the opportunity to connect with a few startup communities while up there which was instructive and inspiring. The startup scene has changed quite a bit since 2010 when I left for Canada to chase my startup dream.

Hello there!

After two-and-a-half years Japan opened its borders to foreign tourists this month. We are in a new phase of “With Corona.” Already I see a massive uptick of travellers to Kyoto. Japan’s latest subsidized domestic tourism campaign has also added much wood to the low embers of the industry here in Kyoto.

Luckily before the major Tokyo airports were crowded, I was able to take off to Lisbon for a work trip (see the blog post linked below). I got back to Japan the day before the border opened, and it only took me 20 minutes from deplaning to getting my luggage and out the door. I doubt that will ever happen again!

Besides the borders being unbolted, the gates to internal travel too were thrown open. We took the opportunity for a family trip to the edge of Japan: to Tsushima and our old home on Ikijima! I will be blogging about that trip next month, but you can catch a preview by checking out the Twitter threads posted below.

👋 Hello there!

I am currently in Lisbon, Portugal. Yes, I travelled 32h45m52.21s to be here. I am very sunburned and slightly dehydrated from walking up and down the waterfront visiting famous landmarks and discovering new kinds of poutine today. Why am I on the opposite side of the world from my family right now? Well, I am on a little holiday before a work retreat starts next week. I have been trying to take it easy, to relax and treat it as a sort of personal retreat. There has not been a series of efficiently scheduled tours and museum visits. I am perfectly content sitting at a café table, listening to the delightfully impenetrable sounds of língua portuguesa (which to my ear is like a drunk Russian trying to speak Spanish), and watching beautiful people zoom by on electric scooters… while smoking. Each morning I walk the city, indulging in epic Euro edifices such as perfectly proportioned plazas and gratifyingly geometric gardens. Already there are a few hundred photos racked up, so expect some travel reports and photo albums next month.

This is my first time visiting Europe. The furthest West I have been is, I dunno, Tehran? And now I am on the very western edge of continental Europe. So far the Portuguese have been excellent to me. The food is delicious, and atmosphere is something entirely new to me. Too many cobblestones though. That is my one complaint. They are pretty uniform however, which is remarkable.

Anyways, I really need to go to sleep.

The summer break has ended here in Kyoto. Taisho (大暑) the “Greater Heat” season of the old 24 term Chinese solar calender ends at the beginning of August. At the end of the month is one of Japan’s 72 micro seasons Tenchi hajimete samushi (天地始粛), when the heat starts to die down. I have been feeling this in the past few days as the humidity has dropped, and I can turn off the aircon and let the cool breeze blow through the new condo.

Yes, we have fully moved into the condo my wife inherited from her father. After much cleaning and removing of old junk, the kids now each have their own rooms to decorate. Depending on how you count, this was the tenth move in two-and-a-half years. Considering our transiency for the last few years, where every place has been temporary, this place gives off a strange vibe. A few months ago I ruminated on the idea of when you can call a city “yours”. It goes without saying that your home should be in your city. This “new” apartment is one that I have been frequenting for 18 years. We had our second daughter here. Both of my kids have known this place all their lives. Thus, this place feels more like “home” than many of the places we have stayed over the past three years.

And now there is school! After a four month hiatus filled with emergencies, a funeral, and far too many hours of YouTube, the kids are off each morning on the train to attend to classes. After seeing them off I walk down the block, cutting through the old temple grounds while the bell tolls, to my coworking space which I share with a startup, a couple of freelance software devs, a musician, a magazine editor, a voice actor, and a monk. It is a wonderfully eclectic place that fits me well.

A home, a school, a workplace… a routine.

I write to you from the Kyoto Tower Hotel. We had a bit of a mishap. More on that below.

When I left you last, my father-in-law, the reason we had come to Japan, had just passed. Thus the first few days of this month were consumed with the rituals of the multi-day funerary proceedings. I should really write about that process now that I have gone through it a few times. In the end, it all went smoothly. Just how it should, and how he wanted it. We spent the next few days going over happy memories, and concluding that everything that happened did so in a satisfactory way. It was a healing process for those left on this side of the bardo. The next step is the interment which we will do in October when it gets a little cooler.

Once the funeral ended, then started a new whirlwind of activity. We decided to clean up and move into the apartment he left behind. (This is our 10th move since 2020?!) From there the kids can go to school, and we can start work on wrapping up the estate. The apartment has one less room than the house we have been renting, so I went off on a hunt for a nearby co-working space to rent an office for my early morning and late night calls.

