Diary of Joy and Shine — 安岡喜晴 (JoyShine)

Sunday, October 11, 2026 : Lunch in 1904, Dessert by Candlelight

Today, on a clear autumn day, my wife and I went to the Former Main Building of the Kyoto Prefectural Office.
It's a Renaissance-style Western building, built in 1904, and it's still in use today as offices for the prefectural government.
It still looks the way it did when it was completed, and it's the oldest government office building in Japan that is still in use.
The cream-colored walls and gray roof stood out beautifully against the blue sky.

After that, we went into the cafe in the southeast corner of the first floor.
A wooden sign hung at the entrance, and the cafe's name included the year the building was completed, written in kanji numerals.
It's run by a long-established Kyoto coffee shop.

While we waited, we took a walk around the building.
Straight ahead was a grand staircase with marble banisters.
Light streamed in through the big windows, and beyond them we could see the green of the trees.

Inside, the cafe was a classic-looking room, with a red carpet and white walls.
The chairs and tables were ones once used in this building and in the former governor's residence.
On the table was a small call bell.
Artwork hung on the walls.
There was a painting of a dog with butterfly wings on its back, holding a tulip in its mouth, and another of white flowers blooming on golden clouds.
Branches of cotton were arranged in a green vase.

First, we ordered curry.
After the meal, we had coffee and relaxed there until around 5 PM.

After that, we went west along Demizu Street and then north along Jofukuji Street, and there was a cafe in the middle of a residential area.
By the time we got there, the sun was starting to set, and the light spilling out of the windows looked warm.
Inside, it was dimly lit with candles and had a calm atmosphere.
We ordered drinks and cheesecake.
Both the amber-colored drink and the clear soda were topped with mint leaves.
The cheesecake came with plenty of fruit, like bananas and grapes.

On the way home, we stopped by a hamburger shop inside a supermarket at the intersection of Horikawa Street and Marutamachi Street.

Curry and coffee in a Meiji-era Western building, then a break at dusk in a cafe lit by candles.
It was a relaxing day.

Tuesday, September 22, 2026 : Walking Where the Past Left Off

An old gate stood facing the street.

On the wall, in small letters,
"NAZUNA TSUBAKI ST."
was all it said.

Kyoto has a lot of gates.

Temple gates.
Shrine gates.
Machiya gates.

A gate is a mysterious thing.

It takes only a few steps to pass through one,
and yet between this side and the other,
sometimes even time changes.

This gate was one of those.

Through the gate, a single narrow alley stretched on ahead.

On both sides, black wooden machiya.

Stone paving.
Lattice doors.
Tiled roofs.

Lanterns stood in front of the houses,
and up under the eaves, round white lights were lined up in a row.

There was almost no one around.

Only the lights went on down the alley,
as if they were waiting for someone.

This is an inn, made by renovating a row of machiya over 100 years old.

It isn't a single large building turned into a hotel.

The machiya along both sides of the alley became the inn,
and together with the alley running between them,
it was all made into one place.

So as we walked,
I slowly lost track of
whether I was inside a hotel
or out walking the streets of Kyoto.

I liked that ambiguity.

Partway along, there was a small garden.

A single tree. Moss. Stones.

Beyond it
was an entrance hung with a noren curtain.

It all looked as if it had always been there.

But up close, it was different.

How the stones were placed,
how the light was aimed,
how the trees were framed,
all of it had been quietly calculated.

It wasn't a place where old things had just been left as they were.

Nor was it a place where they had been replaced with something new.

The sensibilities of people today have made a home inside buildings a hundred years old.

In Kyoto, the word "old" isn't enough on its own.

Right next to something a thousand years old, there's a shop that opened yesterday.

People walk down age-old streets, looking at their smartphones.

Behind lattice doors, there's Wi-Fi.

Time is layered.

New things don't drive old things out.
They quietly build up on top of them.

Tsubaki Street at night was that kind of place too.

White light fell
on the black walls of the machiya.

On the stone paving,
the shadows of the lanterns stretched out instead of people's.

It's an inn,
yet its name doesn't end in "Hotel" or "Inn."
It ends in "Street."

Come to think of it, a person's life
may be more like a street than a building.

Houses get rebuilt.

Shops disappear.

