It’s cherry blossom season in Tokyo, and I wanted to share my thoughts.

The sakura hit full bloom yesterday in my neighborhood, meaning our time together is drawing to a close. Now showers of pink and white petals fills the air every time the wind blows.

I eagerly await the blossoms’ arrival as the calendar changes to March every year. But I’ve never gotten used to how short their “lifespan” is.

Once the flowers appear, we get to live with them for such a short time. It’s easy to see this as pressure. But it’s really the whole reason why we love the sakura.

Even at the spectacular peak of their full bloom, the first cherry petals begin to drift away from the branches, a few at first, then over the days to come, a rain that carpets the ground. Within a week, glory has come and gone.

The sakura is a tree, but it is also a metaphor for the bittersweet impermanence of things. We treasure the cherry precisely because its beauty is as radiant as it is fleeting. It is a living poem that reminds us of ourselves.

If you’re a reader of this newsletter, or my book, it’s no secret that I love wearing kimono. This makes me something of a minority, for the vast majority of Japanese wear Western-style clothing in daily life.

Traditionally speaking, there are many rules to follow in the wearing of kimono. To learn them, one needs to be taught, either over time by their elders, or at kimono school, such as the one I went to for several years. Rules implies rigidity, but it’s not like there are fashion police out there. More simply, it’s a form of etiquette. Even in the modern era, when kimono culture is on the wane, knowing which kimono styles and patterns are most appropriate for a given situation is still seen as a social grace.

But there is one place in Japan where all the rules go out the window. Ironically, it’s also where you can see more people in kimono than almost anywhere else in public. It is Asakusa. I know this from personal experience, for dressing up in a kimono and going to this most traditional of Tokyo neighborhoods is one of my favorite pastimes.

Asakusa, and more specifically the Senso-ji temple area, is brimming with inbaundo, “inbounds,” as the government calls tourists here. And I have seen some really wild kimono styles there. This doesn’t bother me – far from it. While I prefer to follow traditional etiquette, it’s a free country, as Americans say. In fact I am starting to believe that inbound tourists are creating a totally new form of kimono culture without even realizing it.

As my husband wrote about several months back, the government is heavily promoting tourism. In 2025, almost 43,000,000 people visited from abroad. And there has been an interesting shift in the way many of these tourists spend their time here.

For a good while, the focus was on purchasing things to take back home. Pre-pandemic, I’d often see tourists, particularly from Asian countries, engaging in what Japanese call bakugaé: literally “explosive-buying,” slang for buying up everything in sight. It wasn’t uncommon to see visitors laden with bags and boxes of stuff they’d bought: home appliances, cosmetics, even disposable diapers.

Nowadays, at least as far as I’ve seen, tourists don’t seem to spend a lot of money on purchases. Instead, they are spending their money on experiences. In Asakusa, this takes the form of renting kimono to wear around the streets. I’ve been frequenting Asakusa several times a month for the last few years, so I’ve seen the rise of this new fad for kimono cosplay develop with my own eyes. Let me give you a quick lesson in traditional kimono etiquette so that you can understand this shift, and how it compares to Japanese styles of wearing kimono.

As I said, we have many customs when it comes to kimono. One of the most important is matching the season. Kimono have beautiful patterns, most of which have symbolic meanings. Some are obvious, like snow patterns for winter, or sakura cherries for spring. Others are pegged to more specific times: hina-doll patterns are worn in the days leading up to Girls Day on March 3. Rose patterns are only worn when roses bloom, which is May.

It is also customary to match the formality of the occasion. Events like weddings, funerals, or the annual coming-of-age day for the latest crop of twenty year olds all expect very specific types of kimono, traditionally speaking. And when you think about it this makes sense. You aren’t going to wear something bright and chipper to a funeral. Nor would you want something dour for a celebration.

There are further divisions within these events. It probably won’t surprise you to hear a bride wears a very specific form of kimono. What about guests? Well, are you a family member or an invitee? If you’re a close relative, you’re traditionally going to want to wear what is known as a kuro-tomesode. If you’re attending as a friend, a plain pattern is the safest choice. And how old are you? Should you be in your twenties, a colorful furisode would be a wonderful choice. Furisode feature long sleeves and bold, bright patterns, which really pop out and attract attention. They’re considered the privilege of young women. But if you are married – even as a twentysomething – they’re out. Then you’re (traditionally) obligated to wear a more formal kimono with short sleeves.

One of the most fundamental things that can throw outsiders for a loop is that, in the traditional kimono worldview, you aren’t wearing the kimono for yourself. Kimono are fashion, but we wear them to show respect for someone or something. This means you’d never wear anything that might shift the center of attention away from the occasion. Weddings? No-brainer. But it’s true for all events, really.

For instance, if you were attending a graduation ceremony, even as a parent, you wouldn’t want to overshadow those getting the spotlight by wearing something super flashy or opulent. And the center of attention isn’t necessarily a person. In spring, it is customary to avoid wearing kimono with cherry blossom patterns to hamami flower-viewing parties. Why? Because the center of attention for cherry blossom parties are the cherry blossoms themselves! Now, it isn’t like anyone is going to yell at you if you happen to wear a sakura pattern to a hanami. But to those in the know, you might seem like, well, a bumpkin.

So those are just a few examples. There are many others. As I often say, Japan is really flexible when it comes to spirituality, but it’s really rigid when it comes to society. You can roll with this or not. I chose to – that’s why I took kimono classes!

Which brings us back to Asakusa. I usually go alone, strolling the shopping arcades, paying my respects at the temples, and maybe stopping at a cafe to write and sip some coffee. These are considered casual occasions, kimono-wise. So I always pick a casual one: tsumugi, for example, which is considered the all-purpose wear of the kimono world, kind of like how the West sees jeans. I tend to go for more colorful patterns, and because Asakusa is such a culturally historic place, I often choose antique kimono for a retro feel. I like to go for a Taisho-era or early Showa vibe. Asakusa’s that kind of place.

It was in fact at a cafe that I started to notice more tourists in kimono. I opened the door and saw the room completely packed with Asian women, all dressed in ultramodern kimono. Really ultramodern, like something out of a Harajuku boutique, with laces and ruffles, the fabric beaded with faux pearls. This really shocked me. Were kimono making a comeback? It wasn’t until I was finally seated that I realized: everyone was speaking Chinese. Aha. These were tourists.

Some months after that, I saw a middle-age woman wearing kuro-tomesode, a formal black kimono ornamented with gold and silver thread. Now, the only time you ever wear a kuro-tomesode is when a close relative, perhaps your own son or daughter, is getting married. We were on the grounds of a Shinto shrine, so I assumed there would be a wedding happening soon. In fact, I was getting ready to say “congratulations!”

But right before I opened my mouth, I noticed she was accompanied by a man, also in kimono. But he also had a plastic sword strapped to his waist. And then I noticed both were wearing sneakers. I was shocked again – not because they were tourists, but by the quality of the kimono they were wearing. The ladies in the cafe looked almost like gothic lolitas, pure cosplay. But these two wouldn’t have looked out of place at a wedding – minus the sneakers and sword, of course.

For a long time, rental kimono were really cheap – polyester fabrics, or cotton yukata robes. In a sense these fabrics matched the “formality level” of tourism, which is to say “informal.” But it seemed the rental shops were evolving beyond their simplistic origins to offer visitors a wider array of choices to choose from.

Another thing has changed. Until now, most of the tourists I saw wearing rental kimono were Asian women. Now I see plenty of men joining in, too. And people are wearing all sorts of kimono in all sorts of ways that break customs. Everyone’s having fun, so I don’t mean this as a complaint. But traditionally speaking, it’s fashion pandemonium — kimono chaos!

Here’s what I mean. Recently I found myself walking a ways behind behind a pair of women dressed in bright pink furisode. They wore the proper tabi footwear, so I initially assumed they were young Japanese ladies. But then I caught up with them and realized I was wrong. They were tourists – and they were nowhere near twenty! You’d never see a Japanese obasan doing this. It felt a like seeing a grandma in a hot-pink baby-doll dress. But it also made me smile. I mean, why not? If it makes you feel good, go for it.

One of my favorite kimono chaos moments happened shortly after. I spotted a Western man and his girlfriend, walking together, both in bright flower-pattern kimono. A grown man in a kimono meant for a teenage girl! With red ribbons in his hair and a traditional purse! To paraphrase Doc from Back to the Future, “where we’re going, there are no rules.” It seems Asakusa has become a safe space where anyone can feel comfortable wearing any kimono they like.

This is what I mean by saying Asakusa seems to be creating its own unique kimono culture. It’s driven by a combination of interest in Japanese culture, the rental shops run by locals, and the different worldviews and value systems of foreign visitors - all of it empowering people to wear whatever they like to wear, rather than what they “should.”

The irony is that Asakusa is deeply associated with traditional Japanese kimono culture. But today, whenever I see someone in a kimono there, I tend to assume they’re a foreigner. And I don’t seem to be alone.

A few weeks back, I was lined up to pay my respects at Asakusa Jinja, the Shinto shrine right next to Senso-ji temple. As I waited, a middle-aged Japanese woman behind me quipped to her friend, “nice kimono! Perfect choice for the season. The foreigners are really getting good at this.” It took me a moment to realize she was talking about me! Think about this: I’m a Japanese dressed in a “proper” kimono at a Shinto shrine in the heart of Tokyo’s most traditional neighborhood, getting mistaken for being a foreign tourist. I politely pretended not to hear, but couldn’t help but smile. That’s just how it goes in the Wild West-meets-East of modern day Asakusa.

It’s easy to dismiss Asakusa as a tourist trap these days. But I’m telling you, every time I visit, I see something new. Asakusa isn’t stuck; it’s evolving. It feels like a mash-up of local and global styles, the traditions of Asakusa reflected in the choices of people from all over the world.

And maybe this isn’t anything new. Maybe it’s just history repeating. Maybe this is what the Asakusa of Edo, as Tokyo was known prior to 1868, felt like in times of old. It’s easy to think of it old Edo as monoculture, in terms of the country not having any contact with the outside world. But in reality, Edo, and Asakusa in particular, were busy hubs for people coming and going from all over Japan.

Asakusa has always been chaotic in its own way, a cauldron for brewing up new trends in fashion, art, literature, and language. A long history of accommodating waves of newcomers — then from all over Japan, now the world — nourished a sense of openness and inclusiveness. And it was a two-way street: Asakusa absorbed things from visitors as they passed through and went on their ways. Maybe that is what it continues to thrive as a tourist destination today.

That’s why I think of what I’m experiencing as new chapter in the history of old Edo. The players are different, but the “vibe” hasn’t changed at all. So while I’ll stick to my traditional styles, out of personal choice, I’m going to cheer on the neighborhood’s “radical inclusiveness” as I watch the creation of something new.

If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy my book Eight Million Ways to Happiness. You can order here! (Or here if you’re in the UK.)

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Every December, I go to Maryland with my husband. Usually, we stay with his parents for a few weeks, then return before the end of the year to spend the New Year’s festivities at home in Tokyo. That has been the general plan for roughly two decades. This year, however, we broke with tradition and spent all of January in the States. The reason being that I needed to have “boots on the ground” to promote the release of my new book there. But then my husband was invited to give a keynote to a group of Japanese educators… in Waikiki.

Waikiki! We’d already bought our tickets to Dulles, but this was too fun of an opportunity to turn down. He was excited to speak to teachers, as his own language senseis had changed the direction of his life. But it meant flying from Tokyo to Washington D.C., then three-quarters of the way back to Honolulu, within the space of about a week. Would that halve our jetlag or double it? And then there was the huge gap in terms of climate, from below freezing in Maryland to the balmy mid-seventies in Waikiki. I looked at our suitcases skeptically, wondering how we’d fit multiple seasons worth of clothing in. The distances, the logistics… It was totally crazy. But it was also Hawaii. So of course we were all in.

And really, given how packed my schedule had been the last few months, a vacation sounded just about right. I’d spend some much-needed time on the beach while my husband did his conference, and then we added three nights to let us explore the Big Island. The first we’d spend at a resort in Hilo, then move to a bungalow just outside Volcanoes National Park. My idea was to take a leisurely tour of the Big Island while hiking around Mt. Kilauea.

But life had other plans in store.

Things took an unexpected turn while we were still in flight. When I woke up, a few hours before landing, my husband informed me that he’d been exchanging emails with an old friend in Hawaii, and she’d just arranged an appearance for me on Hawaii’s biggest morning news show the very next day. All I had to do was hop in her car the next morning. So instead of sleeping in, I found myself in Hawaii News Now’s “Sunrise” Honolulu studio talking about my book on live television at six in the morning.

My “vacation” kicked off with that unexpected excitement. And as it turned out, it ended with an equally unexpected thrill: we just so happened to be in Volcanoes National Park when Mount Kilauea erupted on the morning of January 12th. Now, I should note, as a Japanese native, volcanoes familiar to us. In fact there are well over a hundred active in our country today. But Japan’s are stratovolcanoes. When they get active, they can explode. So when we hear word of an impending eruption, we run.

Not so in Hawaii. Its shield volcanoes behave quite differently from the ones in my country. They tend to slowly ooze magma or spray it upwards in fountains, like some kind of insanely large firework. Locals keenly track these events, of course, because even slow-moving lava can be incredibly destructive. But other eruptions, more contained, with little potential for damage, are magnificent natural shows.

I learned this on our first day in Hilo. The big-screen televisions in the lobby bar were set to the feeds of various US Geological Service livecams placed inside Kilauea’s caldera. So were the various displays in common areas and hallways. Here on the Big Island, it seemed, volcano watching was a kind of sport.

After settling in we sidled up to the bar. I ordered a mocktail; My husband took a Mai Tai. On the screens, a pair of rocky vents percolated bubbles of magma. It was a strange sight, as though an invisible giant were fluffing enormous, glowing pillows.

“Doming out pretty good right now,” said the bartender, catching our gaze. Then he turned to another couple sitting across the bar, who’d just flown in from Honolulu in an effort to catch an eruption. We overheard that the USGS was predicting one any day now. Kilauea went dormant for long periods, but had grown active again in December of 2024, fountaining in numerous eruptions – officially called “episodes” – over the course of 2025. Now we were due for what the volcanologists were calling Episode 40.

It was all anyone seemed to talk about. “Look at the previous episodes! It’s gonna be this week for sure,” I overheard another man telling his friend, in the same tone a bookie might use to handicapping the horse races. Watching the vents burbling on screen, I could understand. When we talk about geology we usually think about timescales that boggle the human mind. But here geology seemed to be on a kind of speed-run, happening in the blink of an eye.

“If it fountains anything like it did last month,” the bartender told us as he cleared our drinks, “it will be unbelievable. The magma went over a thousand feet last time.” Then he gave us details about where to park in Volcanoes to get closest to the “action.” The Park Service kept visitors at a safe distance, but there were several prime viewing spots. They had limited parking spaces. And if Kilauea erupted, he said, you could bet half the island would make a beeline for the park. Many locals went their whole lives without catching sight of a fountain, unpredictable as eruptions were.

We drove to Volcanoes National Park early in the morning of the next day. The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of the mountains on the island. They were tall – Mauna Kea stood 4,207 meters, slightly taller than Mount Fuji, but also more voluminous: its base was double or more Fuji’s width, giving the mass a grade so gentle it seemed to become the horizon. Mount Kilauea, the centerpiece of the park, wasn’t as high, but its caldera was huge, more like a giant meteor crater than the peak of a mountain, its lip a sheer 165 meter cliff. Off in the distance we spotted the two vents we’d seen on camera, now steaming mightily. We began to hike the rim to get closer to them.

We ended up spending all day there. As night fell, incandescent rivulets of lava stained the skies pinkish-red, in a scene that reminded me of Mordor from the Lord of the Rings.

The next morning, my husband and I awoke at five thirty, thanks to jetlag. We puttered about eating breakfast and getting ready, the TV in our room tuned to the USGS live-feed all the while. At around seven, my husband motioned me over. The vent had been “doming.” Now a flood of molten lava was gushing from it as well. Was this “it?” The great thing about staying where we were was that we could jump in our car and be at the crater ten minutes later. Which is exactly what we did. We had big plans to visit all of the sights in the park, but knew we should take a look at the vents first.

Shortly after we arrived, the doming grew more energetic, eventually developing into a little fountain – “little” only because we were two kilometers distant; it undoubtedly dwarfed the size of our house. The blue sky contrasted beautifully against the luminescent red lava and the jet-black terrain of the caldera. What a day! I thought. But then something changed. The fountain began to grow larger, slowly at first, then faster, spewing a bright red liquid that I could scarcely believe was stone high into the sky. “This is it!” we said excitedly to one another. And it was. Episode 40 reached heights of 800 feet – five times the height of Niagra Falls! – with the show lasting from eight A.M to a little after six P.M., as though the volcano had decided to put in some human hours at the “office.”

[Make sure your sound is on! Feel the power of Mount Kilauea.]

For those eight hours, we did nothing but watch. The fountaining of the vent; the relentless creep of magma coating the floor of the massive basin below in a lake of liquid stone. Later we’d learn that some 5.5 million cubic meters of lava spewed out of the Earth over the course of the day, at volumes of nearly 200 cubic meters a second. That is very roughly equivalent to the average amount of water that goes over Niagara Falls every half hour.

According to Hawaiian legend, Kilauea is home to a female deity named Pele. She is the goddess of fire and lighting and volcanoes, beautiful and passionate, easily angered, and prone to burning those who invite her pique. Yet locals love her because she is an avatar of nature, beautiful and fearsome. Kilauea is both a natural monument to her, and an embodiment of her. This reminds me of the kami, the spiritual beings of my home country. Kami more than symbolize nature; they are nature. A feeling of awe towards natural phenomena is one of the most fundamental aspects of Japanese spirituality. And those feelings are closely connected to our ability to appreciate its beauty.

I will never forget the sights I saw that day. Offerings of food left by locals for Pele, wrapped in Ti leaves, her very favorite. The crimson of the magma as it jetted high into the sky, quickly cooling and turning into a shroud of cinder that fell back to Earth to twirl around the base of the fountain, where the unthinkable heat radiating from the magma stirred the air into twisters. Occasionally debris would rain down around us. The ejecta resembled stone but when you picked the pieces up they weighed almost nothing, crumbling in your fingers like glassy styrofoam. Baby rocks, I thought. Newborns. Perhaps because we’d visited a chocolate farm on our first day on the Big Island, they reminded me of giant cacao nibs. A volcano was erupting less than a mile from us, but the fact I was thinking about babies and candy shows you how safe we felt; we even spent stretches laying on the ground, watching through the Vs of our feet. When my husband took a bathroom break, he came back with a photo of a group who’d set up folding chairs and were having brunch, like a volcano picnic or tailgate party.

