Emma Goto

The Odyssey

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 12:05:24 GMT

Book review for The Odyssey by Homer. I rated it 5 stars.

In anticipation of the release of the new Christopher Nolan movie, I decided to give The Odyssey a read. Even if you’ve never read the poem, it’s one of those stories that a lot of people are roughly familiar with just through pop culture references or from school. And I specifically say “a lot” and not “everyone” because I was surprised to meet at least two people recently who had never heard of it (I suppose it depends on your age, or maybe where you grew up?)

In short, Odysseus (sometimes translated as Ulysses) goes off to spend 10 years fighting in the Trojan War - chronicled in another poem The Iliad - and then The Odyssey covers his 10-year journey to get back home. The stories were first passed down orally, before possibly being written down during the 8th century BC by a Greek man named Homer - although scholars debate whether he even existed as a person at all.

Over the following 28 centuries (!) scholars preserved and translated the poem many times over. I was curious what the oldest surviving complete copy of The Odyssey is, and it’s a copy from the 10th century stored in the Laurentian Medici Library in Florence. (Side note - I had a phase as a teenager where I was obsessed with Assassin’s Creed 2 which features the Medici family, so I immediately recognised the library’s use of the Medici family crest).

The translation of The Odyssey you read will really impact your opinion of it, so I decided to pick up two separate translations.

The first was the 1965 translation by Richmond Lattimore, which is described as being “faithful” to the original Homeric Greek. Honestly speaking, it reminds me of the sort of book you are forced to read in English class in high school, or possibly the kind where you skip reading it altogether and just go to SparkNotes to find the chapter summaries.

And then the second copy I picked up was the recent 2017 translation by Emily Wilson. This one got a lot of media hype - Wilson was the first woman to to do a full translation of The Odyssey into English, and Christopher Nolan reportedly relied on this translation for his movie. Wilson notes in her foreword that she specifically tried to go for a very “ordinary” level of English in her translation, as this is how the original text would have actually read (or heard, actually, since it was first passed down orally). If you were just looking to enjoy a good story, I would wholeheartedly recommend the Emily Wilson translation. It’s straightforward, readable, easy to get through - exactly as she intended.

I opted to read the book a chapter at a time, doing a chapter of Lattimore’s first before then repeating the same chapter with Wilson’s. Generally I’d miss things from Lattimore’s version that would suddenly become a lot more clearer after I read Wilson’s. I wouldn’t recommend this method though, as it took me a long 2 months to finally finish the books (after a lot of procrastinating, and multiple other books in between).

The only criticism I would have with Wilson’s that the prose occasionally almost reads too simple. As one example from the beginning of Chapter 6 to show the difference between the writing styles:

“This people used to live in Hyperia, a land of dancing. But their mighty neighbours, the Cyclopes, kept looting them, and they could not hold out.” - Wilson translation

”[…] the Phaiakian men, who formerly lived in the spacious land, Hypereia, next to the Cyclopes, who were men too overbearing, and who had kept harrying them, being greater in strength.” - Lattimore Translation

But on the other hand the Lattimore translation, even if it might use prettier words, is generally harder to wrap your head around so I can forgive Wilson’s translation for that.

One of the other ways that Emily Wilson distinguishes herself from earlier translations was clearly point out slaves for what they were, rather than softening it to words like “maid” like Lattimore does. Overall, the proper translation of slaves in the book doesn’t necessarily make a difference to the story and I’m sure Homer probably didn’t care about them being slaves either (if it was just a common feature of society back then) but I suppose as readers in the 21st century we can have a bit more empathy for those side characters.

Before reading The Odyssey I had more of an impression that Odysseus was some sort of noble guy, fighting his way to get home - one of the original guys undergoing the “Hero’s journey” story template that you learn about in school. It seems this is a pretty normal misconception to have, and through reading the book you come to realise that Odysseus is pretty flawed. He’s arrogant, violent, vengeful and not really someone you can look at in the 21st century as anything resembling a good guy. As one example, for funsies he and his crew sack a city, kill the men and take the women as slaves.

And so I don’t walk away from the book thinking to myself “yay, go Odysseus!”. And if you were to take this story at face-value and imagine it was something that was written and published today, it doesn’t have that much value as a story. But before you go throwing stones at me - of course if you think about the impact this has had on literature and culture generally, the merit of this poem is huge. As an easy example, the word “odyssey” is literally a regular word found in the dictionary to mean an arduous journey.

I will leave detailing the impact of The Odyssey to scholars and people much more knowledgable than me. But for recent literary references that come to mind, there’s the James Joyce novel Ulysses (a somewhat modern retelling that I am yet to read) and the popular fantasy book Circe (a re-imagining of the goddess Circe’s story, who Odysseus meets on his journey home). Circe then seemingly kicked off its own boom of books in a similar genre, with more recent titles like A Thousand Ships and Ariadne also covering retelling of Greek myths from a woman’s perspective. As a fun bit of trivia, the iconic quote about Helen of Troy whose beauty “launched a thousand ships” (kickstarting the Trojan War after she was abducted) wasn’t even from Homer but from a 1604 play called Doctor Faustus.

And finally, back to the Christopher Nolan movie which prompted me to read the original poem. Although it was released internationally back in mid-July making this rather old news, the release here in Japan was delayed until mid-September (Japan likes to prioritise their own domestic films rather than sticking to the release schedule of international films).

I was quite excited by the idea of watching this in proper IMAX since we have one of those screens in Tokyo, but I really underestimated how competitive it would be. Add in the fact that I was busy for a weekend or two, and we are now in mid October…

Sadly they’ve stopped doing night-time screenings of Odyssey in IMAX altogether (rude) in favour of other newly released films like the Resident Evil reboot, so my husband and I have resigned ourselves to going for a screening on a regular display. Which I’m hoping we can get around to in the next couple of weeks before it completely stops running.

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Mt Tate: a day hike in the Northern Alps

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 08:36:49 GMT

Mt Tate (立山, tate-yama) is one of the most-visited peaks in the Northern Alps of Japan, popular with hikers and sightseeing tourists alike. It's known as one of Japan's Three Holy Mountains (along with Mt Fuji and Mt Haku) and was a place where pilgrims would come to pay their respects by climbing up to its 3015m peak.

These days, the hike up Mt Tate is made much easier thanks to the Kurobe Alpine Route, with a combination of buses, ropeways and cable cars taking hikers straight up to the Murodo plateau at an elevation of 2450m.

Making the 4-hour drive out from Tokyo to Nagano, I then had another 90 minutes of public transport connections before I could finally begin my hike. As popular as Mt Tate is, this was the main reason why I had put off hiking this mountain for so long.

Mt Tate is also listed as one of Japan's 100 Famous Mountains. Even at the time of the book's publishing in 1964, author Kyuya Fukada notes that Mt Tate was well on the way to becoming a tourist trap. But what a gorgeous tourist trap it is.

The peak of Mt Tate can be accessed as a direct out-and-back taking under 4 hours, but I chose to do the slightly extended 6.5-hour loop hike to make the most of my day.

As you begin to climb, you get great views below to the Murodo Plateau.

I got lucky with the weather - no fog, no clouds - and so the views of this plateau were so good. You get to see it for the entire hike, so I took so many photos of it.

Fukada also mentions that Murodo is home to Japan's oldest mountain lodge, which was built in 1695. It seems to have closed in the 1980s though, although the building itself has been preserved and is still standing.

Hiking up, the first waypoint I passed was the Ichinokoshi hut (一ノ越山荘).

From here you can get views out to the neighbouring peaks in the Northern Alps like Mt Yari and Mt Kasa.

There was also an alpine accentor strutting about, in search of crumbs of food left behind by hikers.

From here is a steep and rocky climb up to the first of Mt Tate's three peaks, known as Mt Oyama.

Close to the first peak of Mt Tate is the Oyama Shrine.

Legend goes it was first climbed in 701 by a 16-year-old, guided by a white hawk and a black bear.

The peak itself was rather crowded, so I gave up on any attempts of getting a clear photo without people in it.

I suppose with a shrine close to the summit, this is the official peak of Mt Tate. And if you are using an app like YAMAP to track your hiking, hiking to here will count for you having "climbed" Mt Tate. But at 3003m elevation it's not quite the highest point on this course.

From here I headed back down to the shrine, and continued along with my loop hike, which stretches out along a long ridgeline.

After a short while I came to my second peak of the day.

Atop a pile of rocks is the peak marker for Mt Onanji (大汝山).

Not a particularly dignified peak marker (more of a sign you can hold up for a photo) but this is the highest point on Mt Tate at an elevation of 3015m.

A short walk beyond here is the Mt Onanji rest hut (大汝休憩所). I didn't poke my head in since I assumed it was a regular hut, but actually it's like a lunch spot with food and drink.

A lot of mountain huts in Japan tend to have red roofs (I suppose for good visibility) so I thought this one was quite cute with the dual red and blue.

After this it's a bit more of a climb to reach the third peak of the day.

The rockiness of it may look a little imposing (and I even saw a tour guide holding a lady's hand to guide her across) but it's a fairly straightforward climb up.

The third peak of Mt Tate is called Fuji-no-Oritate (富士ノ折立) and is the lowest of the three, at an elevation of 2999m.

I'm not sure if the peak's name has anything to do with Mt Fuji - but you can see it from the peak!

(But you can also see it from the other peaks of Mt Tate).

From here it's one final ridgeline walk - I thought this one was super pretty.

Actually while walking along this ridge, I overshot the point where you are supposed to make a left turn to head back down to Murodo (oops).

But then I saw there was one more peak only a 5-minute walk ahead, so I figured I may as well visit it while I was here.

Then it was time to make the descent back to Murodo, which came with some of my favourite views on the entire hike. I was really glad I did the loop option.

I had come in peak autumn foliage season, so the sides of the mountains were a lovely mix of green and orange.

Before reaching Murodo, you'll also pass by the Raichozawa Campsite (雷鳥沢キャンプ場). It's very cutely named after the Japanese rock ptarmigan.

And then taking a look back at the path I just descended down off of...

Wow! Although I've been hiking for over 4 years in Japan now, I feel like I always miss out on good autumn scenery. It's probably some combination of not doing enough hiking during this time period, not visiting the best spots, or sometimes I do visit but fog would get in the way. So it felt cool to finally get a good dose of it.

I feel like it was even more gorgeous in person - I would put this as one of the top 10 views I have ever seen in my life.

From the campsite it's one final climb back up towards Murodo.

The building for the Raichozawa Hut looks very, very dilapidated and I assumed it was abandoned, but somehow it's still in operation.

I took one final photo of the campsite. What a great view this would be to wake up to.

Along the way back there was also a field of steam vents, known as the Jigokudani (Hell valley).

They have a warning system set up for the volcanic gas in this area.

I found it quite amusing, but this is the first time I have ever seen "Emma" written in English on Japanese signage (since it's not really a Japanese word). In this case they translated エンマ to be Emma.

I suppose with smoking craters comes hot water, so there was even an onsen building up here - the Mikurigaike Onsen. It's notable for being the highest-elevation hot spring in Japan. Day use is apparently a very reasonable 1100 yen.

And then my final bit of sightseeing for the day was passing by the Mikurigaike Pond.

At this point there were plenty of tourists around.

After one final look at the peaks of Mt Tate, and stocking up on the mountain spring water, it was time to take the 90-minute journey back down to my car.

Since I wanted to make the most of my long drive from Tokyo, from Mt Tate I drove over to the trailhead for Mt Shirouma (only an hour's drive away) in preparation to hike it the next day.

Overall, although Mt Tate can be a bit of a hassle with all the public transport connections you have to make, it genuinely was such a beautiful mountain that made it all worth it for me! I'd love to come back in another season to enjoy it with different colours.

Hiking course options

This was the course I took, which I would recommend if you have the time. It's a loop hike covering the three peaks of Mt Tate, and then descending via the Raichozawa Campsite.

The most direct course to the Mt Oyama (3003m elevation) peak of Mt Tate if you're just looking to get a quick hike in. Although it's not the highest peak on the course, it's kind of the "official" peak.

Public transport access

There are two separate routes up to Murodo where you can begin your hike of Mt Tate. In my case, I hiked it from the Nagano prefecture side as this is the best option if you are driving. If you are coming via public transport, it seems the Toyama side is more popular because there are fewer transfers, but the overall costs and times are about the same. Collectively, the entire route (from Toyama -> Murodo -> Nagano) is known as the "Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route". If you wanted, you could go up one side, and then down the other.

If you look at the Alpen Route website there is a rather handy diagram that helps you make sense of it.

Option 1: Tateyama station (Toyama side)

Coming from the Toyama side, you will be looking at 5.5 hours of travel time from Tokyo, costing you approximately 19000 yen one-way.

Tokyo station -> Toyama station via Shinkansen (2 hours, 13,000 yen)
Dentetsu-Toyama station -> Tateyama station via train (1 hour, 1420 yen)
Tateyama station -> Bijodaira via cable car (7 minutes, 1090 yen)
Bijodaira -> Murodo via bus (50 minutes, 3000 yen)

If you leave first thing in the morning from Tokyo, the earliest you can get to Murodo via this approach is 11:50am. An alternative would be to get the Shinkansen the night before, and spend the night at Tateyama station, in which case you can get to Murodo at 8:30am.

Option 2: Ogizawa station (Nagano prefecture)

If you are driving from Tokyo, then it is quicker to use the Ogizawa station route. Otherwise for public transport it seems similar to the Toyama side - it's a total of 5.5 hours and about 19,000 yen coming from Tokyo via public transport.

Tokyo station -> Nagano station via Shinkansen (80 minutes, 8500 yen)
Nagano station -> Ogizawa via express bus (1.5 hours, 4300 yen)
Ogizawa -> Murodo via bus/cable car/ropeway/bus (90 minutes, 6000 yen)

For the final Ogizawa -> Murodo leg, you should buy the tickets for this in advance on their website. Depending on the time of year, the time of the first bus leaving Ogizawa is between 7 and 7:30am. They schedule tickets via time period - i.e. you can buy a "7:30 ticket" or a "8:00 ticket" so it may be worth doing this a little in advance before your trip so you can get the time you want. Then on the day, there are machines where you can scan the QR code and the ticket pops out.

Once you have your ticket, head up to the second floor where you can get in line for the electric bus.

There are quite a few people here, as they put on 4 buses at a time.

If you are in any sort of rush, you will want to:

a) Line up for the bus early.

b) Once you pass through the ticket barrier, try to get on the first of the four buses. Some people want to get a seat so not necessarily everyone beelines it for the first bus.

c) Power-walk across the Kurobe Dam to try and beat the line for the cable car.