People, too, are gone in time.

But only the street keeps running through the same place.

A hundred years ago, someone must have walked here too.

People going shopping.
People heading home.
People leading a child by the hand.

What they were thinking,
no one can know anymore.

People whose names haven't even survived
have walked this street by the thousands, by the tens of thousands.

And tonight, it's my turn to walk on from where they left off.

Thinking of it that way,
what it means to look at old streets
seemed a little different.

The past isn't something kept somewhere far away.

It isn't something that exists only in history books, either.

Every day,
we walk through places someone left behind,
use words someone made,
and live surrounded by scenery someone protected.

In other words, even if we don't notice it,
we are always carrying on where the past left off.

And our today, too,
will one day become someone else's past.

I don't know whether these machiya will still be here a hundred years from now.

I don't know whether the name Tsubaki Street will still be around, either.

But
the light that glowed here tonight
will certainly stay inside me.

The quiet stone paving.

The black machiya.

The white lights lined up under the night sky.

I looked back at the gate.

Outside was the Kyoto I see every day.

Cars were driving by,
traffic lights were changing,
and people were heading home.

All we had done was pass through a single gate.

Even so, by the time we headed home,
the way I looked at time had changed a little.

We think we are walking toward the future.

But in truth, we walk toward it carrying the past on our backs.

Perhaps the place where the two meet is what we call "now."

September 20, 2026 : Beyond the Corner

Today we went to Juen in Gion.

I wanted to look at it for a while before eating.

Kyoto vegetables. Sushi. Tuna. Salmon.
And matcha ice cream.
Served with sweet red bean paste and shiratama.

When we left, it was already night.

We walked to the Kamo River.

So many people were sitting
along the riverbank.

The Noryo Yuka platforms were lit,
and the lights of the city were reflected on the water.

So many people,
so many lights,
and right beside them,
only the river was flowing quietly.

After that, at a cafe in front of Yasaka Shrine, I ordered a latte.

A white heart on the surface.

Then, north on Higashioji Street by bike.

Partway along, we turned onto a side street and kept going north, and came out in front of the Heian Shrine.

So there was a route like this.

I have been down this street so many times,
but I only found out today.

Saturday, September 12, 2026 : Why They've Been There All Those Years

Today I went to a bike shop to get a flat tire fixed.

Strangely enough, my wife's bike had gotten a flat at the same time.

Mine was the back tire.
Hers was the front.

First, we went to a big chain bike shop.

They looked at my wife's bike and said,

"The whole front tire needs to be replaced."

The total for both of us would have been over 10,000 yen.

On top of that, they said, "Please come back and pick them up another day."

That's when I suddenly thought of what happened at the dentist.

A while ago, a dentist told me,

"You need surgery."
"We'll have to put in an implant."

But when I tried a dentist near my home, I was told,

"This? I can fix this."

In the end, I never had the surgery or the implant,
and now it's completely healed.

So we decided to try one more shop.

This time, it was a small independent bike shop that's been around for a long time.

They looked at our bikes and fixed them on the spot.

"There's no puncture. The valves probably got old and the air leaked out."

They replaced the valves, and the total for both of us was 2,200 yen.

That was quite a lesson.

A big chain that draws a lot of customers isn't always the best.

When an independent owner has run a shop in the same spot for years,
there's a reason they've been there all those years.

With our bikes fixed, we rode straight from there to the Kamo River.

Blue sky.
The sound of the river.
People sitting on the riverbank.

Some people on the bank were sitting alone, and there were couples too.

I wondered what they were all thinking about as they looked at the river.

We crossed the Kamo River and rode north on Kawabata Street.

We stopped at Iroakari.

For drinks, we had apple juice and white peach juice.

The inside is bright and clean, and the food is delicious too.

100 out of 100.

Saturday, September 5, 2026 : Old Sweets Shop and Old Memories

Today we were going to go to Saryo Hosen, a Japanese sweets cafe.

On the way, as we were biking along Horikawa Street,
I noticed that an old shop, one that's been there for as long as I can remember, was open.

Narumi-Mochi Honten, on Horikawa Street.

Founded in 1875, the shop had an old wooden sign hanging over the storefront.