Then the Gion Festival happened. After two years hiatus the festival is back and a ton of people came out to see it. Kyoto’s premier festival Gion started in 869 as a sort of purification ritual. And it was happening just down the street from us! So we took a few walks and checked it out (link to photos below) but did not go to the parade and avoided the densest crowds. (Things still aren’t really pure enough as Japan enters its 7th wave of the coronavirus).

The last day of June. A Real Feel™️ of 42 degrees celsius. Not even summer yet. But things started to settle down this month. We took the kids to Universal Studios Japan. Summer Camp started. Screen time decreased. I went out for coffees with friends, old and new, after a couple months of just being in the house with the kids. There was barely a rainy season and the heat and humidity started to crank up. It was still “crisis mode,” but with a modicum of control.

Yesterday it all changed.

A morning txt and my wife was off on her bike to my father-in-law’s apartment, a five minute ride away. Upon arrival she called the ambulance then messaged me instructions to get the hospital bag. I grabbed the kit and headed out into the sweltering heat, searching frantically for a taxi. It was 11:59 when I arrived at the hospital entrance, only to be told to stay outside. They called it at 12:02.

Done. There. The thing we had come to do, packing up and moving across the ocean to spend the remaining months and moments of his life together — we did it. It is over.

With the cherry blossoms gone and the leaves filling out a bright green, the weather is getting warm and the air is filled with the sounds of preparation for summer.

It is lovely outside, as the humidity has not set in. Yet I have generally been cooped up. The kids don’t have school and are bored. I am working from home. My wife is going back and forth to the hospital. Later this week my father-in-law will undergo surgery. It won’t make him better, but may draw out the decline.

Last week he went back into the hospital, but before that we were able to accomplish two things he wanted to get done: we went on safari, and we interred his wife’s ashes. (Not at the same time, which I hope is obvious.)

Adventure World, a zoo/amusement park/safari park/research lab is associated with the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Base in China. It is one of only three locations in Japan with giant pandas. Grampa always wanted to take his grandkids to see the pandas. And so we boarded four hours of trains down the rugged Wakayama coast and did just that. I took a million photos, some of which are linked below.

Just a reminder: this is the monthly newsletter of your friendly belletrist Chad Kohalyk, where I write a personal note with highlights of both my writing and some of the fun/interesting stuff I find on the web. You probably subscribed via my Twitter account or from my blog. If you no longer want to follow along, just click the unsubscribe link in the footer below. Thank you for reading!

In my last newsletter I wrote a surprise note from Kyoto. Just three weeks later I am writing you again from Kyoto, where I arrived in a sorry state of jetlag yesterday. In these recent weeks I returned to Canada with my two daughters, sold my electric car and computer, moved out of our rental in Kelowna, said goodbyes to friends and family, and returned to Kyoto for the foreseeable future as detailed in this month’s only blog post (link below).

These past three years have certainly been mobile for my family, with the “difficulty level” increasingly ratcheting up.

Greetings from Kyoto.

I am writing from our apartment in the western foothills of the city – a “new town” built in the 80s, with curved modern towers separated by green walkways and stands of bamboo. The weather is unseasonably cold and overcast. The cherry blossoms elsewhere in the country are in full bloom, but are still struggling here.

Last week, while in Kelowna, we got a call from an ER in Kyoto. My wife’s father was ambulanced to the hospital in the middle of the night, heart struggling to get oxygen. He has been battling stomach cancer for a few years so this news took us by surprise.

“Is this your first war?“ I asked my daughter, who will be 13 soon, if the invasion of Ukraine is the first war she remembers.

It was at about her age when I became conscious of actual wars being fought in the present, and not just in the history books. For me it was Gulf War 1. I think the first global news event I remember was the coming down of the Berlin Wall. Tiananmen Square? My adult learning about that event have taken over any youthful memories that may have remained.

Asking my daughter about other wars she replied “Afghanistan… ?” Yes, but on further questioning it seemed that war was in the past for her (granted it was started well before her birth). Surprisingly she wasn’t conscious of Syria, even though I was (shortly) involved in the Syrian refugee settlement movement, and we have discussed that (ongoing) war in our household a lot. My kids have long been exposed to politics at the dinner table. I am known to pull out a map at the last minute to explain nearly anything to rolling pre-teen eyes. (“Not the map Dad!”)

Canadians have a geographic privilege to not have to think of war from a young age. Even compared to the US we have political privilege — there it seems everyone knows someone who has been deployed.

🖖,

A new year so I set my goals with the maximum of motivational momentum which of course was instantly derailed because I got sick with covid.

How is your year going so far?

I recently sat down with an organization working on lunar policy. The moon represents a “clean slate” in terms of human governance. It is the ultimate test to figuring out how can we arrange collective human activity, with benefit of all the knowledge of how we have utterly failed on Earth.

Happy New Year!

