Author of Things Become Other Things, and Kissa by Kissa. Japan. Writer, photographer, walker.
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2024-11-21 08:00:00
Roden Readers — The first memory I have of Enrique Allen is from the campus of Stanford. He had just graduated from the d.school and was teaching part-time. We were about to start working together. He was all bounding lightness. That’s the first image: Jumping, huge bright smile, long black hair, wide open face, totally open heart. Bounding lightness. The lightness stood in contrast to his bigness as a human; not hefty, he was just a tall dude with the broadest of broad shoulders and a lot of muscles.
2024-11-09 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers — Hello from Kuwana, a post-town along the Tōkaidō where I’m about to hop on a boat and sail across the Nagoya Bay as part of this little tour. But I’m writing these words from a kissa called Saboten (Cactus). A place that’s been around for fifty-seven years (!!!). It’s a bit grimy. A bit worn in. (What isn’t after fifty-seven years?) But it’s all Shōwa, and I’m choosing this place over a Tully’s just down the road for a few reasons, and it’s in these reasons that kissas have value, the loss of which is pretty unfortunate.
2024-11-08 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers — I’m on the Tōkaidō again, the road connecting Kyoto and Tokyo that I walked back in May (and walked previously in November 2020), with my buddy John. We’re driving it (GASP — the heresy! Don’t worry — he walked the whole thing forty-three years ago, I’ve walked it twice; driving it is actually proving to be interesting (collapsed spacetime) and strangely exhausting (sitting most of the day)) and doing little, relaxed, pop-ins to various spots that can be difficult to enjoy slowly when you’re knocking out 40+ kilometers of walking a day (like I was in May).
2024-11-01 08:00:00
Roden Readers — I slammed my ballot down and shoved it into an EMS international airmail envelope and gleefully paid thirty freggin’ bucks or so to get that sucker to my utterly blue state knowing damn well that that vote won’t tip the scales in any meaningful way. And yet. And yet — AND. YET. — I wanna be on that ledger. Goddamn, you bet I want to be on that ledger.
2024-10-23 08:00:00
Roden Readers — Hello! After a last horrible gasp of infinitely-lingering-summer on Saturday here in Tokyo (30C, humid) I think — dare I say it and curse it? — I think something like “fall” might be here. That said, I just got back from walking England where the weather was so aligned with my DNA (this must be a thing) I felt all the cells in my body cry out in joy when the cold and the wet hit the system.
2024-10-18 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers — Back from England! Nobody got COVID.1 We walked from Cheltenham to Bath, about 75 miles (121 kilometers) all told. The weather was merciful — six days of sun and one of rain — and even that rainy day was a nice shakeup (helped us remember where we were and how grateful we were for the other days). Got a little sun kissed, which was not on the bingo card.
2024-09-30 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers — Hello from somewhere over the North Pole en route to England. Kevin Kelly and I are running another Walk and Talk with a classic ragtag crew of walkers. This is our … sixth or seventh or eighth (depending on how you count (we did a couple pre-Walk and Talks before transitioning into the Full Walk and Talk model)). We’ve walked Spain, China, Thailand, Indonesia, England, and Japan. And we’re back to England once again, mainly because the walking is so uncomplicated, rights of way galore, with infrastructure in place to make the talking effortless.
2024-09-13 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers — A little over a hundred-and-one years ago, on September 1, 1923, Tokyo shook. Well, all of Kantō shook. Especially Yokohama, which shook something extra terrible. Since the start of the Meiji Restoration (1868) Tokyo has been reconfigured a few times. Ideologically / existentially by Perry’s forced opening of the country’s ports, the ending of the 265 years of (pretty peaceful) isolation. Later, during WWII, in the 1940s, when the Allied bombers carpeted the city in fire, reducing huge swaths of it to utter ash.
2024-09-06 08:00:00
Roden Readers — Hello from a Japan still on the edge of sweltering! I was standing outside a temple in Yamagata a few nights ago waiting for a friend to finish his mountain ascetic training, just standing at seven p.m., not moving, and jeepers was I soaked, sweat was shooting out of every little hole all over my body. If there was a hole, it was secreting. And none of it was evaporating, which only caused more sweating for my confused body.