It was a day to remember. Later we learned that we were luckier than I’d thought. The winds were blowing away from us that day, protecting us from the majority of the debris raining down from the fountain of magma. When we finally returned to our car, we found it covered in glass fibers, spun out of the molten minerals spewing out far below, light enough to ride on the wind. The locals called it “Pele’s hair,” and if you’re downwind of a plume, the fine tubes can easily scratch and cut your skin.

Around six P.M., the fountain sputtered, then came to an abrupt halt, as though some invisible force had turned some invisible valve somewhere. We broke for dinner, then returned after nightfall.

Now all was quiet. The air was cool, crisp, stars innumerable filling the skies above with their light. This kind of crystalline night was something I’d experienced before, in the wilderness. But here was something I’d never seen: “stars” below, in a what appeared a virtual sea of incandescent magma, uncountable hot-spots twinkling in a crimson reflection of the Milky Way stretching overhead. There was no sound, only light, painting our faces in soft reds. Peering down at molten lava felt like something out of a dream. After the wild energies we’d seen unleashed during the day it felt gentle, even sleepy, Pele telling us the show’s over, time for bed.

Our Hawaiian friend who arranged my television appearance called us the “luckiest people.” she has lived in Hawaii her entire life, but never seen an eruption with her own eyes. I think we were even luckier than that, because we didn’t plan for this. We came to Hawaii for business. This side-trip had been a total extra.

At the end of the day, as I lined up for the lone bathroom in the lot where we parked, I struck up a conversation with an older woman. She pushed a cart with a tiny little white dog in it. She told me she that she was exhausted, because she’d spent the night before in her car, hoping to catch Kilauea in bloom. “But I had to do it,” she said. “I’ve lived here for fifty years. I’ve seen everything on this island, but never an eruption. What a day.” I agreed. “We are lucky!” were the last words we exchanged before parting.

Later, I learned, there is a story about the goddess Pele. Occasionally, they say, she transforms into an old lady with a white dog, blending in among us to testing our kindness. I don’t know if I met Pele that night. But if I did, I’m glad I told her how grateful I was, and how I’ll cherish the gift she gave me for the rest of my life.

You can order Eight Million Ways to Happiness here! (Or here if you’re in the UK.)

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One of the first things every author wants to know is when their book will be published. I certainly did. When I handed in the final edit of my manuscript, I asked my editor, with all of the emotion of a parent asking their due date, when mine would arrive. “December 30th, 2025” was the answer. I was a little surprised. After Christmas? The biggest shopping season in the U.S.? When I asked her why, she replied: “New Year, New You.”

New Year’s is, I was told, the official season for the release of new titles in the self-help and wellness genres. In fact, later I heard that something like 70% of all book sales are concentrated that period. I don’t believe that publishers originated the phrase or anything like that; it’s simply their way of tapping into the new year’s resolution mindset.

Japan has a similar culture of new year resolutions, but this is but one of many traditions involving the ringing in of the new year. Osoji, big cleanings, are one I’ve written about before. There’s hatsumodé, the very first prayer at a shrine or temple in the new year. And eating osechi, traditional new year meals, served in two-tiered lacquered boxes filled with morsels carefully crafted to symbolize fortune and happiness. But my favorite is hatsu-hinodé, the tradition of waking up (or, if you’re young, staying up) to catch the very first sunrise of the new year. And that’s something I can do anywhere, even outside Japan.

I am writing these words from Maryland, where I spent the last week of 2025 and the first weeks of 2026. I wanted to make sure I was in America when my new book came into the world. I’m glad I did this. It has been a very exciting time. I’ve been doing a lot of podcasts, and I saw my book “in the wild” on the shelves of a bookstore in the local shopping mall – and as a “bookseller favorite,” no less! Because of this I caught my first sunrise of the year here in America. I took the photo below on the C&O Canal, which runs from rural Maryland to Washington DC.

Doing hatsu-hinodé in America reminded me that there are all sorts of “Japanese” traditions that you don’t have to be anywhere near Japan to appreciate. The same is true of the stories I tell in my book. I’m Japanese, and the majority of the story unfolds in Japan, but the things I learned are applicable to anyone, anywhere.

In the podcasts and media appearances I’ve been doing, I’m often asked what the “takeaways” are from Eight Million Ways to Happiness. I deliberately avoided writing something prescriptive, with rules and bullet points and Venn diagrams and all of that. I wanted to tell a story, not be a guru. But of course, I get it. People are busy, and might not have time to savor and digest an entire book quickly. So while I was walking on the canal that first morning of 2026, I thought of two big points that I think capture the spirit of what I learned on my journey writing the book.

The first is, you can’t outsource your happiness. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t invest your sense of self in toxic people, but it’s really true of anyone, even those who care about us and love us deeply. The reason being, that happiness is many different things for many different people. In my book, I quoted a 107 year old (!) master of calligraphy. When she was asked about the meaning of happiness, she answered that it was all a matter of perspective. One person’s happy place can be another’s hell. The what of that happiness, what it means, is entirely up to each one of us. But the how, of how to get there, lies in the second takeaway:

Gratitude. I can’t define happiness for anyone, but I can say that I believe the fundamental building block is a sense of gratitude. In my case, the biggest source of gratitude is around my new book. After it came out, I received many calls and messages. Some contained links and photos. The British chain Waterstones put my book in the very front of their stores. So did Barnes and Noble in the US. Extended family in Scotland sent a picture of my cousin and uncle wearing Santa hats, holding my books in front of the Christmas tree, and even told me that they’d listened to my audiobook on a holiday drive! And just now, I learned that my book has been reviewed in India. I am so, so thankful for everyone and everything supporting my big debut.

Releasing a book is a big deal. But not everything that fills my cup of gratitude is big stuff. Equally if not more important are the little things, by which I mean the stuff of everyday life, the sorts of things so close to the skin that we often don’t notice them until they are gone. Like walking the C&O Canal every morning with my husband and parents in law, when we visit them. We walk and we talk. Occasionally we spot some wild animals. Some are cute, like the muskrats paddling industriously through the water, or a beaver chewing down a freshly-cut branch, like a living pencil sharpener. Some are awe-inspiring, like the bald eagle I watched plunge into the river, then soaring into the sky with a fish in its talons.

After every walk, my husband always fixes us a cup of coffee, which I love to sip near the fireplace in the family room. Sometimes I split a strawberry muffin with him, the ones my mother in law buys for me because she knows I like strawberries. These moments are equally as precious to me as my big achievements, and I feel equally grateful for them. And these examples merely scratch the surface. There are so many other things.

Gratitude is love. Whenever I find something to be thankful for, that love grows. Gratitude is also empowering. It reminds me that I am connected to bigger things: family, society, and nature.

Which brings me back to that first sunrise of this year. As the rays of the sun painted the clouds in glorious reds and purples, the phrase “New Year, New You” popped into my head. Followed by a question: what might that new me be?

The new me is actually being created every hour, minute, and second of the day. Every heartbeat and every breath. But it only exists because of “previous me.” Becoming new doesn’t mean abandoning or letting go. Looking back, my 2025 was filled with up and downs, joys and challenges, all experiences, all equal, in that they are the currency of my life. But I’m not moving on from them. They’ll always be a part of me, a springboard to new journeys and adventures. And I think that’s the same for all of us. So please, old readers and new, old yous and new yous, have a great 2026!

You can order Eight Million Ways to Happiness here! (Or here if you’re in the UK.)

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I just accomplished something I’ve never done before: recording an audiobook. “Eight Million Ways to Happiness” is coming out in just a few weeks, on December 30th, and I am so happy to have had this precious experience.

The book is 345 pages long, and it took me seven full days in the studio to finish reading all of them aloud. That’s 104,000 words!

The recording sessions were spread throughout November to give me a chance to rest. But to tell the truth, I couldn’t really rest because I was spending the time between making preparations. On day one, we found that I could get through about fifty pages a day. So I made sure to read at least fifty pages ahead of each session. Not aloud, though. I had to save my voice, so I read it in my head. And when wasn’t sure about the pronunciation of a word – which happened a lot; I realized I know a lot more words than I know how to say – I’d have to search for it online, bring up a pronunciation, and practice ahead of time.

The whole process felt a little like a marathon. Reading the book took total concentration from beginning to end, especially with my being a non-native speaker! I took breaks, of course, but it was basically seven hours straight of sitting and talking every time. I knew I couldn’t burn out in the middle, so I had to monitor my stamina and health the whole time.

But in the end, I did it! I finished it! Hurraay for me!

When I was still in the midst of writing the book, I knew there would be an audio version, but I never planned to record it myself. The reason was simple. I am not a native speaker. I figured this alone disqualified me for the task. “It’s about quality,” I would answer, if friends ever asked why I wouldn’t do it. “Reading words is a totally different skill from writing them. I just can’t see myself doing it.” And I had some bigger worries – my book is about a journey of healing, but it begins with my parents’ passing. I was afraid I might break down in the studio.

But much later, when I finished writing, I realized my book contained a whole lot of Japanese words. My book is about Japanese culture; many words are deeply connected to it. I’d long since made the decision to leave those words as is. I’ve never recorded an audiobook myself before, but I have a lot of experience producing voice-overs for videogames. I spent months at studios in Vancouver and L.A. coaching voice actors through the pronunciation of words from the games my company had localized. And from that experience I knew that some words just threw non-native-Japanese for a twist, especially combined syllables like “hya” or “ryu.” Often, even after extensive coaching, we had to settle for an accented version.

Will I be happy if the same thing thing happens with my audiobook? I asked myself. And I knew the answer: absolutely not. Plus, my book not only had Japanese words, but also a fragment of a traditional song. If they hired someone without any Japanese background, how would they know the tune? Besides, I’d made it this far, pouring all of my effort into the book. So why give up now? The way I saw it (or started seeing it), I owed it to myself to see things through all the way to the end. The recording was definitely a part of the process. So when the time came, I threw my hat in the ring. I recorded a few pages at home as a sample. And while I worried endlessly that I wasn’t as fluid as a native speaker, the editor said that might actually be a selling point, that it would feel real and authentic, that they would know they were listening to me.

The most difficult part of recording the audiobook, I learned, is that a sentence can look great on the page, and even resonate in your heart, yet be difficult to enunciate aloud. I wrote every word, knew the contents inside and out, yet still tripped up on a lot of the sentences. It made me realize the difference between the written voice, and the spoken voice. And then there were the quotes, some from archaic books, some in translation and others not, many a century or more old. Those often really threw me for a loop. I’d loved them enough to include them but hadn’t realized how complicated they were to say aloud. Lafcadio Hearn, who naturally wrote in a very 19th century style, was particularly hard for me to find the rhythm of.

At the very first of the first day, I was clearing my throat a lot. I’d take a sip of water out of nervousness after nearly every sentence. But soon, I discovered something unexpected. I kind of liked it!

I was being watched and listened to by a small crowd: the director, who was on a video link; a producer, an engineer, and then my husband, who came with me to every session. They literally hung on every word, making sure I was pronouncing them correctly, and sometimes giving me line reads to help me nail the cadence. This was exacting, tiring, draining work. Really. Yet in spite of it all I found myself improbably having fun.

For example, when I read quotes, I imagined the speakers in my head and pretended as if they were reading. I didn’t try to do their voices, because I’m not an actor and that’s not what an audiobook is about. But I wanted to channel a little of their spirit. For Lafcadio, I tried to affect the pattern of a curious but somewhat stubborn man. Carmen Blacker, author of a great book called The Catalpa Bow, felt a little poetic. And when I read from an old tale about Taira no Masakado, a fierce warrior who lived a thousand years ago, I put a lot of masculine oomph into it. I remember hearing after that the director had been happy with the delivery, which gave me even more confidence.

When it came time to record the painful passages, I came up with a silly little idea. I brought a small toy figure of Gojo from Jujutsu Kaisen, one of my favorite characters from the show, and put it on the desk right in front of me for some quiet emotional support. Whenever I felt like crying, I’d take a glance at Gojo’s cheeky smile and the tears would stop. It worked every time.

What I truly appreciated about this whole process was performing for the director and producer, who were among the very first people to read my entire book, and the first to hear it spoken aloud. When they laughed at funny parts, or grew quiet during sad ones, it really lifted my spirits. “I learned so much,” the producer told me after every recording. “It has so many aspects,” he later said, “sad and funny, scary and heart warming, and educational and entertaining.” I thought I might cry when I heard this.

When I packed up my belongings after I finished recording on the last day, the producer came up and told me not to worry about my accent, or occasional stumbles. “We will pick the best parts and stitch them together,” he said. “Besides, I liked your voice. It will be great.”

I thanked him and said “I felt like a pro,” as a joke. But then he said something that really made me feel good.

“You are a pro. You finished the entire audiobook!”

I am very excited to see my book go into the world, and even more excited for all of you to read and listen to it.

I wrote a book about my experiences and adventures exploring Japan’s spirituality. It’s called Eight Million Ways to Happiness, and is due out in December of 2025. Please pre-order it here!

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Many years ago, my American husband told me that there is a popular game to be played every December in the West. It’s called “Whamageddon,” and the point is to try to avoid hearing WHAM’s smash hit “Last Christmas” before Christmas Eve. If you hear it, you lose. “It’s like a survival game that anybody can play,” is how he put it.

I burst out laughing because I knew from experience how ubiquitous the song was during the season there. In fact, I suspected it would be impossible to avoid. It’s such a seasonal megahit that it’s played everywhere, on the radio of course, but also as background music in stores and for commercials on TV.

But the inescapability of “Last Christmas” isn’t limited to America. It’s popular in Japan, too. When the song first dropped here in 1984, it immediately sold a million copies. And it has become a holiday standard here, too. When I’m shopping for fruit or vegetables or whatever in December, it isn’t at all uncommon to hear George Michael lamenting to a girl how he gave her his heart, but then “the next day, you gave it away.” Poor George!

I apologize for the silence this month. I have been doing something I've never done before in my life — recording an audiobook! It’s for my upcoming book Eight Million Ways to Happiness. I had to read 345 pages aloud — that’s almost 104,000 words! I have to say that this was one of the biggest linguistic challenges I’ve ever experienced as a non-native speaker!

I’ll write about this in more detail soon, I promise. But the point here is that I finished the final recording session a few days ago. I’d been tied up for weeks doing the recording, so I was finally free to run a long-postponed errand: going to the eye doctor to renew my prescription for my contact lenses.

I was so tired that I practically melted into the couch in the waiting room. I closed my eyes, recovering from long days sent cooped up in the studio. Japan doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, so holiday music is already starting to fill the air, and my doctor’s office was no exception. At first the volume was so low I didn’t notice, but then there was no denying it. It was a song I’d known ever since the Eighties. That song.

“Last Christmas.”

It isn’t even December yet, I laughed to myself, and I’m already “dead!”

Of course, I told my husband about this “sneak attack” as soon as I got home. But he told me that “traditionally,” insofar as there are any hard and fast rules, Whamageddon doesn’t officially begin until December 1st. So I’m safe. For now!

Last year, I published a newsletter about a similar holiday song in Japan. We don’t play a survival game around it, but it is actually even bigger than “Last Christmas” in Japan. It’s called Christmas Eve. It was composed and sung by the king of the City Pop scene, Tatsuro Yamashita, who happens to be married to the scene’s queen, Mariya Takeuchi. You can read it here!

I’ll be back with a report on how my recording went soon. In the meantime, happy holidays, and stay safe during Whamageddon!

I wrote a book about my experiences and adventures exploring Japan’s spirituality. It’s called Eight Million Ways to Happiness, and is due out in December of 2025. You can pre-order it here!

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I just got back from a trip to Toyama prefecture. My husband and I went there to climb Tateyama, a famed peak in the region. At 3003 meters, it was the tallest we’d summited. Getting up there took a lot of preparation and training. It also took us through hell.

I don’t mean this metaphorically. The photo at top is Jigoku-dani, literally “Hell valley,” which sits near the base of Tateyama. The trail up and back leads right past it.

Tateyama is absolutely beautiful, as you’ll see from the pictures below. Why would Japanese name a place in the middle of so much natural splendor “hell?” For one thing, Jigoku-dani is an active volcanic site, stained white and yellow by sulfur and other compounds, with bubbling natural cauldrons of water and fumaroles belching acrid steam into the air.

This sulfurous scene evokes jigoku, which is the word for the Japanese concept of hell. It differs from the Christian-influenced hell of the West, in that pretty much everyone is destined to wind up there after they die. The reason being that, in the braid of Japanese spirituality taken from Buddhism, none of us is without sin. We take lives to eat; we smash insects, whether deliberately or by accident. We argue and upset others in ways large and small. The definition of sin is entirely subjective, but I suspect there are few among us who don’t have something they regret having done in their lives. In this worldview, almost no one who has lived is truly free of sin.

Sin may be subjective, but according to Japanese folklore, the first person you’ll meet after dying and going to hell is an old woman who measures them very accurately. She sits at sai-no-kawara, the bank of the River Sanzu, which divides the realms of living and dead. When you meet her, she strips off your clothes and hangs them over a tree branch. The more it bends, the heavier your sins. She reports this to Lord Enma, the judge of jigoku, who will pronounce your sentence later.

The thing is, in Japanese spirituality, jigoku isn’t the end of the road. Everyone eventually gets out and moves on to jodo, the “pure land,” a peaceful place filled with flowers. One of the ways to do this, traditionally speaking, is getting a helping hand from the world of the living. The thinking goes that a thoughtful prayer for a departed soul may help free them from the “chains” binding them, eventually letting them to travel out of jigoku to jodo.

Place names evoking the concepts of sai-no-kawara, jigoku, and jodo can be found in nearly every mountain in Japan. Tetsuo Yamaori, a scholar of religious studies, calls it “the set of three,” and describes them as unique to the Japanese religious (and mountainous) landscape.

Tateyama is no exception. There is a long history of mountain worship here, going back at least 1,300 years. For much of this time Tateyama was widely considered one of the nation’s most revered pilgrimages, and many made the journey to Jigoku-dani in hopes of contacting departed loved ones. But in the 1870s, the Meiji government attempted to separate Buddhism from Shinto, with the aim of elevating Shinto as a state religion. This led to a misguided and vicious populist movement called haibutsu-kishaku: the elimination of Buddhist influences, which led to attacks on Buddhist temples and symbols.

