It was one of my stateside projects, and I achieved it on January 10th. This goes to my earlier desire to reconcile with the denomination of my birth, after the disastrous flirtation with this so-described "Anglo-Catholic" offering of the Episcopal Church, in Philadelphia in the late 1980s/ early 1990s. It is surprisingly easy to get into good graces with the Roman Catholic Church if you ever leave it.

Since I've come back to Japan, I expected a couple of letters (ones containing payment, ehem) to come through. Now, about one week back--nothing. Makes me wonder a bit, and hesitant to send reminder messages. So I wanted to make sure my mail isn't being forwarded or trapped somehow. I send a letter to myself whenever I have that concern.

What are the odds? This was a first in three years from this location in Narita! (I usually see it from the sports park or on the way to Aeon Mall.) NH 183 moments before it landed on Runway 16R (?), January 18, 2026. This one is nicknamed "Lani".

The remarkable airline that I just got off a flight back to Japan on, had a present waiting for me here in Narita City. Japan Post got it to me special delivery moments ago! I have looked at this luggage tag for years in the various ANA lounges, and counted how long it might take for me to one day have one.

I was looking at hotel prices in Narita, Japan in dollars the other day. With the coincidental news that the second Trump Administration is finally stopping the US Mint from coining pennies (the Lincoln Cent), it had me thinking about how coin money changed in my lifetime. If I explain the chart above, it should make sense. Every month, the US issues a consumer price index ("CPI") and that is the egghead-best-guess of what prices are relative to years ago, for the average of what people buy.

You see it there, to the left of city hall. The spring green building. The entrance is inside the alcove at the bottom. Very Japanese! It's the first hotel I stayed in, in Japan. Here it is, a little bit closer. I was chatting with someone online who is considering staying in Narita Town after their flight. I always point people to this hotel.

My iPhone offered me up one of these pictures yesterday, which featured "Blonde Haired Guy" I think he was a Japanese guy, but he had blonde hair. This was the last picture I took in the 2010s. December 31, 2019 at 11:59 pm. I remember that flight. I think we landed late, or there was some immigration delay. A Chinese guy grabbed my luggage off the carousel--but then quickly put it back.

I used to be JFE-9606. Almost thirteen years. Pennsylvania license plates nowadays are three letters, four numbers. This version is nicknamed the "Visa Logo" design. Because if you look at it, it kinda looks like the idea came from the Visa card. Notice the resemblance? Anyways. In Japan, I don't drive. But stateside, I don't have much of a choice. I like the Nissan, and whenever I rent in Hawaii, I try to get a Nissan.

Click to read Charles Gaba, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

The ANA Pocket feature turned me on to this game, which I know doesn't get me more miles. I thought this was basically Tetris. But it isn't. It's Tetris like if Tetris were a panhandler in front of the Wawa in the early 1990s. Or nowadays, I suppose---since I avoid Philadelphia. I broke down and spent 99 cents the other day around Level 160.

I like to fly ANA, as you know. (This isn't a paid spot by the way!) But it's so funny, because when I moved to Narita in 2016, I thought, "great, I can get the nighttime Kennedy flight from the airport. Later that year or 2017, the evening Kennedy flights got rerouted to Haneda! So I've gotten good at hauling ass to Haneda.

I've got the holiday rush and client concerns hitting up against blogging, but I meant to commemorate this. Some of my ancestors came from Slovakia and settled in what was coal country of western Pennsylvania. Life was a lot rougher than it is for a Japan-side US tax preparer almost 100 years later, that is for sure. My great grandmother, Steven's first wife, died in the 1918 flu pandemic, and the second wife had sent their kids away to New Jersey.

Readers of my blog in Japan, I have to apologize to you. This blog actually started out in May 2003, on Lawton Road, in Bridgewater Township, New Jersey USA. I am apologizing to you ahead of time. Maybe that doesn't sound very American, and does sound Japanese. But I am an American. As I told Sora the Troll, "I can't but be an American."

