daily diary: 5/6/25

I am nothing if not an eternal student. (I used to be a dark academia/Donna Tartt devotee so let me have this dramatic opening, okay?)

These days, my most common "fields" of study have been Japanese and Heisei era Jfashion. Fortunately, these two things very often coincide. The other day I bought a book on fashion history at a bookstore in Shibuya. It's entirely written in Japanese with nary a furigana in sight. It's going to take a while to get through and translate, but the time is going to pass anyway. 

This morning, on the last day of my Golden Week break, I set up shop at a nearby kissaten and got to work. 

The book (very straight-forwardly called ストリートファッション / Street Fashion) covers Japanese street fashion from 1980 - 2020. I did consider starting at the beginning, but let's be real, my favorite decade of Jfashion is late 90s - early 2000s so I was eager to get to that part. 

I started by transcribing the first two pages, and then chipped away at the translation. 

As it's only the introduction, I didn't learn anything super groundbreaking. In fairness, this is an area I'm pretty well acquainted with already, so I wasn't surprised. Regardless, it's nice to have more primary sources especially written in the language of origin. 

I'm sure many of you are cringing at the sight of all my hand-written notes. I love writing in my books, always have and always will. I have a couple of friends that are pretty pedantic about the quality of their paperbacks and would never crack a spine. I don't know... I think notes and smudges and wrinkles tell a story about where a book has been, as cliche as that sounds. It's always a joy to me when a secondhand book I've bought has a former reader's notes in the margins. It's like a conversation through time. 

I haven't yet decided what I'm going to do with this information. I'm considering a couple of ideas for more serious posts, albeit once I get through more material. Or it might just stay in my brain. Who knows. 

After a couple hours, I called it quits and made my way back home in the rain. 

I recently got back into playing Stardew Valley so I've been on my farm grind. This is me with my various chickens and ducks, which I have named after different types of noodles. 

The first half of my Golden Week was garbage, but it ended all right. I'm playing a lot of Stardew Valley and dancing around my room. The last three days of the holiday were good. I'm processing a lot of big thoughts and maybe I'll find a decent way to verbalize them. I don't know. We'll see.