I imagine that there used to be many spiritual effigies evoking the underworld in the area. But being Buddhist in nature, many were lost in this chaotic period in our history. Today, only a handful remain. The picture below was taken at Murodo-daira plateau, just a short walk from Jigoku-dani. You can see that many of the statues have been repaired at the neck. This is likely because they were beheaded during the 19th century purge. At some point after, gentler souls rescued and repaired them. The scars remind me a little of kintsugi, the art of repairing porcelain using gold. They evoke both the cruelty and the kindness of people. And also the resilience of our fusion of local beliefs, which are based on adding rather than rejecting different influences.

Still, someone felt compelled to put the little statues behind bars, presumably to protect them from any further vandalism. The rocks were left as offerings by visitors over the years. I added one, too.

I’d wanted to go to Tateyama for quite some time. The reason being that my great grandfather visited there in 1908. As I wrote here, some time ago I inherited his diaries and papers. He was a scientist, an organic chemist, to be specific. But his hobby was the mountains. Actually, “hobby” doesn’t quite do it justice. He saw himself as an “alpinist.” Together with other like-minded sorts, he surveyed peaks and pioneered trails that would, years later, help establish mountain-climbing as a leisure activity in Japan. He passed away in 1941. I began following in his footsteps shortly after reading his diaries, which went into great detail about adventures in the mountains that unfolded many years before I was born.

In one entry, he wrote that “it was my visit to Tateyama that made me what they call a ‘mountain maniac.’” Those last two words aren’t a translation; they were written in careful English cursive. I suspect he learned this phrase from Walter Weston, a British missionary and mountaineer who popularized the phrase “Japan Alps.” They were both founding members of the Sangaku-kai, Japan’s Alpine Club. My great-grandfather’s diary entry continued that “the high mountains of Tateyama are rich in variation, setting them apart from other mountains in Japan,” and that “the view in all directions from Murodo, surrounded by high peaks, is absolutely thrilling.”

He was right. The view from what is now called Murodo-daira (plateau) is astonishing indeed. Murodo refers to an old wooden hut that pilgrims – and mountaineers like my great-grandfather – stayed in when they came here. Now it is a museum. I stood outside it, quite possibly in the very spot where he had once planted his own feet, and drank in the view. The three peaks of the Tateyama range towered over me like a gargantuan folding screen, nature’s art on a scale boggling human comprehension.

Later, back at home, I looked more closely at the diaries and found this sketch, penned in simple but meticulous linework. We really had shared the same patch of real estate, separated not by space but 117 years of time. Yet the mountains were totally unchanged, of course. On a geological scale, a century is less than a moment. It felt thrilling to make such close contact, even indirect, with my great grandfather in this way.

Tatetama consists of three peaks: Oyama (3,003m), Onanjiyama (3,015m), and Fuji no Oritate (2,999m). The trail led up from the plateau through all three, then descended a long slope called Obashiri (the “Big Run”) to return to Jigoku-dani. This route doesn’t seem to have existed in my great-grandfather’s era; his maps didn’t include the Big Run. Rather, he took an old pilgrimage route, much longer, via Mt. Tsurugi-dake, an imposing peak that symbolizes a mountain of needles widely portrayed in Buddhist hell-folkore.

There’s an old painting called the “Tateyama mandala” that portrays it in this way. Here’s a close-up: the spikes at left are Tsurugi-dake, while the more rounded one is Oyama. That’s Lord Enma, the judge of the underworld, at work at bottom right. That building atop Oyama looks to me like a place where kami, the native, non-Buddhist spirits of Japan, would be venerated. There’s in fact a Shinto shrine up there today. Seeing what might be one in a Buddhist painting shows just how thoroughly mixed spiritual traditions are here in Japan.

From my great-grandfather’s diary, I know he made the climb twice on consecutive days; the first ascent had been cloudy, and he wanted to make sure to see the view from the top, which he did on day two. We only needed one try. When we awoke on the day of our climb, a cloudless sky stretched overhead.

On the top of Oyama, there is an old Shinto shrine. The building is relatively new because it has been well maintained, but the shrine has been here for many hundreds of years. Because Tateyama was seen as sacred, in times of old pilgrims changed their straw sandals for clean ones well before they reached this spot. My great-grandfather wrote of “encountering the ugly sight of piles of discarded sandals” on the way here. Fortunately, there’s nothing like that marring the landscape now.

The interesting thing about this route is that each of the three peaks has a distinctly different sort of terrain. The first peak, Oyama, is a “typical” (at least in my mind) mountain, which is to say boulder-y. Onanjiyama has a jagged feel, as though the path has been sawn into the mountain. And beyond Fuji no Oritate, the landscape turns to sand.

All three tower far above Murodo-daira plateau, where our hike began. In the shot below, the blue lake is called Mikurigaike; the white patch behind is Jigoku-dani, stained by sulfur and obscured by rising gases.

Long ago, people made the long journey here to make contact with the souls of the dead. In a certain sense, I had done the same. I can’t say I felt as though I met my great-grandfather, but I certainly felt as though he was with me – or at least that I was with him.

When I was little, his oldest daughter, my great-aunt, often took my tiny hands in hers. “Your great-grandfather was a great man,” she would say. “His name is Mitsumaru Tsujimoto. Remember that.” She never went into any detail. Perhaps she thought I was too little to understand. But she felt it important to tell me this, repeatedly, in our all too short time together. The last link between her father’s generation and mine.

I’m sad we never met, never could have met. But I am grateful that he left so much behind. So many diaries, drawings, paintings, and articles. He wrote so passionately for so long about Japan’s mountains. He spent his life journeying among them. Now I follow in his footsteps, to see what he saw, and hopefully feel what he felt. I want to share it with him, in the only way I can, which is by leaving my own words behind.

That journey has just begun. And I can’t think of any better way to have started, than a little trip through hell – of the Japanese variety. I don’t know if my great-grandfather is there, specifically. But I do know he’s here, in the mountains.

I wrote a book about my experiences and adventures exploring Japan’s spirituality. It’s called Eight Million Ways to Happiness, and is due out in December of 2025. You can pre-order it here!

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Traditions are wonderful. I am in fact quite conservative when it comes to my nation’s traditions, because I see them not only as culture, but part of what connects us and holds us together as a society. But there can come a time when traditions bind. Almost by definition, traditions were made in the past — yet we’re moving inexorably into the future. Times change. And I realized when the times change so much that tradition becomes a hindrance, I need to give myself permission to change things up. If I’m feeling sad because of a tradition, what good is it doing me? But when I change, am I losing part of what makes Japan Japan, and me me?

These are big-picture philosophical questions, but I’ve been facing them in a very specific way lately. Japanese culture is incredibly weather-aware. The changing of the seasons is like the script for many things people love about Japan, from foods to traditional fashions. But the climate is changing, and with it, Japan is changing too.

Over the last few months, I’ve noticed that I tend to greet the day with a little sigh. It’s a bad habit, something that I know I need to stop doing, because a sigh is no way to begin a day. But every time I wake up and read the daily weather forecast in the newspaper, I can’t help it. Inevitably, there will be the icon for a manatsu-bi – “a mid-summer day.”

This sounds like a casual description, but is in fact a meteorological term coined by the Japan Meteorological Agency. It describes any day where the temperature exceeds thirty degrees Celsius, or 86°F. That’s to be expected in mid-summer. But the thing is, we are well into September, which is considered to be, or used to be, the beginning of fall, when things are supposed to be cooling down. And they aren’t. Just manatsu-bi after manatsu-bi, a seemingly endless summer.

I didn’t used to sigh over summer days. My memories of summer from childhood are pretty universally positive. The morning glories I’d plant with my mother in the spring would bloom, colorfully signalling the start of the season. I’d often grab a net for catching bugs and tromp out to the forest in search of kabuto-mushi, shiny rhinoceros beetles in samurai-like armor, prized by kids. I’d usually fail and have to content myself watching tiny antlions, which made little conical holes in the sand, waiting to feast on unwary ants that tumbled in. And as summer neared its end the neighborhood would throw its bon-odori summer festival. The sound of drums would resonate over the rooftops, and my mom would put me in a yukata and send me off to join the neighborhood kids dancing around the stage.

Back then, in the Seventies and Eighties, the average summer day in Tokyo averaged just 27°C, so a manatsu-bi of 30° could make the news. I remember, many years back, sitting at the kitchen table while my mother prepared supper, and the TV reported we’d be getting a heat spike the next day. Both of us stopped what we were doing and exchanged glances in surprise. The fact that we did, and that I even remember it so many years later, shows just how unusual a manatsu-bi was back then.

In fact, our home wasn’t even air conditioned at the time, save for my parents’ bedroom, and they almost never ran it. Neither was my school air conditioned. Most schools weren’t. We didn’t need it. If things got hot, even in mid-summer, all we had to do was open a few windows. Or run a fan, which I loved, because I could talk into it and enjoy hearing my voice change into a robot’s.

We had so many gentle ways of beating the heat. Eating cold somen noodles, or a slice of watermelon, or kakigoori shave-ice, or ice cream. My mother would give my younger sister and I a hundred yen coin each and we’d dash off to the local family-run cake shop, which also carried ice cream and popsicles. Our favorite was the “Jewel Box,” which was vanilla ice cream with chunks of fruit-flavored soft candies inside.

My absolute favorite thing to do on a summer day was taking a nap on my father’s side of the bed. It was next to a window with southern exposure, and the coverlet would get really warm in the afternoons. I’d curl up like a cat and fall asleep to the sound of the cicadas. I’d inevitably wake drenched in sweat, but I felt good. Maybe it was like a sauna. I’d shower off and have a nice cold glass of mugicha barley tea out of the fridge.

Summer felt precious to me as a child because it felt like a discrete period with a fairly specific beginning and end. But recently, that hasn’t been the case. It begins earlier, lasts longer, and gets hotter year after year. The gentle ways of making it through the heat don’t work so well anymore. Remarking to each other how unusual summer is has become altogether usual.

In 2007, the meteorologists debuted a new descriptor: mousho-bi, or “fiercely hot day,” used when the temperature exceeds 35°C, or 95°F. The mass media coined even more variations in the years after, including kokusho, “extreme heat” (40°F or higher) and the distressing-sounding saigai-kyu, or “disaster-level” heat. In 2024, the government started pushing heatstroke alerts to phones whenever the temperature hit that thirty-three degree mark.

You’d think a longer summer might mean more chances to have summer fun. But not when it’s this hot. Unpleasant heat forces me to stay indoors and run air conditioning. This makes ice creams and cold noodles a lot less fun to eat. I stopped making cold barley tea because I’d rather have hot coffee. Katori-senko incense is too smoky to burn in a closed room. I can’t even imagine re-creating those summer naps on my dad’s bed; I’d get heat stroke now. This sounds a little like “first-world problems,” but the heat really can be dangerous, and there’s a slow-build psychological impact to letting go of so many things I once took for granted. There’s a comfort in the old ways, and distress when you have to let them go.

Sometimes, though, you simply have to adapt. Let me give you an example.

Yukata are Japanese traditional casual clothes. The word is written 浴衣, which means “bathing wear,” like a robe, or even pajamas, because Japanese traditionally bathe in the evening. That is why many ryokan (and business hotels) provide guests yukata all year round – they’re for relaxing in.

There are many customs when it comes to traditional fashions in Japan, and yukata are no exception. The biggest custom is that they are “season sensitive.” Yukata are supposed to be worn outdoors only in summer, July and August, and then mainly in the evenings. You might get away with wearing one at the end of June, but September? Never – because that’s typically fall, unless there’s some very special exception, like an early-fall festival. Otherwise wearing a yukata in September would feel like wearing shorts in winter or a snow parka in summer. Just out of season.

But things have changed. I remember a big turning point for me, in midsummer about three years back, when the temperature shot up even higher than usual for July and August. My iPhone was chiming with heat alerts almost every day. I’d studied kimono during pandemic, and even got a teaching certification, so I’d made a habit of wearing a kimono once a week. But it was getting a lot harder to do this in the summer. There are lighter summer weight kimono, but they’re still heavier than a yukata. And they’re expensive, being made of silk. Not only were they getting uncomfortably hot, but I was worrying about ruining them with sweat, too.

So I decided to try wearing a yukata instead. This might seem like a reasonable compromise, but you have to remember, I’d been traditionally trained, and was now going up against literal centuries of common sense about seasonal fashions. A yukata in the daytime felt totally wrong to me. I resigned myself to not wearing traditional clothing until it cooled, whenever that might be.

September came. The temperature was still high but had cooled enough to make walking outdoors more bearable. There was just one problem. Now it was September, and in September, yukata are traditionally out. I tried it once, but almost immediately turned around because it felt so wrong. And this made me really sad.

But as I walked back home, I noticed women walking by in shorts and flip flops and all sorts of summer gear, even though it was theoretically fall. They’d adapted to the weather because they were wearing Western clothes, which had a lot fewer rules associated with them. Why could they enjoy themselves, and I couldn’t?

No reason at all.

So I had an epiphany.

I made the decision to let go of tradition, at least when it came to yukata in September This might seem a small thing. But I think it reflects something a lot bigger. We live in a particularly dynamic time, when we’re faced with changes of all sorts, in all spheres of life. It’s easy to get hung up on the past. I won’t lie: it hurt to have to break tradition in this way. I’ve always seen wearing kimono and yukata in traditional ways as a connection to the past, of my family, of my people.

But I realized that making changes, in a thoughtful and respectful way, isn’t a repudiation of tradition or culture. It’s a tool for surviving. If you ask me, you don’t need anyone’s permission to change the way you do things. But that doesn’t mean you won’ feel a certain degree of resistance. Overcoming that takes a sort of courage, which I say not to pat myself on the back but to acknowledge that change doesn’t come easily.

I still love my country’s traditional fashion calendar, and want to follow it when I can — if things improve on the climate-change front I’d happily go back to the way things were. But I’d rather change a little than give it up altogether. Changing things up when we have to is a tool for making ourselves comfortable and happy in the here and now. I’m not saying it should be done lightly. But when we have to, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up about it. These days, we need all the comfort and happiness we can get.

I wrote a book about my experiences and adventures exploring Japan’s spirituality. It’s called Eight Million Ways to Happiness, and is due out in December of 2025. You can pre-order it here!

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In August, I gave a talk at an anime convention. It was called Anime NYC 2025, and was held at the Javits Center in New York City. (If you missed it, there’s a link to the video at the end of this post.) Some two hundred companies put up over four hundred booths, and more than 148,000 people showed up! The Javits was absolutely packed. In an era of seemingly endless socio-political strife and technological unease, when nobody can seem to agree on anything, it was pretty inspiring to see so many people come together to celebrate, all linked by a shared passion for Japan’s pop cultural exports of anime, games, and manga.

I went the same convention last year, when “only” about 100,000 attended. Even then I found the diversity of the crowd striking, as I wrote in a newsletter at the time. There were all kinds of people: different ages, genders, and orientations; differently abled, different races, different nationalities. Almost all of them wore elaborate costumes, and everyone was having a great time under the same roof. I wore a yukata that time, so I managed to mingle with the crowds. My husband, on the other hand, was in street clothes, a “normal” shirt and slacks. And both of us laughed at how he stuck out like a sore thumb.

Something interesting happened this year. Although almost 50,000 more fans crammed into the Javits, there didn’t seem to be as many cosplayers as last time. Don’t get me wrong — there were lots of people in amazing outfits, many truly impressive. But this year, there were just as many wearing street clothes, enjoying the event, buying anime merch, playing new games, and attending panel discussions. My sense is that the crowd is getting even more diverse, in the sense that a lot more casual fans feel comfortable attending a big event like this, or even that anime isn’t particularly “special” or “unique” to a certain group of people anymore. Rather it’s become an unremarkable form of entertainment in everyday life.

The talk I gave centered on how one might use anime as a lens into Japanese spiritual traditions, in support of my upcoming book. The idea being that Japanese spirituality is always hiding in plain sight, never being pushy nor evangelical, just simply part of the fabric of life — which includes anime. I called it “Jujutsu Whatsit?,” echoing the name of a hugely popular show with supernatural themes, Jujutsu Kaisen. (Incidentally, it’s interesting that they didn’t even bother localizing that title — another example of how comfortable young people abroad are with Japanese culture.)

I started with the big picture, the yaoyorozu no kami, or “eight million spiritual beings” of traditional Japanese cosmology. In this context, “eight million” isn't an exact number; it’s an idiom that simply means “many.” The phrase is key in Shinto, but it’s actually much bigger than that. I would go so far as to say it is the foundation of my country’s spiritual culture, of our entire worldview. Japan’s traditional belief system defines itself in additive terms rather than subtractive, by embracing rather than drawing hard and fast lines between itself and other theological (or even non-religious) systems. This “radically inclusive” mindset means there’s always room for more.

After familiarizing the audience with the symbols that define Japan’s literal spiritual landscape, such as the tori’i gates of Shinto shrines, I used scenes from popular shows, including not only Jujutsu Kaisen, but Demon Slayer, DanDaDan, Spirited Away, Totoro, and even Gundam, to help fans better understand the cultural backdrops to some of their favorite series and films.

I was not sure how this would go over, to be honest. I know from personal experience that America is a place riven by much disagreement about faiths (and/or lack thereof). So I was shocked, very pleasantly, eternally gratefully, to see that nearly 400 people packed in to listen, standing room only. It was a profoundly memorable and moving thing.

You don’t have to be some kind of media expert to know that there has been an explosion of interest in Japanese pop culture abroad. But I have started thinking more and more that the meaning of anime and manga have begun to shift. They are no longer just simple products to consume, but windows of opportunity that stimulate consumers, or a certain subset of them, into deep dives to further understand Japanese culture and values. And the sheer number of folks who showed up, not to mention asked some really interesting questions, seems to bear that out.

I suspect the organizers felt as nervous about the topic as I initially did, as the room was small and tucked away in a back corner of the sprawling complex. When I went in it was empty and I wondered if I’d be talking to a room. But people filed in, one after the other, filling seats and, once those filled, lining up against the walls. I couldn’t believe it. And during the talk, nervous now for a totally different (and very welcome) reason of suddenly having all these people listening, I could see that the doors had been propped open. Later I learned that it for even more people who couldn’t get in, watching from outside.