This shop was on my way to Sundai, my old prep school.
I passed it almost every day, but all I knew was that it always seemed to be closed.
I was never a morning person, and partway through the year I ended up going mostly to evening classes, so I don't remember it ever being open.
Or rather, even if it was open, maybe I just never noticed.

So we decided to go in.

Today was the first time I had ever been inside.

First we picked out some Japanese sweets in the shop, and then had them in the seating area at the back.
Soft light came in from outside through the reed blinds, and it was a calm, quiet space.

I had mizu warabi with brown sugar syrup poured over it.
It was soft, and it seemed to melt in my mouth.

Seriously delicious.
It turned out to be a famous Japanese sweets shop.
Why didn't I go in sooner?
From now on, I'm going to come here a lot.

After that, we went to a cafe near Sky Seven, the apartment building I used to live in.

I ordered a cappuccino topped with caramel.
Fine lines of caramel sauce were drizzled over the foam, and it looked beautiful.

In the evening, we went to a Taiwanese street-food bar called Yoichi Sanpo.

Looking up from outside, I could see colorful lanterns hanging behind the second-floor windows.
A world away from everyday life, lit up by 100 lanterns.
Yellow, blue, red, green, pink.

When we sat down and looked up, colorful lights spread out above us.

It's lively, a little mysterious, and yet strangely calming.

It's completely different from the quiet, traditional Japanese space at Narumi-Mochi earlier today.

In the afternoon, I stepped for the first time into a Japanese sweets shop that had been there all along,
and now, at night, I'm sitting in a place that feels like a night market in a foreign country.

Kyoto has some very different faces.

Finding them is one of the things I enjoy.

Saturday, August 29, 2026 : Traveling in My Own City

Today we went to Porta at Kyoto Station.

It was raining when we left,
and we couldn't decide between the train and our bikes, but in the end we took the bikes.

We went into a tempura shop in Porta.

It's a casual place that serves the tempura fresh out of the fryer.
We both ordered the tempura set, and then added a few dishes on the side.

The tempura came out arranged in a wooden box.
Shrimp, and several kinds of vegetables.

After we finished eating, we took a break at Tsujiri in front of Kyoto Station.

It was raining, so it doubled as shelter from the rain.

On the way home, I went to the bathroom under Kyoto Tower.

There were a lot of people there visiting from overseas.

People were walking through the city I live in as a place they had traveled to.
A street that's nothing special to me might be a street someone else walks only once in their life.

Walking among people who were traveling,
I felt a little like I was traveling in my own city too.

Saturday, August 22, 2026 : Blissful Minutes

Today we went to Sweets Cafe KYOTO KEIZO in Sanjo Shopping Street.
It's a cafe in a machiya over 100 years old, left just as it is.

We ordered their signature dessert, the "10 minutes Mont Blanc."

There's a meringue inside, and they say its texture changes after ten minutes.
So the best-before time is ten minutes.

It's only available for the summer, until August 31.

A card came with it, and it said, "Please enjoy your blissful ten minutes."

Next, we went to Bivi Kyoto Nijo.

There's a vending machine here that squeezes fresh orange juice.
Press the button and the machine cuts three or four whole oranges, squeezes them, and pours the juice into a cup.
It's fun to watch the whole process through the glass.

Fresh squeezed orange juice was really on another level.
And again, we enjoyed the blissful minutes, this time with orange juice.

Sunday, August 16, 2026 : Word That Has Not Changed

I was going through old data on an external hard drive, and found source code I wrote more than twenty years ago.

Back then, a subsidiary in the Fujitsu group asked me to build something that keeps saving a Word document in the background while it is being written.

    Public Sub WordRealTimeSaver()

        Dim W1 As Word.Application
        Dim W2 As Word.Document
        Dim sx, sy As String

        Dim SaveDirectory As String = GetAppPath() & "\Save"

        If System.IO.Directory.Exists(SaveDirectory) = False Then
            System.IO.Directory.CreateDirectory(SaveDirectory)
        End If

        Do
            Try

                W1 = GetObject(, "Word.Application")

                sx = W1.ActiveDocument.FullName
                sy = GetAppPath() & "\Save\" & W1.ActiveDocument.Name

                W2 = W1.ActiveDocument
                W2.SaveAs(sy, Word.WdSaveFormat.wdFormatDocument)

            Catch ex As Exception

            End Try
        Loop


    End Sub

SaveAs changes the file the open document is attached to.
After the first pass, the document being edited is the copy in the save folder.
The document's true path is in sx, and no line ever uses it.

