As I post this, news of the massive earthquake on the opposite coast of Honshu in Ishikawa Prefecture is still unfolding live. The bulk of this was written before today, but we’ve heard the tsunami warnings and seen the ongoing TV footage of buildings burning and road damage caused by the quake. It’s not a very auspicious start to the New Year for that side of Japan. My heart goes out to anyone affected by this disaster on what is normally the biggest family holiday in Japanese culture. It makes the rest of this (which is just my own unrelated personal thing) seem trivial, but I’m going to follow through with posting it to wrap up the year as planned.
As they say in Japanese: Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu. A year ago, on January 1, 2023, I made a New Year’s resolution to update this site more regularly, writing at least once a week about something related to travel or culture — including pop culture — in Japan. Now that 2023 is over, I thought I’d take a look back at the list of things I posted here over the last twelve months. For each month, I’ll also share one or more new photos, closing out the yearbook with some final overlooked highlights from places in Tokyo, Kanagawa, and Kyoto. At the end, I’ll make a special announcement and give some news about the future of this site.
The evening sakura light-up at Chion-in Temple in Kyoto on March 31, 2023. Nine months later, this is the temple where NHK rang in the New Year with a real bell at midnight.
A few of the pictures below are pulled from existing photo galleries, but since they got buried on another page and I neglected to share them here, I’m treating them as fair game still. As you’ll see, I started off strong in 2023, posting five blog entries per month in January and February. However, as is often the case with weak-willed humans making life goals, I got busy, my dedication faltered, and that number dropped to three per month in March and April.
By late May, I had begun alternating shorter “Photo Highlight” entries with regular posts, and that helped me regain my footing and stay on top of my goal better. It made it more manageable for me to keep touching base here every week or so.
As the year went on and my main freelance gig off-site changed to travel writing as well, I began adding a dash of American pop culture, without an explicit connection to Japan, to the mix on The Gaijin Ghost. Throw in a stray stateside destination or two, and what you have is a year in the life of a Tokyo-based expat whose mind map resembles the Venn diagram between Christopher Nolan movies and Denver International Airport.
Tokyo’s famous Shibuya Scramble Crossing, seen from the 17th-floor restaurant BAO by CÉ LA VI in the Tokyu Plaza Shibuya mall, on August 30, 2023.
I still need to go back and fill in the gaps on the 2023 timeline in a couple of places, basically just finishing two posts where I started a draft for each of them but never finished it. When all is said and done, though, I will have 60 posts for the year, so I’ll have averaged five posts per month (maxing out at eight in July, the month I changed jobs).
That’s a good way to cap off 2023, a year when I stayed very busy and on the move, averaging 10,002 steps a day, according to my iPhone counter. I’d like to keep the walkathon going in 2024, but the biggest piece of personal news this year is one I haven’t even shared yet. I’ll get into that and the reasons for my departure at the end, but spoiler alert: this is probably the last new thing I’ll be posting here for a while.
JANUARY
Year’s First Sunrise: On Top of the World with Mount Fuji
The Tokyo Station Hotel: Review and Photo Tour
Mario’s Revenge: A Daytime Photo Tour of Super Nintendo World
The new Ginza Line platform in Shibuya Station on January 19, 2023.
View from the look-down window in Yokohama Marine Tower on February 2, 2023.
The Yokohama skyline from the Marine Tower observation floor on February 2, 2023.
Cherry blossoms blooming over Gion Tatsumi Bridge in Kyoto on March 31, 2023.
Kyoto Tower, seen from the Skyway in Kyoto Station on April 1, 2023.
The southwest turret of Nijo Castle, illuminated in Kyoto on April 1, 2023.
A “Maguro Zanmai Sushi” set from Tsukiji Sushiiwa in Seiseki-Sakuragaoka on May 2, 2023.
The Shin Godzilla statue lit up in Hibiya Godzilla Square on May 29, 2023.
The Great Buddha of Kamakura at Kotoku-in Temple on June 6, 2023.
Zuishinmon Gate at Okunitama Shrine in Fuchu, Tokyo, on June 16, 2023.
The escalator to movie heaven at Toho Cinemas Fuchu on June 16, 2023.
JULY
Tokyo Disneyland 40th Anniversary Report
Photo Highlight: Crossing the Rainbow Bridge
Tokyo from the Bike Lane: A New View of the City
Photo Highlight: Sawtooth Mountain’s ‘View from Hell’
This Bomb Is Mobile: ‘The Dark Knight’ Trilogy as an American Time Capsule
The 100 Greatest ‘Star Wars’ Moments
Photo Highlight: Shin-Okubo to Shinjuku
The View from Abeno Harukas, Now Japan’s Second-Tallest Building
The Sompo Museum of Art during its Yamashita Kiyoshi centennial on July 6, 2023.