So the talk was more than successful. It felt like the start of something new, something bigger. As a writer, I of course want my book to sell. But even more, I want to reach people, to hopefully change their thinking, even to help them heal.

We find ourselves in a time of relentless unease and profound dislocation. I know how much everyone is struggling under political, social, economic, and even environmental stresses, because I feel it myself, see it all around me. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, even hopeless. I want to start a conversation that gives people new tools for looking at the world, to help them tap into the spirituality that is hiding right there in modern life, not only in Japan, but everywhere and anywhere.

I used anime to start, because it’s so popular (and, I mean, because it was an anime convention, after all.) But I sense that the conversation is only beginning. I can’t tell you how excited I am to continue it, to build on it, to connect. And I’ll always be grateful to AnimeNYC, because I’ll always feel like it started there.

I’ve put a recording of the panel up on Matt’s YouTube channel. Please feel free to check it out! And I look forward to keeping the conversation going.

I wrote a book about my experiences and adventures exploring Japan’s spirituality. It’s called Eight Million Ways to Happiness, and is due out in December of 2025. You can pre-order it here!

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Japan is widely seen as a high tech country, much loved for its anime, its manga, and its games. So to many, I gather, my nation feels hip, even cutting edge, at least when it comes to pop culture. But we Japanese know this stylish veneer sits atop a whole lot of tradition. Some of the old ways can be seen in daily life, such as our love for bathing or the preserved foods we eat, or in our language, in the form of politeness levels and set greetings. Other manifestations are physical, such as the ancient architecture of shrines and temples.

The ubiquity of religious sites in my country is particularly interesting, because so many Japanese claim not to be religious at all. This is a testament to how seamlessly spirituality has merged with modern secular society. Our spirituality is strong, but it leans away from things most Westerners associate with the word, such as faith, or sermons, or evangelism, or dogma. For most it is rooted in something simpler: respect. Our native traditions are infused by a general sense that there are things beyond our control, beyond even our ability to imagine, and that deserve to be acknowledged. You can see this in many aspects of Japanese life, if you know where to look. You can even find it in noodles.

Spiritual… noodles? I know, it sounds silly. But hear me out. I’m sure you know of ramen, and perhaps soba and udon too. But there’s another kind called somen. These delicate wheat noodles are a summertime favorite, quick to make and served cold with a light dipping sauce. Dry somen noodles are a staple in Japan, and the best, many believe, come from a town called Miwa. Somen and Miwa are as intertwined in my country’s culinary heart as sparkling wine and Champagne are in France.

Legend has it that the kami, as the manifold beings of Japanese belief are known, taught locals how to make noodles more than 1200 years ago. A devastating plague hit the area, followed by a famine. A local man prayed desperately to the kami for help. And he received a message – a remarkably detailed one. Grow wheat in the area; harvest and grind it; use the local spring water to form a dough; then stretch it carefully into thin threads. The genesis of somen noodles was a recipe from he heavens. So the story goes.

But there’s more to Miwa somen than legend. This is a place where spirituality and commerce intersect. The kami didn’t just give the people of Miwa a recipe for somen noodles. They also set the market price for them every year – even today! Locals call it Bokujosai. It’s a Shinto ritual held every February.

First, everyone associated with the production of Miwa somen gathers to thank the kami for blessing them with such a prosperous industry, and to pray for an abundant harvest of wheat that will sustain them for another year. The senior members of the association gather inside the prayer hall, dressed in their finest suits and ties, as the priest conducts a sacred ritual that has been held almost without fail since the 8th century. And here is where it gets interesting.

These captains of industry might well compete against each other to achieve noodle-market supremacy, or collude to control it in a somen cartel. But they do neither. They wait quietly as the priest prepares fifteen paper balls rolled from washi paper. Five are marked “high,” five “medium,” and five “low.” A roll of hemp fibers are waved over the pile until one of the balls sticks to it. This is removed and studied by the priest, who then carefully writes the result on a piece of paper and presents it to the assembled businessmen.

The businessmen watch these proceedings with rapt attention, because this will determine the wholesale price of somen for the year to come. Should it be “high,” this year’s price will be 12,000 yen per 18 kilogram box of noodles. If “medium,” the standard will be 11,900. And if it is “low,” the price will be just 11,800 yen.

After what seems an interminable wait, the priest presents this year’s results. The priest carefully unfolds a sheet inscribed with inkbrush calligraphy. What will it herald for this year’s somen marketplace?

In actual practice, the price set by the divination is only used as the reference for the first trade of the year. Everyone knows that is simply an opening; it won’t determine the final price – that’s up to market forces. Even still, the Miwa somen industry pays close attention to the divination, because it affects them psychologically. They listen, they respect – but crucially, they are not bound. It is a comfortably loose form of spiritual guidance. Which could well describe average Japanese folks’ approach to spirituality as a whole.

Every beginning has an end, and so too the noodle ritual of Miwa. In August, those involved with the local somen industry gather once more at Omiwa jinja shrine for another tradition: the Miwa Somen Festival of Thanks. Its climax is a dance performance by local women. Spirituality, divination, business – and an interpretive noodle dance? This was right up my alley. When I first learned of it, back when I was researching my book, I knew I had to go. So I did. I paid a visit two summers ago in 2023.

I’d read about the result of the somen price ritual in the newspaper. (It might not be front page news, but this is something that effects all of us, so it’s pretty widely reported.) 2023’s outcome had been “low.” At that time, Japan was still suffering the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The war in Ukraine, tragic enough in its own right, was just starting to affect the global economy. The cost of daily staples was spiraling upward, even as local wages stagnated. Superficially, a “lowball” must have come as a blow to Miwa’s somen makers.

But the kami had spoken. An interview I’d seen really drove this home. Instead of being upset, or angry, the spokesperson for the Somen Association interpreted the outcome as best they could, by spinning it in positive direction.

“In an era such as this,” they said, “we must join our hearts as one. Let us regard this not as a ‘low’ price, but rather use another interpretation of the same character and call it ‘stable.’ And let each and every one of us do our best.”

A magnificent, thirty-meter high torii gate towers over the rooftops of Miwa. I passed through it and into the thickly forested foothills of Mount Miwa, home of Omiwa Jinja shrine. It was a very hot summer day when I visited. A bright blue sky stretched overhead, punctuated by towering white cumulonimbus clouds of the sort we call nyudo-gumo.

The ritual inside the prayer hall was solemn. But after that, the mood grew celebratory. And what a celebration it was!

A group of local women dressed in traditional garb and bright red aprons took up positions in front of the shrine and began to dance in unison. Using threads of twine to evoke somen noodles, they pantomimed kneading the dough, then resting it, then stretching it into the noodles that, had they been real, would have been dried under the bright summer sun. The crowd laughed and cheered. Everyone was having a great time.

Although the outcome of the divination wasn’t really binding, it seemed to have an effect nevertheless. I sensed that, by involving the kami in their business, the somen makers attained a sort of security, a measure of courage to move forward – like a spiritual life-preserver to hang on to, in what was a very difficult time. And that, to me, is Japanese spirituality in a nutshell. It isn’t there to convert or convince. It just is, offering you and me, everyone and all of us, an opportunity to come together, have fun, and kindle a little gratitude for what we’ve got.

When I saw the ladies dancing and the crowd having fun, it made me feel that everything would be all right in the end, too. But most of all, it made me want to have a bowl of somen. And I suspected I wasn’t the only one.

I wrote a book about my experiences and adventures exploring Japan’s spirituality. It’s called Eight Million Ways to Happiness, and is due out in December of 2025. You can pre-order it here!

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I’m writing these words from the US, as I struggle through the usual jetlag and prepare for a talk that I will be giving at AnimeNYC on August 23rd. The title is “Jujutsu Whatsit?” Over the course of an hour, I’ll use situations from anime shows and films to help fans understand Japan’s spiritual traditions.

Anime is about as pop-cultural as it gets, so it might seem a strange lens for spirituality. But this is an anime convention, after all. More than that, Japan’s faith traditions are woven so seamlessly into modern life that they emerge in all sorts of ways without us really realizing it — cartoons included.

The title of the talk comes from Jujutsu Kaisen, a hugely popular series that portrays Japan as a kind of spiritual battleground. I’ll also be focusing on Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, which is known for its unique portrayal of the Japanese cosmological worldview. But there are all sorts of visual and cultural “codes” hiding in plain sight in series that present as secular, for lack of a better word. This makes anime a great way to get a feel for the spiritual landscape of my country.

My talk will be on Saturday, August 23d, from 4:30pm to 5:30pm in Room 1A15. Hope to see you there!

There’s a word in Japanese that can be tricky to translate precisely into English: nakama. Depending on the context, it can be ally, comrade, colleague, or partner. A nakama is different from a tomodachi, a friend.

A friendship is a relationship among people who are drawn to one another for personal reasons. Maybe it’s a hobby or a shared sense of humor or what have you. Nakama describes a relationship among people who are collaborating for some reason, trying to attain some kind of shared goal. With all eyes on a shared prize, nakama relationships can be even more intense than friendships. I learned this myself, early one morning in May.

It was 6:45 A.M., according to my watch, when we reached the trailhead to Mt. Mizugakiyama in Yamanashi. We’d started early because it would take five and half hours round trip to the peak and back. The total distance wasn’t very long, just a little under five and a half kilometers. On flat terrain, a jogger could cover that in well under half an hour. But this wasn’t flat terrain. The peak stood far above, at 2,230 meters – almost a thousand meters above.

We’d done many day hikes, but never a peak this high. And Mizugakiyama was known for rough terrain; there were ladders and chains in some of the more treacherous sections. We chose this peak deliberately, as it sat next to an even longer hike I really wanted to do. A kilometer or so beyond the trailhead, the path forked. One way led to Mizugakiyama; the other, Mt. Kinpusan. But Kinpusan was a nine hour round trip. And at 2,599 meters, it had even more elevation gain. We figured we’d do Mizugakiyama to get the lay of the land, then return sometime in the future to climb Kinpusan.

My fascination with Kinpusan came from the fact that my great grandfather climbed it, way back at the turn of the 20th century in 1900. He was a scientist and what was then known as an “alpinist,” a pioneer who helped establish mountain-climbing as a sport and leisure activity in Japan. I know this because he wrote many diaries of his expeditions, and I inherited them a few years ago. In their pages unfolded a story, one penned in words on washi paper, but also written in terrain, the stone and soil of my country. He climbed a hundred peaks over the course of his lifetime. And Kinpusan was one of his favorites.

“The mysterious formation at its peak cleaves the sky like a raised sword,” he wrote in one entry. “Clouds waft below. The grandeur of the sight stirs me to the point that I find myself shouting at the top of my lungs for joy.” The next page featured his inkbrush portrayal of the formation.

This must have been some view, I thought. So many of the things that moved our ancestors are lost to time. But not the mountains. To the mountains, the hundred and twenty-five years that had elapsed since my great-grandfather wrote his words and I read them was nothing at all. The more I read of my great-grandfather’s diaries, the more I wanted to know him. He had died decades before I was born. But here in the mountains, I thought, I might share the sights that made him shout for joy.

But I was no alpinist. Not yet, anyway. And so I resolved to climb a lower peak first. Neighboring Mizugakiyama. It was a start. And as a bonus, from its peak, I would be able to see Mt. Kinpusan’s from afar.

We made our way up the trail. Spring had already come to Tokyo, but here on the mountain it had only just begun. We ascended through forest peppered by the green flecks of young leaves. As the trees whispered their awakening from winter, the mountain azaleas shouted it, their blazing bright pink bouquets a treat for the eyes. As the sun rose the the air warmed and grew damper. It wasn’t cold enough to need a jacket, but that could change; the bus driver who’d taken us here had remarked that he’d heard there were still some snowfields up there.

Not even a half hour in, we encountered two young men who’d obviously started hiking a little ahead of us. Both looked to be about the same age – mid to late twenties? – but they were dressed quite differently.

One seemed an experienced hiker. He was dressed head to toe in functional gear: a breathable synthetic long-sleeve shirt, hiking pants, and high-cut boots. His large backpack had been tricked out with all sorts of customizations, like a pair of water bottles slung in holsters on the front for easy access, and his head was wrapped in a thin tenugui towel, like a craftsman. I’ll call him Bandana.

His companion, on the other hand, looked as though he’d just rolled out of bed, thrown on whatever he’d found on his floor, and headed out into the hills. He wore a plaid button-down shirt over bluejeans, the hems of which were tucked into his cotton tube socks. His feet were in sneakers. And his backpack looked like a kid’s bookbag. I don’t mean this as a fashion critique. You need to dress right for the mountains. (My friend Kiwi Yamabushi just wrote about this!) If it rains, cotton gets wet and cold. And if you encounter rough spots, you’re likely to twist an ankle in soft shoes. On the other hand, he possessed something no amount of money can buy: youth. Let’s call him Plaid.

As we approached the pair, I caught snippets of their conversation. They were friends, it seemed. Bandana was obviously the more experienced; he was giving Plaid all sorts of commonsense hiking tips. We said mutual greetings, as one always does in the mountains – konnichi wa! – and set off ahead of them. A little further ahead we stopped for something or another and they passed us. Konnichi wa! again.

Eventually, after about another half hour or so, my husband and I reached a camping area. There were Bandana and Plaid, standing at a picnic table, digging through their gear. By this time we felt almost acquainted, and laughed as we caught sight of one another. We set down our packs on the same picnic table to take a water break.

The camping area, which consisted of a small hut, a public toilet, and an open space for pitching tents, sat at the split in the trail. Left led to Mt. Mizugakiyama; right, to Mt. Kinpusan.

“Which way are you going?” asked Bandana, as he unfurled a large paper hiking map on the tabletop.

“Mizugakiyama,” I replied. He nodded.

“But I really want to climb Kinpusan,” I continued. “That is why we’re going to Mizugakiyama.”

He looked at me with a quizzical expression; he of course knew they were in opposite directions. I explained that we considered ourselves novices, and had hired a guide to take us up Kinpusan. The guide had suggested tackling a shorter hike first, to make sure we were in shape.

“But then it was all cancelled because of rain,” I explained. “I didn’t want to chance rescheduling, so I thought we’d just climb it ourselves on the next sunny day. That way, we can tell him we’re ready to hit Kinpusan.”

Bandana nodded as he listened. Then he looked straight at us and said, “We’re going to Kinpusan today. Want to go with us? I’m actually training to be a mountain guide. So the more the merrier.”

It was nice of him to offer, but there were two critical problems. One was that since we’d planned on a much shorter hike, we didn’t have enough water. The other was the bus, which we needed to catch to get back to the nearest station. If we missed that, we’d be stuck.

When Bandana heard this, he broke into a smile. “I’ve got you covered. I brought way too much water – I wanted the extra weight for training. And I drove us here. So I can give you a lift back to the station!”

My husband and I exchanged glances. This was so… irregular! Everything is so planned out these days, scheduled, in chats and emails and things. The organic-ness of this interaction took both of us by surprise.

“Are you sure?” I asked Bandana. “Like I said, we’re novices.”

“So’s my friend!” he said, pointing at his buddy. “This is only his second hike.”

“This is your second hike?” I asked Plaid. “Where was the first?”

“Mount Fuji,” he answered. This made us all laugh, because that’s the tallest peak in all of Japan. But then I realized something: my great-grandfather’s first climb had been Mount Fuji, too. That was the mountain that had sent him off on a lifetime of climbing. Maybe this young man was making the first steps on his own journey.

“I have just two conditions,” said Bandana. “If it turns out that we aren’t fast enough to make the summit, I’m going to make a call that we turn back. And two, if we hit a snowfield, we’ll turn back there too. We don’t have the gear to cross safely.”

We nodded in eager assent. In fact, his willingness to turn back put us more at ease. I’ve never been particularly goal-oriented when hiking. I don’t see reaching a summit as “bagging it” or “conquering it” or anything like that. I don’t feel bad if weather or something makes me turn around. For me, it’s all about spending time on the mountain. With the mountain. Bandana seemed to feel the same.

So the four of us shouldered our backpacks and set out. It felt like a moment – no longer were we four strangers, but a single group. It was a little like a real-life RPG video game: Hiroko and Matt joined the party! I could almost hear the symphonic fanfare from Dragon Quest in my head.

We were nakama.

Bandana turned out to be an excellent guide. He put us on a schedule of breaks every forty-five minutes or so, whether we were tired or not. Every time he’d fish a baggie of trail mix out of his pack and dispense it in handfuls, like a mother bird feeding her chicks. At first I thought he was doing this out of courtesy, and so after the first time I reflexively declined out of politeness. We were eating all of Bandana’s food! But he wouldn’t hear of it.

“People don’t realize how many calories they burn in the mountains. It’s just as important to eat along the way as it is to stay hydrated. That’s why I brought this!” Bandana slid a half-liter plastic trail bottle out of his backpack, filled with more dried fruit and nuts. “It’s my own recipe! I get the dried fruit in bulk from a local supermarket.”

We talked a lot as we walked. Bandana taught us how to tie our shoelaces to better support our feet in our boots. How to adjust our backpacks’ straps to better distribute their weight. When we encountered a stretch of boulders, he showed us how to navigate them safely, with three points of contact -- one hand and two feet, or two hands and one foot – at all times.

But my favorite part was the map. Most hikers rely on smartphone apps these days, and they work really well. But Bandana stressed the importance of knowing how to read a physical map. He’d unfurl that big topographical map on breaks, and show us how to match the concentric contour lines to the terrain around us, how to gauge travel time, how to double-check that we were where we thought we were.

“If you know how to read a topographical map,” said Bandana on one of these stops, “you can feel like you’re climbing even if you’re sitting at a desk. It’s chikei-moé,” he laughed, which might translate into a fetish for terrain. I laughed too. But then it struck me: with my great grandfather’s diaries I’d inherited a huge number of his old maps. I’d wondered why he had so many, even of mountains he’d never actually climbed. But now I knew. He could read them, literally conjuring the peaks in his mind from their two-dimensional contours on the page. How many times had he sat at his desk imagining the climbs ahead, or the climbs of old, or the climbs he would never make? It made me feel a little closer to my great-grandfather. As though we might be nakama as well as relatives.

Eventually, our party reached the final pitch to the summit. Up ahead, I could make out a massive pile of boulders. It was the “mysterious formation” of my great-grandfather’s diary! It looked so close, but we knew from reading the map, and the look of the steep slope leading away from us, that it lay at least another forty-five minutes ahead. Bandana suggested we take a final break.

