logs

I’m going back through and filling in logs where I remember. Honestly, the AI notes are good for figuring out what to do if I fall behind, but I’m not actually that big of a fan of the content that it’s producing itself. Lots of rote “I did this today” and not as many interesting thoughts. To be fair, I think it’d be impossible for AI to do that part. So I should probably just be more diligent about writing the logs day to day so I don’t end up relying on the backfills (where I end up losing a lot of those thoughts).

Day 45: Friday, August 21, 2026

I went up to SF today to hang out with some old friends before I went off to Japan and completed a good ol’ fashioned bar crawl. I feel like a recurring theme of seeing friends’ SF apartments is that they all seem huge to me, but apparently it’s just a NYC bias thing. But the stark difference in rent/square footage is quite noticeable here. All my friends work at startups now, it was interesting to hear how their lives have gotten better/happier in ways that don’t really correlate with compensation. I admit I don’t fully understand it in the sense that I’ve felt the same way about my jobs, but I do get the overall concept/feeling. In general, it’s quite nice to have lifelong friends where you don’t necessarily need to hang out with them every day (in fact it’s been over a year since I’ve seen any of them), but you can always just show up and pick up right where you left off, even sleeping over at their apartment.

Day 73: Friday, September 18, 2026

Travel fatigue is starting to hit for the first time really hard this trip. I already was feeling it a bit in Niseko, but after getting sick, it’s really starting to settle in. So much so that it’s causing me to rethink some of my fishing trips/potentially cancelling them. I think at the very least I should shorten one of them.

Something similar happened the last time i travelled in asia for a long time (2 months), where on month 2, i started feeling the novelty wear off and I start getting tired around the same time I hit Korea. Now explains why I had less fun there than i probably should’ve given the things I did there.

Day 75: Sunday, September 20, 2026

Going to start this cafe session with a bit of a journal session. The past few days in Sapporo look quite different from the first few days that I spent in Sapporo, and I think it would be interesting to analyze a bit about it. When I first arrived, I was definitely a bit physically tired and hungover from all the travel and drinking I was doing in Tokyo, but I was quite excited to explore and try out all the new restaurants/bars in Sapporo. In fact, in those first handful of days in Sapporo, I found myself a bit worried that I only had so much time to visit specific spots. Do I spend tonight exploring a new bar, or return to an old one where the company and bartenders were really interesting to talk to? In contrast, when I arrived in Sapporo this time, I was coming off a random illness that left me in a fever-induced dreamstate in my hotel in Niseko, and much of the energy and excitement that had gotten me through the first stretch of Japan seemed gone. I think previously I would’ve been really upset to have my hotel so far away from the streets full of all the bustling restaurants and bars, filled with locals and tourists alike. But this time around, I kinda like that I have a few quiet spots a block or two away from my hotel, where I can just duck in and grab a bite or drink without spending 30 minutes wandering, hoping to find the optimal place to fill my stomach that day.

There’s a bit of a negative side effect to all of this however. I do have a monster stretch of fishing coming up, and although I am probably physically capable of completing it, I do think that mentally I am the least ready that I’ve been in a while. I’m debating cancelling one of my trips in the middle so I can rest and recover. Although now looking at the trip, it does look pretty exciting and perhaps I should still go ahead with it. I don’t know, maybe I’ll see how I feel after a week of fishing in Tokachi.

Today is a bit of a logistics day for me. I lost a few days to my illness/general travel fatigue. Going to pick up the rest of my gear today, probably get a large duffel for all my fishing stuff, and hopefully find a travel rod case to put my fly rod. Beyond that, I should make a decision on whether I’ll takkyubin or carry two bags tonight, since I think that will probably impact how easy of a trip it is tomorrow.

Anyways, this is the first journal entry I’ve written since coming to Japan. It’s probably no coincidence–writing these takes sitting down and using mental energy, both of which I’ve been devoting pretty extensively towards travel. But I do think that journaling will help compartmentalize the flood of input I’ve received and will continue receiving over the next month, and also it’ll be nice to capture some of my thoughts beyond just the video footage on my cameras!

appendix: days 36–75, august 12 to september 20

Scaffolding, reconstructed from notes rather than written at the time.

prep and departure — days 36 to 49, august 12 to 25

Tokyo booked. Four nights in Nishi-Shinjuku. Shinjuku over Shibuya for reasons specific to this trip: arriving with two months of luggage, jetlag that has you awake at four, and the used-camera district on the west side.
Japanese started in earnest. Hiragana to reliable recognition, katakana a day later and noticeably faster. Anki set up on Kaishi 1.5k, ten new cards a day. Steady state was projected to arrive in early September, mid-trip. It did, and then it collapsed.
The most useful conversation of that stretch was nominally about why Japanese felt hard. The evidence was AP French: As the whole way through, and I could never follow spoken French. What I’d actually learned was a decoding system — catch the fragments, infer the rest from the shape of the answer options. That’s a real skill and it isn’t comprehension, which is why it fell apart against speech at 150 words a minute with no replay. The part that matters is second-order: every A said the system was working, so the signal that I couldn’t do this never got through. High ability clears the proxy without acquiring the skill, and clearing the proxy suppresses the evidence. The rule that came out of it — in input, tolerate the gap; in interaction, surface it.
Booked Akan for October.
Low confidence about driving after years of not doing it regularly, which matters because most of the Hokkaido plan assumes a car.
Packing for humid Tokyo and cold Hokkaido in the same suitcase. Arc’teryx shell and the Kapital wool jacket as the pieces that work for both.
Flew over on ZIPAIR. Did Anki on the way in from Narita.

