There is a specific quality of heat in Kyoto in June that has no real equivalent in France. It is not the aggressive Mediterranean heat, nor the grey sullenness of a Paris summer. It arrives early in the morning, already committed, and it stays. You stop fighting it somewhere around the second week of June and begin, almost involuntarily, to slow down.
This slowness brought something unexpected with it this week: a flood of childhood memory. The Tour de France starts in a few weeks, and from here, watching it means morning replay. There is something pleasantly absurd about it. Some rituals survive every change of latitude.
01 / THE PULSE - Five Minutes
I heard the festival before I saw it. A low percussive rhythm pushing through the neighborhood, insistent, getting louder by the block. Then the float turned the corner and there they were: two young men in matching yukata, one of them standing with full kumadori makeup, the bold graphic lines of red and white across his face that signal, in kabuki tradition, a heroic or supernatural figure. He was maybe twenty. He was holding it with total seriousness.
What struck me was not the spectacle itself but the casualness of its scale. This was not a UNESCO-declared event with barriers and scheduled television coverage. It was a neighborhood procession on an ordinary may morning, in suburbs of Kobe, with shopkeepers watching from their doorways. The float moved through slowly, ropes under tension, the young men impassive above the crowd. Five minutes later the street was empty again.
Summer in Japan announces itself this way: not gradually but all at once, through ritual.
02 / THE BREW - Cité Coffee Roastery & Vintage, Shimogyo Ward, Kyoto
I walked in expecting a clothing shop that happened to sell coffee. I was wrong, and pleasantly so.
Cité, named after the Île de la Cité in Paris, which tells you something about the owners immediately, is one of those places that should not quite work on paper. The layout gives you perhaps eight seats at a single communal table; beyond that, the space transitions into vintage clothing, and at the back, almost hidden, the roasting operation. The couple who run it met in Paris, him studying fashion, her the flute. You feel this in the logic of the place: there is taste in every decision, but it is personal taste, not curated taste.
The coffee is serious. They roast in-house, and the range is wide enough to require a moment of actual consideration. The pastries deserve their own mention. There is an apple tart that, if you are the kind of person who does not normally order cake at coffee, will make you reconsider that policy entirely.
It has the particular atmosphere of a place built by two people who had a clear idea of what they wanted and simply built it. There is no concept, only conviction.
03 / THE SPIN - Tenniscoats,Papa's Ear
Tenniscoats have been making music together since the late nineties, and Papa's Ear, originally recorded in 2012 in Stockholm with Swedish folk-jazz trio Tape, is the record where their instincts found their most fully realized shape. It was never on vinyl until Morr Music reissued it this year, a fact that seems almost intentional in retrospect: the album asks for a format that requires a decision.
Saya's voice is the anchor. It operates at a frequency that is neither urgent nor distant. It simply arrives, and you arrange yourself around it. The Swedish musicians bring glockenspiel, melodica, woodwinds, a kind of quiet Northern light that does something unexpected when placed against Tenniscoats' Tokyo sensibility. The result is not a fusion. It is more like a conversation between two languages that discover, partway through, that they share a grammar.
Put it on in the morning. It is precisely the right record for a June where the heat has already won.
04 / THE SIGNAL - Pro Cycling Manager / Tour de France 2026
This is not a beautiful object. It is a video game, in fact 2 video games, and it will tell you almost nothing about Japan.
But here is the thing: every summer since I was roughly seven years old, the Tour de France has existed as a specific texture of time. The flat stages on in the background. The commentators' voices becoming ambient. The particular quality of a July afternoon when you are not quite watching but not quite not watching either. Lego on the floor. Later, an Amstrad.
I bought this year's edition partly from reflex and partly because watching the Tour from Kyoto carries a certain deliberate absurdity. The stages run overnight here. You follow it in fragments, catch a result in the morning, fill in the rest with your imagination. The game is the halfway point between memory and distance. You build the race yourself, you manage the team yourself, you control the outcome, which is precisely the fantasy of anyone who has ever watched a mountain stage from a couch and thought: I would have attacked earlier.
The Tour starts in a few weeks. I am ready to ride my digital bicycle for all the summer
05 / THE THOUGHT - The absence of a face at the front of the peloton
Japan is a country organized, at a foundational level, around the bicycle. Not as recreation, not as a lifestyle statement, as infrastructure. You see it in the morning school commute, in the rows of bikes outside every station, in the particular Japanese bicycle itself: upright, practical, built for the bakery run and not for the col. Every city in this country has solved a problem that cities elsewhere are still trying to solve.
Which is why it is strange, every July, to watch the Tour de France and notice who is not there.
There is no Japanese climber in the peloton. No sprinter, no rouleur, no domestique carrying bidons up the Tourmalet. A country of cyclists, of serious, organized, culturally embedded cyclists, produces almost no one at the highest level of road racing. The explanation, when you start pulling at it, is not simple. Part of it is structural: Japanese cycling culture was, from the beginning, oriented toward the track rather than the road. The keirin, a form of motor-paced sprint racing developed in Kitakyushu in 1948, originally as a post-war betting sport, became a national institution with its own professional system, its own velodrome network of over forty tracks, its own governing body and strict training pipeline. The road was never the point.
Japanese keirin riders are not failed Tour riders who took a wrong turn. They are athletes in an entirely separate tradition, one that happens to share a vehicle.
Still. When July comes and I watch the peloton climb in the dark and the heat, the absence is there. A country that treats the bicycle as a basic fact of life, and the sport its riders made famous happens to be one that televises best at midnight from the other side of the world.
There are worse ways to feel the distance.
Stay grounded, and see you next week.
-Nicolas