I gave up Facebook in early 2015. Partly, this was because I realized that it was the device for bullshit artists, including a young Japanese who said to me "if by magic we could be in the same place." But, when there was a chance to be in the same place, her positioning was more like, "sir." Yeah, OK. (Then don't go make it to common circles like I 'misunderstood you' and am some kind of bad guy.

Well, the "had to" part was my original visa was running out on November 17, 2005, and my ninety-day stamp would inevitably, so December 20, 2010 was the flight. Before the flight, I wrote this blog post about overnighting in Narita, where I live now, and had first stayed in Japan in 2005. You can read it here: That was December 19.

I am here after having gone around the New Town this evening. Seven miles. You know, I have said, that I came to Japan over twenty years ago. May 2005. When I walk around Narita, I still have the memories of those times in my head. My mind's eye sees the Narita of twenty years ago---at least in the central district. Narita has changed. Nowadays, it's changing rapidly. I wonder how it's going to turn out in the rest of the 21st century.

As regular readers know, I live in Narita City and have for a while. June will be ten years. I used to live over in the Igodai neighborhood (where "egos go to die"), but moved closer in town around the start of 2023. My situation was not so good. I had incredibly noisy and inconsiderate neighbors for 2023, 2024 and most of 2025.

I am lucky to live a block or so away from a local sakery. The sakery of Narita. Cho-mei-sen. "Long Life Stream". On occasion, I go there. I want that long life. I suppose. Maybe I need that long life for some other purpose unrevealed to me. I'm lucky to be in a town with a sakery,

This is an appreciation post. The picture was taken from the parking lot of the Kōzunomori Seven-Eleven, maybe in October. I did not go to that one today. But I did go to the Narita Nishi-guchi (a "go to" one), the Karabe one, and the Akasaka one, looking for New Years' cards ("nengajo"). I mostly send them to stateside clients I will be seeing.

If you can see the writing on the car, it refers to the Takara Belmont Corporation. I remember reading once, somewhere, that Osaka's Takara Corporation basically took the Belmont barbershop chair, a product of a company in Chicago, and reverse-engineered it into the Takara barbershop chair. They could make it for 30% less, due to the cheap yen in the Bretton Woods era (360 yen to the dollar---about what it is, inflation-adjusted, now, actually).

This is a picture from the other day, taken during one of my "insomnia walks". I have previously written about Representative Yatagawa, who I met at the JR West Exit, AND again, at Kōzunomori Station a few days later. He might have thought I was "stalking" him, but it turns out that my current insomnia walk takes me past the Catholic Church in Narita, and then Kōzunomori (KS-39 on the Keisei Main Line) is my fallback ride in case I don't have the energy to walk back to the Old Town/Machi.

I am writing this as a self-styled, “small z” zionist. I support Israel, and I feel that what Hamas did to the Israelis on October 7, 2023 was really wrong. And I am CERTAIN James Li does and did, too. It was entirely inappropriate that Liora Rez, or perhaps her non-profit group as a committee, called James the “Anti-Semite of the Week”.

The superstition in Eastern culture, or at least in Japan, is that baby girls born in the year of the Fire Horse grow up to kill their husbands. As a result, the year 1966 shows a marked decline in births overall. I have pointed out, as many have, that Japan is losing indigenous population. And so, my feeling is: why not just change the narrative on what being a Fire Horse Women is?

I was working on the rough draft of my alternate reality treatment for "The Beautiful Flower Garden" when I got to thinking about Elizabeth Vining. I haven't mentioned the practicing Quaker since my blog post in 2009, ("Ichiro Ozawa tests everyone's Christian forgiveness"), but Ms. Vining was Prince Akihito's tutor, recommended by Douglas MacArthur. Here is a picture of Ms.

I happen to have seen Representative Yatagawa now twice this month during my insomnia-induced early morning walks. Of course, I am not Japanese. I am an American with a vote, a franchise, in Pennsylvania. I do live here in Narita most of the year, in Chiba's 10th District. The morning I met Yatagawa sensei, he was at the West Exit of JR Narita Station as I was heading to what I call the "Heisei Steps": the thirty-one steps down to Nishiguchi-doori (West Exit Avenue).