The next day, that line is gone.

                W2 = W1.ActiveDocument.Content.Document
                W12 = CreateObject("Word.Application")
                W12.Visible = False
                W12.Documents.Add(W2)
                W12.Documents.Save(True, Word.WdSaveFormat.wdFormatDocument)

It starts a second Word and keeps it invisible.
No one can see the status bar on that one.
Going from Content back to Document returns the original document.
Documents.Add returns a new, empty document.

Three months later, the second Word is gone.

            Do

                y = GetAsyncKeyState(13)

                If y <> 0 Then
                    Exit Do
                End If

                y = GetAsyncKeyState(&H1)

                If y <> 0 Then
                    Exit Do
                End If

                y = GetAsyncKeyState(&H2)

                If y <> 0 Then
                    Exit Do
                End If

                y = GetAsyncKeyState(&H4)

                If y <> 0 Then
                    Exit Do
                End If

                y = GetAsyncKeyState(&H25)

                If y <> 0 Then
                    Exit Do
                End If

                y = GetAsyncKeyState(&H26)

                If y <> 0 Then
                    Exit Do
                End If

                y = GetAsyncKeyState(&H27)

                If y <> 0 Then
                    Exit Do
                End If

                y = GetAsyncKeyState(&H28)

                If y <> 0 Then
                    Exit Do
                End If

                Sleep(100)

            Loop

The Enter key, mouse buttons, and four arrow keys.
If any of them is pressed, the loop ends and the save follows.
Instead of asking Word whether the document changed, it watches the person.
The place could not be hidden, so the moment was chosen instead.

In the end, it was not taken up.
Probably, a progress bar running in the status bar on every save attempt did not feel right.

If it were me now, I would not ask Word anything.

When the client is a company, anything that has to sit inside Word tends to be turned down at review.

The OS keeps an eye on the folder, and when the file changes, the contents at that moment go into a dated copy.
Word is not called, so nothing runs in the status bar.

void WatchAndKeepCopies(const wchar_t* folder, const wchar_t* backupDir)
{
    HANDLE dir = CreateFileW(folder, FILE_LIST_DIRECTORY,
        FILE_SHARE_READ | FILE_SHARE_WRITE | FILE_SHARE_DELETE,
        nullptr, OPEN_EXISTING, FILE_FLAG_BACKUP_SEMANTICS, nullptr);
    if (dir == INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE)
        return;

    alignas(DWORD) BYTE buf[32 * 1024];
    DWORD n = 0;

    while (ReadDirectoryChangesW(dir, buf, sizeof(buf), FALSE,
               FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_LAST_WRITE, &n, nullptr, nullptr))
    {
        if (n == 0)
        {
            KeepCopyOfEveryDocument(folder, backupDir);
            continue;
        }

        const BYTE* p = buf;
        for (;;)
        {
            const FILE_NOTIFY_INFORMATION* fni =
                reinterpret_cast<const FILE_NOTIFY_INFORMATION*>(p);

            std::wstring name(fni->FileName,
                              fni->FileNameLength / sizeof(WCHAR));
            KeepCopy(folder, name.c_str(), backupDir);

            if (fni->NextEntryOffset == 0)
                break;
            p += fni->NextEntryOffset;
        }
    }

    CloseHandle(dir);
}

When the notification buffer overflows, everything in it is thrown away and only a count of zero is returned.
When that happens, it is not the moment to give up quietly, and the whole folder is read again.

Excel and PowerPoint each have a method that saves a copy of the open document.
Word does not.

So from outside, the last saved version is as far as it goes.
Twenty years ago and today, the character just typed is only inside Word.

If this had been what I handed over back then, it would probably have been taken up.

Saturday, August 15, 2026 : One of Best Teas I Have Ever Had

Today we went to Shijo Kawaramachi.

First we went to Tottotto Shijo Kawaramachi.
Going in, we saw Sapporo Beer lanterns hanging from the ceiling and a lucky cat poster on the wall.

