There is a specific kind of dread that arrives in Kyoto around mid-May. Not dramatically. It doesn't announce itself. The mornings are still bearable, the evenings almost pleasant. But the humidity is already there, waiting just behind the air, and you know what it means. You've been here before.
I've started checking the weather in Sapporo. Not because I'm going. Just to look at the numbers. Fifteen degrees. A light breeze. It's a form of grief tourism, I think, visiting the forecast of a city where summer is still a reasonable concept, then closing the app and going back under the air conditioning.
01 / THE PULSE - Shirakawa-go, June
There is a particular logic to leaving Kyoto in early summer. Not a trip planned around a destination, more of an exit strategy. You pick something far enough to justify the journey and different enough to feel like a change of air. Shirakawa-go is both. The valley sits in the mountains of Gifu, about one hour by bus from Takayama, and the first thing you notice when you arrive is that the heat followed you here too, but it's wearing different clothes. Greener. Less concrete.
The gassho-zukuri farmhouses are the reason most people come, and they are genuinely impressive. Those steep thatched roofs built to shed the region's heavy snowfall, massive and dark and old in a way that doesn't feel performed. But I found myself looking past them, or rather below them, at the yellow flowers growing along the path in that particular shade of summer that only exists in Japanese countryside in June. Somewhere above the frame, something white crossed the air between the trees. I took the picture before I knew what it was.
The farmhouse is still there in the background, slightly out of focus, doing its historic thing. The flowers are what I remember.
02 / THE BREW - 08 Coffee — Akita
I have never been to 08 Coffee. The shop is in Akita, roughly few hours north by shinkansen, which is not a journey I've made for coffee. I doubt I will. And yet their iced coffee shows up at my door every summer, and I'm always glad when it does.
It started with the packaging. The bottles come dressed in illustrations of Akita's four seasons, the kind of considered graphic design that makes you feel like the people behind the product care about more than what's inside it. I ordered the first time because of how it looked sitting in a photograph. That's an honest reason, and I'm not embarrassed by it.
The coffee itself holds up. Their iced coffee is unsweetened, made from 100% specialty beans blended specifically for cold drinking, extracted through a large nel drip. Clean, sharp, with a finish that doesn't drag. My wife, who has a more cautious relationship with caffeine, mixes theirs with milk. Their café au lait base was designed for exactly that: a lightly sweetened concentrate made with beet sugar, smooth enough that the word "adult" in their tagline doesn't feel like marketing. It actually tastes like something made by people who drink coffee.
In Kyoto in June, the cold chain from Akita to your refrigerator feels like a small miracle. The bottle goes in. The afternoon goes on.
03 / THE SPIN - Emiliana Torrini — Fisherman's Woman
She's on my wishlist. Has been for a while. One day I'll walk into a record shop and find this one in the crates and that will feel like it was always supposed to happen that way. Until then, the Record will do.
I first heard Emiliana Torrini in 1998, during an internship at a French TV music channel called MCM. That version of me was twenty-something and taking it all seriously in the way you do when you're surrounded by music all day and haven't yet developed enough distance to pretend you don't care. She appeared and I immediately cared.
Fisherman's Woman, released in 2005, is the one I keep coming back to. It's not the most immediately striking of her records, which is part of why it lasts. It takes up residence slowly. "Lifesaver" is the track I can't explain to anyone without sounding like I'm describing a film score, the sound of water, a boat at night, the specific silence that exists on the sea when there's no wind. You don't feel like you're listening to a song. You feel like you're somewhere slightly outside of time.
I listen to it in the dark, headphones on, usually when Kyoto is already asleep. It has nothing to do with Japan and somehow fits perfectly here.
04 / THE SIGNAL - Converse Chuck Taylor — Made in Japan, Camellia Collection
I didn't need another pair of Converse. I own several. The problem is that Converse Japan keeps making them interesting in ways that make restraint difficult. The Made in Japan line is a different object from what you buy elsewhere: the canvas is heavier, the construction tighter, the silhouette has a precision that the mass-market version doesn't quite achieve. They're still Chucks, but Chucks that have been taken seriously.
This camellia print is the new collection. Red flowers on black canvas, white sole, the Japanese katakana replacing the usual ankle patch in a way that feels earned rather than decorative. I bought these. But I'm also watching the Daisuke Kondo collaboration, which does something quieter with the same format, simpler graphics, a different kind of restraint, the kind of shoe that asks less of the outfit.
There is a category of object in Japan that takes something ordinary and applies to it an exactitude that makes you see the original differently. A pair of sneakers shouldn't be able to do that. Somehow these do.
05 / THE THOUGHT - On Surviving the Summer
The forecast for Sapporo today: 14 degrees, partly cloudy. Here in Kyoto: 31, building humidity. We are only in May.
Someone moving to Japan is usually prepared for certain adjustments. The language, obviously. The social codes. The bureaucracy. Nobody warns you about the summer.
I don't mean the heat itself, though 40 degrees is its own argument. I mean the duration. From late May until mid-October, Kyoto operates under conditions that I can only describe as actively hostile to the outdoor life I came here imagining I would lead. The humidity doesn't merely accompany the heat. It is the heat. It presses against you when you step outside and follows you back in. I sweat in ways I did not know I was capable of sweating. I find this intolerable.
The result is that I spend a significant portion of the year I could be exploring one of the most beautiful cities in the world instead sitting under an air conditioning unit playing video games. There is something absurd about this. I've made peace with it. More than peace, actually: I've built a kind of parallel domestic season around it. The cold coffee ordered from Akita. The records listened to properly in the dark. The evenings spent on games that require the same kind of focused attention that, in another climate, I'd give to a long walk.
The expat romance of Japan is built on autumn light, spring blossoms, winter silence. Nobody puts the Kyoto summer on a postcard. I understand why. But after four years I've stopped fighting it and started furnishing it. It's not the season I would choose. It's the season I have.
If any of this resonates, hit reply or share it with someone who'd get it.
Stay grounded, and see you next week.
-Nicolas