All-in-all though, the cable car and ropeway journeys are quite short, and they have them on continuous loops at these busy peak times so even if the lines seem long, they do move quickly. Within about 90 minutes, you should be able to begin your hike.

Option 3: Direct access via overnight bus

If the idea of doing all these transfers doesn't appeal to you and you don't mind sleeping on buses, you can get the overnight bus to Murodo. This is the most convenient and also the cheapest option if you are coming as a solo traveller and want to do it as a day hike.

There are two bus companies that offer this option:

Maitabi is a company that does a lot of overnight bus trips for hikers across Japan. They pick you up at 11pm from Shinjuku station, and drop you off at Murodo at 7am (or 8am in September). They then pick you back up at 12:30pm, and drop you back off at Shinjuku by 9pm. It costs between 20,000 - 26,000 yen round trip depending on the season.
Kosoku bus: a pretty similar setup to Maitabi. But it seems to be a fair bit more expensive - 28,000 to 30,000 yen round trip.

For both these cases, when I was researching doing this hike at the end of September, they were not running the buses, so I think they only really run on the weekends / at peak season.

The overnight bus makes the 4-hour out-and-back course quite feasible, while it's a bit dicey to do the longer loop hike due to the timings.

Car access details

If you are driving from Tokyo, I would recommend driving to the Nagano side of the mountain to the Ogizawa parking lot, as it's a 4-hour drive. In comparison, the Toyama side is a 5.5 hour drive.

The final 10km (15 minute) drive up to Ogizawa is along a long rural road. Luckily it's not narrow (2 cars can fit) and it's all asphalt in good condition. I mention this because I have seen some really sketchy roads in my time hiking mountains in Japan, but I suppose with the amount of tourists that visit Mt Tate, they have the money to make nice roads. It did turn out to be a rather spooky drive up at night with no other cars around, though. There was a lot of fog on the night I went, so I inched along at quite a slow pace. I ended up seeing a deer, fox and even a tanuki on the drive in (and saw some monkeys on the drive out).

As you drive up the road and approach the parking lot, there will be a turn on the left with a sign that says parking for motorcycles. It's a bit confusing, but if you take that turn, it is actually a free parking lot for cars too.

If this is full, drive a further minute or two up the road and there is paid parking available at the rate of 1000 yen per 12 hours.

When I arrived at 7pm on a weekday, there were still spots available in the free parking lot. This was sort of the tail-end of the season though (30th of Sept), so I wouldn't be surprised if it fills up earlier in the summer holiday season.

If you are planning to sleep in the carpark, the one downside here is that the toilet block is a 6-minute walk up the road to the bus terminal. There is a path at the far end of the carpark which has a shortcut through the woods up to the bus terminal, or you can walk along the road. There were plenty of other fellow car-sleepers so it felt like a fairly safe spot to sleep.

Once at Ogizawa, you will then need to use the chain of public transport (bus -> cable car -> ropeway -> bus) to finally get up to Murodo, which I have covered in detail in the public transport section above.

When to hike Mt Tate

Mt Tate's hiking season is between July and early October.

Mt Tate's connection with the movie Wolf Children

As a final piece of trivia, while up near Murodo I noticed a couple of references to a Mamoru Hosoda movie called Wolf Children. Although not quite as famous as Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki's works, Hosoda has done a number of popular animated films (most popularly The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and more recently, Belle).

Personally, I loved Wolf Children! It's a rather touching story about two children being raised by a werewolf man and a human mother, and their struggles with trying to find their identity between their wolf and human halves. If you're interested in Japanese or animated films, I would recommend you give it a watch if you haven't already.

In one of the movie's scenes, one of the children Ame joyfully runs up the side of a mountain, coming to a view of a lake.

As it turns out, Mamoru Hosoda grew up in Toyama prefecture, and the visuals for this scene were based on Mikurigaike Pond, which is only a short walk from Murodo.

In the movie the area is depicted as a complete wilderness, while in reality there was a horde of tourists around (myself included) snapping pictures of this lake.

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Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Book review for Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear. I rated it 3.5 stars.

I hated on Atomic Habits when I first read it, as I felt it didn’t quite compare to The Power of Habit. Now doing a re-read 7 years laters, I can begrudgingly start to see its merits a bit more.

Atomic Habit does solve the only criticism I had with Power of Habit - that although it does a good job of explaining the science behind habits, it did not have enough actionable advice. Atomic Habits has more than plenty of it, structuring the book’s chapters into the various ways you can start and stop habits.

The author James Clear is quick to thank Power of Habit author Charles Duhigg for his work, and acknowledges that his book builds upon it. It reuses the same “cue - routine - reward” habit loop from Power of Habit, but renames it to “cue - craving - response - reward”.

However where Power of Habit seems to be fairly well-backed by science and research, I got the feeling that Atomic Habits is a bit more “woo-woo” with its advice (for want of a better word). One of the early claims James Clear makes in the book is that habit formation is tied to your identity. If you tell yourself you are a smoker and give yourself negative self-talk like “I can’t quite, it’s too hard”, then you will find it much harder to quit than if you genuinely believe that you can quit.

Both Atomic Habits and The Power of Habit have a Notes chapter at the back where they have references to all their sources. I’m not usually in the habit of reading it, but I got pretty curious about some of Clear’s ideas and at this point had a flick towards the back of the book. Almost embarrassingly, quite a few of his sources were tweets? (To be fair, this was just in the earlier chapters, and once he gets more into the meat of it, most of the references are to proper scientific journals and the like).

But still, even just comparing the length of their notes chapters - Atomic Habit’s 25 pages to Power of Habit’s 60 - you can already get the sense that the Power of Habit is a much more comprehensively-researched book. Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and I think it really shows in the quality of research. Both authors do the “tell an anecdote, then tie to back to a concept” style of writing that is common in self-help books but I have say Duhigg is the better writer in this regard - he’s a journalist that’s worked for both the New York Times and The New Yorker, and it shows.

But at the end of the day, a productivity book is only helpful if it actually can bring about change in your life. And it seems that’s what the rest of the world thinks too, as Atomic Habit has gone on to sell over 30 million books, while the Power of Habit lags behind at a mere 3 million.

As for some of the practical advice that Atomic Habits offers:

Firstly, create an awareness of the habits governing your life: write them down, point them out to yourself
Use time and location cues to start new habits (at time x and location y I will do behaviour…)
“Habit stacking”: find an existing habit, and tack on a new one onto the end of it
Make good use of your environment: if you want to drink more water, keep bottles nearby.

And so on. Ultimately the book is worth the read if you really take the time after you read it to implement as many of his strategies as you can into your life. Maybe not quite backed by science, but nonetheless I think many of his strategies will probably have a positive impact on your life.

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The Power Of Habit

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 09:40:49 GMT

Book review for The Power Of Habit by Charles Duhigg. I rated it 4.5 stars.

I originally gave this book 5/5 stars when I read it 7 years ago, and classed it as one of my all-time favourite productivity books so I figured it was due for a re-read and a proper review. It’s a fairly entertaining read filled with stories about the ways that habits work for and against people - from a gambling addict who ruined her life, to how Starbucks train their employees.

The one problem with The Power of Habit is that while it’s got many different stories about the life-changing power of habits, I don’t think it provides quite enough detail on how you can start or stop habits in your own life. You will walk away from this book feeling good, knowing that you can use the power of habits to change your life if you want to - but whether you actually will is the big question.

There is a section in the Appendix that gives an overview of how you might break a bad habit, which Duhigg dubs “the golden rule of habit change”. Habits are organised into a “cue - routine - reward” loop, and you should aim to keep both the cue and reward, and change only the routine.

Firstly, identify the routine end-to-end. The author’s example is that every afternoon he goes to the cafeteria, buys a cookie and has a quick chat with his colleagues.
Experiment with finding an equivalent-but-different reward. Try going for a walk, eating an apple, a cup of coffee, or heading over to a colleague’s desk and chatting with them. The aim of this is to try and figure out if there’s something else that can satisfy whatever the urge is.
Isolate the cue. You can do a set of who/what/when/where/why questions to try and narrow it down. Is it because you need the energy boost, or because you’re bored, or is it the time of day that’s influencing you?
Make a plan. The cue remains the same, but think of a new routine or reward to overwrite the original “bad” one. The author realises that he was using the snack break to chit-chat, which was what he really wanted. So he set an alarm on his phone every day to go over to someone’s desk for a chat instead.

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Light Up Coffee, Shimokitazawa

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Light Up Coffee is a cafe and coffee roaster with three stores across Kichijoji, Shimokitazawa and Mitaka. I've been visiting too many pretentious coffee spots lately, so Light Up Coffee in Shimokitazawa really hit the spot for me. It's a tiny two-storey building that falls perfectly into that charming "your local coffee shop" kind of vibe.

They do espresso-based drinks but I would say they specialise in pour-overs, with eight single-origin beans on the menu ranging from 650 to 800 yen (with a 50 yen surcharge for ice).

I forgot to ask what roast level each of the beans is, as it's not mentioned on the menu. If I had to guess though, I bet they are mostly light roasts. I decided to go for their Rwanda Shyira pour-over (700 yen). They had some snacks on the menu as well so I decided to pick up a slice of their cassata cake (800 yen).

Heading inside their store, they had a display with all their beans available for sale.

They had all the beans out for you to sniff as well, so if you're not sure you can make up your mind at the counter, maybe take a look inside first.

The branding is quite cute! Although I was a little bit confused by how they seemed to categorise their beans between sweet, soft, special and juicy.

You can take a seat at the counter downstairs, or head up to a small amount of seating on the second floor.

I went with the second floor, which I regret a little - I think it might have been more fun to watch the baristas at work. I did get a window seat though, which came with a nice breeze.

The coffee comes with a tasting card. The taste - very smooth. The tasting card suggests notes of berries, and that sweetness comes through. A solid, simple cup of coffee. Compared to the coffee I had tried at Ogawa before this one, although that wowed me a bit more, I felt the cup I got here really suited the laid-back nature of the cafe.

Of course, maybe it's all psychological - I recently learned that there are scientific papers that report that changing the shape or colour of the coffee cup you serve the coffee in also affects the taste of it. The more you know.

The little cake was really good as well. It was sort of like an ice-cream cake with dark chocolate, nuts and dried fruit inside, but not overly sweet like real ice cream would be.

Coffee store interactions can be rather a mixed bag, and as much as I want to rate a coffee based on the taste of the cup itself, the overall atmosphere and vibe always play a role. The staff here were super friendly guys, so Light Up in Shimokitazawa is a big thumbs up from me.

As a final side note, Light Up is only a short walk from Setagaya-Daita station. If you are walking from Shimokitazawa though (only 10 minutes away) I would recommend walking past the Bonus Track on your way through, as it's a fairly lively area with a bunch of eateries.

The other place worth possibly checking out is Shiro-Hige's Cream Puff Factory right nearby which does these Totoro-themed cream puffs. Very cute.

Light Up Coffee's beans: the verdict

I picked up a bag of their La Palta Peru washed beans (2000 yen for 150g). I'm more of a natural than a washed person, but my husband is a washed fan and I picked up a natural bean from Ogawa so I figured I'd better be nice to him. All their beans are also available on their online store, and the prices range from 1700 yen to 2300 yen per 150g (i.e. 1130-1530 yen per 100g).

The beans come sealed with the roasting date on the back. The shop staff recommended waiting 10 days from the roast date.

What I really loved was the pour-over instructions they gave me.

The production quality on this is really high! 10/10 for the photos, and they even had separate instructions for the Kalita Wave and V60. I had recently visited Coffee Wrights which also uses the Kalita Wave. I really don't know too much about it. It seems the Wave helps prevent "channelling" (i.e. when the hot water doesn't equally spread out across all the coffee grounds and just concentrates in bits). I'm going to be honest, I'm starting to feel a bit of an urge coming on to buy all the possible drippers out there to taste test them...

Anyway, as for the bean itself - sometimes it's a bit fiddly to get the bean to taste good but bam, I followed their instructions and the beans tasted good from the first go. I went with 15 clicks on my Timemore C2, and 90℃ as they suggested. I did adjust the amounts so that I could do it with my normal dose of 13g of beans (which meant 208g of water in total). Usually I do 13g/200g so it's just a tiny bit more water with this method.

It doesn't taste like a super-fancy bean, but rather a solid all-round bean that you could drink every day. I'm a fan and my husband was too.

Light Up Coffee: pour-over method

Light Up's V60 method reminds me a tiny bit of the 4:6 method. In particular, between the first pour and second pour, basically all of the water drains out of the dripper.

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Ogawa Coffee Laboratory, Shimokitazawa

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 02:06:53 GMT

Ogawa Coffee has a very long history, first opening in Kyoto in 1952, and more recently (since 2020) expanding to a number of stores in Tokyo as well. They even have one store in Boston! Although most of their branches are named “Ogawa Coffee”, there are three with the “Coffee Laboratory” moniker in Tokyo where I suppose they are going for a different sort of vibe. For their Shimokitazawa location they describe it as an “experience-based beans salon”. Well, whatever that means, it for sure is an experience.

Stepping into the store, the staff behind the long concrete counter will whip out a rather overwhelming menu for you to look at.

I’ll recommend that rather than heading straight up to the counter, you sidle along to the wooden display right behind it so you have a bit more time to try and figure out what the heck the colour wheel means.

They had some coffee grounds you could sniff - only for the super expensive stuff, though

A lot going on here.

If you have a couple of beans in mind, the staff are pretty helpful and will bring out the cans of beans for you to take a closer sniff.

It’s a bit confusing, but once you’ve got a bean in mind you can choose from a couple of options: ESP (Espresso), P.O (Pourover) or AP (Aeropress).

The bean with the price for 100g of the bean itself, or with the various drink methods

You need to find this legend in the corner to figure out what the acronyms mean

They have a fairly big price range on the pour-overs - from 830 yen for a blend bean up to 2700 yen for one of their premium beans from Panama. Most sit in the roughly 1100 - 1500 yen range.

They also offer cappuccinos or cafe lattes (extra 220 yen surcharge) which means you will probably be paying at least 1000 yen for one of those.

Ogawa Coffee Laboratory is going for a very specific aesthetic here. They can serve multiple people at once and will bring out the menu, tablet and credit card machines on the counter.

But as soon as the customers disappear, they also put all the machines away back underneath the counter until you’re left with a long bare concrete counter again.

Just with some coffee gear in the middle

In a way the minimalist aesthetic reminds me of Leaves. Along the other wall there’s a long bench, with a couple of small tables for seating.

At first I thought the white panels on the wall were just minimalist art, but actually it’s where they store all of their beans.