First we ordered oolong tea and melon soda, and made a toast.
Then we ordered an assorted sashimi platter, charcoal-grilled skewers, and tsukune.

After that we went to Nakamura Tokichi Shijo in Takashimaya.

First, cold brew Nakamura-cha came out as a welcome tea.
This cold brew Nakamura-cha was fantastic. It is a close match for the tea at Ippodo Chaho.
This was just the welcome tea.
Imagine a welcome tea holding its own against Ippodo Chaho. (lol)

We ordered two servings of Nama Cha Jelly.
The matcha one came with matcha ice cream, matcha jelly, shiratama, and matcha cream on top.
The other was hojicha jelly, topped with black sesame ice cream and shiratama.

When we left Takashimaya it was drizzling, so we waited at the entrance for the rain to stop.
After the rain let up, we got on our bikes and went to Bivi Nijo.
It started raining there again too, so we took a break at the Gong cha inside Bivi Nijo.
After we left Gong cha, we sat on a bench on the second floor of Bivi for a while, did some shopping at the supermarket, and went home.

Saturday, August 8, 2026 : Distant World Somewhere Inside My Memory

Today we went to a sandwich shop in Sanjo Shopping Street.

Then we went to a cafe in the same shopping street.
The shop looked like an old machiya left just as it was.
We took our time over coffee inside.

Old houses bring back the feel of the Showa era.

A lot of memories come back to me.

Memories of my childhood.
Memories of my grandma's house.
Memories of the people around me in those days.

Memory is a mysterious thing.
The things we remember aren't necessarily the important ones.
A moment that meant nothing at the time suddenly comes back decades later.

A room, still new and clean, from when I was a child.
The clock that used to hang there.
The melody that came from it.
The sounds from the kitchen.

At the time, I thought it would all last forever.
But somewhere along the way, a lot of it had gone.

And in the end, only the memories inside me remain.
Perhaps it isn't the building itself that I feel nostalgic for.
It's the time it brings back, the time I can never return to.

A world I can never return to, no matter how much I want to.

A distant, distant world of remembrance, somewhere inside my memory.

Thursday, August 6, 2026 : Software That Outlives Its Runtime

Software these days is nearly always built on top of something.
There is not much that stands by itself.
Mine were like that too, for a long time.

Near the end of my student days I made an application that adjusted the connection settings to make the Internet faster.
At that time, some magazines approached me and asked to publish it.
It worked by rewriting MS-DOS settings.
But, it does not run anymore.
That is not my fault, though.
There is nothing left for it to rewrite.

After that, there was a period when I wrote in C# for years.
At first, I wrote C# on .NET Framework 1.0.
Those programs asked the user to install it first, before they would run.
Once it was installed, they ran nicely, and they were quick to write.
And above all, it was easy, to make an application.
And yet, before I had done anything, 1.0 came to an end.
That is ridiculous, isn't it. lol
Microsoft said they would keep backward compatibility, and yet what I wrote on 1.0 no longer ran on its own.
I took them at their word and worked at it, and it came to nothing.
The code had not rotted.
The floor underneath ended first.

I think software hardly ever dies from its own bugs.
The ground beneath it goes first.
The person who wrote it did nothing wrong, and it disappears from the bottom up.

Since then, I have been writing only in C++ and the Win32 API.
I link the CRT statically, so there is no vcruntime, no msvcp, no api-ms-win-crt to install.
I keep _WIN32_WINNT fixed at 0x0601.
The same executable, built as it would have been for Windows 7, still starts on Windows 11.
There is nothing to install beforehand.
Copy it, and it runs.

This must look like a step backward.
It looks like nothing more than leaving the new way for the way I wrote twenty years ago.
But the way I wrote twenty years ago is the one that reaches twenty years from now.

CDs that hold DICOM images usually come with their own viewer, burned on beside them.
Sometimes that viewer does not start.
Even so, the images inside open.
That is because they are stored as DICOM.

This became clear once I wrote the DICOM reader myself.
Follow the standard, explicit VR little endian, 1.2.840.10008.1.2.1, and read straight through.
Implicit VR reads its lengths differently, but it opens too, as long as you split it the way the standard says.
Things that are published, and that nobody can withdraw for their own convenience, are built like this.

