Hello from the land of … burnout? Well, not burnout-burnout, because I’ve been busy with a billion things here in the background. But from the land of slight newsletter burnout? Yes? But even that’s not entirely true. Because in May (eight-billion years ago in contemporary time) I published some 40,000+ words to my The Return to Pachinko Road pop-up newsletter of me walking from Kyoto to Tokyo over seventeen days.
Basically, what I’m trying to say is I feel guilty for not having published here (here = Roden, a “monthly” newsletter by me, Craig Mod) in the last couple months. But, BY GOD, it has been busy. What have we been doing?
Finishing RH-TBOT
Finishing the Random House edition of Things Become Other Things (“RH-TBOT”). I’m anywhere from a week to a month behind on this (depending on how generous my editor is being; hi Molly!). This is one of the main reasons I haven’t kept up with Ridgeline or Roden these past few months — any free second I have to write, I apply to this manuscript.
Big news though: I finished the latest (close to final-final) draft’s set of edits on Saturday. (Which is why I’m writing this.) Did a three-hour call last night with a reader, going over a close look at the first forty pages. It’s feeling VERY GOOD.
It’s difficult to emphasize just how different this edition is from my Fine Art ed. published last November. It’s over 2x the length in terms of word count, will contain more illustrations and historical documents, a bunch of B&W photos, and more. Most importantly, it’s just got tons more context — about who I am and how I ended up in Japan, and historical context about the Kii Peninsula itself. The more I work on this, the more excited I am to get it into the world. Pubdate scheduled for next May.
RH-TBOT has to be 99% wrapped by the end of this month (for various marketing / copy editing purposes). As much as I want to keep fiddling and adding and polishing and refining this manuscript (I can’t believe I’ve been working on this for 3.5 years), I am also grateful for a hard stop to be in sight. On one hand, there are so many other books I want to be working on. And on the other, I can’t wait to shift into Mass Market Book Marketing Mode (MMBMM) for RH-TBOT at the start of next year. I’ll be calling on a lot of help from y’all.
In the background, I’ve continued to publish the SPECIAL PROJECTS members-only Nightingalingale diary of writing / making TBOT/RH-TBOT. I just sent out my 251st (!!) issue today. Thanks to everyone following along.
Just a reminder: I have a one-off mailing list dedicated to sending out One (1) Email when RH-TBOT goes on pre-sale. You can sign up here.
Board Meetings
In June, I ran an H1 2024 board meeting for SPECIAL PROJECTS members. It went really well. I’m always amazed by the power / value of running these things — for putting in perspective the last six months of work and life. A LOT happened between Jan - June 2024, and it was nice to stop and meditate on it all with members. As always, lots of great questions were asked. Archives of all my board meetings are available to members on the SPECIAL PROJECTS member site: members.specialprojects.jp
Walk and Talk Bali
In June, I co-ran a “Walk and Talk” with Kevin Kelly in Bali. It was fabulous, if EXTREMELY SWEATY.
Tamori TV
But perhaps the biggest “thing” I’ve done in the last couple months was media-related.
Since I last wrote (in May) I filmed a two-day television show with one of Japan’s most famous (if not the most?) TV people — the sunglasses-wearing Tamori-san. His team wanted to do an episode on Morioka. They reached out to me in February. I get so many inbound media requests, half of them get ignored and half get sent to my assistant to be filtered (and 95% of those are turned down). His team’s email slipped through the cracks. Eventually, one of the shops I’m friends with in Morioka DM’d me: Dude, the TAMORI team wants to talk with you. REPLY TO THEIR EMAIL YOU FOOL. If you don’t join the show they probably won’t come to Morioka.
So I did. And thus kicked off a bunch of meetings. Eventually culminating in shooting up in Morioka. I walked around town with Tamori for two days. It was like walking next to John Lennon. Folks freaked out. Now, truly, I had no almost idea who this guy was when they reached out to me. I mean, I guess I’d recognize his face if you showed me a photograph, but I am so utterly, fully disconnected from pop-culture (Japan or otherwise), that I knew nothing of his many daytime shows, his music shows, his late night shows. I’ve never watched TV here. Apparently, he’s been on TV, nearly daily, for some fifty years. He’s 78 years old. A tiny guy. Basically everyone over thirty in Japan sees him as avuncular to the max. He’s the country’s uncle. Utterly beloved. He wears sunglasses to hide an accident in childhood that left him blind in his right eye. He’s funny. He’s smart. He’s kind. He’s Tamori-san.