It is the morning of New Year’s Eve here in western Canada. There is more than a foot of snow on the ground, but the sky is a clear blue. A beautiful last day to a volatile year.

We spent the first months unable to leave Iki Island due to travel restrictions. I made a big breakthrough in my book. We made plans to move to Osaka and put the kids into international school. Then we had to undergo an emergency international move under pandemic conditions. My father passed away suddenly. I think I found my purpose in life. We had to settle into a new house in a new community, new schools and finally a new job.

It was all too much, and we have no space for all the reflection here. So I will close out with some final lists. Apologies as I assume your inbox is already full of year end roundups, so here is another one to throw onto the pile, as we say goodbye to 2021.

Autumn greetings,

T’was a month of floods, sudden snows, electricity outages, and food shortages (due to panic buying). All the while I was looking at the gorgeous fall photos coming out of Japan. Ginkgo trees were in full yellow regalia (seriously, check it out on Twitter!). On FaceTime the other day my father-in-law in told us of how it was getting cooler in Japan. The sun was shining brightly into his Kyoto apartment. He wore a nice fall sweater over a black turtleneck. I looked it up and it was 27 degrees Celsius.

Unfortunately due to border closures we were not able to visit Japan this autumn. Since June our apartment in Kyoto sits waiting to be cleaned out. It will sit longer due to the latest Omicron-inspired Japan border closure. And it looks like we will miss the usual spring visit, leaving us to merely hope that we can make it next summer.

But all is not lost. After 21 months off, I am once again gainfully employed. I started a new, fully remote, job last week. It has been tiring getting used to the pace of working life again after so much time off. However, I am in my element, learning about all sorts of new things (the company is an applied research firm working on internet protocols).

Halloween greetings to you!

Lately we are experiencing the brisk autumn weather. As the sun sets, darkening the cold blue sky, it drops to about 1 degree for All Hallows’ Eve here in western Canada. The neighbourhood is well decorated. Our neighbours harvested the last of their garden before the frost set in, mounding the soil and planting crosses and tombstones with punny names of the dead.

Earlier this month, before the snow fell in the mountain passes, we decided to take a family trip to Vancouver. Since shipping to/from Japan is very limited we can no longer receive the big care packages of food we would usually get each month. So we loaded up the electric car and headed to Richmond BC for a haul of Japanese food to last us through the spring. Luckily the drive was NOT a disaster like the first time. I have included some photos from our trip in the section below.

Today is Canada's first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. I have been home discussing the topic with my children, and remembering the plight of the survivors and those that never came home. So I will not write a full preamble to this month's newsletter. I hope my fellow Canadians are reflecting on our shared history. For those abroad, maybe take a moment to look into Canada's past. But remember that this is part of a global story. Today the Asia Watch newlsetter from the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada featured Indigenous issues from around Asia. The chart below comes from that post, and gives you an idea of the size of indigenous populations are there, many without a proportional voice. It is about time we listened up.

🖋 From the Blog

My year on Ikijima, a remote Japanese island
Big wrap-up piece. I try to capture a year living on Iki, and all the emotion, in a mere 3000 words 🙃

"Home" has been on my mind. How many times have we moved house in the past 18 months? (During a pandemic I might add!). This month we finally settled into our new place in Kelowna after two months of nomadism. This chair goes here, that rug goes there. Should we move the lamp? We keep things pretty minimal for practical reasons. In the meantime, my mother is reconsidering her home situation after the passing of my father.

The local wildfires have taken many people's homes. At the beginning of August it looked like hell outside. With the drop in temperature and recent rains, the smoke has cleared up significantly, but there are still sites in the valley where evacuees from surrounding areas are living out of campers and trailers, waiting to return and/or rebuild.

This month has also seen another dislocating disaster as people (try to) flee Afghanistan. Previously I have written about Dr Nakamura Tetsu who spent 30 years in Afghanistan. In his book (my review here) he scoffs at the coming-and-going of arrogant foreign militaries and NGOs. He was able to accomplish so much on the ground because he was so committed to listening to the needs of the Afghan people. (His attitude and story impressed me so much I travelled to his memorial south of Fukuoka this spring).

Dear reader,

We haven’t settled. Eight weeks ago, after giving away all of our possessions to neighbours and friends, we left the island of Iki. From there to Kyoto for just a few days before running the pandemic gauntlet at YVR and watching the clock tick in a quarantine hotel in Richmond. All shipping had stopped between Japan and Canada in May, so we wheeled all the suitcases and boxes we could take on the plane to a rented isolation house in Kelowna. There we sat for three weeks, only able to travel to the hospital to say goodbye to my father.