I ordered a cup of their El Salvador Los Alpes Natural (1220 yen).

Just jumping to bean prices for a second quickly, the beans for this were 2000 yen for 100g. There was another Brazil bean that cost 1520 yen for a cup, but 5800 yen for 100g of beans which is quite a big change in the ratio between the cost of a bean vs the cup. I feel like you’d want to go for the one where you are getting the most value for money per cup. Unfortunately the Brazil ones were sold out this time.

Anyway, the coffee came on a cute little coaster which I think was the cut-out square of one of those bags the coffee beans come in. I have to say it does not fit the aesthetic of this place at all, but is oddly charming.

And of course, a nice tasting card (you better be giving me one at these prices).

As for the taste - I was ready to be disappointed by this place being all fancy and the coffee not living up to the hype. But genuinely, really good coffee. I had told the barista I didn’t want something too acidic, and he started pointing me to all the boring beans - Yirgacheffe, Blue Mountain, their house blend and so on. So I’m glad I just completely ignored him and went for this El Salvador bean instead. I think maybe my idea of acidity is different to the average coffee-drinker so I probably shouldn’t be telling baristas that.

The card mentions notes of strawberry chocolate. There was a touch of acidity, but in a delicious way with hints of sweetness and I could almost taste the chocolate. This was a natural process bean, and I definitely love it.

I decided to buy a bag of the same beans to take home so my husband could try it.

Note they don’t put the roast date on the packaging itself (lame) but it is on the tin of beans, so if you care about that, you should make a mental note when they get it out.

The Ogawa Coffee Laboratory is located in a building known as Reload, near Shimokitazawa station.

There are a couple of other shops in the complex.

There was one cute one called Desk Labo which I had seen mentioned on an Instagram round-up of stationery shops.

Cute! Although nothing much I was interested in - I suppose it was more knick-knacks than stationery

Ogawa Coffee Laboratory’s beans: the verdict

Unfortunately Ogawa doesn’t provide any sort of pour-over instructions to go along with their coffee beans, which feels like a bit of a miss on their part - if it’s a lab, they should have like, the best possible recipes or something.

The bag just mentions the purchase date.

I was able to get one of the baristas to tell me what temperature they were doing their pour-overs at though - 92℃.

They were also selling the drippers they were using in-store, although I forgot to take a photo. From Googling online, it might be a Kalita Hasami-ware. Which apparently is the fancier version of the Kalita Wave, as it’s made out of porcelain. (Even so, it’s only like 2500 yen so it’s not as expensive as it sounds).

Unfortunately, once I opened up the beans at home I had the same issue I always tend to have with fancy beans! I just couldn’t get it to taste quite as amazing as it did in store (skill issue, or maybe this is a sign that I need to buy that dripper). I played around with it, and the best taste I got was 15 clicks with my Timemore C2 (not too fine) and also using the Leaves pour-over method (which is a fairly quick one and doesn’t extract too much).

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Hyakumeizan: hiking the Hundred Famous Mountains of Japan

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 11:46:33 GMT

The 100 Famous Japanese Mountains or Nihon Hyakumeizan (日本百名山) are a list of 100 mountains picked by mountaineer Kyuya Fukada in 1964. These hundred mountains are very popular among Japanese hikers, and generally have good public transport access and well-maintained trails. I wouldn't say that these are necessarily the "100 best mountains in Japan" but for any hiker living in Japan, this is the list to check off.

I climbed my first hyakumeizan a little over 4 years ago and have been steadily chipping away at them ever since, now having climbed 76/100. Climbing the hyakumeizan involves a fair amount of logistics planning, and you'll want to batch multiple peaks together in one trip for efficiency. Rather than listing the peaks as a straight list from the top of Japan to the bottom (or from highest elevation to lowest elevation) I have clustered these peaks as a practical guide of how you might hike them, taking into account my own experiences checking off the peaks so far.

Note that throughout this page, I make the assumption that you will want to climb these mountains during their snow-free period. Hiking on snow mountains is also an option if you have experience in that area - but personally I prefer to snowboard in winter instead, and don't want to give any unsafe information to anyone so I won't be mentioning any specifics about snow hiking in this guide.

Hyakumeizan map

The hyakumeizan are spread out across all of Japan, starting from the northernmost Mt Rishiri, on an island off the coast of Hokkaido, all the way down to the southernmost Mt Miyanoura, also on an island, off the coast of mainland Kyushu.

Conveniently there's quite a big cluster closer to Tokyo - there's a lot of day hike options here, plus many of Japan's highest peaks are in a region known as the Japanese Alps.

As a quick breakdown:

Hokkaido: 9
Tohoku (north of Tokyo): 14
Around Tokyo: 34 (quite a big battleground with lots of day trip options, which I'll break down below)
Japanese Alps: 27
Northern Alps: 15
Central Alps: 2
Southern Alps: 10
South of the Alps: 10 (a random assortment)
Kyushu: 6

How I've broken down this guide

When I began hiking the hyakumeizan, I was a complete beginner to hiking. My second ever hike was up Mt Tsukuba, which is coincidentally also the lowest-elevation and one of the most beginner-friendly of the hyakumeizans. So my hyakumeizan journey is also tied quite closely with how I started to enjoy different forms of hiking.

Keeping that in mind, I have roughly ordered the guide starting from where you might start if you were also a complete beginner. Day trips from Tokyo are the easiest category of hike, and then we start to add in weekend trips, using overnight buses and eventually, camping or staying at mountain huts. Using a car is recommended for some of these hikes, but where I can I've opted to show the public transport approach as well.

Day trips from Tokyo

The very first category of hikes on this page is also what I consider to be the easiest - day hikes you can do from Tokyo. You don't have to worry about travel planning, renting a car, booking accommodation months in advance or constantly checking weather forecasts. All you need is a free day and you can check another peak off of your list.

Of course, you might not be living in Tokyo (sorry!) but I figured this was a good place to start nonetheless.

Beginner/medium difficulty day hikes

Mt Tsukuba is quite possibly the easiest hyakumeizan on this list, with a combination of cheap price to get there from Tokyo, plus only being a short 30-minute walk to the peak if you take the ropeway. Quite coincidentally, this was also my very first hyakumeizan.

Mt Daibosatsu, Mt Akagi and Mt Amagi are also relatively beginner-friendly hikes. Mt Daibosatsu in particular is lovely for its views of Mt Fuji. To be honest I'll say that Mt Amagi felt a bit niche, but is also a nice opportunity to spend some time exploring Izu.

Mt Chausu is a very easy hike distance-wise if you take the ropeway up, but you can extend it into a bit of a longer hiking course to make it worth the trip. It's a bit pricey at a round trip of 12,000 yen on the Shinkansen, but there's not too much else to pair it with in the area. As a mountain I love it, though!

Mt Kirigamine, Mt Utsukushigahara and Mt Tateshina are all quite close to each other. They can each be done as separate day hikes, but as they are all quite short it may be worth pairing them together, especially if you can drive.

With the main hiking trail for Mt Ibuki being closed it's not too exciting of a hike, but I'm including it here as there's not really any way to pair it with anything if you're coming via public transport. If you have a car, I would consider pairing it with Mt Arashima.

Mt Tanigawa and Mt Mizugaki head into the medium difficulty as they are in the range of a 5 - 6 hour hike round trip, and quite steep. Mt Mizugaki can be combined with Mt Kinpu into an overnight camping trip as they are right next to each other.

I do not have blog posts up for them, but have YAMAP logs uploaded for Mt Kinpu (via public transport) and Mt Utsukushigahara (via car).

Longer day hikes

These mountains are still accessible as day hikes from Tokyo, but worth tackling once you have the confidence that you can do longer hikes.

Mt Kumotori and Mt Tanzawa could be technically classed as overnight hikes (with mountain huts available at the peak) due to their 9 - 10 hour hike length, but most hikers tend to do these as long day hikes. Although long, the pro of these are that they are quite close to Tokyo and you can climb them in the colder months.

Mt Ryokami is also a day hike, but the tight bus timings may make it difficult if you are a slow hiker.

Mt Azumaya is a day hike doable with the Shinkansen, and becomes much easier if you have a car.

Technically day hikes

These can be done as a day hike from Tokyo in a pinch, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it (due to either distance or cost). I've listed them here for completeness's sake, but I recommend reading on to see other ways to hike them in the sections below.

Day hikes with a car

Now we're moving onto hyakumeizans which are best done by car. Doing all 100 of the hyakumeizan via public transport is not impossible - I'm sure some people have done it - but in some cases you'll be doing wacky things like walking an extra 5 - 10km to the trailhead, or coughing up money for a taxi (if you still consider that public transport).

So being able to drive, or making hiking friends in Japan who can drive, will come in handy. If you can speak Japanese there is an app called Yamarii where people will organise drives to trailheads which can be an easy way to check off more hyakumeizans.

Mt Kobushi is a fairly straightforward hike if you have a car. It can be done via public transport too - it will just turn into an overnight hike with a stay at the summit's hut. Mt Hotaka does come with a chain-climbing section, which may be your first encounter with one if you are following the hikes in order on this page.

At a 3-hour drive from Tokyo, Mt Shibutsu also becomes a straightforward day hike if you can drive. Note for public transport users, actually it can be a rather lovely weekend of camping - the Oze Marsh is very famous for it - and it can also be combined with Mt Hiuchigatake.

Mt Kisokoma-gatake is one of my favourite beginner-friendly Alps hikes, with the Komagatake Ropeway taking you up to 2612m before you start hiking. It is public transport-accessible, it's just the timings become a bit of a squeeze and it would be worth spending a night in the area before or after your hike.

I've already mentioned Mt Utsukushigahara, Mt Kirigamine and Mt Tateshina in the public transport day hikes section, but just noting again it's only an hour's drive between Mt Utsukushigahara and Mt Kirigamine so you could knock both off in a day's drive, if you don't mind the driving time being much longer than the hiking time. Mt Tateshina is also quite close to both of them so there's some combo opportunities there as well.

Weekend trips

Having exhausted the available day hikes from Tokyo, you'll be wanting to turn your sights to weekend trips. You can hop on a plane or Shinkansen to another part of Japan, hike a peak or two while spending a night at a hotel in between and then head back home.

Assuming you are a beginner hiker, you may not be interested in overnight hikes just yet (I know I wasn't!) so this section exclusively features mountains that can be done as day hikes.

Nikko

The Nikko National Park makes for a lovely weekend getaway:

Day 1: Train to Nikko, hike Mt Nantai. Sleep at a hotel near Nikko station.
Day 2: Hike Mt Nikko-Shirane, head back to Tokyo.

Fukushima / Yamagata

Fukushima and Yamagata have four day hikes easily accessible via public transport - Mt Adatara, Mt Nishi-Azuma, Mt Bandai and Mt Zao. I wasn't very efficient, and actually did all of these separately. The Fukushima area is particularly famous for its autumn foliage, so it may be worth timing these for a late-September to mid-October trip.

For all but Mt Bandai, you can actually do as day trips from Tokyo if you wanted (pricey, at 20,000 yen round trip on the Shinkansen). But it would be best to double them up as two separate weekend trips.

Weekend 1:

Day 1: Shinkansen up to Yonezawa, hike Mt Nishi-Azuma, then 45-minute train ride to Yamagata and stay the night
Day 2: Hike Mt Zao then head back home to Tokyo

Weekend 2:

Day 1: Shinkansen up to Nihonmatsu, hike Mt Adatara, Shinkansen back down to Koriyama
Day 2: Hike Mt Bandai then head back to Tokyo.

I haven't put up a post for Mt Bandai but I have my YAMAP log here. You can stay at a hotel at Koriyama station, get an early morning train to Inawashiro Station and then begin your hike from there.

Aomori

Heading all the way up to Aomori, you can visit Mt Hakkoda and Mt Iwaki as two separate, easy day hikes via public transport. Mt Iwaki can be very short if you take the chairlift, but otherwise has a more normal hiking course as well.

I stayed at a hotel in Aomori for both of these hikes. I gave myself 3 days so I could do a tiny bit of sightseeing the day before. I'm not too sure if it's possible to squeeze the whole thing into a 2-day trip. But a feasible way to do it would be:

Day 0: Train up to Aomori at night
Day 1: Hike Mt Iwaki
Day 2: Hike Mt Hakkoda and head home to Tokyo

If you got a rental car, maybe you could also drive and do Mt Iwaki and Mt Hakkoda in one day.

I haven't put up posts for these but I have uploaded my YAMAP logs for Mt Hakkoda and Mt Iwaki.

Nagano

There's a lodge at the trailhead for Mt Asama, so if you're coming via public transport this is a pretty convenient place to stay. Otherwise it is also feasible by car.

Day 1: Shinkansen to Sakudaira station, bus to Takamine Kogen Hotel
Day 2: Hike Mt Asama, then get return bus back to Sakudaira and on to Tokyo

Mt Asama only re-opened in May of 2026, but was closed for a couple of years before that.

Niigata

Mt Echigo-Komagatake had a bit of a reputation as not being doable by bus, but I learned actually there are shuttle buses during the fall period, as it's a famous photography spot for its waterfall sunrise clouds.

Day 1: Shinkansen, local train and bus to Oyu Onsen
Day 2: Early morning shuttle bus, hike Mt Echigo-Komagatake, then head back to Tokyo

Personally I did it via car and slept in my car at the trailhead.

Another day hike mountain in Niigata is Mt Makihata. Unfortunately this is one of those ones that is probably best done with a car - drive to the trailhead the night before, hike it, and then drive home.

Gunma/Niigata

Mt Hiragatake is an interesting one. One popular (and masochistic) way to climb it is to do it as a 12-hour day hike. The other is to get a reservation at a lodge, and the lodge provides a shuttle bus service to take you up to a separate trailhead, where you can do the hike over a more reasonable 7 hours.

There's 3 - 5 different lodges that provide this service, but it can be a bit of a battle to get a booking. For one, you can try mid-week, but they don't put on the shuttle bus if you are the only hiker, so it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation where you want to be able to get a booking, but on a night popular enough that they are going to put on the bus.

It's a 4 - 5 hour drive from Tokyo to the lodge, or there's a public transport option which RidgelineImages has done.

Myoko-Togakushi Renzan National Park (Nagano/Niigata)

There are four total hyakumeizans in the Myoko-Togakushi Renzan National Park - the other two are Mt Hiuchi and Mt Myoko which I'll cover below. I did these two via car, but it seems to be public transport feasible.

