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The start of this year has felt a bit like walking through overlapping layers of time. This week I discovered more about a porcelain plate, one of those “it’s always been around” objects that suddenly demands your attention. It comes from that era when Europe fell in love with an imagined Japan, and yet, holding it now in my home here in the US, I found myself thinking less about style and more about memory: what we inherit, what we project, and how objects quietly follow us across borders and generations. Then I wrote about something far more social and sparkling: the 71st Shinnenkai of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce of Northern California at The Westin St. Francis. There’s a particular energy in a room where Japan and the U.S. meet through business, community, and long relationships: old friends greeting each other in a mix of languages, formal greetings followed by very human conversations about hopes for the year ahead. Being in that space reminded me how much of “Japan” lives outside Japan’s borders, carried by people, partnerships, and rituals we recreate far from Tokyo. And then, in complete contrast, I remembered “the sparrows” at Enoshima station in Kanagawa. No big agenda, no event, just colorful knitting on a bunch of small metal birds close to where I used to live. It was one of those quiet, almost throwaway moments that somehow stays with you. Maybe because it captures something I love about living there: the way the everyday can suddenly feel cinematic, if you let yourself pause long enough to notice. Three very different scenes, but they all nudged me to think about how we relate to place and time: through objects, communities, and these tiny, unscripted encounters. Wishing you a week where small things catch your eye in just the right way. Warmly, Saskia
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