What could only be seen inside a browser cannot be seen anymore.
The contents have not changed at all.
What disappeared was the thing that opened them.

I think building something that lasts is not the same as building it well.
If you must build on something, build on what nobody can withdraw.
There is nothing fancy or new about it.

It is never the contents that become unreadable, but the thing that opens them.

May 16, 2026 : More Than the Dress and the Voice

Today, we went to Sakanoue Shoten, a restaurant located on Shinbashi Street near Shijo Kawaramachi.

When we stepped inside, the interior of the restaurant had an old, nostalgic look that brought back memories of the past.
According to the staff, this building has been here since the Taisho era, it dates back over 100 years.

For drinks, we ordered a melon soda and a sudachi citrus squash.

Inside the restaurant, John Lennon's "Love," the Bee Gees' "Melody Fair," the Cascades' "Listen to the Rhythm of the Falling Rain," and lots of other nostalgic songs I used to listen to all the time were playing.
Even Richard Clayderman came on, ah... memories...

The food had a purely Japanese feel, and it was delicious.
And it reminded me of how delicious ochazuke is.

And, just as we were about to leave, "Eyes on Me" came on, of all things!

John Lennon, the Bee Gees, the Cascades, Richard Clayderman... and so on... and then, finally, game music came on!!

What on earth is this lineup?
From oldies to game music... what kind of genre is this?

Come to think of it, ever since we entered, the songs playing had all been ones I sing at karaoke, beyond genre.

Maybe memories work the same way.
Scattered, inconsistent, impossible to categorize, and yet unmistakably ours.

In other words, we're all more than what others see, hear, or can gain from us.

Friday, May 15, 2026 : Clinic, Committee, Then Cafe Break

Today was outpatient clinic in the morning, then patients until 3 PM, and then on to my occupational physician duties for the safety and health committee.

At the safety and health committee, I talked about heatstroke prevention and customer harassment countermeasures.

Kyoto is already seeing days around 30 degrees Celsius, and the forecast for early next week is up to 36 degrees.
So I said we need to check the flow early, who to report to when they feel unwell and how to step away from work.
And that goes for the back of house, the receiving area, the kitchens, and event work.
The kitchen carries the most risk, because humidity and radiant heat come on top of the air temperature, so I said a WBGT meter should go in there.

I also went through the thresholds. Below WBGT 21, you still need to keep drinking water.
28 and above is severe warning, and 31 and above is the danger zone.
That is the level where you consider changing the work itself, adding breaks, rotating staff, and in some cases stopping work.

For customer harassment, the starting point is that customer-facing work is emotional labor.
Verbal abuse, intimidating behavior, being held for long stretches, excessive demands, hinting at a post on social media.
I said these are safety and health problems, because they lead to mental health trouble and to people leaving the job.
From October 1, 2026, the revised Labor Measures Comprehensive Promotion Act makes customer harassment measures a legal duty for employers.
So I told them a stated company policy is not enough on its own.
Who staff turn to on the floor, at what point it goes up to the store manager or head office, how the record is kept,
and a setup that does not leave one employee dealing with it alone, all of that needs to be in place early.

I also brought up the measles outbreak.
Routine measles vaccination in Japan began in October 1978.
Because of how the system worked before that, and how many doses each group received, immunity varies a lot from one generation to the next.
People born between October 1, 1972 and April 1, 1990 are the single-dose generation, and their antibody levels have likely fallen.
So I asked them to check their maternal and child health handbook and to get an antibody test,
and, if it turns out they need it, to consider another dose of the MR vaccine.

After the committee, I had a return-to-work interview online with an employee on leave of absence.
There was nothing of concern, and I judged that a return to work would be fine.

With the interview done, it finally felt like the weekend!
I took a break at a cafe on Gokomachi Street and came back home.

May 10, 2026 : Riding Through My Own Memory
© 安岡喜晴 (JoyShine)

Today we biked to the Katsura Imperial Villa.

We crossed the Katsura River over the Kuze Bridge.

The roads around here are the ones my father used to drive me along when I was a child.
It was a nostalgic road, one we took every time we went to visit my relatives.

And this scenery, too,
was the scenery I saw again and again from the car window back then.

Of course, as a child,
I had no idea what road this was.

I was just riding in my father's car,
watching the scenery go by.