Now it was my husband’s and my turn to play host. We had purchased bento lunches, and each came with two traditional onigiri – riceballs with pickled plum fillings. We offered to split them with Bandana and Plaid so we’d each have one. They tried to refuse, but this time we wouldn’t have it. We’d come all this way together, sharing Bandana’s knowledge, not to mention water and trail mix. It was the least we could do. We sat there, gazing up at our destination while eating shared rice balls. We were nakama, a bond forged by mountain magic.

We ate quickly and made the final ascent. We passed glorious stone cliff faces along the razor-like ridge leading to the summit. And before long, I found myself standing before that “mysterious formation” on the peak of Mount Kinpusen: Gojo-iwa. It was a beautiful day. We were blessed with 360 degree views of the Central and Southern Japan Alps and the Yatsugatake range. As I stood there, in the same spot my great-grandfather had more than a century before, I understood why he’d shouted for joy. Now I shouted, too.

We snapped photos of each other on the summit and made our way back down to the trailhead. We talked about many things over the three or so hours it took. But it wasn’t until we returned to the split where we’d first made our pact to climb together that I thought to ask a question. A question I hadn’t needed to ask, because we were nakama. But now we were something more. I turned to Bandana and Plaid.

“I’m Hiroko, and this is Matt. What are your names?”

And so a group of nakama became friends.

I wrote a book about my experiences and adventures exploring Japan’s spirituality. It’s called Eight Million Ways to Happiness, and is due out in December of 2025. You can pre-order it here!

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June is, traditionally, rainy season in Tokyo. Traditionally, the temperature should drop, a brief respite before the punishing summer heat descends upon the city. But not this year, and certainly not this day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky as I walked along a road in suburban Tokyo. I carried a parasol to create a little shade from the sun shining above, but nothing could stave off the heat radiating up from the pavement beneath my feet. What am I doing? I thought to myself as I trudged ahead, my body feeling as though it were shimmering with the heat-haze. I have a perfectly comfortable air-conditioned home. But I pressed on, because if I missed this opportunity, it would be another year before I got another chance to see the person I wanted to see. His name was Osamu Dazai. His vocation was writer. His address, my destination, was a graveyard in the suburbs of Tokyo.

Dazai wouldn’t be moving anytime soon, but this was a special day: June 19th, the anniversary of his passing away in 1948. That it was still being commemorated some eighty years later was a testament to how celebrated of an author he was in life. Actually, June 19th wasn’t the exact date of his death. He famously committed suicide by jumping into a canal with one of his lovers, but their bodies were found a week later on June 19th, still bound at the waist by a red rope. It was, coincidentally, also his birthday.

The deaths of famous folks are often memorialized with special titles, rather than calling them by name. Dazai’s is Oto-ki. It was coined by a novelist friend as a nod to Dazai’s last story, Oto (Cherry), and the fact that cherries were one of Dazai’s favorite foods. I learned this after stumbling across the information in a Japanese-language sightseeing pamphlet, which also mentioned that fans from all over Japan gathered to leave cherries on Dazai’s grave that day.

I wouldn’t exactly call myself a Dazai fan. I first became interested in his work after learning of his unexpected popularity among American anime fans – more on that in a bit – then read his acclaimed quasi-memoir No Longer Human. It’s dark stuff. But I respected it. And for some reason, I felt myself wanting to check out his grave on the anniversary of his death. He’s one of those writers who feels defined by death, both in the way he lived and in the way he passed. Somehow, a visit felt fitting.

Visiting graves is part of the fabric of life for Japanese. We often visit the graves of our relatives as a family, sweeping up and cleaning, offering incense and flowers, sometimes leaving an old favorite of the departed from when they were alive – some food, a bottle of sake, what have you. Although these visits are commonly conducted during specific holiday periods, such as ohigan in spring and fall, or obon in summer, it isn’t at all odd to visit outside of these times, either. There aren’t any strict rules; we go whenever we feel the urge, in the spirit of paying a visit to a relative. The only difference is that they aren’t visible anymore. When I visit my family’s graves, I talk. I like to tell them how things are going, ask them to say hi to other relatives or mutual acquaintances who’ve passed over to the other side. I know it’s a one way conversation, but it makes me feel better, especially when I’m missing them the most.

I’m not related to Dazai in any way. And as I said I’m not some kind of superfan. But my visit wouldn’t have surprised many Japanese anyway, because there’s another fashion of visiting graves here, not for mourning or remembrance, but simply for fun. This kind of visit is historically called sotai (掃苔), written with characters that literally mean “cleaning up moss.” Today, aficionados are better known as haka-mairaa (墓マイラー), from “haka-mairi,” or grave-visit, extended into a kind of verb, tongue in cheek. Haka-mairaa visit graves to celebrate the legacy or works of famous people (and the occasional celebrity animal, like Hachiko, whose statue sits in Shibuya but whose grave can be found on the grounds of a certain Tokyo graveyard.) It’s a way to show respect and gratitude.

Some haka-mairaa visit whenever they happen to be near an interesting grave. Others have turned the practice into a hobby, even a lifestyle. The literary researcher Kajipon Marco Zangetsu has visited more than 2,500 people’s graves in a hundred and one countries during the last thirty years! He’s literally crisscrossed the globe, visiting the Antarctic to pay respects to explorer Robert Scott, then the Arctic Circle for Roald Amundsen. He also journeyed to the distant Polynesian island of Hiva Oa to visit the grave of artist Paul Gauguin, among many other grave-visiting journeys. In an interview, Zangetsu describes a rough childhood, being raised by an alcoholic father. He says that literature, music, and paintings helped him survive his hardships. As he grew up, he came to see those artists who inspired him as benefactors. And so he decided to show his gratitude by visiting their final resting spots, first in Japan, then all over the world.

I’ve never considered myself a haka-mairaa (in fact, I only just learned the term while writing this newsletter!) But I understand where their feelings are coming from. I visit graves of people outside of my family from time to time too. For example, when Matt and I were writing Ninja Attack! I visited the grave of famed ninja master Hattori Hanzo to show my gratitude. Similarly, when we were writing its sequel Yurei Attack! we went to the grave of Lady Oiwa, star of Tokyo’s scariest ghost story, to ask her permission. (This is common practice in the kabuki world, too, whenever they put on a production of Yotsuya Kaidan.) And when we published Japandemonium Illustrated, we brought a bouquet of flowers to artist Toriyama Sekien’s grave, so that the three of us could celebrate his work coming out in English for the first time.

Dead people are invisible, because they’re no longer with us, physically. But as anyone who has lost someone close knows, they linger in other ways. And so I don’t see the dead’s invisibility as a reason or excuse to ignore them, even if they weren’t personally close to me. I didn’t know Hattori Hanzo or Lady Oiwa or Toriyama Sekien – they died centuries before I was born. But I (and my husband) wanted to pay our respects, because it felt like courtesy, manners, and simply the right thing to do. Their legacies and memories remain, nourishing generations of people who came after them, and will come after us, I suspect.

It’s fun to take a personal moment with such stars of the cultural scene. Plus, it’s an excuse to learn more about them. In Sekien’s case we didn’t just visit his grave; we went to the National Diet Library, dug up some very old maps, and pinpointed the location of his house/studio back in the 1770s. Then we used Google Maps to navigate there. Unsurprisingly, a brand-new modern home stood there, and I would bet you its occupants have no clue about the historic land upon which they’re now going about their lives. But it was exciting to stand where the artist who’d made the book that inspired us did his work, 250 years back. On our way back home, we stopped by an old little Japanese restaurant in the neighborhood. We ordered food for two, but I asked for water for three. It made it feel as though Sekien was sitting with us. When you open your heart like this, you realize that the people who passed away may not really be so far away from us after all.

Fans visiting to Osamu Dazai’s grave, especially on his death anniversary of cherry, is very much similar to that.

Osamu Dazai’s career spans the years leading up to and just after World War II. His most popular works are 1947’s Shayo (“The Setting Sun”), and the 1948 novel Ningen Shikkaku (which has been published in translation under a variety of names, most famously No Longer Human.) Shinchosha, his Japanese publisher, has put out 6.5 million copies of Ningen Shikkaku in Japan alone. But these days Dazai’s fame is not limited to the literary world, or even to Japan. The dour author was reinterpreted as a handsome young bishonen (beautiful boy) character in a manga series called Bungo Stray Dogs, which became an anime that was translated and released abroad in 2023. Dazai proved one of the most popular characters. At the peak of the show’s popularity, the hashtag “#dazaiosamu” racked up over 1.5 billion views on TikTok, and made an old English translation of No Longer Human a surprise bestseller. This sparked even more interest, and now Penguin Random House is putting out a new translation of the classic – the fourth! – in 2026.

The graveyard where Dazai now rested was inside of a Buddhist temple. Passing through the tile-covered temple gate, I found myself at the tail end of a line of well-wishers. They spanned the generations and demographics, a whole variety of people, old, young, middle age, male and female, all of us heading in the same direction. Many carried offerings in their hands: incense, cherries. By the time I made it to Dazai’s plot, there were maybe fifteen people hovering around his grave. Some watched quietly; others whispered conversations about the author in low voices so as not to disturb the others. It felt like an ad-hoc outdoor literary salon.

Dazai’s plot is arranged with a patch of open space about a meter square in front of the gravestone. On that day it was piled with colorful offerings, making it pop out against the gray background of the surrounding stones. Packs of cherries, flowers, beer, sake, whiskey, Pocari Sweat sports drinks (hey, it was hot out there), books, and more filled the space. Among them, I noticed more than a few bottles with a distinctive panda design. I knew exactly what they were – bottles of MSG, sold in supermarkets. Out of curiosity, I asked the man next to me, an older gentleman in a straw hat, what it meant. “Dazai loved MSG,” he said. Then he asked, “Are you a fan? Go ahead, stick a cherry into his name!”

I’d heard about the custom. Nobody knows when and who started it, but fans have been fitting cherries into the characters inscribed in Dazai’s tombstone. Presumably, they meant this as an offering, so that he might enjoy his favorite fruit in the great beyond. But I demurred. I hadn’t brought any cherries, for one thing, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have wanted to risk stepping on any of the pile of gifts left for Dazai. As I turned to depart, a teen-age schoolgirl still in her uniform passed me, carrying a small bouquet of yellow flowers. She reminded me of the illustration on the cover of Dazai’s novel Joseito (“Schoolgirl”). Is she a fan of the novel, I wondered? Or of the manga? It didn’t really matter; she was showing her respects along with everyone else. And now it was time for me to go, because I could see a new crowd of people moving in behind the girl.

Across from Dazai’s plot stood the grave of another classic novelist: Ogai Mori. He was a titan of the prewar literary scene, too, but nobody seemed to be paying him any attention on this day. I felt kind of bad, so I made a point of stopping and pressing my palms together in front of his grave before I left. Then I noticed something – a few cherries and a bottle of water. It seems someone had had the same thought as I did. Now Mori had some cherries to share with Dazai.

Osamu Dazai lived a life of despair, a despair reflected in his work. He was an addict, an alcoholic, and attempted suicide several times before finally succumbing in the end. I really wonder what he would think, what he would feel, if he could see all of these fans gathering at his grave today, paying their respects, showing their gratitude for the painful truths he expressed in his work, at terrible personal cost.

As I walked back home, I reflected on the fact that graveyards aren’t necessarily seen as dark or sad places in Japan. It’s true that it is extremely painful to lose someone. It’s easy to think that death is the end of everything. But one of the things I love about the Japanese worldview is that it helps us remember that death might not be the end we think it is. When we remember those we’ve lost, we also remember that they are and always will be there for us.

I wrote a book about my experiences and adventures exploring Japan’s spirituality. It’s called Eight Million Ways to Happiness, and is due out in December of 2025. You can pre-order it here!

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When you look at mountains, the first thing that probably strikes you is their beauty. Perhaps you think, what a great place to go climbing, or have a picnic, or simply take a walk through the forest. I suspect most people think this way, and so do I. But there is another way of looking at the mountains in Japan, an older way. One that isn’t rooted in leisure, but spirituality.

Mt. Daisen, at a little over 1,700 meters the highest mountain in the Chugoku region, is a perfect example of this dichotomy. Today, it’s part of the Daisen-Oki National Park. It’s a beautiful place, and easily climbable in a day; some 90,000 summit it every year. A series of paths lead to the top, with its incredible views of the Sea of Japan. One, the Natsuyama Trail, is designed for hikers. Another is a steeper ascent that follows in the literal footsteps of a trail historically used by religious pilgrims.

That’s the one I wanted to climb. When I hear things like “old trail historically used by pilgrims” my sense of curiosity starts tingling. No matter how steep or difficult (well, within the realms of my climbing abilities and common sense), I want to take that way. And Mt. Daisen’s is particularly interesting. It’s simply fun to visit. But it also captures Japan’s spiritual worldview in ways old and new.

To understand what I mean, let’s turn back the clock – way back, to before the dawn of recorded history. Understanding the Japanese heart means understanding the mountains. My nation is covered in them. Some are quite rugged and high. And before the advent of modern technology, they were seen as very dangerous places. The terrain could be confusing; the weather unpredictable; and there were hazards from wild animals to rockslides, not to mention simply slipping and falling. This made them the sort of places that ordinary folk avoided.

Perhaps because of this, mountains were viewed as places where all sorts of spiritual beings resided. Kami, the avatars of the natural world in Shinto; hotoke, the deities of Buddhism; the spirits of the dead; yokai, oni, and spooks of all sorts. This makes sense, for the normal “rules” of life didn’t apply there.

Today, Mt. Daisen is known for Jizo-shinko: the worship of the Buddhist deity known as Jizo. Japanese have long treated Jizo as a kind of guardian angel, for children in particular but everyone in general, regardless of their faith (or even if they possess no faith!) Statues of Jizo can be found nearly anywhere, small, baby-like, with gentle smiles. Locals often show their appreciation by knitting them little caps and bibs, to protect them from getting cold as they stand watch. That’s the kind of affection Jizo inspires here. And Mt. Daizen’s Jizo-shinko expanded the concept to include animals as well. A belief in the mountain’s divine power to protect their livestock attracted large numbers of farmers eager to protect their assets, which led to the establishment of a cattle-trading market at the foot of the mountain. By the end of the 19th century it grew into the largest in Japan, with more than 10,000 horse and oxen traded annually. This is the ancestral birthplace of the “wagyu” the world loves today.

Daisenji temple has been a spiritual center for 1,300 years. Today it is Buddhist, but in times of old it was the locus for a broader nationwide spiritual philosophy known as Shugendo, which fused elements of Shinto, Buddhism, Taoism, and local folk religion. Most of all, they worshipped mountains.

Practitioners were known as gyoja, “those who train.” Gyoja saw mountains as their “spiritual mandalas,” with the peaks representing the holiest of holy ground. They called Daisen’s peak Misen, from Shumisen, a sacred five-peaked mountain from Buddhist cosmology. Gyoja believed that truly expert practitioners might open and access a world beyond even Misen. This is why they subjected themselves to all of the physical and mental trials that mountains like Mt. Daisen had to offer, to bring themselves closer to the sublime.

Shugendo was a radically inclusive sort of belief system. Its holy grounds often incorporated Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples side by side. And they often worshipped deities that were fusions of Shinto kami and Buddhist deities, which they called gongen, or avatars. This was the case on Mt. Daisen as well. The local gyoja venerated an avatar that represented a fusion of Mt. Daisen, which was seen as a Shinto kami in its own right, and Jizo. They called it Daichimyo Gongen. And it anchored religious life on Mt. Daisen for more than a millennium.

The old trail I wanted to climb is called the gyoja-dani (gyoja valley) course, and it begins at Daisenji temple, deep in the forests that cover Mt. Daisen’s foothills. It is a remnant of the era when this was once a Shugendo mountain. You may have noticed that I have been using the past tense a lot here. That is because Mt. Daisen isn’t a Shugendo mountain anymore, and there is no sign of Daichimyo Gongen, either. The reasons for that can be traced back to one of the biggest surprises in Japanese history: the sudden arrival of American gunboats in Japanese waters in 1853.

In the decades to come, all sorts of foreign influences flooded into the country. Western technologies and philosophies caused major changes in the way we governed ourselves and lived our lives. They compelled us to question the ways we had long thought, fought, and created. And our spiritual traditions were no exception. The government feared that Western philosophies might overwhelm our culture as we Westernized. And so in 1868 they took the dramatic step of reorganizing the Japanese religious landscape. Buddhism and Shinto would be forcibly separated, so that the authorities could remodel the latter into a state religion. But Shugendo was considered too thoroughly fused to untangle. It was banned outright, in a prohibition that would last until after Japan’s defeat in World War II.

It has been a hundred and fifty years since Daichimyo Gongen disappeared from Mt. Daisen, along with other avatars of Shugendo across the land. I wanted to climb the gyoja-dani course to see if I could still feel what the gyoja did, to sense what they sensed. We can’t see the kami and hotoke with our own eyes. So can a god really disappear? I didn’t think so. But I needed to find out.

My search for a lost kami began early on a misty late-spring morning. When my husband Matt and I set out from our inn, dew still clung to the rapidly greening foliage, and clouds to the peaks of Mt. Daisen far above. But even from these earliest moments the mountain made its spiritual heritage obvious. The trail began at a Buddhist temple. But almost immediately, we had to pass through a large stone gate – a tori’i, symbol of Shinto.

This isn’t an altogether uncommon thing in Japan, where the lines between faiths aren’t nearly as firm, or fraught, as those abroad. But it tells a story, for those who knew how to read it. Beyond the gate presented sacred territory, a place where the Shinto kami and Buddhist hotoke and all of the other countless spirits of Japanese belief have dwelled together in quiet harmony for a very long time. It was very easy to imagine this having been a place where Shugendo gyoja trained long ago – an impression reinforced all the more when, just beyond the Shinto gate, we found a cluster of Buddhist statuary. Japan’s patchwork of spiritual traditions, woven into a mountainside in wood and stone.

I entered the grove of statues. The smell of loam filled the air with every footstep, and I almost had to duck beneath a moss-covered tree-trunk that bisected the space at a diagonal. One of the largest was a Fudo Myo’o, a fierce-looking Buddhist deity associated with Shugendo. The others were all Jizo. The statues were quite weathered, covered in moss, their features softened by long exposure to the elements. It was obvious I was in their realm now, an older one. I pressed my palms together, Buddhist style, in a greeting and sign of respect and continued on. We had many hours walk ahead if we were to reach Misen.