Day 0: Night-time Shinkansen up to Itoigawa, stay in hotel
Day 1: Bus to trailhead, hike Mt Amakazari then back to Itoigawa. Take a 30-minute Shinkansen (4000 yen...) to Nagano station and spend the night there.
Day 2: Express bus from Nagano station, hike Mt Takatsuma then head home to Tokyo

Fukui

The only hyakumeizan in Fukui is Mt Arashima, and there's nothing super-close by to combine it with if you are coming via public transport. If you are just tackling Mt Arashima on its own, it would look something like:

Day 1: Travel 6 hours by Shinkansen and local train to Echizen-Shimoyama station, stay at Hotel Furearu Izumi
Day 2: Get on the first morning train, start your hike by around 7am. Get on the local train back to Fukui and then onwards to Tokyo.

If you have a car, there are some options here to make it more worth it via also hitting up Mt Ibuki and possibly Mt Ena:

Day 1: Drive 6 hours to hike Mt Ibuki, then drive onwards towards Fukui
Day 2: Hike Mt Arashima, drive onwards towards Mt Ena
Day 3: Hike Mt Ena then drive back to Tokyo

I did Mt Ibuki and Mt Arashima together with the aim of also tacking on Mt Ena, but gave up because the weather wasn't so good on day 3.

Tottori

Mt Daisen is rather a lonely hyakumeizan all on its own in Tottori prefecture, so there's not really much opportunity to combine this one with another hike.

Day 0: fly into Yonago airport (a 90 minute flight). It's about a 30-minute bus ride to Yonago station where there are hotels to stay.
Day 1: Hike Mt Daisen, maybe fly home or spend another night in the area

Fun fact, Tottori also has the distinction of being Japan's least-populated prefecture!

While in the area, why not check out Tottori's sand dunes, or head over to neighbouring Shimane prefecture? I'm a little biased since my husband is from here, but it's a rather underrated area with a pretty castle.

Shikoku

The biggest thing that surprised me about the island of Shikoku is that they don't have Suica/IC cards - their JR line is still using paper tickets! I'll admit I didn't really do much sightseeing other than the mountains, but Tokushima is famous for its Naruto whirlpools and also that iconic Yayoi Kusama pumpkin sculpture on Naoshima island. With public transport, you'll need to fly in the night before:

Day 0: fly into Tokushima airport (90 minute flight from Tokyo)
Day 1: Hike Mt Tsurugi then travel on toward Iyo-Saijo station
Day 2: Hike Mt Ishizuchi, then fly home from Matsuyama airport

Iyo-Saijo has a number of hotels and is a pretty big town, but the travel time between the two hyakumeizans on public transport can be a bit of a pain. You can also get a rental car to make this a bit easier. If you are solo, it will really be quite pricey but not as bad if you go in a group.

Morioka

I've got an upcoming Morioka trip planned so I'll be back to edit this section. I think it might be hard to squeeze into 2 days, but 3 days is doable:

Day 0: Head up on the Shinkansen at night, hotel at Morioka station
Day 1: Pick up rental car, hike Mt Hayachine
Day 2: Hike Mt Iwate, drive an hour to Mt Hachimantai, return the car
Day 3: Spare day / enjoy Morioka then head home

Morioka is a pretty convenient base for this - the 3 hikes are not too far of a drive (1 - 2 hours) from it. The reason I put Mt Hayachine first is that you need to pick up the rental car, and the shop only opens around 8am. Since Mt Iwate is the hardest hike of the three, it's best to put it on the day when you can have an earlier start in the morning.

Mt Iwate was closed for a couple of years to hikers, and only just recently reopened this year.

Yamagata

This trio of peaks has been on my radar for a while but I haven't quite gotten around to it. The main blocker for me is that my current plan is:

Day 1: 6 hour drive from Tokyo to Mt Chokai
Day 2: Hike Mt Chokai, drive 2 hours towards Mt Gassan
Day 3: Hike Mt Gassan
Day 4: Hike Mt Asahi
Day 5: Drive 6 hours home

Which sounds kind of rough, right? If you got a Shinkansen up there and then rented a car, it probably wouldn't be as tiring. (I own a car, so Yamagata feels a bit too close to resort to a rental car). It would also probably make sense to split this up into 2 trips, or give yourself a week to do the hikes.

Doing an overnight hike with a stay at the summit hut is an option for Mt Chokai and Mt Asahi. I have seen people do a 2-day weekend of Mt Chokai - where they drive out from Tokyo on day 1 and hike up to the hut. On day 2, they hike down and drive back to Tokyo.

Mt Gassan is the most touristy out of the three (it even has a chairlift), so I would suspect there is good public transport access, and is quite possibly a candidate for a weekend hiking trip by itself.

Nara

When you think of Nara you might think of the lovely bowing deer at the Todaiji Temple, but actually the two hyakumeizan in Nara are a little more remote and a hassle to get to, and I would really recommend going via car if you can. The public transport options aren't the greatest, and Mt Omine turns from a 9km hike into an overnight 22km one if you want to take the bus (rough). Mt Odaigahara is a very easy peak, though.

Day 1: Shinkansen from Tokyo to Osaka, get a rental car, hike Mt Odaigahara, stay at a hotel (the Forest Kamikita hotel was quite nice)
Day 2: hike Mt Omine, drive back to Osaka, Shinkansen back to Tokyo

Northern Alps day hikes

Finally, the first mention of the Alps on this page! The Alps is home to a hefty 27 hyakumeizans. Many are 2-day hikes, and they're mostly a 3 - 5 hour drive away so it becomes a bit of a time commitment that you have to check off one at a time. Here are a couple of the easier ones.

Mt Norikura is the easiest mountain in the Northern Alps, with a bus that takes you up to the highest bus stop in Japan. If you can drive, you can do it together with Mt Ontake:

Day 1: Drive 4.5 hours to Mt Ontake, hike it, spend a night nearby
Day 2: Drive 2 hours to Mt Norikura, hike it, drive 5 hours back to Tokyo

You could swap out one of those mountains for Mt Yake, or do Mt Yake on the third day before heading home (as you pass by the area as you drive out of Mt Norikura).

Mt Tate is another weekender option. You can turn it into an overnight hike with Mt Tsurugi. It's only an hour's drive away from Mt Shirouma, so you could hike that together with Mt Shirouma over 3 days as well.

If you are using public transport, I think hiking any of these mountains realistically turns into a 2-day trip (one day for travelling, one day for hiking + heading home). There is also an overnight bus option for Mt Yake which I mention below.

Mt Ontake had a very deadly eruption in 2014. It only fully reopened a couple of years ago.

Southern Alps day hikes

Although I've been sticking to mentioning day hike mountains, if you want to hike Mt Senjo and Mt Kaikoma optimally, this will probably mean your first mountain hut visit. It's about as easy as a mountain hut can get, as you get off the bus at Kitazawa Pass and the hut is right there. This means you don't have to lug anything up the mountain, and if you bring extra gear you can leave it at the hut so you don't have to worry about the weight. From the hut, there are two routes leading out in 2 opposite directions to Mt Senjo and Mt Kaikoma, so you can do two separate day hikes.

If you're coming by car, you'll need a day 0 to drive into the area and possibly sleep in your car. For public transport users, practically it's a 3-day trip (and two nights at the hut) as the first day will just be travel.

Hiking in Kyushu

I think Kyushu is a pretty decent candidate as a longer hiking trip for beginners. The hiking courses are not too long and the public transport is great. It is actually possible to do 5 of Kyushu's peaks in 5 consecutive days via public transport, although the main limiting factor will be if you have the endurance to pull it off. (Not to mention 5 days of clear weather).

Personally, I did 4 hikes in 4 days and by day 4 I was really quite tired. Hypothetically here's an itinerary to do all 5 in one trip, but I would recommend either a) padding this with rest days in between or b) splitting the itinerary in half and doing it in two separate trips.

Day 1: fly from Tokyo to Oita airport, stay at Beppu
Day 2: hike Mt Sobo, return to Beppu
Day 3: Hike Mt Kuju, stay in Higo-ozu or Aso area
Day 4: Hike Mt Aso, travel to Kagoshima
Day 5: Hike Kaimondake, stay in Kagoshima
Day 6: Hike Mt Karakuni, stay in Kagoshima
Day 7: Return to Tokyo

And of course there is also Mt Miyanoura on its own island off the coast of Kyushu, which can be done as its own separate trip.

Day 1: fly from Tokyo to Kagoshima airport, then take a plane to Yakushima airport
Day 2: Drive to Yodagawa trailhead, 9 hours out and back
Day 3: Travel back to Tokyo

Of course, Yakushima is home to the famous 7000+ year old jomon sugi, and it's said to be the forest that was the inspiration for the Ghibli film Princess Mononoke. So it might be worth making a bit of a longer trip out of it. Since it's closest to Kagoshima, you could pair it together with some of the other Kagoshima hikes.

Mt Karakuni (韓国岳) is the final peak in mainland Kyushu I am yet to climb. You can get a bus from 霧島神宮駅 to えびの高原バス停, and then do this 3 hour hiking course.

Mt Aso is Japan's most active volcano, so double-check it's open before you go!

Overnight bus hikes

So overnight buses are great if you don't drive but are intimidated by the idea of staying in a mountain hut or at a campsite. You'll get picked up around 10 - 11pm in Tokyo, and then the bus drops you off at the mountain trailhead at 5am - 6am. You'll have enough time to do the hike and get back home to Tokyo the same day. The biggest downside depends on whether you can get any sleep on the bus.

If you're not a fan of night buses, there are alternatives for most of these mountains.

Mt Aka, Mt Fuji and Mt Naeba have huts at their peaks. However for Mt Naeba the public transport options don't seem to be as good and you may need a taxi. If you drive, you can stay in the town of Echigo-Yuzawa the night before which is quite a nice area.

Mt Hiuchigatake has the option for you to stay overnight in the Oze Marsh area - there are a bunch of mountain huts, plus the option to climb Mt Shibutsu the next day.

Mt Ena doesn't have too many options, it's either overnight bus or car.

Mt Aizu-Komagatake has both an overnight bus and overnight train option. They do have a hut at the top but without any food or drinking water so it's very minimal. Of course you can drive up to this one as well.

And finally Mt Yake I've mentioned earlier on this page can be done as a day hike with a car, or you can camp at the campground right near the trailhead.

Overnight hikes

So we're over 60 hyakumeizans in, and it's finally time to whip out your tent or prepare for a night at a mountain hut! I have a separate post on Japanese mountain huts where I go into what it's like to stay at one. I was quite leery at the idea at first, but actually I quite enjoy them now.

Myoko-Togakushi Renzan National Park (Nagano/Niigata)

Mt Hiuchi and Mt Myoko can be tackled as two separate day hikes, but to save you driving between the two trailheads, you may as well do them together as a set. The hut is really quite nice and is probably one of my favourites out of all the ones I've stayed at in Japan.

Mt Haku (Gifu)

Mt Haku is a lovely mountain - one of the three Holy Mountains of Japan - but it is a bit of a hassle to get to. If you're coming by public transport, it'll have to be an overnight hike due to the timings:

Friday: Shinkansen to Kanazawa
Saturday: Bus to the trailhead, hike up and spend night at summit
Sunday: bus back down, Shinkansen back to Tokyo

Note that I am specifying specific days here because I think this was only doable on the weekend.

If you are coming by car, you can do it as a day hike, and sleep somewhere nearby at the trailhead.

Day 1: 7 hour drive from Tokyo, sleep at lodge or campsite
Day 2: day hike, another night in the area
Day 3: drive home to Tokyo

Oze Marsh (Gunma/Fukushima/Niigata)

I've mentioned both Mt Shibutsu and Mt Hiuchigatake as separate day hikes earlier on this page, but actually they sit very close to each other. You can tackle them as a 2 or 3 day traverse course with a night in between at the Oze Marsh. The huts are lower in elevation so I think the amenities would be fairly good as far as mountain huts go - I hear they may even have an onsen.

Mt Iide (Fukushima/Niigata/Yamagata)

I've had Mt Iide on my list to hike but didn't quite get around to it this year. It's a 4-hour drive from Tokyo to the trailhead, plus a 14-hour, 20km hike over 2 days so it does sound a little daunting. There is a mountain hut near the peak, but I think it is a fairly minimal one so I see a fair few people do this one with a tent.

Mt Sukai (Nikko/Gunma)

Mt Sukai is a beast of a mountain - 24km over 14 hours. It used to be an easier mountain but a road closure means there is now only this one difficult route to climb it. You might think there is a mountain hut near the peak, but alas no. The "easiest" way to break it up would be to do:

Day 1: Hike 2.5 hours to the hut
Day 2: Hike 9.5 hours out to the peak, then back down to the hut
Day 3: Hike 2 hours back down to the trailhead

The hut is unmanned and requires no bookings. Depending on the time of year, you will be battling it out for a spot with all the other people who want to hike this mountain (including some rather large tour groups). They only reopened the hut in 2026, and the toilet they had broke from overuse so you have to bring your own portable toilets as well.

Of course, if you have the endurance you can do this as a day hike, and that is probably what most people do. I'm thinking I need to be a lot more fit before I attempt this one.

Northern Alps 2-day hikes

Now, back to the Alps. You can see this is where much of my remaining uncompleted hikes are.

Mt Goryu and Mt Kashimayari

Mt Goryu and Mt Kashimayari can be done as two separate 2-day hikes, but I'll point out there is the option to combine them together into a 2 or 3-day hike. However it involves crossing the Hachimine Kiretto, one of the three Kirettos (knife-edge trails) in the Northern Alps. Not for the faint of heart.

Northern Alps multi-day hikes

Kamikochi is a bit of an interesting area, as there are quite a few hyakumeizans near each other, and not one standard way to hike them. I think the ones I've done, I've done in a bit of an unorthodox way, but spending a couple days traipsing through the Northern Alps is quite the experience so I have no complaints.

If we talk about standard pairings:

You should definitely do Mt Washiba and Mt Suisho together as they are quite close in distance. This alone will be a 3-day hike, but you could turn it into a 4-day hike by tacking on Mt Yakushi.

I did Mt Kurobegoro together with Mt Yari but I think it would be more efficient to do Mt Kurobegoro together with Mt Yakushi instead. (I will probably have to come back and do Mt Yakushi on its own).

Mt Yari can be done as a 2-day out and back. Otherwise you can combine it with Mt Okuhotaka for a 3-day hike, but this involves you crossing the very scary Daikiretto ridge and I wouldn't recommend it unless you know what you are doing.

Mt Okuhotaka is a 2 or 3-day out-and-back hike on its own via the Karasawa Cirque (very popular in autumn).

So that will put you at 3 - 4 separate trips for these 6 peaks.