tokyo — days 50 to 53, august 26 to 29

First real shopping day, Shinjuku and Nakano. Carried the TP4 empty so everything I bought could go into it. Mid-30s and brutal. “Tokyo is hot” turned out to be the most useful Japanese sentence of the week.
Bought the DJI Osmo Action that’s since become the fishing camera. Set it up for prerecord so I can catch a strike without filming the whole river.
X100V got the AR-X100 adapter and a PRF-49S filter, which means the original lens cap no longer fits anything.
Unagi gozen at Ginza Koara at noon. Omakase with sake pairing at Tanimoto a couple nights later.
Kakureya, past midnight: Carlsberg draft, kaku highball, lemon sour, Tomino Hozan shochu on the rocks. The draft was the thing — creamy foam. Fujisoba on the way home.
Flight to New Chitose on the 29th. Nearly left a jacket in room 509. Tonkotsu at Ramen Taiga, then found Waltz, a record bar near Tanukikoji, and Koji-san behind it.

sapporo, first stretch — days 54 to 60, august 30 to september 5

Built the vlog format in CapCut. Lowercase, “noncompete logs,” day number out of 460, left-aligned typewriter titles.
First river day with Kevin from Sapporo Streams. Twelve minutes of usable footage and suddenly the content problem was abundance, not scarcity.
Two big rainbows a few days later. I keep being surprised by how beautiful the wild fish are here.
Several bars in a row, and I threw up three hours after one of those nights. Still blaming the amaro.
4 AM meets on fishing days, bars at night, editing in between. In retrospect that’s not a sustainable shape for a week.
Walked up to a soba place, the staff said “sumimasen” with a hand raised, I had no idea what it meant, panicked, and left rather than find out.

rebun — days 61 to 63, september 6 to 8

Ferry over to Kafuka. Rugged coastline, cliffs, dense green, and streams you could step across.
The fishing was bluelining: follow the thin blue lines on the map into water nobody bothers with, and look for wild iwana. This was closer to the fishing I imagined back in July than any guided day has been.
The guide wanted the sunniest day for hiking. I didn’t want to lose a whole fishing day to it, so we compromised on a short scenic hike and fished the rest.
Somewhere in here was the best ramen I’ve ever had.

sapporo pit stop — days 64 to 67, september 9 to 12

Cash turned into a real project. The eastern Hokkaido guides all want cash on the day, and between withdrawal limits and an account that locked itself out of caution, a trip deliberately booked around small local operators produced an extremely modern problem.
Backed up Kevin’s shared drive before it expired, and discovered that buying a large SD card in person is much harder than it should be.
Left the dying suitcase with Kevin, along with the collared shirts and a linen pant I was never going to wear again.
Foxfire XL waders. Tried the green felt boots in 28. Looked at Hardy, Orvis, Redington, Zinn, Loop.

niseko — days 68 to 72, september 13 to 17

Setsu is the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed in. It changed the question from “how long should I stay” to “why would I leave.”
Day 68, September 13, is where I first said out loud that the pace was wearing on me, and wondered whether another guided day actually sounded fun. That isn’t the same thing as not wanting to fish. It’s that everything on the calendar starts at a fixed time.
Then I got sick, fast. A vaguely off morning turned into shivering, fever and a headache inside a few hours. Cancelled the next day’s fishing from bed. The fever broke overnight; the rest of it stuck around two more days. White bread, jam, and several liters of Pocari.
Left Niseko about five pounds down, almost all of it fluid. Kutchan to Otaru to Sapporo. Ate soba.
The thing that surfaced here wasn’t physical. I felt like I should be planning the Alaska trip and couldn’t make myself care. Decision fatigue, not tiredness.

sapporo again — days 73 to 75, september 18 to 20

Obihiro leg booked, then three days on the water with Oku, camping if the weather cooperates.
Bought the rod. Zinn 8’11” #5 with a Hardy Marquis LWT #5 to match. The Marquis felt too light against the tip-heavy rod until I remembered line and backing weigh something. Deferred the expensive line rather than buying everything in one impulse.
Anki has completely collapsed — hundreds of reviews pending and my Japanese feels rusty. Though honestly the improvement that stuck came from ordering dinner, not from cards.
A TikTok did unusually well and the audio is harsh on mobile and fine on desktop, which is the most annoying possible version of that problem.
Dinner was too rich to finish. The staff spilled beer on my denim, apologized by making me mac and cheese I had no room for, then comped the whole meal and ushered me out. I spent the walk home trying to work out how to say “are you sure?”
And now the rod problem. The 10’ TFO tube is mid-80s centimeters, too long for the Proteca and too fragile in its paper case for the kind of travel ahead. Takkyubin the suitcase ahead, buy a duffel today, and solve the flight home when it’s the flight home’s turn.