The path itself is unique: constructed from countless natural stones, worn smooth by the feet of countless visitors over countless years. Shortly we came across a creek bisecting the path: another symbol. In Japanese spiritual lore, water separates the land of humans from the great beyond of the kami and hotoke, between life and afterlife. A low stone bridge, carved with Buddhist sutras, arced over the creek. We crossed it and continued beyond.

I found another old Jizo statue on the side of the path, leading to a Shinto shrine. This one was carved into a boulder, centuries ago, as an offering from a wealthy merchant. The effigy has been watching over the path ever since.

At the end of the bumpy stone path, we found a formidable stone staircase. Atop it sat a grand-looking Shinto shrine. Its name, I knew, was Ogamiyma Jinja – “great kami-mountain shrine.”

But I also knew this shrine hadn’t always been called that. Long ago, it had a different name: Daichimyo Gongen Jinja.

This is where an effigy of the lost avatar I sought had been enshrined, until that Meiji-era order to separate kami from hotoke, Shinto from Buddhism. Daisenji had no choice but to comply, and in 1875, after some 1,300 years of veneration, they removed Daichimyo Gongen and enshrined a new Shinto deity called Onamuchi-no-kami. Daichimyo Gongen Jinja became Ogamiyama Jinja, and a site of Shugendo worship became a Shinto one. Which it remains today.

Yet there were subtle clues here, if you looked with the right eyes. The kami may have been new: 150 years was a blink in the history of my nation’s spirituality. But that massive wooden structure, the shrine itself, was anything but. The massive timbers used to build it spoke to its age, hewn from old-growth forests of the sort that are sadly rare today. But the biggest hint of all was hiding in plain sight: the gorgeously gabled roof. I knew from my studies that this style was known as gongen-zukuri. Gongen! Like the avatar. This was a popular design long ago, when Shinto buildings often incorporated Buddhist architecture. A fusion of two faiths’ symbols, once used to house an avatar that was a fusion of two faiths. How perfect was that! This building is in fact the largest surviving gongen-zukuri shrine in Japan. It’s a testament to how Daisen Shugendo once flourished here.

In fact, archaeological excavations have revealed the remains of at least 170 buildings that once made up a huge “campus” affiliated with Daisenji. At its peak, some 3,000 monks lived here, many of them trained as warriors to guard the mountain during the tumultuous Warring States period. They must have been strong, for it was they who laid the path of rocks leading here, one of the longest stone paths of its sort in Japan. Those warrior monks are gone, long since laid to rest in graves scattered around the mountain. And Daisenji’s buildings have been reduced to just fourteen. But the path remains. I think they’d be proud to know that.

The entrance to Daisen’s mountain-climbing trail lay just beyond the shrine. Here the stone path ended, and a long dirt trail began. In times of old, only a chosen few, just five of Daisenji’s top gyoja, were allowed to tread this path. Today, of course, it’s open to anyone who wants to climb. And climb we did.

Locals sometimes call Mount Daisen “Izumo Fuji,” for from certain angles, the west in particular, its smooth slopes resemble those of the iconic mountain of my country. I recall once catching sight of it from a car window, years back, and doing a double-take.

But from the north, Mount Daisen presents a totally different face. About a half hour’s hike from the shrine, we came to a valley, wide and open, filled with rocks. This was gyoja dani - the valley of the Shugendo practitioners who used this mountain as a spiritual training ground. From this angle, Mount Daisen doesn’t resemble Fuji at all. It is an awe-inspiring string of peaks filling my vision entirely. We stand for a while in the morning light, drinking it all in. By now the clouds had cleared a bit, revealing snow in the craggy face of the range ahead. Occasionally we heard rumbles as rocks tumbled down the steep slopes. Looking more closely, we could see many of the crevices filled up with huge piles of stones, evidence of centuries and millennia of rockfalls. This is a beautiful place, but also a dangerous one, home to powerful forces ungoverned by human rules. It must have taken a lot of bravery to enter these hills without modern trails or gear. It’s easy to understand why the gyoja, followers of that lost avatar, came here to pray. Simply being here feels like a prayer.

It took us roughly three hours to reach the top. Three hours up what seemed an endless flight of rough stairs. At one point we encountered a snowfield, too large to avoid. We’d purchased sets of microspikes for this very occasion, strapped them onto our boots, and carefully crunched our way higher through the icy terrain. The winds grew cooler and cooler as we ascended. We watched the clouds nervously. They were back, and looked like they might bring rain. I hoped they might break enough for us to get a view from the top.

Alas, Misen was what hikers call “socked in,” shrouded in thick fog. Wrapped in that blanket of cloud, I sat for a while and thought about Shugendo practitioners in old times. Shugendo literally means the “way of acquiring power.” Gyoja trained themselves in the mountains to gain power, which to them meant the ability to make contact with spiritual beings in realms beyond our own. Surrounded by mists that broke only occasionally to reveal snatches of Earth far below, I wondered if I might have found it myself.

We took the same path back down. When we finally returned to the shrine, I made a point of going inside, where I bowed twice, clapped twice, and bowed once again, in Shinto style. I wanted to thank the mountain for letting us in, and allowing us to return unscathed. But I also took the opportunity to peer deeper into the prayer hall, to the altar beyond. It was empty, just like the altars of most Shinto shrines. For the kami are invisible; they are, as a priest once told me, “the space in your heart,” to feel all of things that make life worth living. If you think they’re somewhere, then they are.

So Daichimyo Gongen isn’t here, anymore. But neither is he not-here, if you get my meaning. This shrine venerates a Shinto deity called Onamuchi-no-kami, but if you ask me, this “newcomer” and the Avatar of old are one and the same. Both symbolize the mountain itself. And that hasn’t changed one bit. Names are just names. What is important is our feelings – our awe at the stunning beauty of this place, our respect for the unpredictable powers of nature. Daisen literally means “great mountain,” and in the end, that’s all that matters. No matter what we call it, it will always be here for us.

I wrote a book about my experiences and adventures exploring Japan’s spirituality. It’s called Eight Million Ways to Happiness, and is due out in December of 2025. You can pre-order it here!

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I have written a book! And I am excited to reveal the cover to you for the very first time. Eight Million Ways to Happiness: Wisdom for Inspiration and Healing from the Heart of Japan is coming out on December 30th, 2025, from the fine folks at Tiny Reparations Books, but you can pre-order it at the link above (and I’d greatly appreciate if you would!)

Eight Million Ways to Happiness is the culmination of more than a decade of research, exploration, and living. It is a story of re-connection, as I traveled Japan to explore my nation’s patchwork of spiritual traditions after the loss of my mother, and later my father. It’s a cultural history of the Japanese spiritual landscape, and also something more: a roadmap for those questing for meaning in the modern world, but who shy away from locking themselves into any specific faith.

The book’s title comes from the Japanese idiom yaoyorozu no kami, literally “eight million kami,” kami being what we call spiritual beings in Japan. Once, we saw them in everything: the heavens above, the ground below, the trees, the rocks, the rivers, the seas, the tools we used, even the words we speak. To us, eight million isn’t a strict accounting. It is an awed description of an uncountable multitude of incredible diversity, of a spiritual space defined by incorporation rather than rejection.

Even still, I wouldn’t blame you if you found the title a little shocking. I remember the first time I mentioned it to a friend.

“Eight million?” he practically gasped. “Don’t you think that’s too many?”

I quickly explained that the book’s title was taken from the idiom, in a poetic sense, not as a literal reckoning.

“So what it really means,” I continued with a smile, “is an indefinite number of ways to happiness!” But his expression remained so quizzical that I started laughing, which made him start laughing, too.

That laughter is really what this book is about. That positivity in the face of complexity and uncertainty.

Many books treat Japan as an exotic subject, but Eight Million Ways to Happiness is the first to focus on Japanese spirituality as it manifests in daily life — sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, but always comforting and inspiring.

In Japan, religion co-exists with modern society in ways quite different from that of the West. Our spirituality hides in plain sight, quietly, like the air we breathe, invisible yet equally precious and essential. It inspires so much of what the world loves about Japanese culture traditional and pop, fueling connoisseurship and craftsmanship, nourishing cleanliness and cuisine.

Because of this, I never really paid much attention to my country’s spiritual traditions growing up. Everything changed with the devastating loss of my mother. Desperate to ease my pain and sorrow, I began taking long walks in a local park. It was there, surrounded by trees and life, immersed in the cycles of the seasons, that I began to heal. And I sensed something more: a quiet pulse beating just beneath the surface of my culture. Was this what the eight million kami were about? I needed to know more.

My research took me to some extraordinary places. I followed a monk through a labyrinth of caves to reach an ancient altar hidden deep within a mountain. I ascended to the dizzying heights of a sacred waterfall to watch priests conduct a ritual few outsiders are ever permitted to see. I traveled to places holy and haunted. At the climax, in snowy northern Tohoku, I made contact with a ninety-year-old itako spirit medium, the last of her kind, to experience traditional ways of re-connecting with those we’ve lost.

I think you’ll come to the same epiphany I did: that Japanese spirituality isn’t just for one country or people. It’s relevant for everybody, because it is radically inclusive, and rooted in something that everyone can share: a sense of gratitude for existence itself. That provides the foundation to center ourselves, to nourish and uplift, even as we go through difficult times.

Let me give you one example from my book. There’s a particular group of kami known as the Seven Gods of Happiness, popular in Japan for centuries. They’re deities from different spiritual backgrounds, male and female, domestic and foreign, sailing the seas to bring fortune to all who welcome them. Their example goes beyond mere tolerance; it’s a hint that we’re all in the same boat, too, and when we embrace differences it makes us stronger — and happier.

Eight Million Ways to Happiness: Wisdom for Inspiration and Healing from the Heart of Japan will be published on December 30th, 2025. If you’ve enjoyed my newsletter, you’ll love the deep dives this book affords me the luxury of bringing to you. It is my honor to be your eyes and ears on a journey through Japan’s spiritual terrain, and if you’d like to join me, you can preorder my book here, or at your favorite bookstore. Thank you!

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Many words in Japanese have been borrowed from English and other languages. We call these gairaigo, literally “words that came from abroad.” Many of them are foods: piza for “pizza,” hanbagaa for “hamburger,” or koohii for “coffee,” just to name a few. The concept isn’t limited to my country, of course: virtually every English speaker knows the words “sushi,” “typhoon,” and “tsunami,” for instance, all of which arrived in English from Japanese.

There is another type of loanword that Japanese use in daily life: wasei eigo, literally “Japanese-English.” We differentiate these terms because they sound like English, but were coined by Japanese speakers. For instance, plus alpha. Any idea what it means? We use it to mean a bonus extra, or a boost to something. How about my boom? That’s what we call a personal fad. A few are well enough known abroad to qualify as loanwords there, such as level up and salaryman. English has counterparts to wasei eigo, too: borrowed from Japanese, but used in different ways than natives would. Like “tycoon,” meaning “wealthy businessman” in English. But you might be surprised to learn that it is a synonym for “shogun” in Japanese.

I bring all of this up because of a word that has become almost inescapable in English recently: ikigai, from the Japanese for “reason for living.” It seems a straightforward loanword, but I’ve noticed that English speakers use it in a very different way from Japanese speakers. Before we get into that, let’s take a quick look at the history of the word in translation (or more accurately, in borrowing.)

Ikigai has long been used in Japanese. Nobuhiko Kanda, a professor at Bunkyo University, wrote a paper in which he traced its first known appearance in print to a dictionary from 1908. But the commercialization of the concept began in the mid-1960s. That is when dozens of Japanese books with ikigai in the title started being published, sparking a fad that continued through the 1990s.

Ikigai appears to have entered the English lexicon in 2008 via a writer named Dan Buettner and his bestselling book The Blue Zones, which profiled regions where inhabitants seemed to be unusually long lived. One of these places was Okinawa. In a 2009 TED Talk, Buettner declared that “in the Okinawan language there is not even a word for retirement. Instead, there is one word that imbues your entire life, and that word is ‘ikigai.’ And, roughly translated, it means ‘the reason for which you wake up in the morning.’” (I am suspicious of the idea that there isn’t any word for retirement in the Ryukyu dialect, and I don’t see ikigai as anything specific to Okinawa, but these concerns are beside the point here.)

The TED talk inspired a blogger by the name of Marc Winn, who in 2014 applied the concept of ikigai to a pre-existing Venn diagram that was made by a Spanish astrologer named Andres Zuzunaga. Zuzunaga’s chart claimed that one’s purpose might be found at the overlapping intersection of “what you love,” “what you’re good at,” “what the world needs,” and “what you can be paid for.” But as Winn wrote in a blog post last February, “I replaced ‘Purpose’ with ‘Ikigai,’ merging Buettner’s cultural concept with Zuzunaga’s visual.” The mash-up went viral, quickly spreading to “HR seminars, life-coaching sessions, and entrepreneurial workshops, amassing billions of views.”

Among these viewers were a pair of writers named Héctor Garcia and Francesco Miralle. They were writing a Spanish-language book that would be released in English translation in 2017 as Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life. Like Buettner, they explored longevity in Okinawa, but they also used Winn’s chart in their book. Their global mega-success helped mainstream ikigai into foreign tongues, connecting it to both happiness and personal prosperity. By 2018 it had become so widely used that the Oxford English Dictionary bestowed it with an official entry. And so a new gairaigo was born.

Or is it wasei eigo? The way in which English speakers use “ikigai” differs subtly but critically from the way in which Japanese do. In the West it’s a secular form of prosperity gospel; in Japan, it is more akin to a psychological diagnosis. (To make things easier henceforth, I’ll use “ikigai” in quotes to refer to the English adoption, and ikigai in italics to refer to original Japanese usage.) Now, let me say up front, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. But what I find fascinating is that now the Japanese government has now seized upon the word, reverse importing it back into Japan as though it were a new concept, right along with the ikigai-astrology chart. You might be asking yourself, how is that possible? I certainly was, when I first saw it. But the answer can be found in the gulf between “ikigai” and ikigai.

In English, “ikigai” has come to mean “a passion that gives value and joy to life.” (I am quoting the Japanese government quoting Garcia and Miralle who are in turn channeling Buettner here in a linguistic game of telephone.) “Ikigai” has also, because of that chart, become closely associated with fortune, in terms of finding work that you enjoy.

But in the Japanese, ikigai has a much heavier meaning. It is neither about passion nor prosperity. It is about survival. The word literally means something “worth putting your life on the line for.” In other words, if you fail, death awaits. Because ikigai has these heavy connotations, in colloquial Japanese it is really only used in situations that represent extremes on a spectrum: either deathly serious or joking around.

The most commonly encountered usage is the latter. Like, you’re out with friends, and someone says “drinking beer is my ikigai,” ha ha ha (then takes another big drink). It’s kind of like how English speakers might say, “I can’t live without my [fill in the blank].” Of course you can, but that’s not the point, and everyone knows it.

When I think about this kind of ikigai I think about middle-aged K-pop fans. According to 2023 statistics, the majority of Japanese fans of BTS are women in their 40s and 50s! And this tracks, because some of my friends are among them. They love going to shows and screaming their lungs out. Whenever they tell me about their latest concert adventure, they inevitably describe it as their ikigai and we laugh.

Now, on to that heavier usage. This ikigai is mainly used in relation to elder care, in terms of people who are struggling, mentally and physically, late in life. Their survival is dependent on finding a reason to stay engaged in life. It’s commonly held that finding an ikigai will stave off age-related ailments like boke, senility. This is something anyone who has elderly family or friends takes very seriously. It can be a literal matter of life and death.

It might surprise you to hear that when I was growing up in Japan, the adults in my life – my parents, my teachers – counseled me to avoid looking for my ikigai. This wasn’t some attempt to crush my spirit. What they meant was the opposite: they wanted me to keep my mind open. You’re too young to narrow your focus, the thinking went. Don’t be picky; try anything and everything, even if it might seem boring at first. I recall being told once that I hadn’t lived nearly long enough to have found my ikigai in that sense of “putting my life on the line for something.”

The caution wasn’t only reserved for kids. There was a sense that ikigai, if applied in the wrong way, could foster unhealthy attachments or dependency. This was especially true if your ikigai centered on other people. In my parents’ generation, the stereotypical definition of ikigai was raising kids. Back then, it was altogether normal for women to stay home and raise children while the men worked late into the night. But hyperfocusing all of your life-energy on raising kids wasn’t necessarily healthy for anyone involved. Taken too far, it could be a recipe for toxicity: absentee fathers and over-protective mothers. And what did you do with yourself when your kids left the nest?

As I grew up, I came to see ikigai as a double-edged sword. You were supposed to have one, right? So if you didn’t, it could lead to a lot of doubt and self-recrimination. So-and-so has their ikigai, why not me? It was a precursor to how social media exacerbates feelings of alienation, hopelessness, anxiety, and depression among young people today. We all go through periods of trying to find ourselves, and not only when we’re young. It is all too easy to slip into a toxically comparative mindset – seeing those with ikigai as bright, joyful, and promising, and those without one as somehow dark, gloomy, lacking.

One psychiatrist, writing on the Japanese health website Nikkei Gooday, goes so far as to declare that “the preconception that one must have an ikigai in their life is problematic.” They continue, “we can live without an ikigai. We were born for the purpose of living. That means our lives have meaning in and of themselves.” I wholeheartedly agree. And it is incredibly important to spread the word, for Japan, this supposed bastion of “ikigai,” has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world.

Although the overall numbers have declined from their peak in 1999, when the nation recorded a tragically high 33,048 suicides, the proportion of young citizens – defined as ten to nineteen years of age – among them has been rising steadily. A 2020 report listed suicide as the top cause of death for Japanese between the ages of 15 and 39. And in fact 2024 marked the worst year for suicide among young people since 1980.

This is why seeing my government’s encouraging of young people to seek out “ikigai” (quotes intentional) gives me very mixed feelings. Of course, it’s good to encourage others to seek out their passions. But regardless of what people outside of Japan may think – and I don’t blame them, given how “ikigai” is used in English these days – Japan certainly doesn’t have any kind of monopoly on ikigai, if the ongoing mental health crisis is any indication. And I’m not sure a website promoting a foreign book on the topic is going to fix it.

When I was studying English, I had my hands full memorizing grammar and vocabulary, so I never really paid much attention to differences between languages. But as I gained more experience and became truly bilingual, I realized the tools of grammar and vocab are useful but far from oorumaiti (“almighty,” another loanword.) Equally crucial is understanding the cultural context of expressions. Without that, you can be a walking dictionary and still run into misunderstandings.