If you were up for a week-long traverse, you could follow a variation of this YAMAP log and do Mt Yakushi -> Mt Kurobegoro -> Mt Washiba -> Mt Suisho. You can see from there he descended via Sugoroku hut, but you could keep going and tack on Mt Yari onto the end of that (see this log), and then even go to Mt Okuhotaka via the Daikiretto ridge, which would give you all 6 of the peaks in this area in one go.

Mt Tsurugi and Mt Tate

Speaking of scary ridges, it's common to hike Mt Tsurugi via the Betsuyama Ridge, a very tricky traverse with steep drops. It's dangerous enough that Mt Tsurugi is considered one of the most difficult hyakumeizan. Doing this route does let you combine it together with Mt Tate over a 2 or 3-day hike.

The alternative to this is to hike it via the Hayatsuki Ridge. This is less dangerous, but requires a fair bit of endurance as there's 2000m+ of elevation gain (usually done as a 2-day hike with a stay at their hut). This is the route I will probably take.

Central Alps

Mt Kisokoma-gatake can be done as a 3-hour day hike, while Mt Utsugi nearby is a longer 2-day hike. If you combine the two together, realistically speaking it may become a 3-day hike.

Southern Alps multi-day hikes

Finally, moving onto the Southern Alps. Similar to the Northern Alps, there's a couple of multi-day hiking options here, or even the possibility of doing it as one long traverse.

Although Mt Houou is in the Southern Alps, it's sort of on its own. Best done as a long 1-day hike or 2-day hike with a stay at the hut.

Mt Kita and Mt Aino should definitely be done together as they are quite close.

Mt Warusawa and Mt Akaishi similarly make a lot of sense together as a 3-day hike. You can also tack on Mt Hijiri to make it a 4-day hike.

Mt Shiomi is probably done on its own as a 2-day hike, or possibly together with Mt Kita and Mt Aino. And finally, you can do Mt Hijiri and Mt Tekari together as a 3 or 4-day loop hike.

If you are wondering if it's possible to do a Southern Alps traverse? Yes - see this YAMAP log for someone who did a 131km traverse covering Mt Hijiri -> Mt Akaishi -> Mt Warusawa -> Mt Shiomi -> Mt Aino -> Mt Kita -> Mt Senjo -> Mt Kaikomagatake. The only peaks they miss are Mt Houou and Mt Tekari.

Hiking in Hokkaido

And last but not least, we end this guide on the 9 remaining Hokkaido hikes. You might at first assume tackling Hokkaido and Kyushu will be quite similar, but a couple of Hokkaido's peaks are quite hard - Mt Poroshiri even gets the distinction of being "the hardest" hyakumeizan. Hokkaido comes with an increased risk of bears (bring bear spray) and the public transport options are quite bad, so I would recommend getting a rental car if you can.

Some crazy people do all 9 of Hokkaido's peaks in 9 - 10 consecutive days, but for the more sane of us, you will probably want to break this up into a couple of separate trips.

Mt Rishiri

This is the northernmost hyakumeizan, sitting on its own little island near Wakkanai airport, so it's quite convenient to do as a fly-in fly-out type of trip. And one plus - if you're scared of bears, it's maybe the only part of Hokkaido that is bear-free.

Day 1: Fly into Wakkanai airport, ferry to Rishiri island and spend the night
Day 2: Hike Mt Rishiri, fly home in the evening

Eastern Hokkaido

Eastern Hokkaido is quite a fun area to drive around. The only scary thing is that the Shiretoko Peninsula (where Mt Rausu is) has the highest concentration of brown bears in Hokkaido, and just last year a hiker died after being attacked by a bear mid-hike. As an example of a schedule you could follow:

Day 1: Fly in to Memanbetsu airport
Day 2: Hike Mt Shari
Day 3: Hike Mt Rausu
Day 4: Hike Mt Meakan
Day 5: Fly out via Kushiro airport

Of course this is quite the hard schedule, and you'd probably want to give yourself some buffer for rain. We did a variant of this via car ferry, and also visited Mt Asahi before heading home.

Daisetsuzan National Park

There are three hyakumeizans inside of Daisetsuzan National Park. Of all the Hokkaido hyakumeizans, Mt Asahi is the easiest, with public transport access and even a ropeway. It's also Hokkaido's tallest peak. As an example itinerary:

Day 1: Fly into Asahikawa airport
Day 2: Hike Mt Asahi
Day 3: Hike Mt Tomuraushi
Day 4: Hike Mt Tokachi and fly home in the evening

Although you'll probably want to give yourself a buffer! Mt Tomuraushi is quite long for a day hike.

Mt Yotei

Mt Yotei is a bit random, since it's not majorly close to any of the other hyakumeizans. If you were to combine it with another mountain, it would probably be Mt Poroshiri - there's a 3-hour drive between the two of them.

Otherwise, if you were to do this one on your own you'd fly in to New Chitose Airport. This is Sapporo's main airport so it could be nice to combine with a bit of sightseeing.

Mt Poroshiri

And right near the bottom of this hyakumeizan list is Mt Poroshiri. Along with Mt Sukai and Mt Tsurugi, it's one of the most difficult hyakumeizan, and requires a fair bit of logistics planning. It's a 2-day hike including a river crossing, and you have to book the hut and lodging in advance.

The minimal itinerary would be:

Day 1: Fly in from Tokyo to New Chitose Airport, drive to the lodgings near the trailhead
Day 2: Hike, stay at Mt Poroshiri's mountain hut
Day 3: Hike out, head back to the airport

As well as Mt Yotei which is a 3-hour drive away, I also see people combine Mt Poroshiri together with a drive up to Daisetsuzan National Park where they do one or more of the peaks there.

Mt Meakan and Mt Tokachi are both active volcanoes, and are currently closed as of writing this. Mt Rausu was also closed to hikers after a fatal bear attack in 2025, but reopened this year.

Mt Kusatsu-Shirane

Mt Kusatsu-Shirane gets its own section at the very bottom here, since the peak has been closed off since 2018. Even though a couple of the other hyakumeizans have been opened and closed over the years, Mt Kusatsu-Shirane seems to be the only one that is permanently closed. The popular hiking app YAMAP has a digital badge you can get for climbing all 100 peaks, but even they have set it so that you only need to climb 99/100 to receive it.

It seems from Oct 2026 they are planning on opening some hiking trails back up in the area, but access to the peak itself has been closed since its eruption in 2018.

Completing the hyakumeizan, and what comes next

This guide might read as an encouragement or endorsement to treat the hyakumeizan like a checklist, where you attempt to cram as many mountains you can into one trip. Really, here I could tell you - slow down, enjoy yourself! But to be honest I'd be pretty guilty of not following my own advice at times, so I can't really say that.

Nonetheless, some of my fondest memories of hiking these hyakumeizan have been the random side quests that have come out of it. I remember hiking Mt Amakazari, and then having the rest of our hiking plans rained out so we made a detour to Itoigawa's Jade Beach and being scammed by the "fox stones" that look like jade but are not. Or visiting Sendai after hiking Mt Zao and getting to see the Sendai Daikannon, the ninth tallest statue in the world (so cool!)

Some might argue that hiking is not something that should be gamified with a list like the hyakumeizan. But for me it's been such a positive in my life - it's given me a reason to visit random corners of Japan that I would never have considered visiting otherwise. I've had a lot of fun these past 4 years.

And if you're wondering what comes next after you complete the hyakumeizan? There is of course the Nihyakumeizan, which will send you on another journey all around Japan. More niche lists include the Hyakuteizan, or the Yamanashi Hyakumeizan if you want to stay a little closer to Tokyo. For those crazy enough, you could probably do the whole hyakumeizan list over again. I know I have a fair few hyakumeizans I'd love to revisit in my lifetime.

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The Everlasting

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 07:02:36 GMT

Book review for The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. I rated it 4.5 stars.

The Everlasting had been on my TBR for a while, but when I heard it had won both the 2026 Hugo and Locus Fantasy awards, that bumped it up to the top of the list. From the cover and the name, I'll be honest I had the assumption it was going to be your run-of-the-mill fantasy novel (but decent, considering it won an award) but there were a couple of twists in there that I found quite interesting.

For one the plot itself is quite unique for a fantasy as it hinges on time travel. A historian by the name of Owen goes back in time to record the story of legendary knight Sir Una Everlasting for future generations. The pair get stuck in a loop, and re-live the same events of Una's legendary exploits over and over as they try and rewrite history. The book swaps perspectives between the loops, and even if the pair don't recognise each other upon a new loop, it's like two souls reconnecting and a romance starts to develop over time (very cute, really).

Towards the end though, the time travel started to get more and more confusing as the author tried to figure out a way to wrap up the story neatly.

The other thing I enjoyed about the novel was the unconventional romance. Una is a very tall lady - you could probably imagine Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones. Owen is described as as more of a lanky, scholarly type. I don't think it mentioned heights specifically but Una is basically described as being huge and Owen not so much. Although it's technically a hetero pairing the gender roles are swapped and I'm not sure I've come across that in recent memory. (A bit niche but it does remind me of the anime Witchcraft Works).

Overall a very beautifully written fantasy/romance!

As a final side note, they are doing a Netflix adaption of this one! Gwendolyn Christie feels like the obvious choice, but also I'm not sure if she wants to get typecast permanently into the female knight type of role so it'll be interesting to see who they pick.

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PHILOCOFFEA, Omotesando

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Philocoffea is a coffee shop founded by Tetsu Kasuya, winner of the 2016 World Brewers Cup. Even if you haven’t heard of him, you may have heard of his famous “4:6” method for making pour-over coffee. Their first branch opened in 2018 in Chiba, and they have since expanded to five stores, including this Omotesando store which only recently opened in 2025.

The store is tucked away down a flight of stairs. I visited around midday on a Saturday, but surprisingly it wasn’t too crowded.

The interior of the store is fairly compact, and they make good use of Tetsu Kasuya’s champion status, selling “world champion series” coffee drip bags and noting particular beans as “World Champion Tetsu’s pick”.

On the menu is a selection of single origin beans for pour-overs, ranging from 800 to 1500 yen.

They did also have two 4000 yen beans but they were out of stock.

They have more natural than washed beans, which was nice - I feel like usually the ratio is the other way around in Tokyo. And you can also get cafe lattes for 1000 yen. The pour-overs are still a reasonable price if you compare them to any other fancy pour-over place in Tokyo, but 1000 yen does feel quite high for a cup of espresso-based coffee - I wouldn’t necessarily recommend coming here unless you happen to be a pour-over lover.

I picked their Panama Bambito Estate Yellow Catuai (natural process) which cost 1200 yen. The guy behind the counter was fairly friendly and helped me pick something that was not too acidic, but had some sweetness, and this was the one he recommended. I was a little tempted by their cold brew tasting set (2000 yen for 3 cups) but I wanted to try their pour-over since that is what they are famous for.

You’ll be handed a number for your order so you can take a seat in the meantime. They do ask if you want to watch your pour-over being made, in which case they will call out your order number before they start making it so you can come over to the counter for a look.

The owner of PHILOCOFFEA, Tetsu Kasuya, is famous for his 4:6 method, which is named for how he splits the amount of water into a 40/60 ratio. This is the method Kasuya used to win the World Brewers Cup, and it still seems to hold up 10 years later. They were selling a book on the method in the store. And if you buy their beans on their website, this is the method they recommend you use to make pour-overs.

In store though, they don’t actually use the 4:6 method. Instead they use Kasuya’s New Hybrid Method, a method he developed quite recently in 2025. It’s done with a Hario Switch brewer, and the big quirk with this method is that while for the first 2/3 you use a fairly standard 90°C water, in the final third you drop it to a very low 70°C. When I asked the barista in-store what temperature he was pouring at and he said 70, I was like “what??”

The other quirk is that they wait for the water to drain completely between pours. For those not familiar with pour-over, usually you’ll add the hot water in increments - say 50g in one go, then wait 10 seconds, do another 50g - and the water doesn’t drain from the dripper completely between pours, you’re just adding more to the top of it.

The barista explained to me that the reason for letting it drain completely each time is that then when you add more hot water, it will hit the coffee grounds directly, maximising the taste. They then also have to grind the beans quite coarsely compared to normal pour-overs, as otherwise the water will just take forever to drain.

They had samples showing the grind size.

I suppose grinding the beans more coarsely to begin with means that less of the flavour is extracted, so then they have to make sure the water directly hits the grounds, but then maybe that makes the coffee too strong so then they have to drop the temps to 70°C. It seems a bit of a fiddly dance between all the parameters, and I can understand why they would still continue to recommend the 4:6 method. The other downside of the New Hybrid is that you would need to go out and buy a Hario Switch brewer, while it’s more likely that people own V60s.

The seating area is fairly minimal - just a couple of stone benches in an open space. They do give you a nice tasting card to go with your cup as well.

I’ll admit I wasn’t super impressed by my cup, relative to how fancy this place is supposed to be and the complexity of their brewing method. Surprisingly, a touch of bitterness and acidity came through, although there was some sweetness in the aftertaste. If you’re in the area looking for a cup of decent pour-over and want that fancy vibe, then for sure hit this place up - but I don’t think it quite makes it onto my list of favourite coffee spots to visit.

Omotesando is known for being a very upscale and expensive area to shop for luxury brands. The beans they were selling at PHILOCOFFEA do a very good job at fitting in with the area, as they were quite expensive too. The branding is quite cool though - I like their stork logo, plus the beans are all numbered based on the batch.

I wonder what they do once they reach 999, start over again?

All the beans were sold in 200g bags, and started at about 3000 yen on the low end for a light roast. I would say this is still in the reasonable range for a premium brand here in Tokyo. On the higher end though they got up to 6000 yen or even 9000 yen for 200g.

No samples are out, but you can ask the staff if you would like to smell the beans

In my case, the Panama bean that I got (remember it was 1200 yen for a cup) cost 7300 yen for 200g. So relative to the price of the bean, the price of a cup doesn’t feel so bad. Maybe this is a place to drink coffee, rather than buy it.

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Coffee Wrights, Kuramae

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 02:26:32 GMT

Coffee Wrights is a roaster and cafe located only a 2-minute walk from Kuramae station. Although admittedly not a word I had ever come across, they take their name from a wright, who is “a person who makes things”. They offer both espresso and pour-over coffees, and have a small amount of seating on their second floor with free WiFi.

They had a bunch of single origin beans available (mostly washed) ranging from 750 to 950 yen for a cup of pour-over. They had bean samples out, but this was more just for looking and not for sniffing.

I decided to get their Ethiopia Nigusse Gemeda, which was noted as using a “slow dry natural” process (reading online, apparently this means they are dried over 20 - 30 days instead of the usual 10 - 15).

