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Hanami 2026

It’s a new school year in Japan. My son has entered his fourth year and my daughter is enjoying her last pre-school year before the big jump (not that she cares yet).

I’ve recently wondered how my childhood would have changed had the school year started in April instead of September. To be honest, I’ve always found it quite depressing to start with a new class, a new teacher, make new friends as the winter was visibly approaching. Maybe that’s just me looking at Japan with my rose-tinted glasses again though.

Spring means a lot of new things for everyone at the same time and, you know, cherry blossoms, picnics, drinks at the river. It’s exciting, it’s fun. It’s really a fun time.

A fun time except I hurt my back at the gym, which is the official version I tell everyone. But in reality, I think it happened during my sleep. But ssshhh. That injury sort of snowballed into many different smaller injuries… the rib cage muscles, the shoulder, and whatnot. My body is trying to communicate something. The funny thing is that whenever I search for my symptoms online, there’s pretty much always some doctor advocating that yoga is a good approach to recovery. So now I got to do yoga I think. I tried many years ago and it really sucked but if that’s the price to pay so my body can function a few more decades with less pain, I think I’m open to it now.

In other news, I’ve been tearing this site apart. I wrote some case studies, I migrated my old portfolio in a sort of archive. I redesigned a bit, cleaned stuff up. I simplified my themes because I think at some point I had 7 and it was just ridiculous and messy. So now sorry, there’s just the two (light and dark mode); we’ll let it at that until I catch the bug again.

I’ve been toying with the idea of publishing notes related to work, design and AI on my website but I still don’t know what the right approach is. All my notes are super messy right now. It’s a big collection of bullet points with no shape or form. I need to read, categorize them, discern the good stuff from the bad stuff. Ugh. I think I’ll do it, but I need time. I need another season worth of time.

Spring 2026 Kamogawa view

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