Take the Japanese word faito. This is another loanword, as it originates in the English word “fight.” But it is also wasei eigo, because Japanese use it in a totally different way from English speakers. English dictionaries describe “fight” as “using physical force to try to defeat another person or group of people.” But faito has nothing to do with violence. In fact, it is entirely positive! Because the fight isn’t against other people; it’s against yourself, the inner weakness that might hold you back from achieving something. I was on the girls’ handball team in high school. We would always shout faito! to cheer ourselves through the pain of strength training. When someone missed a shot or something, we’d shout donmai! (another loanword: “don’t mind”), then faito! to keep the team focused on the goal.

You can see a classic example of this in a 1982 commercial for a popular energy drink. Two men – one of whom is Hiroyuki Sanada of Shogun fame, sprint along a beach and shout Faito! Ippatsu! (which might be rendered as “DO IT IN ONE!”) Faito was one of the first words I knew to be cautious about in English. When I went to study abroad I remember telling myself to hold back and not shout “FIGHT!” when cheering my school’s basketball team.

All of which is to say, “ikigai” and ikigai have pretty much the same relationship as “fight” and faito! In the West, “ikigai” is all about unleashing your inner potential, while in Japan, ikigai is more like a tool for survival. None of this is to say that “ikigai” is bad and ikigai is good. They’re just different, and yet another example of how words can change when absorbed into other languages. I’m just saying it’s important to keep those differences in mind.

So you might want to be careful using “ikigai” around native speakers of Japanese. They will undoubtedly laugh and nod along when you use the term to describe your passion for work. But they aren’t laughing at you. They’re laughing with you. Because it’s all good. It’s like that psychiatrist said: life is precious, and living has meaning in and of itself. Everything else? That’s just a plus alpha.

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Today is the 14th anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake.

I wanted to share an article I originally wrote for an American magazine in 2020. It’s a story of loss told through the lens of Shinto priest Nobuhiko Ise, who tended to shrines that were cut off from human contact within the irradiated evacuation zone. The Asahi Shimbun reported today that some 25,000 former residents remain unable to return to their homes in what the Japanese government euphemistically calls the “difficult-to-return” zone.

Ise passed away two years ago at the age of 92. I feel fortunate that I was able to meet with him, and I feel it is important to share his story with you.

“Let’s begin,” says Nobuhiko Ise, beginning a rapid rhythm on a taiko drum. This is to call forth the kami, he tells me, to signal the start of a prayer ritual in Shinto, the native religion of Japan. We sit together in Tsushima Inari Jinja, a shrine like many in this country. It is a wooden structure roughly the size of an American bungalow, framed in unpainted wood with white and crimson accents, topped by a gracefully angled roof of copper shingles tarnished warm green with age. A frayed shimenawa, the distinctive braided rope used to delineate Shinto holy spaces, hangs over the entryway. Inside the sanctum, the 91-year-old Ise, clad in a traditional hat and a colorful silk jacket over white robes, puts down the drumsticks and sits atop a tatami mat facing the altar. Then begins to chant: Under the heavenly sky, may all people everywhere have calm, have peace, have lives without misfortune or disaster…

It is the sort of prayer one might hear at any Shinto shrine on any given day, anywhere in Japan. But this isn’t just anywhere. Tsushima Inari Jinja sits in a “hot zone” heavily contaminated by radioactive fallout from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster in 2011. This shrine was once the spiritual anchor for an entire village. Now that village is a ghost town, population one. Ise himself, and he only for as long as it takes to carry out his duties. Then he must return to safety outside the zone once again.

Why does a priest continue ministering to a shrine where nobody comes—where nobody can come? Ise seemed a little surprised at the question when I first contacted him by phone at his home in the city of Fukushima. “I am a Shinto priest,” he told me. “Taking care of the shrine, cleaning and carrying out the rituals, is my job. It is my duty to keep my shrine alive.”

At 2:46 in the afternoon of March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake centered off the coast of Japan’s Tohoku region began shaking the country. Later, seismologists would measure it at 9.1 on the Richter scale, the fourth largest since the U.S. Geological Survey officially began tracking global tremors in 1900.

I remember that afternoon, because I was here in Japan when it happened. It was a beautiful spring day. I had been on a Skype call in my home office in western Tokyo. There was a lurch. The house creaked, a sound I’d never heard before. Then came the shaking. As a Japanese I’ve experienced countless earthquakes. Most are quick jolts that end in seconds. This one was different. The shaking continued—then grew stronger. The tall bookcase next to my husband’s desk began rattling ominously. “Grab the shoes!” I shouted to my husband—we’d need them if the windows shattered. As he rushed back with the footwear, we opened the sliding door to our deck and crouched outside, unable to stay on our feet. A fear, animal and true, rose in my gut. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the shaking stopped.

It was the crows who broke the long silence. From their agitated cries it was obvious they too knew something was terribly wrong. A few minutes later, the first aftershock hit, nearly knocking us off our feet again. I watched electric lines swing like jump ropes overhead as their poles swayed. And what we were feeling down there in Tokyo was but a fraction of what they were experiencing closer to the epicenter up north.

When the aftershock passed, we turned on the television. The emergency broadcast showed the outline of Japan, with the entire Pacific coast pulsing in red. A tsunami was coming. Evacuate immediately. Stay away from coastlines. Evacuate immediately.

But there was almost no time for those in coastal communities to react. 22,192 men and women, young and elderly, who had woken up thinking it was just another spring day, lost their lives in a matter of minutes.

But what we didn’t know at the moment, lost in grief as we helplessly watched the horrors up north unfold, was that those same surging waters had wiped out the cooling system of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, a series of four reactors located on the Pacific coast. The government evacuated residents, then instituted an exclusion zone 20 kilometers around the reactor. Within 24 hours, the cores would melt down. Workers braved high levels of radiation in a desperate attempt to cool the reactors with water pumped in from the sea. Unit 1 was the first to explode. Units 3 and 4 followed over the next two days. A plume of radioactive fallout drifted over a vast swath of Japan’s countryside. This was another tragedy atop the devastating natural disaster—one entirely man-made.

In the months and years afterward, the evacuation era was re-defined to specifically cover the most contaminated towns, and euphemistically renamed the “Difficult-to-return Zone.” It follows the rough footprint of the plume carried by wind from the reactors after the meltdown, roughly 340 square kilometers, half the size of the Chicago metropolitan area. For years, special permits were required for entry. In 2017, the government reopened Route 114, the national highway cutting across the Zone, to traffic, but drivers must pass through quickly, without stopping. Every road off the highway is barricaded and guarded. As a result the villages and towns inside the Zone have been cut off to all but those on official business: mainly decontamination workers, and former residents given occasional, brief permits to check on their properties. Some 22,000 citizens remain domestic refugees to this day, unable to return to their homes in that forbidden place.

Ise is one of them.

“I was there when the earthquake hit,” Ise says after the prayer ceremony, gesturing in the direction of his former home just a few dozen meters downhill from the shrine. “The tsunami hit the coast, but we’re up in the mountains. I thought we were safe. Then men I’d never seen before came to the village. They were all wearing hazmat suits. None of them spoke to us, so none of us knew what was going on.”

Tsushima Inari Jinja shrine was the spiritual anchor for the village of Tsushima, which lays down the hillside. After World War II, its population swelled to more than 4,000 as veterans returned. But by the early 2000s this number had dwindled to just 1,400. Tsushima was a stereotypical small town in rural Japan, tight-knit and aged. Everyone knew one another. Most of them made a living through farming. Ise did, too, tending tobacco fields and rice paddies in addition to his duties at the shrine. The appearance of the hazmat-clad people in their midst came as a huge shock. They didn’t say what they were doing, so villagers could only try to piece together a picture of what was going on. The television was reporting on the explosions at the nuclear plants, but the official line was that the emissions posed no immediate danger to citizens. The hazmat suited interlopers suggested otherwise. Later, much later, the village would learn that those men in the suits were recording levels of nearly 60 microsieverts an hour—six hundred times the normal average background radiation. But none of this was spoken of at the time. Eventually the residents made the decision to evacuate themselves.

“We didn’t even pack,” Ise said. He is a soft-spoken man, but the anger begins to rise as he remembers. “We left with the clothes on our backs. We just assumed it’d be a few days in a disaster shelter and then back home. And now 11 years have passed. Eleven years, and still we can’t go home. It isn’t right.” We gaze down the hill at his house. He says the contents inside are exactly as they were on the day he and his family left, more than a decade ago.

Ise lives in the city of Fukushima today, about an hour west of Tsushima by car. He visits Tsushima Inari Jinja twice a month, along with two other shrines that are outside of the Zone. He sweeps out the dust and cobwebs, doing maintenance wherever needed, and then, once the sanctum has been prepared, puts on his robes and performs a Shinto prayer.

Officially, Ise isn’t allowed back into Tsushima at all. The entrance to the village is closed off with a metal accordion barricade. Guards stand watch beside it. But the old priest was always determined to return to his birthright. By tradition, Shinto priesthoods are inherited. For 17 generations, some 800 years, Ise’s bloodline has watched over Tsushima Inari Jinja and ministered to the villagers. Ise isn’t allowed into his village, but he used his own money to hire a construction company to open a path through the woods off the main road into the shrine’s back entrance. This is neither officially recognized, nor is it prohibited. There is a strict separation between church and state in Japan, and perhaps because this is a shrine, the authorities have turned a blind eye to Ise’s efforts. So we entered the holy ground through a gray zone.

It was a beautiful summer morning as we pulled up to the shrine gate. Ise’s son was behind the wheel, he was in the passenger seat, and I was in the back.

“They say that the radiation endangers all of our lives,” he said as we pulled up. “But the thing about radiation is, it’s invisible. It looks like any other day around here.”

It’s true. If you’d fallen asleep in Fukushima City and woken up here, in the middle of the forest, verdant and green, you’d think we were preparing for a hike. The morning sunshine was warm. Flowers were blooming and birdsong rang through the canopy above. It had rained the night before, and the air was pleasantly moist; I could even smell the loam through my mask, which I was wearing more out of courtesy to an elderly person during the pandemic than radiation concerns. But there was no forgetting the bilingual signs posted at the border to the Zone: Caution. High-dose radiation area. Pass through quickly. Do not stop.

The highway running through the Zone has been decontaminated, to an extent, and so too the grounds of Tsushima Inari Shrine. The radiation readings here hover just under 1 microsievert per hour, about 10 times the levels outside of the Zone. Other spots in the village are much higher. Ichiro Suenaga, mayor-in-exile of Tsushima, told the Tokyo Shimbun in 2021 that he had recorded levels of 20 microsieverts an hour near his former residence— 80 times the amount specified by the government as requiring decontamination. The radioactive cloud that drifted over Tohoku after the explosions at Fukushima Daiichi 11 years ago wasn’t homogeneous. It polluted indiscriminately but randomly. One spot might be relatively clean. Another, just steps away, could be dangerously high.

“I’d hate for it not to be here if, someday, people can finally return. It’s a small shrine, but it has a role. I have one too. Protecting it.”

Outside the shrine hangs a cloth banner, a little tattered by the elements, hand-lettered with red kanji calligraphy reading Fukko Kigan—“Prayers for Recovery.” But the thing that really catches my eye is the torii, the distinctive gate used to delineate the entrance to a shrine. It is missing its horizontal cross-bars. Ise says they fell during the original earthquake, one of the few visible signs of damage in his area. Now all that remains are a pair of unconnected stone columns. The sight of it shocked me almost as much as the signs at the border did. Shinto shrines can be large or small, opulent or humble, but they are always kept clean, the grounds always maintained. The unrepaired torii feels like a metaphor for just how wrong things have gone here.

“I was going to fix it,” Ise said, as if reading my mind. “But then the villagers stopped me. They said to leave it, as a reminder of what happened.”

For centuries, the villagers of Tsushima gathered here to mingle and pray. The shrine hosted festivals to commemorate the planting of rice in spring and at harvest in fall. The residents would heft a mikoshi, a portable Shinto shrine, from Tsushima Inari Jinja into the streets of the village, chanting and dancing and consecrating the fields in hopes of another prosperous season. Then they would cap off the day with a party, drinking cups of saké rice wine, toasting each other and most importantly the kami, the Shinto gods of the natural world to whom Tsushima’s residents, and their ancestors before them back to time immemorial, believed they owed their harvest and happiness.

All of that history ended in March 2011. There is no one to plant rice in Tsushima now. The fields are fallow and filled with weeds. The streets are empty. The houses and shops are shuttered. But the kami remain. And they always will. That’s why Ise keeps coming back. Both to pay his respects as a priest, and to remind the kami that the people haven’t forgotten them.

If you were to ask the average Japanese what their religion is, you’d have a hard time getting a straight answer. Surveys show that 70 to 80 percent of us claim no religious beliefs at all. Yet there are actually more Shinto shrines in our cities and countryside than there are of our celebrated convenience stores.

Since prehistoric times, the inhabitants of the Japanese islands have believed that everything has a spirit. Plants. Animals. Natural phenomena. Even the very terrain itself, like the seas and rivers and mountains, even rocks, harbor spirits of their own. By respecting and venerating these spirits, humans positioned themselves as part of a greater natural order. This worldview is called animism, and it is the fundamental concept underpinning the traditional Japanese system of beliefs. Those spirits, known as kami, are avatars for every aspect of the natural world, and Shinto, written with words meaning “The Way of Kami,” is the method of interacting with them.

You’d be hard pressed to find a modern Japanese who literally believes that spirits lurk in every object surrounding them, but that ancient mindset subtly informs our worldview in much the way Judeo-Christian beliefs have molded thinking in the West, even if you don’t happen to be Jewish or Christian yourself. Particularly in big cities, most people don’t visit shrines every day or even regularly, yet huge numbers of us come out on special occasions. In the 72 hours after midnight on New Year’s Day 2019, for example, 100 million Japanese visited shrines and temples all over Japan. A hundred million out of a population of what was then a hundred and 26 million. And shrines have a special place in many smaller local neighborhoods and communities like Tsushima.

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A great many Shinto rituals and festivals are related to agriculture. This makes sense because we were an agrarian economy up to the 20th century. It also makes sense because farming is, of course, working with nature, which means working with forces beyond human control, namely the weather. My impression of American farmers, at least in olden times, is one of rugged individualists on isolated homesteads. But rice farming is and always has been a group endeavor. It takes a village to make and maintain rice paddies, which in times of old had to be planted and picked entirely by hand, stalk by stalk. Farmers depended on the support of the kami, in the form of the things outside human control. For everything else, they depended on each other.

In Tsushima’s annual Taue-odori, literally “planting dance,” locals dressed in costumes evoking traditional farming outfits: colorful work kimono and straw hats and sandals. Then they would perform an interpretive dance representing the rice-cultivation process from planting to harvest. They held the festival at Tsushima Inari Jinja because it was an anchor for their community, but even more so because they weren’t dancing for themselves, or not only for themselves. They were dancing for the kami.

But the dances stopped in 2011.

The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, as the natural aspect of the disaster on March 11, 2011 is officially known today, damaged or destroyed some 4,800 Shinto shrines in the Tohoku region. Today 243 remain within the borders of the Difficult-to-Return Zone, isolated from their parishioners in the outside world. In 2021, a construction firm built a new “combined shrine” in the town of Futaba, outside the Zone. It gives the parishioners of 50 shrines that were either wiped away by tsunami or contaminated by fallout a place to gather and practice their faith. Ise could have taken this path as well. He could have incorporated his shrine with another, or even chosen to rebuild outside of the Zone. I asked him why.

“Shrines are connected to people through the land,” Ise said. “We live on the land. Crops sprout from the land. Our ancestors are buried on the land. You can’t separate a shrine from the ground it stands on. And besides, I’d hate for it not to be here if, someday, people can finally return. It’s a small shrine, but it has a role. I have one too. Protecting it.”

As Ise packed up his robes after the ritual, he handed me an ofuda, a Shinto talisman. It was a folded sheet of white washi paper inscribed with calligraphy in Ise’s careful hand, reading “Tsushima Inari Jinja,” along with “Household Safety,” “Traffic Safety,” and “Safety from Illness.” Shinto shrines generally prepare and sell talismans just like this to visitors, but obviously, nobody can visit Tsushima Inari Jinja now. Every year, Ise prepares hundreds of these ofuda, consecrates them in a ritual at the shrine, and mails them to his former neighbors who have scattered across Japan. Sometimes, when he gets together with one of them, he’ll hear a lament that their hometown might eventually disappear from the map altogether.

Ise’s talismans are an effort to fight the dying of that light. In the immediate years after the disaster, he’d mail around 1,000 every year. It started with about 1,000 mails. But the number decreases year by year. Some have moved on without updating their contact information. Many others have passed on from age. Last year, Ise mailed just six hundred talismans. But he says he plans to continue for as long as he can. Ise’s work is about maintaining a spiritual home for former residents, but so too does it provide a little light in the darkness, a hope that someday, somehow, things might return to normal.

“That’s the happiest thing in the world: a normal life,” Ise said. “And it’s also the most difficult thing to achieve.”

The disaster in Fukushima was, of course, a Japanese disaster. But Ise’s struggle to maintain a semblance of normalcy amid a catastrophe without end mirrors all of us, trying to do the same in modern times beset by pandemic and strife. We’re all struggling with the realization we can never go back “home” to the way things were before. Maybe Ise’s work hints that the way forward is paved by individual effort, no matter how small and isolated, little beacons in the darkness.

You can see what the “Difficult-to-Return Zone” looks like in this video that I created below.

* Photos Courtesy of Hiroko Yoda

Update April 2025:

In March 2023, the government lifted the evacuation advisory for part of Tsushima-ku, and locals were once again allowed to visit Tsushima Inari Jinja shrine. The photo below is what the shrine looks like today. As you can see, locals decided to keep the old torii gate, visible behind the new one. The light that Ise kept alive has been passed along to a new generation.

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My house is a typical modern urban Tokyo house, which means it doesn’t have a yard to speak of; just a few strips of dirt, enough to plant a few shrubs. But even though I enjoy gardening, I’ve never minded, because of the view across the street. Our neighbor’s garden is huge, easily the size of the footprint of my entire house. It’s the product of years of hard work on the part of the elderly woman who lives there. I’ve always loved looking out our windows and seeing the plums and kumquats and oranges, and the seasonal flower beds she’s tended over many years.

Or I should say I used to, for this cute patch of greenery was dismantled by a construction company two weeks ago.