For their pour-overs, they use a Kalita Wave dripper. Interestingly though, it seems they use an Aeropress for their iced coffee?

They were also selling the Kalita Wave

The first floor is mostly taken up by their equipment, including a roasting machine in the corner.

And then up on the second floor they have a small amount of seating. I stopped by at 11:30am on a weekday, and it was pretty near empty (note they are closed on Mondays and Tuesdays).

The drink comes with a tasting card (yay) and the cup was a rather nice double-insulated one.

The pour-over I would rate as decent. It had both acidity and sweetness like it’s marked on the tasting card, although not quite to the point where I could identify the notes of strawberry mentioned.

This was my second coffee of the day after I visited Single O in the morning and I’ll admit I did enjoy that one more. Although that’s less of a criticism of Coffee Wrights, and possibly more about me starting to dial in a bit more on my tasting preference (Single O’s cup had notes of plum, so I suppose while still sweet, it’s a bit more of a grounded sweetness). Single O’s staff were a lot more friendly though, so I think vibe-wise Single O was also the winner for me.

From the second floor you have a bit of an opportunity to do some people-watching if you get a window seat, plus there was a small collection of coffee books.

My eye was drawn to this book called 咖啡空少 World Coffee Shops, a book by a former flight attendant from Taiwan, listing a bunch of cafes he had enjoyed in Tokyo. The book was written in both English and traditional Chinese. I suppose not too helpful if you are a regular Japanese customer here, but perfect for me.

Of course Coffee Wrights was listed in the book, which probably explains why the cafe had this book stocked (two or three copies, in fact) to begin with.

The book was from 2018 so it may be a little dated now, but it was fun to flick through and see all of the usual suspects - Onibus, Fuglen, Glitch, Supreme and Mameya. He also had Coffeehouse Nishiya (since closed, and replaced by Coffee Counter Nishiya), Coffee Valley and Jubilee. There were also others that have been on my list to visit including Little Nap, Obscura, Passage, Nozy, Light Up, Switch and Bear Pond. The book also lists the prices of the coffee, so it was a bit of a time capsule back to 2018 (Mameya was apparently selling theirs at 350 - 1100 yen, while it’s jumped up to 700 yen - 3000 yen today).

He credits the opening of Blue Bottle in Kiyosumi Shirakawa in 2015 with kicking off third wave coffee in Tokyo. This is a suburb I am yet to visit - I had previously heard it was a coffee hotspot at least 10 years ago, but I’ll have to go investigate for myself whether it is still a thing, or has now been superseded by places like Kuramae. The book mentions his four favourite cafes in Kiyosumi Shirakawa as Blue Bottle, Allpress, Cream of the Crop (unfortunately closed permanently in Aug 2026) and Arise Coffee Roasters.

Back to Coffee Wrights, they do also sell their beans in the range of 1200 - 1800 yen for 100g.

I didn’t pick any up today (they also have an online store if you were curious) but I will note that the bean I drank was being sold for 1800 yen per 100g.

In another corner they had some awards.

Coffee Wrights’ head roaster Takuto Sakaibara (who is also a jazz saxophonist - how cool) has won a couple of awards over the years.

Apparently there is also such a thing as an Aeropress Championship, and the cafe had a cool poster of it up on the wall.

Plus a rather intriguing-sounding El Salvador Pacamara Week.

It seems it’s a yearly event where the Embassy of El Salvador collaborates with cafes to showcase their Pacamara bean. I don’t think I’ve come across that bean before, and although the Pacamara Week is long past now, the poster will be pretty useful as a list of cafes that may be worth checking out.

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Never Let Me Go

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 08:31:30 GMT

Book review for Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I rated it 4 stars.

After reading The House of the Scorpion, the other book that came to mind for me on a similar topic was Never Let Me Go which I decided to pick up for a re-read (I last read it in 2020).

The book is told in a simple first person style from the perspective of Kathy, a woman reminiscing on her days at a boarding school called Hailsham. At first everything seems rather immature and pointless, with her reliving inconsequential moments with friends Ruth and Tommy. But Ishiguro lets the true dystopian nature of this world he's built slowly creep up on you.

The book is simply written, but with a romance subplot and the melancholic tone throughout, it really tugs at the heart strings.

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The House of the Scorpion

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:49:17 GMT

Book review for The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer. I rated it 4 stars.

A sci-fi book set in the distant future where cloning technology has been invented. The book follows the story of a young boy named Matt, the clone of a rich drug lord named El Patron.

The book is labelled as YA, which I’ll admit biased my opinion on it going in. Part of the reason for this label is because we follow Matt from ages 6 to 15, so it’s a bit of a coming of age story. Although it’s YA, the themes of the book are serious with the topic of clones and free will. Matt endures abuse and the isolation of not being recognised as a human being. We also see Matt make immature mistakes as he mistakenly models his behaviour on El Patron who he idolises.

But in keeping with its YA label, the plot itself is less a philosophical question - of course Matt deserves to be recognised as a human being - and is partially a bit of an adventure story to cater to a young audience. I really enjoyed the world-building of the initial third of the book, but I felt the plot lost me a little towards the middle and the end.

This was a rather niche book that I only came across as part of a book club (actually my first ever book club I participated in) and I probably wouldn’t have picked up the book otherwise. It seems it was a runner up for the Newberry Medal (an American award for children’s literature) in 2003, but otherwise has mostly slipped off of the radar. Although apparently it’s still on some middle school reading lists according to Reddit, but I suppose I never came across it since I grew up in Australia. Wouldn't necessarily recommend it to an adult and I think it reaffirms for me that I shouldn't be reading YA, but an interesting enough read.

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September 2026

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 09:53:41 GMT

September was a rainy, rainy month here in Tokyo. I spent the first week of it down in Sydney visiting my Mum, then came back to Tokyo and holed up in my apartment for much of the rest of it. Suddenly the skies cleared though, and I got in some hiking right at the end of September, which is why this newsletter is a little delayed coming out.

Hiking Hokkaido's Mt Poroshiri and Mt Yotei

I did a road trip around Hokkaido in August, so September had me slowly making my way through my blog posts for that. The first mountain we hiked was Mt Poroshiri. It's considered to be one of the hardest hyakumeizan due to the amount of logistics planning involved, plus a bunch of river-crossing which is quite a rare thing for hiking in Japan.

Poroshiri was an absolutely gorgeous mountain, and I feel so grateful that I got the opportunity to climb it with such good weather.

The second major peak we climbed in Hokkaido was Mt Yotei - at 9 hours round trip it's still a solidly long hike, but in comparison to Mt Poroshiri it felt pretty easy!

Visiting Hakodate

Hokkaido had quite a bit of rain while we were there as well, so although we originally had more hiking-specific plans, we instead took a detour to the port city of Hakodate. We ticked off its two most famous attractions - the star-shaped Goryokaku Fort and the nighttime view from the top of Mt Hakodate.

Aside from that, I challenged myself to find Hakodate's best coffee, we visited Hakodate's famous burger chain called Lucky Pierrot, and did a quick hike up the nearby Mt Hokkaido-Komagatake.

Hiking Mt Tarumae

To round off our Hokkaido road trip, we also visited Mt Tarumae which is really quite an awesome mountain - would recommend if you happen to be in the area. Sometimes the effort-to-views ratio for hikes isn't too great (long hike up in the forest, pop out to enjoy the view for a second kind of thing) but Mt Tarumae is excellent since you get to spend most of it doing a hike up around its crater rim.

Birding and coffee in Sydney

Then I was off to Sydney to help out my Mum with some things. I'll admit when I first moved to Japan, I always found heading back to Sydney to be pretty lame and I was just keen to get back to Tokyo. Now after more than 4 years away, I'm finding more and more that I'm able to appreciate Sydney's merits. Not that I want to move back there, mind you! But these days I'm finding it's not so bad for a visit.

While there I also got to enjoy two of my favourite hobbies - birding and coffee.

Visiting a different country is a pretty easy way to add to your list of birds. I logged about 10 new ones in Australia (well, new to the blog - I have seen most of them before) and I've now got 88 total on my birding list.

Visiting Single O in Sydney and Tokyo

While down in Sydney, I also visited Single O, a cafe that's apparently rather famous for its coffee. I had never heard of it while growing up in Sydney, but I wasn't paying that much attention to coffee/cafes back then either.

Single O also has five locations in Tokyo, so once I was back home I decided to head out for a little visit to their roaster location in Ryogoku. The coffee was as good as the one I had in Sydney, and it was interesting to see the little differences in the menu options due to the different coffee culture we have here in Tokyo versus Sydney.

Living like a hermit during Silver Week

Japan had its Silver Week of public holidays in mid-September. My husband was gone during that time for a work trip, so I had some grand plans to head off on a solo road trip up north or out to the Alps to tick off some more hyakumeizans. To be honest though, I was kind of tired? Which is fair enough, so instead I decided to just chill at home and not talk to anyone for 9 days straight.

(Well, a tiny bit of an exaggeration - I did attend one meetup event and also went to the gym, supermarket, etc.)

I finished off my first knitting project.

And I did a watercolour Skillshare tutorial, which I think doesn't look too bad.

In the spirit of honesty though, this was my first attempt before I signed up for the Skillshare account.

I think a tutorial just makes it really easy since they tell you how to properly layer the colours, and I suppose being able to translate a photo into a set of outlines in ink is a skill in itself. And in a tutorial they do that step for you, so you just have to copy their sketch.

And then I even had the time to pick up a video game, so you know I was really going stir-crazy at that point. It was this super-cute one called Tiny Bookshop.

Basically you run a little bookshop out of a trailer you tow behind your car, and you can recommend books to people that come into your store. The really neat part is they use book names and plot summaries for actual real books, so you can enjoy finding new book recommendations for yourself as well. If you like books, would recommend.

Books I reviewed this month

Some of the reviews I put up on the blog this month include:

Middlemarch: considered the best novel (published in English) of all time by The Guardian. It's a rather chonky 800+ page classic, and has a similar vibe to Pride and Prejudice, except it has a bit more of a realistic take as it focuses on all the ways that things can go wrong after marriage.
The Love Hypothesis: I love a good rom-com book (although usually I just bash on them - it's rare for me to give it a good review). In Love Hypothesis's case, it's become enough of a hit to have a movie version released on Amazon Prime. Unfortunately the movie didn't quite live up to the book, and I wouldn't recommend you go reading the book either unless you happen to be a Reylo stan as it's actually a former Star Wars fanfic turned proper novel.

I also have to admit that, like I mentioned in my last newsletter, I am still yet to finish reading The Odyssey. I haven't seen the movie here in Japan yet (the IMAX tickets just get booked out so quickly...) so I've been procrastinating on finishing it off.

Hiking Mt Tate and Mt Shirouma

I finished off September with 3 days of hiking in the Northern Alps - a day hike out to Mt Tate, and then a 2-day hike up Mt Shirouma. To be honest I had been in a bit of a solo hiking slump lately. I still really enjoy hiking with my husband or my friends but I couldn't quite muster the urge to head out on a 4 - 5 hour drive to a distant mountain by myself. Maybe it was the fact that I hadn't hiked in an entire month, but I was quite motivated this time and it turned into a really nice solo trip.

Expect to see posts for those next month!

What's next in October

I mentioned in my July newsletter that I was trying to make new friends, but my initial attempts via meeting up with strangers off Reddit haven't really turned into too much. I think partially it's because you are not going to click with everyone, but also it's surprisingly hard to schedule a time to meet (some people are very slow at replying, or they're busy travelling, or hey, I've been pretty busy lately too). I figured maybe I needed a change of strategy, so I decided to sign up for a bunch of events/meetups in October. Let's see how this goes.

And of course, I have a couple of hikes planned, so fingers crossed the weather plays nicely for me in October.

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Single O Ryogoku Roastworks/Cafe

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Single O is a popular Australian coffee chain that also has five stores open in Tokyo - actually more than Australia itself (which only has three). After my recent visit down to the original Single O branch in Sydney, I was pretty impressed by their coffee and decided I wanted to check out one of the Tokyo branches as well to see how it compared.

The other thing influencing my decision was that there was a small easter egg near the back of the Sydney menu. It mentions that if you show a photo of the menu to them they will give you a free coffee at one of their Tokyo branches! I was a little sceptical but I decided to go on this side quest to figure out whether this was true or not.

I went with Single O’s Ryogoku branch as it has a roaster on-site, and I had some other cafes I wanted to check out in the nearby area. Ryogoku is the area next to Kuramae, one of my favourite spots for coffee, and is most famous for being the home of sumo wrestling and also the Edo-Tokyo Museum which is on my list to check out at some point.

The Roastworks is a little out of the way - 800m from Ryogoku’s metro station and museum and down a regular street. They have a sign pointing the way, but really you’d have to be coming here specifically to spot it.

On their menu is a fairly similar array of coffee options to the Sydney branch, although the food selection is more limited.

Australian cafes tend to have more of a brunch culture where you get a proper meal along with your coffee, but with serious coffee spots in Tokyo I find that the coffee tends to be the main thing on the menu along with some small snacks, so this makes sense.

The prices are pretty similar between Sydney and Tokyo, which would usually be weird because Tokyo has a lower cost of living than Sydney - but I find specialty coffee is one of the things that comes at a more premium price in Tokyo which explains that. For Tokyo cafe prices, this is fairly reasonable (650 yen for a cappuccino).

For their pour-over coffee, they stock a small range of single origin beans (800 - 1000 yen) plus two blends (700 - 800 yen). Interestingly, no natural processed beans (only anaerobic washed, washed and honey). One of the blends available on the menu was their Firecracker, a summer blend they do each year that was apparently inspired by the Sumida River Fireworks Festival.

Of course my eyes were drawn to the single origins, so I decided to go with their Hakuna Matata bean (1000 yen) which uses honey processing. The staff at the counter was super friendly, and she recommended this one for me since I mentioned I didn’t want too acidic a cup.

I also showed her the “free coffee” easter egg I had seen on the Sydney menu, and she had never seen that before - but after checking with another staff member in the back she honoured it (nice!), so I decided I may as well splurge and get a banana bread with espresso butter (800 yen) as well.

It comes in a fancy Kinto carafe

The Finca Hakuna Matata bean is from Ecuador, and Googling online the backstory for the husband-and-wife team that grow this bean is rather impressive. They met when they were working as a war nurse / war trauma surgeon for Doctors Without Borders, and then decided to start a coffee farm.

My thoughts on the coffee - this was a pretty good pour-over! There was no acidity or bitterness at all. The tasting notes mention plum and caramel, and for sure there is some sweetness, but it’s more of a grounded sweetness (like a plum) if that makes sense.