The base of the Cocoon Building seen from the Sompo Museum of Art on July 6, 2023.
Tokyo Station, with light glinting off the new Tokyo Midtown Yaesu skyscraper, on July 6, 2023.
The Thunder Dolphin roller coaster in Tokyo Dome City on July 18, 2023.
The Thunder Dolphin track snaking through the centerless Big O Ferris wheel on July 18, 2023.
The center square at Yebisu Garden Place on August 2, 2023.
Ameyoko shopping street in Ueno on August 10, 2023.
Swan boats docked beside Shinobazu Pond in Ueno on August 10, 2023.
Bar Piano, where Anthony Bourdain drank, in Shibuya’s Nonbei Yokocho, on August 16, 2023.
The Claudia, the same cocktail Anthony Bourdain sipped, at Bar Ishinohana on August 30, 2023.
An alternate view of the Shibuya Nebuta Festival float on September 16, 2023.
Tokujin Yoshioka’s “Star” sculpture outside Tokyo Midtown Yaesu on September 19, 2023.
Outside Ginza’s Kabuki-za theater on the night of September 19, 2023.
OCTOBER
Photo Highlight: Portable Shrine at Jingumae Crossing
‘Star Wars’ Cinema Concert at the Tokyo International Forum
The Michelin Files: Sushi Yoshitake, Tokyo’s Only Three-Star Michelin Sushi Restaurant
The Harry Potter Cafe and Warner Bros. Studio Tour Tokyo (Coming Soon)
Photo Highlights: Skytree After Dark
The sign outside Akasaka Station and the Harry Potter Cafe on October 9, 2023.
A cotton candy cocktail at Tír na nÓg in Ginza on October 11, 2023.
The Wako building at the Ginza 4-chome intersection around sunset on October 11, 2023.
Miyashita Park’s rooftop, seen from Human Trust Cinema Shibuya on October 29, 2023.
NOVEMBER
From Amityville to Ringu: The Evil Eyes of Three Houses and One Cabin
Photo Highlight: Imperial Palace Moat, Elevated View
Tokyo Disneyland: 2022–2023 Highlights (Coming Soon)
The Michelin Files: The Tokyo Pizza Restaurant That Ranks Among the World’s Best
The final day of the Tokyo International Film Festival in Hibiya on November 1, 2023.
A replica of the Capitoline Wolf outside Ajinomoto Stadium in Chofu on November 3, 2023.
Nishi-Shinjuku, seen from the 13th floor of Takashimaya Times Square on December 6, 2023.
Takashimaya Times Square view of the fall colors in Shinjuku Gyoen on December 6, 2023.
Ginkgo trees shedding their leaves near the Tokyo International Forum on December 12, 2023.
Hamburger steak soup curry at Sapporo Dominica in Ginza on December 12, 2023.
Year of the Offline Baby
I’ve deliberately buried the lede here because I feel like anyone who’s read this far (or at least scrolled down past the pictures) probably isn’t some random stranger who’s uninvested in the person behind the writing. In 2023, I put the reader on a first-name basis with my wife, Azusa, making her something of a phantom character here, even though I used to think it was presumptuous when I’d hear people refer to their partners by name without introducing them (as if everyone was just expected to know who this other person was). I figured that even if someone didn’t know me or her, they could probably surmise the nature of our relationship—if not as spouses, then at least as traveling companions.
2024 sees us faced with the possibility of parenthood. Azusa is pregnant, and the due date, which happens to be Independence Day in the U.S., means we could have a baby who’s literally “born on the Fourth of July.” On Christmas Day 2023, I heard a heartbeat for the first time.
Obviously, this is a pretty major life development, both in the sense that there’s life growing inside her and in the sense that it will change our own lives (and already has since we first found out in early November). Faced with becoming a father, it’s made me reevaluate my priorities, embracing the need, in the Japanese way, to be a more responsible person who looks out for the welfare of the group and attends to the needs of others before their own.
A positive pregnancy test in the Meyer home on November 4, 2023.
Stephen King once wrote, “Life is not a support system for art. It’s the other way around.” That quote comes from his memoir, On Writing, and it’s one I came to appreciate more in 2023. You could substitute “the internet” for “art” in that quote and it would hold just as true.