OMG TAMORI!!! TAMORI!!! People were screaming from their cars, from buses. Construction workers hanging off buildings were yelling down to him. We went to the Mikoda Morioka morning market (which, FWIW, is very cool, very “post-war,” very salt-of-the-earth vibes; you should visit if you’re in town and get coffee at Madoka Coffee) at 6 a.m. and I was in a state of non-stop horripilation — it was as if the hundreds of people shopping for vegetables and noodles were witnessing Moses part the Red Sea. Tamori!!!! — women in their 60s and 70 and 80s screamed and hopped and pointed and shed tears. I’ve never been so close to celebrity that’s so on the receiving end of this much reverent love and admiration. Laser beams of adoration were flying out the eyeballs of everyone, piercing Tamori’s chest. I was getting a contact high just rubbing shoulders as we walked the market.
Folks were coming up to me, too. Thanking me for bringing Tamori to town. Shaking my hand as if I had done anything special on my own. Modo-san — thank you thank you. I just went with the flow.
Now, truthfully, I really didn’t want to do this show. The timing was horrible. I wanted to focus on my Tōkaidō walk (The Return to Pachinko Road!!). I told the producers a million times that the shoot had to happen in April or I couldn’t do it, but in the end it still happened in May. With much reluctance I did it. It was exhausting. It was chaotic. There were forty (!!) people on set on location, six cameras, cue cards. How many cue cards have I ever read in my life? Zero. How much on camera improvisation had I ever done while side-eyeing cue cards? Zero.
Well, that’s OK, the producers said as they threw me off a cliff.
There was no introduction to Tamori-san. No shaking of hands with a gentle — Hey man, I know you’ve never done this before, let’s have fun! Let’s make a great show! You know, the sort of thing you’d want to do to get the best performance out of someone.
The first shot was behind the station. Stand here! I was told. OK! Bring out Tamori! the producers yelled. I imagined him emerging from some cryogenic chamber in his van. He stood next to me. Next to him was a famous, young female newscaster named Mori-san doing her first on-location shoot. OK — START! they yelled at us.
“I’m Tamori!” said Tamori, with seasoned professionalism.
“I’m Mori!” said Mori, perfectly on cue.
“AHHHH!!!!!!!” I screamed as I grabbed Tamori-san by his brittle shoulders and shook him and said, DUDE!! You can’t just start me like this!!!
The whole crew nearly burst into ritual suicide.
I think I may have been the first person in the history of Japanese TV to shake Tamori-san.
Seconds after the shakening
So, that’s how it started. We made it through, but, good god it was a lot. By the second day, I had about eight billion percent more confidence, knew what to expect. I wished I could have gone back and redone day one. But that’s how it goes, television — a train barreling forward collecting footage to be chopped up in the editing room later on. TV is relentless. It’s a medium with little space for in-the-moment empathy. It felt like every millisecond was being counted. You could feel money evaporating in the sun. Flop sweat was on the brows of all present.
In the end, I said yes to the show as a gift to Morioka. My ego was truly nowhere to be found in this project. If my saying yes brought Tamori to the city, and Tamori visiting meant a lot to the citizens of Morioka, then I felt duty-bound to help make that happen, no matter how flailing my part may have been. Even if it meant short-circuiting the next two months of my life. (Which it did.) The show came out. I got a flood of thank-yous from strangers. A bunch of shops I love and adore got some prime-time exposure (which they were happy to have!) and they got to meet one of their heroes. (As one shop put it: Tamori-san is a god to me, I can’t believe he’s here. Thank you for making this happen.)
Right before inhaling a bunch of wanko soba
In the end, I’m grateful to have been given the surreal opportunity. Sure, it paid badly. Sure, it took up a ton of time at the worst possible time in the middle of an already jam-packed schedule. But some interesting social capital was accrued: My neighbors all saw me, and my standing next to Tamori-san on TV means a lot in the context of their universe. These little moments add up, reconfigure how I’m seen in their eyes, and that in turn makes me feel like a more participant, additive part of society here, when that’s not always the easiest thing to feel. Most importantly, though, it obviously meant a ton to Morioka the city, and the people of the city. In that sense, I am very glad I did it, or at least helped catalyze the “event:” A tiny man in sunglasses walking the streets, spreading love, a gentle gaze upon it all, blowing people’s minds, one little step at a time.