So today I learned something for the first time.

This scenery, the one that had stayed in my memory all along,
was the scenery just past the Katsura Ohashi Bridge.

I had known this scenery for decades,
but it was only today that I learned the name of the place.

After that, we stopped by a Japanese sweets shop, Nakamuraken.

We ordered two mugitemochi, the sweet this shop is famous for.

The simple sweetness was just wonderful.

Then we headed to the Katsura Imperial Villa.

But at the entrance, a guard spoke to us.

He told us that you need a reservation to go inside.

I didn't know that.

So we had no choice but to turn back for today.

On the way home, we stopped at a Korean restaurant, and I ordered bibim naengmyeon.

While eating the cold, spicy noodles,
I thought back on the roads in Katsura we had ridden today.

The places I once watched from the window of my father's car as a child,
today I was riding through them on my own bike.

The scenery that has been in my memory for decades
is slowly connecting with the scenery I see now.

It was that kind of day.

May 5, 2026 : Path That Lives On

Today we went to Arashiyama.

We biked west, west along Oike Street.
Turned right at the famous (?) Sanjo Oike intersection.
Before long, we reached the Daiei Street shopping arcade, then went down the slope and kept going straight, straight, straight!

And we made it to Arashiyama.

After about a 30-minute wait, we got into this cafe.
One of the most popular cafes around.

A bit unusual, but I ordered an orange cream soda.
And a matcha tiramisu.

Melon cream soda is everywhere, but orange cream soda is a rare find.
Plus, since I'd been waiting under the bright sun, I was tired and went with a soda.
But the soda took so long to arrive that by the time it came, I'd already recovered from the fatigue.
So drinking the soda was kind of a struggle to finish.
Since I was no longer tired.
I should have gone with a hot cafe latte.
So after finishing the soda, I ordered a hot caramel latte on top of that.
I finished the hot caramel latte, and we left.

After leaving the cafe, we walked along the Bamboo Path.
I walk this path every time I come to Arashiyama.
I remembered that day.
The day in 2014 when I walked along the Bamboo Path with my mother and father.

That moment is gone, never to return.
I want to return, but there's no going back to that world.
This path I'm walking now.
What's waiting at the end of this path, I wonder.

May 2, 2026 : A Day of Cycling Around Higashiyama

Today we'd planned to go to Arashiyama, but we got a late start, so we switched to the Higashiyama area instead.

From Oike Street, we headed north on Teramachi Street.
We hit Marutamachi Street and turned east.
After that, we went north and further north on Shirakawa Street.

Then, we stopped at a Japanese sweets cafe, Ichijoji Nakatani.
We ordered the warabi mochi parfait.

We then went to a cafe, Tsubame, for a coffee break, but it was almost closing time.

So we just kept cycling north up Shirakawa Street to Shirakawa Kitayama.
From there, we headed west along Kitayama Street for Horikawa Kitayama.

Along the way, we crossed Matsugasaki Bridge. It reminded me of that day.
That day when, on the way back from cherry blossom viewing, we stopped at Volks, the restaurant that means so much to me, and then rode home along the Takano River.

Partway there, we stopped at a place on Kitayama Street that looked like a cafe to rest, but they were only open until 5 pm, so we used the bathroom, bought some cookies, and left.
There was a tea cafe close by, but it likely served only set courses and looked pricey, so we skipped it.
So we got back on our bikes and continued west until we reached Horikawa Kitayama.
From there, we biked south to Horikawa Kitaoji.

Then, we cycled east to the mall near Karasuma Kitaoji.
There, we took a break at Freshness Burger on the first floor. This is a place where I often took breaks during my Doshisha days.
We stayed there resting until around 7:50 pm, then around 8:00 pm, we had spicy ramen at Fukuchian, a ramen shop on the same floor.

After eating, we went to the bike parking.
AAAAH!! We parked at the same time but hers was free and mine was 200 yen?? These automated bike parking systems really mess up way too often!!
There's actually a spot at Shijo Omiya where it always comes out free. I'm not gonna write which one here, though.

We left the mall and sped home on our bikes down Shinmachi Street.
Shinmachi Street has light traffic, so it's nice to bike on.

We didn't make it to Arashiyama as planned, but the cycling turned out to be more fun than expected.
It was a good day.