The banana bread was fairly regular, but considering it’s 800 yen here but 13 AUD in Australia (1430 yen) this felt like more of a reasonable price to pay. It’s also funny to see that the amount of butter they put on the bread here in Japan is less than the big dollop you get in Australia, probably just because the Japanese are more restrained with food portions in general.

I was expecting more of an espresso taste from the butter but it tasted like regular butter, really. It seems the banana bread is a pretty key staple here, even featuring on a sweater for sale that was hanging on the wall.

As for the store layout itself, it is rather small as the roaster is the main part of it. Unfortunately it’s all in a separate room so there’s not too much to see for regular visitors.

Probably the cupping room - and the roasting equipment was adjoining the cafe rather than a part of it

There are four tables, a small counter space and then one table outside.

I suppose it must get pretty crowded on the weekends but it was absolutely empty when I stopped by at 10:30am on a weekday.

They’ve kept the same overall design as the Australian one (an industrial orange/black feel) plus the overhead hanging paper cups.

Funny design

And their cold brew on tap - actually only two of the labels say “cold” so I suppose maybe it does hot coffee as well?

I saw one person buy one - it’s a super fancy machine, you just pop the cup underneath and it spurts out the correct amount in one go.

Also there were these big plastic tubs of Vegemite on the top counter (they sell Vegemite sandwiches).

Nicely lit by a stray sun ray - befitting its status as a superior breakfast spread

Aside from the t-shirt merch, they had a small selection of branded coffee gear.

And of course, they were selling some beans. The prices range from 1300 - 2000 yen for 100g of their single origin, although they only sell in 150g or 250g sizes depending on the bean. Their blend beans are as cheap as 880 yen per 100g (but again, you need to buy 250g). Fairly standard prices for Tokyo for stores with a bit of a “premium” brand like this one. And I don’t think too far off what they were selling for in Sydney. Maybe their fancier 150g beans are pricier than what the Sydney branch was stocking.

I didn’t buy any as I still had quite a lot left over from my trip to the one in Sydney. In Japan, it’s very standard for stores to offer beans in 100g and 200g sizes, while I noticed in Australia the default bag size is 250g. It seems like Single O has mostly gone with the Australian standard and packaging here and was also stocking 250g bags.

The beans were completely different to what was being sold in Sydney though, which I found interesting. I thought maybe they would just source the same unroasted beans for both Sydney and Tokyo, and then roast them on-site, but it looks like they source completely different beans as well. The ratio was also interesting to compare to Australia’s - only two blend beans here, with five single origins, while the split is swapped in Australia with six blends and three single origins. Of course, Japan has a bigger filter coffee culture than Australia does, while Australia is huge on their espressos (which generally use blend beans) so that makes sense.

I did ask the staff at the counter if the beans that they choose cater more to a Japanese taste here? The answer is probably yes, although I wasn’t able to get much more info than that (fair enough). She was super friendly though! Apparently she had spent some time working in Australia at a cafe as well. I wasn’t sure if I was going to get a “g’day mate” when I walked in the door but we had a regular conversation in Japanese which I appreciated (occasionally people assume that I can’t speak it).

Overall, a pretty decent cup of coffee. If you’re looking to head to a Single O specifically, it may pay to visit the Hamacho location as that seems to be a tiny bit bigger. Of course, visiting here and then combining it with a trip to the Edo-Tokyo Museum would be pretty nice as well.

Or you could head for a walk along the Sumida River which is right nearby - with great views of the Tokyo Skytree

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Knitting Project 01: PetiteKnit's Penny Gloves

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In a very, very overdue update to my last post on knitting, I have finally finished my first proper knitting project - a pair of fingerless gloves using PetiteKnit’s Penny Gloves pattern. There was a lot of learning, frustration and procrastination on this project here, but I got through it! I originally started on the gloves in May, and it felt pretty silly to be knitting in the middle of summer, but it has all worked out because the temperatures have started to drop again and it’s getting closer to the season when I will actually be able to wear them.

This was my first pattern from PetiteKnit, which is a super popular brand for knitting patterns. The patterns look pretty modern, and they do a very good job of marketing their designs on their website so it all looks very chic. I’m happy with how the gloves turned out so I’ll be buying another pattern from them in the future.

Choosing the yarn

So I picked my project, but then the first hurdle was figuring out yarn. Yarn is so confusing since there’s so many different types and sizes. Did you know there is even possum yarn? Australian possums are very cute but they are unfortunately also an invasive species in New Zealand, so they use the fur they harvest from the pests. The more you know.

Anyway, in the case of PetiteKnit, they actually have recommended yarns that go along with their patterns so I decided to save myself the hassle and just go with the Cardiff Cashmere in their 733 Baobag (khaki green) colour. I’m not too sure what the yarn scene is like in Japan - I assume maybe it could be cheaper to buy local - so I’ll have to figure that out eventually.

Picking your needles

The next question is, what knitting needles to use? A scarf just has you going back and forth, so you can use regular knitting needles. When you imagine a glove though, it’s a circular tube, so the knitting technique is a little different and is known as “knitting in the round”. There were three different techniques I came across:

Using double-pointed needles
Using circular needles: these have a wire attached in between them so you can create a loop
The “magic loop” approach with circular needles: basically with regular circulars, the length of the needle + wire needs to match the circumference of what you are knitting. With the magic loop you can use super long wires and still make small items

The magic loop seemed the most useful since I can just re-use the needles for other projects, so that’s what I went with.

I found the technique super tricky to wrap my head around at first, so I had an Obsidian file where I screenshotted a bunch of reference pics from a video and kept referring back to it.

English vs Continental vs Combined Knitting

As I mentioned in my last post on knitting there are two main ways of knitting - English and Continental. Originally this would’ve been influenced by what part of the world you lived in, or who taught you knitting, but nowadays with the internet I suppose these lines blur a bit. To make it more confusing there’s also Combination knitting, which uses a combination of Continental and Eastern techniques. I ended up going with this, as although I liked knitting in the Continental way I wasn’t much of a fan of purling that way and I preferred the Continental approach.

Actually knitting the gloves

Gloves have quite a small surface area, so I’m sure the actual hours I spent knitting on this project wasn’t too long. (Actually I probably did a quarter of the project just on the drive to Mt Haku a couple of months back). What I found though was that when I got to a tricky bit - figuring out how to do the thumbs, or fixing a hole - I would really procrastinate on it, since I knew it involved sitting down at my computer for a couple of hours scrolling YouTube videos and figuring out how to do the thing.

I also ended up with quite a large hole near the thumb of the first glove I knitted since I made a mistake. I followed a tutorial on the second glove, which still produced a hole but a much smaller one. I think a hole is kind of inevitable. But with some fix-ups at the end it basically becomes invisible.

The second glove

The pattern actually calls for 2 balls of yarn, but I only bought one to begin with. As I was approaching the end of my first glove, I saw that I might be able to just about squeeze it all into one ball. (I figured this out by weighing the first glove versus the remaining yarn). I made the length of the glove a bit shorter (going from 12cm to 9cm) and in the end I had a bit of yarn to spare. I don’t really think the gloves need to be 12cm long to begin with, they feel plenty-long at 9cm, so this felt like a fair trade-off to me.

The one regret with this was that it mentions you are not supposed to tighten the top bit of the glove too much when you are binding off - and I did - so it does feel a bit tight around the fingers on one of my hands.

I suppose we’ll have to see if I get much wear out of it this winter to see if it was actually worth it! It’s a fun little project though - might want to make a separate pair for myself in a different colour, or make a pair as a gift at some point. Especially as it just fits in one ball of yarn it’s rather convenient.

Resources I used

Getting started

Casting on
Combination knitting and a second and third reference for it - it took me a while to wrap my head around
Magic loop
M1R and M1L

For the thumb of the gloves

Backwards loop
This video on dealing with the thumb saved my life. There was this step in the instructions that says “Pick up and knit 2 sts” and I was just so absolutely confused by it.
Dealing with holes in the thumb - to be honest with the thumb hole I just randomly started stitching bits together and it turned out okay.

Fixing mistakes

Finishing off

The other thing that becomes important is understanding when a stitch is twisted, especially with combination knitting where you are twisting stitches on purpose. If you scroll down on this post there’s a nice little graphic that shows the difference.

Project summary

Pattern

Penny Gloves from PetiteKnit, 35 DKK or 840 yen

Yarn

1 ball of Cardiff Cashmere - Classic - 733 (Baobab)
3,410 yen including shipping from k2tog, a Japanese retailer which has super-fast shipping times (like arrived the next day). I highly recommend them.
Pattern mentions needing 2 balls but if you only knit the gloves to 9cm instead of the recommended 12cm it will fit.

Needles

HiyaHiya 80cm/3cm
About 1700 yen from amirisu, which is the online store for a popular knitting shop called Walnut in Japan. Their shipping turnaround time was like a week, so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend them.

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The Love Hypothesis

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 03:02:39 GMT

Book review for The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood. I rated it 4 stars.

I originally read this in 2021, but came back for a re-read as they recently released a movie adaption of this over on Amazon Prime. The book uses the classic "fake dating turned actual dating" trope and is about Olive, a PhD student in biology at Stanford getting with Dr Carlsen, a professor who has a reputation for being very mean to his students.

For me, my favourite part of the book is knowing that it was originally a Kylo Ren / Rey fanfiction. A lot of the physical similarities are left in - Olive is tall like Rey, Adam is described as being "towering and broad" (Ben Swolo meme, anyone?) And not to mention Adam is literally named after Adam Driver, who played Kylo Ren in the movies. Imagining Kylo Ren doing all this weird romance novel shit like pushing a car shirtless across the carpark just makes things unintentionally funny.

I've since read a couple of Ali Hazelwood's other books, and she has a bit of a pre-occupation with describing the male leads as being massive and huge (I literally wrote "fucking lmao" in my Kindle notes for one of those quotes) which can be a bit cringey at times.

There are other smaller references - Adam and Olive's favourite colours are black and white respectively (like their sides of the Force). A character mentions that Adam might almost have an 8-pack, which seems in reference to that SNL skit on Kylo Ren. And Olive even wears a Star Wars t-shirt at some point.

Of course then the other fun part is trying to map the characters to their Star Wars equivalents. Olive's best friend Anh, is an Asian girl - so it's clearly Rose. And then Rose has a love interest (who is also friends with Olive) by the name of Jeremy. Jeremy has red hair so it was kind of a mystery for me who he was supposed to be. Considering he's friends with Rose and Rey, I had assumed it had to be Finn, since he gets with Rose in the Star Wars movies. But surprisingly it turns out he's General Hux? Which is kind of a weird pairing.

There's a side plot with Olive's roommate Malcolm, who has a crush on Adam's friend Holden. They're supposed to correlate to Poe and Finn. (Although I've never read much, I bet there is a lot of Poe x Finn fanfiction out there so I'm surprised I couldn't put the dots together sooner). For some reason I got it in my head that Holden was an aged-down version of Harrison Ford and had ended up as Adam's friend in this version (weird, I know).

As for a review on the movie while we are here - ultimately, the most amusing part of the book for me is the fact that it's based on a Kylo Ren / Rey fanfiction. Of course then watching it as a movie where the male lead is definitely NOT Adam Driver, I just couldn't quite enjoy it as much. Not to mention the book drops hints that Adam likes Olive from near the start of the book, and so it's fun to watch his pining play out while Olive remains oblivious. Sort of like a modern Mr Darcy.

But I didn't quite get that vibe from the movie - it felt a lot more cringey, especially in the earlier scenes where the characters aren't able to convincingly play off the whole fake-dating thing. Not to mention Adam comes across better in the book. In the movie he feels more like an awkward anti-social robot. Of course I kind of skipped through bits of the movie and watched it while doing the dishes and so on, so maybe me not properly sitting down and watching it also contributed to that.

As a random fun fact that really tickled me though, the male actor in the movie is a British guy by the name of Tom Bateman. Guess who he's married to?? Daisy Ridley (i.e. the actress for Rey in the Star Wars movies). How funny is that!

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The Grounds Coffee Factory, Sydney

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 06:47:56 GMT

The Grounds is a small chain of coffee shops in Sydney with over-the-top, very Instagrammable decor. Since it’s not too far from Sydney’s airport I like going there for a “bye Emma, see you next time” breakfast with my Mum before I hop on a plane back to Tokyo.

Their original store in Alexandria opened in 2012, while their Coffee Factory is a more recent addition, having opened in 2024. It reminds me a little of the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Tokyo which integrates all the coffee roasting equipment with a large cafe space.

At the Coffee Factory, they have big silos where they store their coffee beans before roasting.

We got to see it in action - one of the staff was hoisting a bag of beans over their feeder.

The beans get moved up towards the ceiling in tubes, and then plop into the silo specific to that bean.

I’m a big fan of the decor too with all the green and orange.

I only got into pour-over coffee just this year, so pre-2026 Emma would have just stuck with a cappuccino (which is decent enough). But now I find it quite exciting to be able to pick out a bean to try, and the Grounds have a pretty decent selection.

The beans available - it's actually a screen, which I'm sure makes it a lot easier to swap out

They have 4 blend beans, plus at least 7 different single origin beans available.

I got their Colombia Hulia “Candy Blast” ($13) which has notes of watermelon. This was in their Experimental bean category so I think was one of the most expensive.

It came with a fancy, rather large tasting card - I love it. There’s a wide variety of tasting cards I’ve seen across the many cafes I’ve visited in Tokyo - from not having one at all, to pieces of paper they’ve cut out into squares, to rather fancy-looking embossed cards and each time I get a new one I get reminded of that American Psycho scene.

The Colombia Candy Blast was pretty smooth and very sweet! I had had a “watermelon sugar” bean at Headlands a couple days prior, but this one wins in terms of watermelon-ness. I think the one criticism I would have is that it had the slightest hint of bitterness. Looking at the tasting card, it’s marked as having an “omni” roast level.

I had to Google that one online, but it means that it’s a bean that suits both pour-overs and espresso. Since light roast works better with pour-overs and darker for espresso, I suppose then it falls somewhere in the middle. I feel like that’s a bit of a waste - just make it a light roast and let us pour-over lovers enjoy it, c’mon! But I suppose considering espresso is much more popular in Australia it’d make sense to play both sides.

My Mum got their Ethiopia Yirgacheffe batch brew ($6).

It’s only a batch brew (i.e. made in bulk) so I wasn’t too impressed with this, I’ll admit - I’ve had better Yirgacheffes. A nice smooth taste though, and a nice touch that they still give you a tasting card for it.

For food, we grabbed a croissant and avocado on toast.

It’s tasty, but a whopping $24 (that’s Australian prices for you).

