During the New Year holiday season, most Japanese households have a big clean up so as to enter the next year all sparkly and fresh. This is called osouji (大掃除) and it literally just means ‘Big Clean’.

While there’s not really a great deal to polish up or dust or vacuum on the interwebs, I did take some time to put together a kind of road map for my little corner of the information superhighway in the coming months.

I was supposed to leave Japan in April 2020. That didn’t happen, obviously. This year the idea is much the same, just transposed to April 2021. Thing is, the way the situation is evolving makes me wonder if this new plan will also end up smashing into a wall and exploding into tiny little flaming pieces while I stand around scratching my head and muttering to myself.

Fingers crossed that isn’t an accurate prediction, but who really knows any more(!)

Still, 2020 wasn’t a bad year, all things considered. I managed to work around the pandemic and …

• I finally finished visiting all of the stations in Japan with Fuji in the name,
• went to the 12 Japanese castles with their original keep,
• and took a photo every single day. (Some of them were actually pretty good.)

I do have a few projects (well, okay, seven or eight) up my sleeve. I’m going to roll two of them out next week. I hope you like trains & I hope you like visiting random stations dotted about the Japanese countryside, tenuously connected by name alone. (Hmm, that sounds awfully familiar…)

The daily photo project is also transforming. It’s gotten harder and harder over the year to come up with images I’m happy with, especially now I have a new job with long hours in a particularly uninteresting corner of Kawasaki.

However, I don’t want to stop entirely so I came up with a little compromise: I’m going to keep posting daily over at 365project.org , even if it is just the odd uninspired boring random slice-o’-life photo, like a picture of my morning coffee, or a screwed up receipt my neighbour dropped on the stairs.

I’m only going to bother posting a photo here if I’m particularly pleased with something I take on that day.

Instead, I’m going to shift to more of a “weekly best of” pattern, and I’m planning to do that on Saturday. Just so you all know.

Oh, and I added an improved subscribe function for all ten of my loyal readers ;) It’s in the sidebar.

Have a happy, healthy 2021 everybody.

I hope it is at least a little bit less crap than 2020 was!