April 30, 2026 : The Power of Timing

Today, we had sukiyaki for lunch at Juen.

Before the sukiyaki started. I remembered that day.
That rare day, surprisingly I was the first to arrive lol.
That day was sukiyaki too.
We ate sukiyaki, got full, and left the restaurant.

Since we were nearby, we thought we'd check out Gion Tokuya, and when we got there, what a miracle, zero wait time.

We enjoyed Tokuya's warabi mochi with zero wait, and when we left, the usual line was there as always.

The wonder that timing weaves.

Back in junior high, that instant when the noisy classroom suddenly went dead silent, just for a moment.
At that moment, everyone got buzzing, "What was that silence just now?"

Dozens of conversations, all going silent at the exact same moment.
Dozens of people in line, all happening to disappear right before I arrived.

Slipping through the mesh of probability, a miracle born from coincidences stacked together.

Tokuya, and the memory of that classroom, taught me the power of timing.

April 29, 2026 : Song That Hasn't Aged

Today we went out for dinner at Benjamin Steakhouse Kyoto.
Inside, we were led to a booth.
The space felt cozy and relaxed.

We ordered the three-meat course and ginger ale.
The first dish was a salad with prosciutto.

In the background, Ray Charles's "I Can't Stop Loving You" was playing.
It felt nostalgic somehow.
It's a song I used to listen to thirty years ago, when I was a ronin studying for university entrance exams.

Even at that time, the song was already more than thirty years old.
The Beatles, too.
Thirty years have passed since then, so logically the songs should feel even older than they did back then.
But listening to them now, they feel just as old as they did then.

Why? Strange.
Oldness isn't about time. It's about whether the brain perceives it or not.
Probably that's because the song's presence hasn't changed, and so the oldness I feel stays the same, no matter how many years pass.
Just like my own memories, no matter how much time passes, I'm still the same self I was back then.
Time has stood still, I thought.

April 10, 2026 : Quite the Multitasking

In the morning, there weren't many patients, but somehow, I felt tired.
I'm not so sure why, but I've been feeling kind of tired lately.
Then a man who'd had lung cancer surgery came in, and when I checked his past records, I realized that I was the one who had flagged his chest X-ray for further examination.
After that, somehow I got my energy back and the tiredness seemed to fade away.
It made me realize that fatigue has so much to do with whether your heart feels it or not.

In the afternoon, I worked on a PC investigation.
I traced the behavior of an app to figure out where it saved its data, to extract the data I'd been asked to pull.
And, I also talked with one of the technicians about how we handle the assessment of color vision test results.
After that, I reviewed the chest X-ray readings for today's patients. I check all the other doctors' readings at the end, as well.
Quite the multitasking, lol.

March 29, 2026 : A Spring Day at the Kyoto Imperial Palace

Today we went to the Kyoto Imperial Palace.

While walking down the gravel path in the grounds of the Kyoto Imperial Palace, we saw a tree with white blossoms among the pine trees.

From there, we visited the exhibit about Emperor Showa's enthronement, with black-and-white photos of the Emperor and Empress in their robes.

Next, we came to the Gishumon Gate, and looked up at the wooden pillars and golden ornaments.

Then, looking at the Shishinden from under the Jomeimon Gate, we could see the hall beyond the vermilion pillars.

We then went around to the front of the Shishinden, with the Sakon no Sakura and Ukon no Tachibana standing on either side.

"Sakon" means "left guard" and "Ukon" means "right guard", the names come from the imperial guards who used to line up near these trees during ceremonies.

The cherry blossom symbolizes fleeting beauty, while the tachibana citrus tree symbolizes eternity, they're paired together as a contrast.
A thing that flees, and a thing that stays unchanged forever.
I wondered what this contrast means.
Does it mean that a thing is beautiful because it isn't eternal?
Or does it simply show how this world is built, from things that are fleeting and things that are eternal?
Either way, I feel the essence of Japanese aesthetics standing on either side of this place.

From there, we came to the Gonaitei Garden, where the curved Dobashi bridge was reflected in the water beneath beautifully sweeping pine branches.

At the back of the garden, there was another weeping cherry tree.

Finally, we stopped at SASAYA IORI+.

It was really a relaxing day.