Since then it has been a month of back and forth. We asked the kids where they wanted to go for a short holiday once we were out of quarantine. They said Hogwarts. So, I took them to stay in residence at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, my alma mater. After the 45 degree weather in the dry Okanagan, Nitobe Gardens was nice and green. We rode Stanley Park and ate lots of Japanese and Chinese food. We bought a car (more on that below). It was a busy three days.

Since being out of isolation we have been staying with my mother in Armstrong BC, about 60kms north of Kelowna. We have a new house in Kelowna, and have slowly been moving stuff into it. We got our first covid vaccines. My wife and I took a second trip to Vancouver to pick up the new car (more on that below), staying on Granville Island with its lovely night view of the city. Then it was back to Armstrong and back to shuttling stuff to Kelowna in our new car, driving through the hazy valleys of the “Smokanagan.”

Greetings!

Tonight I am writing to you from a rented room tucked amongst the green foliage the religious corner of the campus at the University of British Columbia. Next door is a Catholic college and a seminary. Yes, it is a little weird, but the accommodations are nice and priced very well.

First, I must confess that I was weak and blew off last month’s newsletter. The truth is, I’ve had a hell of a last six weeks (more about that in the link below). And thus we are here on the western edge of Canada at my alma mater (obviously I did not attend the religious schools here).

Happy spring!

April seemed to fly by. At the end of last month we were in Kyoto for spring break. It was such a wonderful opportunity to see the cherry blossoms. On April 1st we left by boat from Kobe, passing through the Setō Inland Sea to Oita on the eastern side of Kyushu. From there we crossed Kyushu to Kumamoto, stopping at a few sights, before taking another ferry over to the Shimabara peninsula for a couple of days of hot spring relaxation. With spring break ending, I drove the family up to the Nagasaki airport so they could fly back to Iki and turned around to spend a few more days on my own doing field research in southern Shimabara.

It was beautiful weather and my arms and neck turned red as I tromped around the ruins of Christian castles. These were destroyed in the 17th Century, sparking the exodus to remote islands and the "Hidden Christian" phenomenon in Japan. It was a fruitful trip, and was to be the first of three this month. Unfortunately, the cherry blossom season at the end of March triggered a flare-up of coronavirus, forcing me to stay put and cancel my trips to Tsushima and the "pirate" base of Hirado.

Spring is here! Greetings from Kyoto.

We are in the old capital as it is Spring Break and the kids are off school. They have now completed one full academic year on Iki (minus a couple weeks of stoppage due to coronavirus last year)! They have done so well and grown so much.

We came to Kyoto this time to mark the one year anniversary of my mother-in-law’s passing. She passed away unexpectedly last March, just a week after our arrival in Japan. March 11th is our one year anniversary of arriving in Japan. We flew into Japan with all our belongings, 4 suitcases and 4 big boxes, under pandemic conditions. Tomorrow will be the one year anniversary of my leaving work. This month marks many anniversaries, but one of the most significant is the ten year anniversary of the Tōhoku Triple Disaster. I remember where I was when that earthquake caused the giant tsunami which took out the nuclear power plant. (Watch this video with the sound on to get a sense of how big the earthquake was.)

On the 11th of March the entire country stopped in remembrance. At 2:46 in the afternoon my wife and I stood in our kitchen, watching a ceremony in Tokyo on TV, while a siren sounded for one minute on the island emergency broadcast system. Ten years on, Japan is still grappling with the fallout from that day.

Hi, how are you?

One year ago today (well, technically it was Feb 29th but...) we moved out of our house in Kelowna. It would be ten more days before we left Canada for Japan by the skin of our teeth. What a year.

This month was also marks my 15 year wedding anniversary. Gratitude! 🙏

And now that the state of emergency has lifted, and the weather is nice, we can travel again (with precautions of course)! Iki is a lot colder than we thought it would be, so I am very happy to be getting nice weather again.

Are you having a Happy New Year 🎊 so far? I hope you are staying bundled up.

Just a reminder: I am sending this missive to you from a new service (Buttondown). If you no longer want to receive my monthly updates, you can unsubscribe easily.

Iki was shut down for January due to an outbreak of coronavirus. Since Dec 28th we have had 56 people come down with the virus. All but one have healed up, and that person should be out of hospital within days (I hope!).

We spent the month mostly indoors playing chess. Each day my 9 year old daughter and I get on our iPads, fire up Chess.com, play bots and do drills, all in preparation for the evening’s “Immortal Match” in the living room after having a bath. Every night is a new epic battle (and I am not talking about the battle of getting the kids to bed!). It's fun to learn something with your kids. I haven’t touched a chessboard since I was about 14, and she has a good eye. She even offers me cute tactical advice! We even started watching some Chess YouTubers together. I am surprised this new passion has lasted a whole month, but I will ride this fad as long as I can!