Since the internet is not the real world, and I’ve reached a good jumping-off point here after a year of blogging, I’ve made the decision to step away from this site for a while. This is something I’ve already done once before, back when Azusa and I first got married in mid-2018. At that point, I had been maintaining the site for two years, but for the next four, I only updated it once a year.
That’s where we’re headed in 2024, I think. Even if it’s just in occasional photo galleries, there are still places in Japan that I’d like to show more of, such as Asakusa, Fuji Five Lakes, Ginza, Himeji Castle, Hiroshima, Kobe, Odaiba, Okinawa, the Rainbow Bridge, Shizuoka, Tokyo Dome City, Ueno, and Yokohama. We still have many places elsewhere that we’d like to visit, too, with the thatched-roof village of Shirakawa-go being one that’s high on the list, if for no other reason than because it’s winter right now, and that would be the perfect season to visit.
If I’m ever able to be a digital nomad for a month and do another road trip across America, I’d like to also maybe write some short “Road Diaries” to go along with that in the manner of my “Photo Highlight” posts. For now, though, I’m going to focus on learning to relive — and if all goes well, raise a child — in the post-pandemic world.
As someone who spent years teaching English conversation classes and having face-to-face interactions with people all day, I’d like to find a healthier balance in 2024 between time spent online and the lost art of life offline. If 2022 was the Year of the Vampire, and 2023 was the Year of the Travel Blog, maybe 2024 will be the Year of the Offline Baby. (In this case, however, it’s a real baby, not just a pet project that’s like my “baby.”)
All that remains is for me to say thank you to anyone who might be reading this. It’s not much compared to other sites I’ve written for, but this little blog of mine with its unpaid staff of one receives about 6,000 visits and 7,000 page views a month. The only catch is that around 5,500 of those come from unique visitors. The page views are also spread out disproportionately, with almost 1,500 of them this month coming just from the February post, “Japan’s Life-Sized Gundam, Through the Years,” and another 1,000 of them coming from the June post, “Comparing the Ghibli Museum with Ghibli Park.” What that and Squarespace’s other dashboard analytics tell me is that I probably have a lot of Gundam and Ghibli fans and other assorted people who are just stumbling across the site through Google searches.
Odaiba’s Life-Sized Unicorn Gundam Statue with special blue-and-red lighting on December 23, 2023. This winter lighting is being done as a tie-in for the January release of a new Gundam film.
For years, I dreamed of being a writer without having much to show for it, and I’m extremely grateful to be able to do it for a living (for now, at least). But the truth is, I’ve been doing it for dollars for six and a half years — full-time since 2021 — and beyond traffic statistics, those abstract, meaningless numbers that drive content mills, I have no earthly idea who reads any of what I write. Most of the time, it’s something I do in a complete vacuum, having little to no interaction with readers or even the editors who field my submissions. I wrote for one site for six years without ever having a single face-to-face conversation with anyone there. It leaves me wondering sometimes to what extent I’m just out here talking to myself.
If that’s not the story of the internet in all its solipsistic noise, I don’t know what is. I’ve thought about opening up the comments section and trying to encourage more of a dialogue with readers, the way some podcasters and YouTubers do with their listeners and viewers. Yet attempting to moderate comments and reply to them in earnest might require a bigger time investment, and this site isn’t bringing in any money to begin with. As the Joker once said, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free” … especially when you have a family to support. I don’t want to litter the site with a bunch of trashy ads, but I also haven’t built up enough of a community to really ask people to support me through Patreon or anything like that.
It’s not like I have some great legion of followers on social media, either. Since I’m not on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, my only link to that whole bizarro world before was Twitter, which is a cesspool now, more than it ever was. In the same way that it kind of lost the plot when it renamed itself “X,” I feel like the internet in general has lost the plot as sites struggle to keep afloat in the ongoing media apocalypse. When headlines started becoming increasingly vaguer, framing themselves like trick Jeopardy! questions where the reader has to click on the article before they even know for sure what it’s about, that’s when I knew we were in trouble.
All the more reason to embrace the Year of the Offline Baby. This is where I do my best Bono impression — post-Joshua Tree, pre-Achtung Baby — and say, “It’s no big deal, it’s just that [I] have to go away and dream it all up again.”
In the meantime, thanks again for reading, and have a happy New Year in 2024.
The line for the hatsumode (first shrine visit of the New Year) at Fuda-Tenjin in Chofu, Tokyo, on January 1, 2024.