2024-08-30 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers — Hello! It has been a month of movement over here. Both sides of a recent trip to the States (to speak at XOXO with Mr. Kottke) were disrupted by typhoons — my flight out was canceled and I had to do an (expensive) emergency rebook (my first airline couldn’t get me on a flight until a week later), and my flight home had to be moved (for free) up three days to “beat” the current typhoon back.
2024-08-21 08:00:00
Roden Readers — A cover! That’s a cover! Of Things Become Other Things! To be published by Random House! In May! 2025! OK — I’ve used up my excitement quota for the rest of 2024, but, heck, a public-reveal/unveil of a book cover is as good a thing as any to use it up on. Hello from Portland, weird Portland (so weird) — it is I, Craig Mod. I am here for XOXO.
2024-08-01 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers — They’re disappearing, the old kissaten. Once slowly, now quickly. Last month we lost Café Ace — a stalwart of Kanda that I was only introduced to a couple of years ago, but never failed to visit when I was in the ’hood. Their nori sandwich was weirdly bewitching, their coffee sweet, their many, many signs hand-painted, delightful, the thickness of paint revealing how prices has changed once or twice over the years.
2024-07-28 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers — I randomly attended a little talk in Tokyo the other night and Sam Holden gave a short presentation on some of his work preserving sento bathhouses around Tokyo. It turns out Sam has a fabulous newsletter documenting his work, and you should absolutely subscribe: “Dispatches from Post-growth Japan.” I’ve been plowing through his archives these past couple days. Sam writes frequently and eruditely about a lot of what I’ve light-touched upon in previous TOKIO TŌKYŌ TOKYO pop-up newsletters (archives available to SPECIAL PROJECTS members): namely the shifting landscape of a city like Tokyo, and how best to balance change with “sensible nostalgia.
2024-07-25 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers — Hello! It’s been ages (well, a month or so) — I’m in constant scramble mode (or is it burnout mode?) these days. Finishing up the Random House edition of Things Become Other Things, and catching up on life itself. I published a big update to Roden a few days ago. One of my many todos post-walk has been to dig through the film I shot while walking the Tōkaidō in May.
2024-07-22 08:00:00
Roden Readers — Hello from the land of … burnout? Well, not burnout-burnout, because I’ve been busy with a billion things here in the background. But from the land of slight newsletter burnout? Yes? But even that’s not entirely true. Because in May (eight-billion years ago in contemporary time) I published some 40,000+ words to my The Return to Pachinko Road pop-up newsletter of me walking from Kyoto to Tokyo over seventeen days.
2024-06-19 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers — Time is yours, he said, and it was — time, ours, for the next week as we walked across Bali. Time and sweat, so much sweat. Leeches? They were ours, too, but with less blood and horror than expected. (“Our record is thirty on one person!” they told us. We maxed out at just a handful, no boots sloshing thick with our own juice.) Stink was also ours, as were home cooked vegetarian meals and mangosteens and shared cigarettes and crossword puzzles and sleeping side by side on elevated wooden platforms and Jean Valjean’s lyrical plight and bandanas and making our guide laugh so hard he cried and a single flat white coffee so perfect and mythic and unexpected it can only be explained as Indonesian jungle magic.
2024-05-10 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers! Hello! As I wrote last week, my new pop-up newsletter/walk — The Return to Pachinko Road — begins on May 14. Subscribe here if you feel so inclined (almost 3,000 people have already signed up — thank you!): And, as I also mentioned last week, Ben Pobjoy — walker maximus++ — sent over a bunch of tips for my upcoming Tōkaidō walk. Here is his letter below. (With a few inline notes from me.
2024-05-08 08:00:00
Roden Readers — Here we are! May! Good god! Let’s dig right in. First, I’m running a new pop-up newsletter connected with my upcoming Tōkaidō walk. The newsletter is called The Return to Pachinko Road and you can sign up here. It starts on May 14, ends on June 1st-ish. I’ll be walking some 600 kilometers from Kyoto to Tokyo and, as usual, publishing a daily essay with photographs. I haven’t done a walk + newsletter of this length in … a long time.
