012 - 020: Tokyo, Digest
"On the inside looking in."
I wrote most of my last nine posts from Japan. Before I recap them, I want to explain what I’ve actually been doing here, because for over six months, I’ve only gestured at it obliquely.
On my third or fourth return trip since 2023, it became obvious that I wasn’t just visiting anymore. Something unresolved had taken hold. I felt a growing pressure to do something in Japan again, even though I couldn’t yet articulate what that something was.
A friend once accused me, accurately, of believing there’s no virtue in doing anything that isn’t difficult. It’s an exhausting and occasionally self-defeating impulse, but it’s also what puts wind in my sails when it comes to that which I care about most. And so I started looking for a challenge large enough to justify the persistent, intense tug towards Japan I kept feeling.
Considering my extensive, peculiar knowledge of nuanced, micro-scene Japanese contemporary culture, which is, as ever, for better or for worse, mostly still contained in Japan, and my growing interest in researching the nation’s sociological and economic realities and shifts, I wondered if the answer was staring me straight in the face all along. Perhaps the things I kept fixating on were the things I wanted to roll together into a new professional undertaking.
So, a few weeks after I completed my three-month stay in the fall, I came back to Japan for another three-month stint, this time telling myself it was a research trip. I knew that studying from afar—and, especially, trying to communicate from afar, without the currency of shōkai (紹介), or personal introductions—was going to be challenging and slow. When no one can vouch for you in this country, doubt and circumspection persist and are hard to overcome. It’s not impossible, but I find that if you do need to cold-call people, you need to be tremendously flexible and patient; the meeting can take months to be offered. I knew I had to just “meet people where they live,” and also invite spontaneity, otherwise I’d get locked into my own private echochamber, or, worse, locked out entirely.
What followed was something I should’ve anticipated: I wound up just building a whole life in Japan. Even though I had—and still have—no interest in permanently moving, I was indisputably living in Tokyo, and while the time I was committing was making my art-and-media enterprise more clear to me, and making it finally feel qualitatively achievable, it was also bringing me a certain duress. While Japan—and the Japanese—were giving me so very much, I was also giving Japan and Japanese so much in kind, and this became increasingly more taxing. Additionally, I was establishing connections and entanglements that felt permanent but that would eventually once again be a ten-hour-long flight away. Maybe it’s for these reasons that my essays have begun to take a more ethnographic—and biographic—tone; I’ve been trying more and more to just understand people and preserve memories rather than comb through stats and figures.
And yet, still, I’m still not entirely sure where this is heading.
What I do know is that, little by little, I’ve begun circling the idea of building something back in L.A. that can hold all of these cultural threads at once—art, writing, research, relationships. Not a gallery, not a magazine, not a “brand,” but a hybrid space that could function as a showroom, studio, and publishing platform all at once.
The goal wouldn’t be translation so much as careful framing: bringing over works, ideas, and people in ways that preserve their density and context while still making them approachable for curious American audiences. A place where exhibitions, printed matter, and digital media can coexist, and where cultural specificity isn’t flattened in the process of being shared.
It’s all still forming, but I’ll start laying it out more clearly in the coming weeks. But if any of this resonates or sparks ideas of your own, please reach out via email or Instagram.
“012: Beams & Arrows”
An exploration of how Japan’s iconic “select shops” became trapped by their own heritage, forced into a late global expansion that compromises the very “Made in Japan” mystique they spent decades cultivating.
“013: 7-Obsession”
Why the dream of “Japan-ifying” American 7-Elevens is a structural impossibility, caught between the density of the Japanese konbini and the sprawling, car-dependent reality of the American C-store.
“014: The Shibuya-kei Method”
A look back at the 90s movement that treated pop music as editorial art, where the “cover” was designed before the “book” was written, creating a vibrant, recombinant world out of global archives.
“015: Information Dense, Culturally Rich”
An analysis of “trust arbitrage,” the invisible financial and social ecosystem that allows Tokyo’s small-footprint boutiques to thrive on low volume and irregular hours by prioritizing reputation over scale.
“016: A Moat, a Cliff”
Decoding Tokyo’s bifurcated rental market: how high-end “commercial moats” like Ginza insulate the city’s interior, allowing radical, low-rent experiments to exist just blocks away from global flagship stores.
“017: The Marching Artist”
A deep dive into the “proletariat” Japanese art market, where the abundance of creative output is quietly subsidized by the artists themselves through rental fees, unpaid labor, and donated archives.
“018: Wabi-sapremacy”
An examination of “yukkuri culture,” the “polite panopticon” of ambient commands and beneficial friction that nudges Japanese society into a synchronized, patient rhythm without the need for explicit philosophy.
“019: The Kandō-minium”
Using the metaphor of the octopus pot, takotsubo (蛸壺), this post explores a city of hermetically sealed nodes where intense internal coherence is fueled by kandō (感動), the active emotional act of being moved to participate.
“020: When You Can’t Sell Out, You Sell In”
How Japan has only the “sell-in” because it has always collapsed the hierarchy between art and commerce, allowing corporations to function as the primary patrons and infrastructural hosts of aesthetic innovation.