Salt Spring Edition
31 May 2026
I am on Salt Spring Island this weekend, where my Dad was born, to celebrate an exhibit about Japanese Canadians in the area. My youngest brother (who contributed stories from my Dad to the project), his family, and one of my bazillion cousins have come out for it as well. It has been fun to catch up and share stories about our parents. So my commentary will be a bit short this week because I think I got too much sun. I hope you don’t get a ping when you receive this because I’m sending it out early.
Monday
I have enjoyed some of Haruki Murakami’s novels. These have some of that weird flavour and the drawing style also seemed to suit them. I borrowed this from the library, but I just noticed a copy at a bookstore on Salt Spring.
Tuesday
I bought this chair with scholarship money in grad school and it served me well. I had it reupholstered a while ago, but apparently they no longer make the piston cylinder that controls the height. So I had to say goodbye to it. No I am using one that I found in an alley.
Wednesday
This probably some sort of cultural appropriation that I ought to be outraged about, but I still think these are fun. I have a soft place for them, partly because I have many soft places, but also because the first one inspired my daughter to take up martial arts.
Thursday
Empathy is tricky.
Friday
Maybe this a misapplication of brain power, but so it goes.
Saturday
Got over 20K steps. The car GPS seemed a little wonky, though fortunately those two statements were unrelated.
Sunday
Another scene from my graphic memoir in progress Not Made in Japan, about my experiences as a student in Japan in my twenties during the eighties. This continues the adventure with Nishihama-san in Okinawa.
That was my week. I hope you had a good one, with a better one to come.
your story about your friend saying we need to look out for poisonous snakes and then later you finding out from a more authoritative source that there aren’t any around there, the story makes me think in those pre-Internet days there wasn’t much fake news, except maybe the national enquirer newspaper which everyone knew was fake news, but these days there’s so much misinformation and divisive and hateful online comments and articles which are probably written by AI or at least people paid to write them or maybe even people who are trapped in human trafficking and forced to write them, so everyone needs to be on their guard about believing almost anything anyone writes or says.