2024-05-03 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers! I’m going back, baby. BACK TO PACHINKO ROAD. From May 14 to May 30, 2024, I’ll walk approximately 600 kilometers from Kyoto To Tokyo, inshallah, along the old Tōkaidō Road, which isn’t really “old” at all anymore, and in many places is, indeed, loaded down with ball-jangling pachinko parlors. I will be running a pop-up, of course. You can subscribe here: Subscribe to THE RETURN TO PACHINKO ROAD (If that form doesn’t work (ad blockers, etc.
2024-04-21 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers! Last week I had a new piece for the New York Times go live: “A Japanese Village Wants Tourists to Come for Heat, Soot and Steel”. I took tons of photographs (also, this marks the first time for me getting some film-shot photos into the Times, if you’re keeping track / not that this means anything or matters, though.) and, naturally, many didn’t get included. So here we go.
2024-04-18 08:00:00
Roden Readers — It may not feel like it, and I may not be sticking to the schedule, but in theory this is a monthly newsletter. It is I, Craig Mod, writing from a near constant state of frazzle and delight that has been this year. The cherry blossoms have come and gone for most of central and southern Japan, and now those cherry trees are back to their most-of-the-time totally unremarkable, goofball greenness.
2024-04-17 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers! For the first time in literally a month, I had a morning to myself and a day with nothing on the schedule — no movement, no interviews, no meetings, no calls, no to-dos. I spent it with the internet off, no phone nearby, reading. This is the way. If you’ve ever wondered what “richness” feels like — for me (and I suspect many others out there in the world), one valence of “rich” is being offline, away from the din of connectivity, the dopaminergic pull of the web and apps and social media, engaging directly with one or two well-considered things.
2024-04-08 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers! Hello from the village of Yasuhara on the western edge of Kōchi, a village filled with Kengo Kuma structures. I’m writing from the shoes-off Yasuhara Community Library, which is beautiful, as you can see above. Here’s my little workstation: 1 Working at the Yasuhara Community Library With the launch of TBOT in November, Kissa by Kissa received a bump of attention. Blackbird Spyplane put the two on their favorite book(s) of 2023 list.
2024-04-01 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers! Hello, Craig Mod here with a dispatch on my trip to Yamaguchi city last week. The blossoms are about to bloom! The cherries! Everyone told me this. It was supposed to be today! they’d say, sad the trees weren’t cooperating. But I didn’t mind. I’m not too fussed about the cherry blossoms in general (I’ll enjoy them if I catch them, of course) but there’s something thrilling about the almost-bloom, the just-about-to-burstness of trees on the cusp of a mega-blossom.
2024-03-12 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers! Hello, it is still I, Craig Mod, still writer of this newsletter. I went walking last week. It had been fifteen months since I had visited the Kii Peninsula, and this was the first trip since publishing the fine art edition of Things Become Other Things (which takes place there). Two friends and I started to do a yearly walk together in 2021. A pandemic response — hey, let’s get out of our house and walk somewhere in the countryside, far from the virus!
2024-02-27 08:00:00
Hello Roden Subscribers — Running a membership program feels like sticking your head in a meat grinder and hoping a rainbow comes out. It’s a slurry of vulnerability and hubris and insanity, and it’s also a bit — let’s be honest — embarrassing. Please, you say, support my work? In the humble tone of a supplicant. #grateful Oops — there goes your ego, along with your head, into the grinder.
2024-02-20 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers! Hello, it is I, Craig Mod, writer of this newsletter. And runner of one membership program called SPECIAL PROJECTS, of which many of you are members (thank you!), and which makes Ridgeline and many other things possible, and which is now — somewhat unbelievably — FIVE YEARS OLD. That is, five years ago I launched this thing. This membership program. Somewhat sheepishly (OK — pathologically sheepishly). And the work I’ve been able to do in these intervening years — all the walks, the pop-up newsletters, and not-pop-up newsletters, and books (Kissa!
2024-02-04 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers! Did I walk in 2023? Oh, I walked. Maybe not as much as some other years, but walk I did and here is where and what I did when it comes to walking. I started the year off with a TOKIO TŌKYŌ TOKYO walk, part two, and walked in the winter through the streets of Tokyo, a city I know better than and have spent more time in than any other in the world.
