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).