Staying “Honest”
After my two days of shooting I went straight to Kyoto, slept badly for two nights, and then began the Tōkaidō walk. I was probably operating at 30% of max energy, if that. I had given my all to the show, the introvert inside me had experienced death by cue cards. The first day of the Tōkaidō walk was 43 kilometers long. The second was 44 kilometers. I honestly thought: Maybe I don’t finish this walk? Maybe I can’t do it? It’s hard for me to convey just how empty I was after the TV shoot. Imagine doing something for the first time, something that’s going to be seen by tens-of-millions of people, and then try to not think about how you could have done it better for days and weeks after the fact. It gets in your head in wildly unexpected (but obvious in retrospect) ways. But I made it. I made it from Kyoto to Tokyo, walking at a near Edo-era pace, finishing the walk in seventeen days with one day of rest. I wrote and published every night. I carried a Hasselblad and Leica M6 and M11 and photographed the hell out of everyone and everything. I published nearly 40,000 words to the pop-up newsletter. I wrung myself dry, I used it all up, all the energy, all remaining life force, and all the while I kept writing: This is a walk about keeping myself honest.
Having done the last 18 months of media — all the newspaper and magazine and TV interviews — I’ve come to understand, just a little, how people can be knocked off track, can forget where the “real” work is. Media is so seductive, so seemingly “important” that to optimize for exposure seems like a goal in and of itself. I feel none of that, the pull to go media crazy. I am grateful to feel none of that. Maybe if this Morioka stuff had happened ten years ago, it would be a different story. But I’m 43. I know that the only “real” work is the hard work, the boots-on-the-ground work, ass-in-chair editing-the-same-sentence-for-the-40th-time work. So in a weird way, while the timing wasn’t ideal on an energy scale, the timing of the Tōkaidō walk was a perfect followup the Tamori shoot — a big, totally unsexy walk across Japan, where nobody knew who I was, where the days crushed me, where I was just a fool on the road.
They were hard days I had thrown myself into. Huge days. Physical days. With evenings that were lived entirely in the mind with no downtime. I burned as much energy sitting and writing as walking and looking.
But along the walk I met amazing people, heard their stories, witnessed their lives. Captured as much of it as I could, as best I could, given the circumstances.
And the “honesty” thing: If I’m doing anything interesting today, it’s because of the walks I started doing a decade ago, and — more accurately — the walks I started doing since forming SPECIAL PROJECTS in 2019. Five years ago I stepped out of my front door and walked the entire Nakasendō, and that reconfigured everything. That seeded Kissa by Kissa, helped me understand the power of memberships, and filled my days with unexpected meaning.
It was good to remember that — that the true work is on the road, doing the hard thing again and again. And then getting up and doing it again, regardless of if anyone is watching.
That said — I don’t mind all media. :) I started doing a monthly thirty-minute J-Wave FM radio show and … I love it? It’s live, in Japanese, and it’s one of my favorite media things I’ve ever done. (I’ve done four episodes so far, including one live on the road on the Tōkaidō.) Unlike TV, it energizes me. The host I talk with, Yukino Nagai, is just lovely through and through. She is a beacon of love and welcoming vibes. Everyone in the studio is having fun. I basically go on and talk about walking for thirty minutes. The show is sort of a promotional run-up for the forthcoming Japanese edition of Kissa by Kissa, coming out this November. (More on that later.)
OK! Back into the RH-TBOT mines. I wanted to get this Roden out since … well … it’s been too long. Lots going on. Lots of good stuff. Grateful for the opportunities and grateful for the SPECIAL PROJECTS member support — my membership program really does drive all of this. A billion thanks to members, past and present, new and old.
Stay cool, don’t forget your sun umbrella,
C
p.s., Oh, I’ll be at XOXO in Portland in August on stage with Jason Kottke. See you there?
And thank you to Ayako Jozsa, my assistant, for taking those behind the scenes Tamori photos. And for being on location with me — I honestly would have fallen over without her support.