2024-02-01 08:00:00
2023 was amazing, bewildering, inspiring, gnomic, exhausting, bacterial, and mostly, fun. I mean — by the end of the year I was but a swollen forearm fighting for my life (OK, maybe not quite that bad), but wow … WOW. 2023: Easily the most monumental and generative year of my life. I owe that fullness to SPECIAL PROJECTS, my membership program. Now, a somewhat unbelievable five years old. Here is everything I learned last year.
2024-01-21 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers! My parents have visited Japan twice. Once in 2018, some 18 years after I first moved to Japan. And then again this past December. That first trip, despite the pleas of my mom to go to Kyoto (which she still to this day calls, endearingly, “Ki-yōti”), like any know-it-all insufferable son, I took them on a kind of best-of B-sides tour: Kamakura, Kanazawa, Kōya-san, Hiroshima. If I may say so myself, I think it was a fabulous itinerary.
2024-01-10 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers! Happy new year!! I meant to send a 2023 Year in Walking post, but then my arm got infected, and the year came crashing down, and now I figured I should address this new New York Times ranking ASAP. So here we are. Walking review coming soon, but we’ll have to wait a little longer. A few months ago The New York Times asked me for my picks for places to visit in 2024.
2023-12-31 08:00:00
Thriving Roden Subscribers — I love antibiotics. I love them so much. I am in awe of how long I went without articulating this love. Each and every day we should open our front doors and yell into the crisp morning air: Thank you, antibiotics! Thank you dicloxacillin and ampicillin and minocycline and sarecycline and cefepime and delafloxacin and clindamycin and clarithromycin and oritavancin and cilastatin! When folks complain about the state of things today, I like to flippantly bring up the fact that two hundred years ago, if you got the wrong scratch — THE WRONG SCRATCH — you’d die.
2023-12-25 08:00:00
Happy holidays, walkers! Kevin Kelly and I began talking while walking together some twelve years ago, near his home in Pacifica. Eventually, we branched out, and for these past six years have been running more “formalized” walk-and-talks across five countries with some 40+ people. We’ve walked-and-talked in China, Spain, England, Japan, and Thailand. These experiences are some of the best weeks of our lives. We’d love for you to be running walk-and-talks as well!
2023-12-15 08:00:00
Ridgeliners! Thank you all for the rapturous response to the TBOT announcement. We’ve finally shipped almost all of the orders, caught up with the rush, and new orders are now being tackled next business day. You can (probably?) still sneak a TBOT in before Christmas. Grab a copy here. Onward to the latest issue about a walk in Thailand I recently completed: It was hot. I was sweating. We — were sweating.
2023-11-26 08:00:00
Faithful Roden Subscribers — Things Become Other Things, fine art edition, launched a couple of days ago, and — I swear — I was about to send a letter here, to you kindly folks of Roden, but sales were happening so quickly, flying at my head like JK-Simmons chairs (except infused with love and kindness, and not chairs, but stuffed, plush, capybaras), and I had so much laundry to do (where does all this laundry come from, and how do I generate so much of it?
2023-11-22 08:00:00
Walkers, have I got a walking book for you: Things Become Other Things. It’s a book about walking thousands of kilometers of the Kii Peninsula. About walking those old Kumano Kodō paths — but not the ones you probably know. It’s about talking with a thousand fishermen and farmers and kissa owners, about communing with the mountain fauna, about hopscotching around leeches. It’s about floods and tsunamis and the capricious fecundity of nature.
2023-11-05 08:00:00
Roden Readers — My third big Tokyo walk kicks off tomorrow today in a couple hours — TOKIO TŌKYŌ TOKYO³, a six day, 150km walk from edge to edge of Tōkyō-to. More info on it here, and you can sign up directly here. I’m Craig Mod, and it looks like I might be walking through some typhoons this coming week. But I also got my second skin cancer biopsy back the other day and — hooray hooray, just a dumb mole.
2023-10-24 08:00:00
Hello Ridgeliners! It’s been 10 months since my last big Tokyo walk, so once again, here we go — I’m gunna walk the heck out of Tokyo. And once again, I’m running a pop-up newsletter for the walk: TOKIO TŌKYŌ TOKYO³! You can sign up here: (Note: If you subscribed to my previous TTTs, you aren’t subscribed to this one; I like all my pop-up newsletters to be enthusiastically consented to!