Finding My Feet

Japan is starting to feel like home.

Not in the dramatic sense. Not a revelation, not a single moment I could point to. More the quiet kind of feeling you only notice in retrospect. The route to the convenience store no longer requires any thought. I have a favourite table at a coffee shop nearby. The trains are still incomprehensibly punctual and I have stopped finding that remarkable, which probably says something.

The biggest change from where I was this time last year is people. I was worried about that when I first arrived. Building a social life from scratch as an adult is genuinely hard, and Japan comes with its own layers of language and culture that make it harder still. But it has happened, slowly and then all at once, as these things tend to. I have made some genuinely good friends here, and that has changed everything. Having people to eat with, to wander around with, to make plans with. It sounds small written down, but it is not small at all.

The other thing that has changed, and I am a little self-conscious about mentioning it because it sounds like the sort of thing people announce on social media, is that my health is in a considerably better place. The weight has come down, the head has cleared. I sleep better. I think more clearly. Japan makes a lot of this easy. The food, the walking, the general rhythm of daily life here. But some of it is also just having settled in enough to actually take care of myself properly instead of just surviving the transition.

I should mention, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I may have developed a mild fondness for crane games. By which I mean I have probably spent more time in front of a UFO catcher than any adult should reasonably admit to. In my defence, I give most of what I win away to friends, because I genuinely just like the playing of it. Whether this counts as generosity or rationalisation I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

The more significant thing, honestly, is that I have started building things again.

For a while, the personal projects had gone quiet. Life had been full, the move had taken a lot of energy, and the kind of creative tinkering I have always liked to do in the background had slipped away without me really noticing. It is back now, in several directions at once.

A friend recently passed on their Anycubic Photon Mono 4K resin printer, having upgraded to a Bambu Labs machine and thought I might put it to use. It needs some attention before it is fully operational again, which is fine. I am working through it when I have time, which is a good kind of problem to have.

On the software side, I have been rewriting a number of old personal projects in Go. Nothing going anywhere in particular, just the quiet satisfaction of taking something that worked but was showing its age and giving it a cleaner foundation. Alongside that, I have been writing some iOS apps in Swift, purely for my own use. I let my Apple developer licence lapse a few years back, but I am starting to think it might be worth renewing it at some point and putting something out properly.

The project I am probably most invested in, though, is one I built out of mild frustration. I have never found a Japanese learning app that actually worked for me. The popular ones approach things in ways that do not match how I think, and I kept bouncing off them. So I built my own. I have been using it daily, which is a reasonable test of whether a tool is genuinely useful or just an interesting thing to have made. So far it is passing. I will probably open it up for others to try eventually, once it has had a bit more time in the wild with me as its only and most critical user.

There is a lot still to figure out here, in Japan and in general. But things are moving in good directions. That feels worth saying.