This isn’t an unusual story. Real estate prices have been going up, and so a lot of old homes are getting knocked down and replaced with multiple smaller houses, or built up into big apartment complexes. But her lot remained for many years, a rambler house in the Showa post-war style, L-shaped, with sliding doors and orange roof tiles of fired clay. It even had a little engawa veranda for sitting and enjoying the garden, or just taking in the sun. Three generations of family lived there, and they wanted to update their living space. That necessitated knocking down the old home, and the garden along with it, for the old woman had grown too feeble to tend it anymore.

I’ve lived here, across the street, for more than a decade now, and almost every spring or summer day I’d see her weeding and pruning. Once a year she’d fertilize the soil, and at these times her whole family would pitch in. I’d watch as they trundled in bags of mulch and her son and grandson used a hand–pump to apply insecticide to the trees. She’d obviously put a lot of time into planning the garden out, because there was always something in bloom in nearly every season.

My favorite was late winter through early spring. While the rest of the neighborhood resembled a sepia photograph, her garden was technicolor. The kumquats and orange trees bore their fruits. Different species of camellia bloomed in red, white, and pink. My absolute favorites were the ume, the plum trees. She had two gorgeous specimens. Every February one bloomed white; the other reddish-purple. At their peak they looked like popcorn popping, and whenever I saw them I knew spring was just around the corner, no matter how cold it felt outside.

Plums are, I think, Japan’s most emotional flower. They’re known as haru wo tsugeru hana, “the blossoms that tell us spring is coming.” The blossoms of the sakura cherry are most commonly associated with the spring, and hanami, the viewing of these blossoms, has been a custom in my country for a millennium. But the plums precede the cherries by a month, and the origin of hanami was actually about the plums, not the cherries. Plum hanami dates back even further to the Heian era, 1,200 years ago.

The first ume were brought to Japan from China as medicinal fruits. This was a practice of the elite. But it didn’t take long for the nobility to realize how charming the flowers were. Perhaps this is because they have no rivals. They’re one of the first species to bloom every year, and deliver a heavenly fragrance, subtle and sweet, a literal breath of fresh air at the tail end of a long winter. In fact, the word Reiwa, the name of our current era, is tied to plum-blossom viewing. It was taken from the Manyoshu, Japan’s oldest poetry anthology, which was compiled in the Heian. It’s a combination of two characters that appear in a poem that goes,

In this auspicious month of early spring, the weather is fine and the wind gentle. The plum blossoms open like powder before a mirror, while the orchids give off the sweet scent of a sachet.

Japan’s all-time most famous plum aficionado is a man by the name of Sugawara-no-Michizane. He was a scholar, poet, and politician in the 9th century. Today he is revered as a Shinto kami called Tenman-Tenjin, the god of learning. For this reason, every Tenjin or Tenman-gu shrine will always have plum trees within their boundaries.

Sugawara-no-Michizane had a plum tree in the garden of his residence in Kyoto. But he found himself caught up in court intrigues and demoted. Then he was banished from the city in 901. He was bereft at having to leave his garden, with its splendid sakura and pine tree, but he was particularly sad about his beloved plum. In sorrow, he wrote an elegy for it:

Kochi fukaba

Nioi okoseyo

Ume no hana

Aruji nashi tote

Haru wo wasureruna

When the east wind blows,

May it carry your fragrance,

bloom, bloom, my plums!

Though you’ve lost your master,

Forget not the spring!

After Michizane left his residence, they say, the sakura died from heartbreak. But the pine and the plum leapt into the sky, desperate to rejoin their owner in his distant exile in Dazaifu in Fukuoka. The pine ran out of energy half way, landing in what is now Hyogo prefecture. But the plum tree made it all the way to Dazaifu! And you can see it there today, at Dazaifu Tenmangu shrine. People call it the Tobi-ume (flying plum), and it’s estimated at over 1,000 years old. Dazaifu Temangu is a home to 200 plum varieties, and tobi-ume usually starts blooming first, in white. I haven’t been to Daifu Temangu yet, but I’d sure like to see the Tobi-ume someday.

Like Michizane, my (admittedly indirect) relationship with my neighbor’s plum trees ended abruptly. Michizane was forced out of his home. In my case, the end was signaled by the arrival of big trucks and heavy excavators. I’d known the house was coming down, because the owner’s daughter came by to tell us last year. I immediately asked her what would happen to the garden. “We can’t keep it,” she said. I guess the shock on my face was obvious, for she quickly added, “We’re going to miss the plum blossoms, too.” She didn’t look any happier about it than I was. But the house was old and falling apart and there was nothing else they could do. She even offered to give the trees to us if we had a way to extract them. Even if we could, though, we simply didn’t have room on our tiny lot for them.

Months went by. I tried to forget. But the minute the trucks arrived, a panic set in. I rushed outside to beg the workers to hold off for a moment, so I might cut some of the branches from plum trees. The trees were already budding; blooming was no more than a week away. Yet they had only minutes left in their long lifespans. The workers, looking at the forlorn trees, agreed to wait. I dashed back across the street to my house, grabbed a pair of pruning shears and told my husband that the time had come. We rushed out to salvage what we could.

It was the first time I’d ever entered the property and taken a close look at the plums. It was obvious they were quite old. Though they stood no taller than the bottom edge of the roof, their age was apparent from their beautifully gnarled trunks, which curved gracefully into complex shapes before lofting smaller branches in every direction. Once, I spoke to a traditional Japanese gardener. He told me the measure of a tree’s age isn’t it’s height: it is the tree’s shape, its beauty. Many centuries-old trees in Japanese gardens are quite short, because they’ve been constantly, meticulously trimmed to maintain their appearance. As the old woman who lived here had done with these plums.

There is a famous saying in Japan: sakura kiru baka, ume kiranu baka: “an idiot who cuts cherry trees; an idiot who doesn’t cut plum trees.” You shouldn’t cut cherry trees because they grow sick from the wounds. Plums, on the other hand, need to be actively trimmed after their blossoms fall, or they won’t bloom again as beautifully the next year. I know this because I have two plum bonsai, one red and one white, and nip their branches every year. As that old gardener told me to do.

My neighbor's trees were beautifully trimmed. Judging from the complexity of trunks and branches, the mother and her family took wonderful care of them. It couldn’t have been easy for them to make the decision to sacrifice these trees.

When I looked up, shears in hand, I could see that the red plum had yet to bud, but perhaps because of the angle of sunlight, the white one was already covered in them. Again the sadness welled up, because that gentle, old tree was so ready to bloom. Really, it was a matter of days.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I found myself saying as I began to trim, quickly, for the workers were idling their machines and waiting for me to get off the property. My husband helped reach taller and thicker branches. Together we culled as many as we could. Before we left, I touched the knotty trunks of those trees for the first time and last time, thanking them for bringing us joy every year, saying good-bye forever.

Later I heard the old woman had lived in that house since she was a little girl. That garden had so much history; the plum trees were probably older than she was. To nourish and grow something takes much time and work. Creating this garden took decades. Destroying it took less than an hour. It felt like a metaphor for so many things happening right now.

I was worried if the branches would bloom, because all the buds were still so tiny. But in the warmth of my room, they flourished beautifully. I know the flowers will fall soon, for branches without their mother-tree are destined to die. I wish I’d had the ability to move the plums across the street as Michizane’s Tobi-ume had. They wouldn’t even had had to fly far, if I had the yard to host them.

Big things change and it is out of our hands. So all we can do is focus on the little things that we can control. The little things that bring joy, however fleeting, and help us carry on. Because we must. Soon my little pair of plum bonsai, which live outside, will bloom as well. When I look at their flowers, I will remember those old trees, and keep their memory alive.

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Today, February 2nd, is “Setsubun” in Japan. The word literally means “seasonal division,” as this is the day before the spring equinox. Setsubun is a celebration, and we celebrate it in a fun way: by tossing roasted soybeans inside our homes, which are intended to drive away bad spirits known as “oni” and welcome the spring.

You might have heard of this tradition. But you may also have thought: why throw beans? And what’s so important about the day before the spring equinox?

The basic concept is that change creates instability, until a new order settles. Just because we will pass the equinox doesn’t mean the temperature will steadily rise. One day will be warm. Another will be cold. Sometimes the difference between the two is quite acute – a recipe for catching a headcold.

In times of old, Japanese people believed misfortunes of all sorts were the work of invisible spirits called “oni.” Plagues, natural disasters, famines, fires – you name it, the oni were behind it. Periods of instability were seen as “prime time” for these baddies to get a claw-hold into our lives and cause all sorts of harm.

Originally, “oni” was more of a concept: malice personified. Over the generations, they emerged as characters, and today they’re almost like mascots. You’ve probably seen popular illustrations of them, with their ghoulish horned faces, red, blue or green skin, muscular bodies, and tiger-skin loincloths.

So why beans? “Mame,” as we call legumes of all kinds in Japanese, sounds similar to a word “mametsu,” which means vanquishing evil. This auspicious association has led beans to become seen as tools for bringing luck, and by throwing them, we can “purify” an area from the influence of oni. But not just any mame: “fukumame” (as Setsubun beans are known) have to be roasted soybeans. Raw beans absorb malice and sprout – giving you a cursed sort of plant, folklorically speaking. And nobody wants that.

When we throw the beans, we chant a saying. It varies from region to region, but the most common one goes: “Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!” – Oni out! Good fortune in!

My family was never big on tradition, so the first time I remember participating in Setsubun was in kindergarten. The teacher gathered us round and told us we’d be driving oni out of the classroom. I must have lit up when I heard this, because I remember thinking: just leave it to me.

I may have been a little girl, but I knew oni well. They were “bad guys” from the tale of Momotaro, the peach boy, which like every kid I knew by heart. Momotaro was born from a peach, grew up into an incredibly strong little boy, then banded together with a brave dog, monkey, and pheasant to fight the oni on their own turf of Onigashima – Oni Island. They bowed in defeat and offered Momotaro their treasure.

So I was ready to throw some beans. I was born for this, I felt.

But then something unexpected happened. The teacher handed out construction paper, scissors, and crayons, and told us to draw an oni face. “We’re going to make oni masks,” she explained. “And everyone is going to wear them when we throw beans!”

Now this threw me for a loop. I thought the bad guys were outside. And why were we wearing the masks? But being in kindergarten, these concerns didn’t last long. I dove into the project with my friends. When we were done with our masks, we put them on and began pelting the room and playground with soybeans. What a great time I, and all of us had!

It wouldn’t be for many years that I developed a more nuanced way of thinking about oni. Kids’ folktales aside, oni weren’t always simply the baddies. And throwing beans at them didn’t make us humans absolutely good, either. In fact, oni could live within us, metaphorically speaking, in the form of negative thoughts: anger, jealousy, grudges, or hatred. Life is full of up and downs, and we are emotional creatures, so it’s inevitable we’ll harbor negativity like this at some point.

But that negativity is like the “junk” in your mind that hinders, or at least doesn’t help, you live a healthy life. So to another way of thinking, the Setsubun custom could be seen as a “reset” for our hearts. It seems people of old knew this too. Another part of the tradition is eating a number of soybeans equivalent to your age. This gets harder to do as you grow older. But then again, getting rid of our negative baggage gets harder as we get older, too. It’s another poetic expression of the oni within us.

Years later, I also learned that the “Oni out! Good fortune in!” phrase I’d grown up on wasn’t necessarily the same thing people said all over Japan. Some are actually quite harsh, like the chant of Sendai, which adds the refrain “oni no mentama butsubuse!” (crush the oni’s eyeballs!) Ouch. Here are some others:

“Fuku wa uchi, Oni mo uchi!” (Fortune in! Oni in, too!) (Kinpusenji Temple, Nara)

“Senshu banzai, Fuku wa uchi!” (Fortune in, forever!) (Sensoji Temple, Tokyo)

“Fuku wa uchi, Oni wa uchi, Akuma soto!” (Fortune in! Oni in! Demons out!) (Kijin Jinja Shrine, Saitama)

What I like about these is the idea that “bad” can be changed to work for “good.” That’s really key to Japanese spirituality as a whole: there’s an inclusiveness for goodness.

In closing, I’d like to share my favorite Setsubun story. It’s a short anime from the classic series Manga Nippon Mukashibanashi (Animated Japanese Folk Tales). The title is, appropriately enough, “Setsubun no Oni.”

It tells the story of an old widower who lost his wife and child long ago. Out of desperation at his loneliness and isolation, he decides to do the opposite of the usual chant at Setsubun. “Fuku was soto! Oni wa uchi!” – essentially, Forget fortune – bring in the oni!’

And it works! A pair of oni knock on his door, thanking him for the refuge during a time when everyone casts them out. The old man, shocked, welcomes them in. Then one by one more oni arrive. The oni are so moved by his hospitality that they bring sake, snacks, and dance and entertain him all night long. At the end, they promise to return next year for another party. So the lonely old man, who lost so much, isn’t so alone anymore.

This story goes against custom, but in another sense, it’s totally in keeping with Japanese spirituality. So many of our legends contain stories about the other sides of things. We can find goodness even in badness.

My husband and I throw beans every Setsubun too. Originally, I coached him to say “oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!” because such was the standard Setsubun chant in a typical Japanese household. But over the years, largely thanks to our work writing about them, we’ve become quite affectionate to oni. More recently, our traditional household cry has become “Fuku wa uchi! Warui oni wa soto! Ii oni wa uchi!” — in other words, “Good fortune in! Bad oni out! And the good oni can stay.”

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My husband told me about Whamageddon, a game that Americans play during the Christmas season. It’s a simple game with one rule: if you hear Wham’s Last Christmas, you lose. I get it, because I heard it frequently as a high-school exchange student in Indiana. I also get it because I spend most Christmases in the United States with extended family, so I know how inescapable the tune has become in the years since its 1984 release. 

But did you know there’s a similarly inescapable holiday song in Japan? It’s even bigger than Last Christmas in my country. It’s called Christmas Eve. It was composed and sung by the king of the City Pop scene, Tatsuro Yamashita, who happens to be married to the scene’s queen, Mariya Takeuchi.

It’s hard for me to exaggerate just how big Christmas Eve was, and is, in Japan. Yamashita wrote the song for Takeuchi in 1981, but ended up recording and releasing it himself a few years later. It proved popular enough, but its incorporation into a 1988 promotional campaign gave it a second life. In 2016, the song earned a Guiness Record for spending thirty years on the pop charts, the longest of any single ever recorded in Japan. Over the decades it has entrenched itself as THE Christmas song in my country, and even affected the way the country celebrates the holiday.

When you think about it, this is a little odd. Less than 1% of Japanese identify as Christian, and nobody gets the day off work for Christmas here. Yet Japanese have long embraced the iconography of the imported holiday: Santa and trees, lights and tinsel, Christmas cakes, and, of course, the gift-giving. Just like the U.S, stores and restaurants begin putting out their Christmas decorations in late November, hanging colorful lights on trees and buildings, turning parts of the city into sparkling illuminated wonderlands. 

There’s nothing religious about these displays – you won’t see the nativity scenes or stars of Bethlehem you might in the States. It’s a big marketing scheme to sell goods and services – but it’s pretty, so everyone rolls with it.

There are so many Christmas displays in modern Japan, in fact, that it might seem like my country has always embraced the holiday. But in fact, it’s a relatively recent development. When I was a little girl, back in the Seventies, there wasn’t anything like them at all. Everyone knew about Christmas, but it was still seen as a foreign custom, so the celebrations were a lot quieter. 

My parents, for example, would sneak into our rooms as we slept, leaving little presents behind. When we awakened the next morning and rushed delightedly to show our them, they feigned surprise and said they were from Santa Claus. Our Santa was particularly special: he’d usually leave a book for each of us on Christmas Eve, and then a stuffed animal or board game on Christmas night, which we’d all play together the next day.

For years, my sister and I wondered how Santa came into our house. All of the picture-books we’d seen explained that he rode a sleigh pulled through the sky by red-nosed reindeer, dropping into good children’s homes via their chimneys. But, like most homes in Japan, ours didn’t have a fireplace. Neither did any of the other houses in our neighborhood.  How did he do it?  Before long, we realized Santa was actually my parents. The childhood Christmas tradition came to an end, and Christmas day became just another day.     

But everything changed in 1988, at the height of the Japanese “bubble economy.” Japanese advertising companies were at peak influence, producing commercials that often felt like art. Starting that year, and continuing to 1992, the Central Japan Railway Company, better known as JR, released a series of glamorously produced television commercials under the title “X’mas Express.” The sixty-second spots starred fashionable young women excitedly preparing for their boyfriends’ return by bullet train – and all of them were set to Yamashita’s Christmas Eve.

These were less ads than minute-long dramas, each with its own little love story. They absolutely entranced young people, to the point I still remember one of the catch phrases:  jinguru beru wo narasuno wa kaettekuru anata desu – “It’s you who rings the jingle bells when you return.” As the ads grew more elaborate in subsequent years, bullet train platforms filled with young couples on Christmas Eve, attempting to re-create the scenes for real. A great many seem to have purchased Yamashita’s album to set the mood, for it broke a million copies by 1991. (The number is almost double that today.)

As the combo of JR and Yamashita’s song burned the concept of a romantic Christmas Eve into the minds of a generation of young Japanese, other companies quickly began following suit. All sorts of stores, hotels, and services began using the idea to hook their own customers. And the focus of the holiday festivities began shifting from Christmas Day to Christmas Eve.

Today, many establishments actually take down their decorations on December 25th. The “tradition” of bringing Kentucky Fried Chicken home on Christmas Eve is another example of the shift. The company originally promoted the practice as a Christmas Day thing in the 1970s, but that shifted to Christmas Eve in the Nineties, right along with the rise of Yamashita’s song.

So while every year is Last Christmas in America, Japan goes through an endless Christmas Eve. The trio of a catchy pop song, an advertising industry at peak power, and the national railways sold Japan a new fantasy of a romantic Christmas Eve, shifting the timing of the entire holiday in Japan.

Christmas may not be a religious tradition here, but it’s still special because it’s a prelude to the much bigger national tradition of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. In essence, it gives us a moment to catch our collective breath and look back before the flurry of New Year’s travel and festivities start. I suspect that’s the real reason why Christmas remains so popular in Japan. And now we’ve reached the end of 2024. I hope you have a great holiday season!

I wrote a book about my experiences and adventures exploring Japan’s spirituality. It’s called Eight Million Ways to Happiness, and is due out in December of 2025. You can pre-order it here!

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