Ridgeline subscribers! Hello! As I wrote last week, my new pop-up newsletter/walk — The Return to Pachinko Road — begins on May 14. Subscribe here if you feel so inclined (almost 3,000 people have already signed up — thank you!): And, as I also mentioned last week, Ben Pobjoy — walker maximus++ — sent over a bunch of tips for my upcoming Tōkaidō...

Roden Readers — Here we are! May! Good god! Let’s dig right in. First, I’m running a new pop-up newsletter connected with my upcoming Tōkaidō walk. The newsletter is called The Return to Pachinko Road and you can sign up here. It starts on May 14, ends on June 1st-ish. I’ll be walking some 600 kilometers from Kyoto to Tokyo and, as usual, publishing...

Ridgeline subscribers! I’m going back, baby. BACK TO PACHINKO ROAD. From May 14 to May 30, 2024, I’ll walk approximately 600 kilometers from Kyoto To Tokyo, inshallah, along the old Tōkaidō Road, which isn’t really “old” at all anymore, and in many places is, indeed, loaded down with ball-jangling pachinko parlors. I will be running a pop-up,...

Ridgeline subscribers! Last week I had a new piece for the New York Times go live: “A Japanese Village Wants Tourists to Come for Heat, Soot and Steel”. I took tons of photographs (also, this marks the first time for me getting some film-shot photos into the Times, if you’re keeping track / not that this means anything or matters, though.) and,...

Roden Readers — It may not feel like it, and I may not be sticking to the schedule, but in theory this is a monthly newsletter. It is I, Craig Mod, writing from a near constant state of frazzle and delight that has been this year. The cherry blossoms have come and gone for most of central and southern Japan, and now those cherry trees are back to...

Ridgeline subscribers! For the first time in literally a month, I had a morning to myself and a day with nothing on the schedule — no movement, no interviews, no meetings, no calls, no to-dos. I spent it with the internet off, no phone nearby, reading. This is the way. If you’ve ever wondered what “richness” feels like — for me (and I suspect many...