My work can be frustrating. For me, I mean, in that I don’t get a lot of direct feedback about it. I get a few always-thoughtful comments here and there on a given post in the long string of Tokyo-related poems, pictures and stories I publish here. On Facebook and Twitter, I get a pleasing [...]
Time passes, and we change… But when historians investigate the beginning of our relationship, Or the state of things closer to this present day, They will always find a picture of us holding each other close and smiling… (To my wife Michele, on our 13th wedding anniversary. Every number is a lucky one.)
Nakano-ku, specifically the relatively small area encompassing Nakano Station and Nakano Broadway, is my favorite part of Tokyo. I have stayed there twice for extended periods in the last five years, and I have grown very comfortable and familiar with its streets, quirky little alleyways, and the rhythms of the Japanese people as they move [...]
I’m always writing, or thinking about writing. And I’m always taking pictures, or thinking about taking pictures. Regarding the latter, my wife and I share an old house, by U.S. standards anyway, and the house and the things in and around it are rather photogenic. So here are some bits and pieces from a week [...]
Ahhh, the sun of a thousand galaxies, and it’s all shining down here on…me. (Pictures taken on Waseda Dori somewhere around Ochiai, I think, on April 13th, 2012. I had been very sick for nearly the entire first two weeks I was in Tokyo. Some kind of lung infection, which I later learned I probably [...]
I have owned or had the use of a personal computer since 1982, when my dad bought me an Osborne 1 to take to college. In some areas dad was a bit of a forward thinker. His experience as an upper mid-level executive for Electronic Data Systems (EDS), a now-defunct information services company, convinced him [...]
The last time I left Japan, on May 7th, 2012, I had the very same meal as the first time I arrived in Japan in late February, 1987. Except I think I had a Coke back then. Nevertheless, I ordered this meal on purpose. I was looking for some kind of circular, symbolic closure. Why [...]
It’s quiet here at the galaxy’s core. I don’t suppose the stars would stop moving even if we asked them to. I have considered doing so. Night after night we bathe in ever-moving light, some of it from the sun we abandoned so many birthdays ago surely it must have extinguished by now. If you [...]
「パスポートプロのスタジオで」 Hmmm. “Pro passport photo studio.” I could barely read just that much of the Japanese. I saw my reflection melded into the picture of an old man in the window of an old Tokyo photo shop, and I ended up wondering about two men. The old man, was he a good man, a kind [...]
I lived in Tokyo for almost two years in 1987 and 1988. Due to carelessness while moving frequently in the early ‘90s, few personal photographs from my Tokyo days survive. Eight or ten drunken happy snaps and the pictures that make up Tokyo in the Underbrush are about all I have. Luckily, my late dad [...]