As we made our way to pay and leave, we bumped into a super friendly guy named Nagi who offered to give us a tour of the back roastery area. Turns out he was the manager!

He was rattling off so many facts as he showed us around that I could barely keep up. Since they also sell their beans to over 100 stores, they need to roast in the range of I think 5000kg beans a week (!) and have capacity for up to 10,000kg.

They have a little cupping area as well where they taste-test their beans.

With their range of blend beans, you need to keep the flavour of these consistent over the long-term, so with the tasting you can change the ratio of the beans that make up the blend.

Nagi knew the percentage of Colombia bean used in each blend - basically a big coffee geek (he does the cupping too), which is funny because apparently he wasn’t even into beans before he started being the manager here. But I suppose he fell in love with it after that.

Of course I had to ask him what his favourite bean was - he told me it was their Beanstalker blend. After drinking Beanstalker for two weeks, he says all other coffee tastes like shit in comparison.

He also pointed out to us this coffee bean sorting machine.

I’ve seen employees doing this by hand at fancier coffee stores in Japan, but basically sometimes there might be a defective bean in a batch that you want to remove. I didn’t realise you could automate that.

Nagi also told us that nearly everything used in the store was real, with the one exception being the bags of beans stored up above the feeder.

All those beans stacked up on the left there - just for show.

In reality, they come in on a pallet like you see on the ground wrapped in plastic there. With each bag weighing 50kg+, you can imagine it’d be a pain to get the beans up there and then back down again.

Of course you can also buy their beans. For a blend bean like their Beanstalker, it’s $18 AUD (2000 yen) for 250g, while their single origins can go up to $40.

I didn’t buy any this time, but their beans come in this little cardboard packaging which actually makes for the perfect filter paper holder so I’ve kept it around.

The Grounds has 4 locations in total right now, but they’re making plans for a 5th and 6th, with one on the edge of the Sydney Botanical Gardens. Will definitely add that to my list to check out whenever it does open.

If you were interested in going, their Coffee Factory location is pretty accessible as it’s near Redfern train station, which is only one stop away from Central (Sydney’s largest train station). They accept online bookings, which I recommend you do if you are planning on going on the weekend. This time around it was a weekday, and since we were there around 8am it was pretty empty. Japanese cafes open quite late generally but the Grounds opens at 7:30 - I love that part of Australian cafe culture!

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Headlands Coffee, Sydney

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I honestly don’t know where the best coffee is at in Sydney (other than the places I used to visit nearby my office when I worked here). So, similar to Single O, I only found out about Headlands Coffee via living in Japan. Specifically, I had visited this cafe in in Koenji called Porta which was selling Headlands beans. I thought its Platypus logo was really cute and I ended up buying two packs, so I figured I better make a visit to the shop itself at some point.

I’ll admit Headlands conjured up images of a rocky coastline like the Sydney Heads, but actually the cafe is in a Sydney suburb known as Summer Hill. Although it’s only 15 minutes by train from the CBD, I’ll say off the bat that if you’re visiting Sydney, I wouldn’t recommend coming here since it really is just your average Sydney suburb (albeit a seemingly nice one).

We visited on the weekend which turned out to be a pretty busy time, as there was a local market going on. Luckily most people got takeaway coffees, so it was still quite easy to grab a seat.

Cappuccino for $5, filter coffees range from $8 to $10

They had a coffee “omakase” on the menu but instead we decided to just get two cups of pour-over coffee, since the omakase set was actually an espresso shot, milk coffee and a cold brew. And I’m not too keen on drinking an espresso shot.

The Google reviews had also mentioned their croissants were quite good so we also picked up two of those.

$9 - $11 for a croissant

Also on the menu are some toasties (i.e. toasted cheese sandwiches)

We got their Colombia Watermelon Sugar (Castillo natural) and their Ethiopia Halo (Heirloom washed).

No tasting card, ah well!

What I also found interesting on the menu was that for all of their specialty beans, you could choose to get it either as a straight espresso or as a filter coffee. (I also noted that Australia seems to use the term “filter” exclusively here and not pour-over). Tokyo is fairly big on its pour-over, and while I might see people being able to choose between pour-over or a milk-based coffee there, seeing just straight espresso was a bit of a surprise for me.

As for the coffee itself - the Colombia watermelon sugar had a very sweet fragrance and quite a unique smell. Although there was the tiniest of a bitter aftertaste, it wasn’t sour at all and I quite enjoyed it. The Ethiopia Halo tasted like a washed bean (which I am admittedly biased against) with hints of tea, but I think my Mum quite enjoyed it.

I was quite curious to see their pour-over setup.

The phone on the stand, I think they use that as a timer or maybe for the recipe, not sure.

They were using a rather unique style of dripper called the Clever Dripper, which is an immersion-style. Basically, none of the hot water drips out of the dripper - it just stays in there until they release it at the end.

The owner of Headlands Coffee is a guy by the name of Takumi Sakamoto, who won the Australian Coffee Roasting Championship in 2019. Now the fact that he’s Japanese isn’t 100% a surprise since when I visited Porta the owner there had mentioned Headlands was run by an Australian/Japanese couple.

So although I want to compare Headlands as an example of a Sydney coffee shop against what I visit in Tokyo normally, I suppose it’s not really a fair comparison - I assume this place has at least a bit of Japanese influence.

There's a little Daruma on the shelf too.

I think the owner possibly might have been sitting at the counter (I realised later when I googled the store’s name and found a picture of his face). The packaging of the beans he had with him caught my eye.

Sneaky photo

Looks to be Coffee Supreme!

Taking a quick look at Headlands’s bean selection, the packaging was super cute. You can see the full range on their online store, which costs $30 - $45 for 250g.

They also had a loyalty program going as well.

They didn’t have too much stock of the beans (only washed/decaf/blend) so I decided to give it a skip. I saw one lady who bought like 4 - 5 boxes of beans in one go though (wow).

They even sell a bit of merch, which I coincidentally saw one guy rocking at the markets outside.

Nice tote bag

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Single O, Surry Hills

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:31:19 GMT

While on my recent trip to Sydney, I made a visit to a popular cafe called Single O. Although they’re originally an Australian cafe, they have since expanded to Japan and actually have more stores in Tokyo (five) than they do in Australia (three). I wasn’t too much of a coffee snob while growing up in Sydney, so funnily enough I didn’t learn about Single O until after I moved to Tokyo. But I figured rather than visiting one of the spots in Tokyo, I should give the OG store in Surry Hills a go first.

The “O” in their name stands for Origin, and if you’re not super-familiar with coffee beans, it means all the beans in a batch were sourced from a single location, rather than being a blend of multiple beans. This generally makes for a tastier cup of coffee.

O for Origin

Nowadays, you can expect to be able to drink a cup of single origin coffee at any good coffee store, so you’d almost think it’s a bit too generic of a name to be giving a coffee shop. In Single O’s defence though, they have been around since 2003 - maybe when the concept of single origin coffee is not quite as common sense as it is today.

The cafe didn’t seem to have its name on a sign anywhere, so it would almost be hard to tell if you’ve found the right spot - but the hordes of people give it away.

We arrived a little before noon on a weekday, and had about a 40 minute wait to be seated. It seems to be a fairly popular spot for tourists (to be fair, I guess I am technically a tourist as well) and is probably on some sort of “best coffee in Sydney” list somewhere.

A cappuccino is $6.5 which I think is a little on the expensive side even by Sydney standards.

We decided to grab their Filter Flight, which comes with 3 small cups of coffee for $12 (12 AUD = 1350 yen = 8.5 USD). This felt like a super-reasonable price to pay compared with Tokyo - I’d expect something like this to cost 1500 - 2000 yen over there. The cost of living is lower in Tokyo than in Sydney for most things, but good coffee is one of its outliers.

Onto the three cups of coffee, from left to right:

Killerbee cold brew: one of their house blends.
Costa Rica La Minita: a washed single origin bean. The tasting card marks it as “the OG”, as they’ve been working together with this farm for 15 years.
Wush Wush Hush Hush: a rather funny name, but the interesting characteristic of this is in its blend. 50% is their Colombia Wush Wush (natural process) bean, and then the other 50% is a decaf bean.

The cold brew had a fairly decent, well-rounded taste - nothing amazing but a decent cup. The Costa Rica and Wush Wush were the two pour-overs and it was fun to compare the difference together with my Mum. It came down to natural vs washed - I prefer natural beans, so I liked the sweeter taste of the Wush Wush more. The tasting card noted passionfruit, and I think I could just about get a scent of it. My Mum turned out to be more of a washed fan and liked the Costa Rica. For me, I generally find Costa Rica beans to be a bit more sour and not so much my personal preference!

I’d be curious to know what’s the general split of people’s preferences on washed versus natural. My sample size is only three people at the moment, and while I prefer natural, my husband and my Mum seem to both like washed beans more.

We also got some food. The banana bread is their specialty, which comes with either espresso or matcha butter ($13).

And then I got their coconut banana porridge ($19).

Paying $19 for porridge, now this is Sydney prices.

The banana bread was pretty average, and I wouldn’t come here just for that (especially for $13). The porridge - super creamy, and the first mouthful tasted great, but it was oddly way too salty and sweet. Don’t get me wrong, I can eat ice cream and brownies and I’m not averse to sugar but a whole bowl of this was way too overpowering. Japanese people tend not to like American/Australian sweets since they find them overly sweet, so I think maybe my tastebuds had adjusted a bit too after 4 years living in Tokyo. I had to get my Mum to finish the last third of the bowl off for me (thanks Mum).

Overall though, this was some pretty good coffee, and I’d feel pretty happy to recommend this as one of Sydney’s top coffee spots, if you can come at a time when there’s less of a line.

As we were leaving, I decided to peruse their beans at the takeaway counter.

Takeaway coffee culture is much bigger in Australia than it is in Japan (where it is mostly non-existent) so if you just wanted to grab a cup to go it would be much quicker than waiting for a sit-down spot.

I really like the overall design/brand of Single O too - you can take a look at their website and see what I mean. Top marks for website design.

The beans are laid out with their single origin on the right, and blends on the left - the blends are the ones with the illustrations on them. They also have all their beans listed for sale on their website. Since Australia is such a espresso-loving country, they had a big variety of blends (six types) plus three single origins.

The blends with weird names like AWOL (i.e. decaf) and yeehah

The beans also don’t list roast levels - it seems in Sydney they tend to just differentiate between “for espresso” and “for filter” (or “all methods” for beans that suit both). I decided to grab a bag of their Wush Wush ($30 for 250g).

Note all prices come with a 1 - 2% credit card surcharge (ew, don’t see much of that in Japan) plus 10% surcharge if you’re eating in on weekends.

Another fun feature of Single O is their cold brew section - they have all their cold brews on tap.

As a final aside, if you might be wondering - where is Surry Hills? - it’s a rather trendy suburb just south of Sydney’s main CBD. From Central station (Sydney’s biggest station) it’s only a 6 minute walk.

The CBD itself can be rather soulless (large parts of it are fairly quiet on the weekend, as it’s more a hub for office workers) so Surry Hills feels rather lived-in in comparison, and I’m sure there are a lot of cute cafes in the area. Maybe if I were to give a Tokyo equivalent, it could be like Nakameguro or Shimokitazawa. Note that it is quite an expensive area to live in, though. Once you’re done exploring Surry Hills, I would recommend getting a bus or the light rail and heading north up towards the Circular Quay / Opera house area. The Botanical Gardens is also very nice as well.

Single O’s beans: the verdict

So, once I got home from Sydney it was time to taste test the Wush Wush beans. In terms of brew guides, Single O provides a generic V60 guide on their website. Surprisingly, this has no mention of a recommended temperature.

The packaging lists the roast date, and all it says otherwise is to finish drinking it within a month. No mention of when you should first open it up, but generally I’ve heard you should wait 2 - 3 weeks.

I was a bit too excited to open this up and we started drinking it only 9 days after the roast date, which I think in hindsight was too soon. Overall it was quite a finicky bean to get to taste as good as it did in the store - there was just a bit too much sourness. I wasn’t sure the finickiness came from it being half-decaf, which apparently you’re supposed to use a slightly different set of parameters for decaf beans.

You can see the difference in colours between the two beans used

Drinking it iced was pretty tasty though (it gets rid of most of the acidity), so I ended up drinking most of the pack that way, at a slightly finer 12 clicks on my Timemore C2, 96°C. We finished off the pack about 3 weeks in, and I took a few last goes at a hot pour-over - I settled on 96°C and the Hoffman method with my go-to 15 clicks. At that point it tasted not bad so I think it was more of a time thing in the end. Lesson learned!

Price-wise, 30 AUD for 250g of their beans comes out to 3349 yen. For 100g you’re paying about 1350 yen which is on the reasonable end compared to Tokyo prices. Maybe Tokyo beans are just higher priced in general, but since Single O also sells their beans on to other cafes, maybe they’re able to roast their beans at quite large quantities which helps bring the price down for regular customers as well.

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Birding in Brooklyn, Sydney

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A lunch outing to Brooklyn, Sydney. To be honest I had never heard of this place before, but it wins the distinction of being the "northernmost suburb of Sydney".

First up were some welcome swallows perched under the roofs of some shops.

And then this white-faced heron. I had never seen these guys in my life before! But apparently common on the waterways in Sydney if you head up north.

I couldn't stop at 4, so here's one more for good measure.

If we're comparing herons, I'll have to say the grey heron wins in coolness. But if we're comparing egrets (apparently egrets are herons) then the white-faced heron wins out over the little egret. The grey contrasted with the white around the eyes is rather pretty.

Speaking of birds in the water, I also spotted some Australian white ibises.

They do look rather cool in amongst the mangroves. Usually we see them amongst the trash bins in the city, which is rather less-cool.

We also spotted some Australian pelicans - absolutely humongous.

Together with the silver gulls you can see the scale of the pelicans.

Another new sighting for the blog was some chestnut teal ducks. These guys are native to Australia - but I'd never really paid attention to the fact that they're a different species to the mallard ducks, which we also see in Sydney.

There was a white-bellied sea eagle flying overhead.

And a juvenile Australian magpie with one of its parents. Quite a common sight to see a trio of magpies - mum, dad and the kiddo.

And finally, the classic kookaburra.

I neglected to take many photos of Brooklyn itself. It's a quiet little town - population 700. It has a post office on the water, and they deliver mail by boat to residents along the waterways. Actually, the boat they use is rather fancy boat. You can pay $72 to join the mail run while enjoying some morning tea. (I wonder if they actually do any mail delivering at this point or if its just a cruise service).

There's also a train that runs alongside the water, stopping at the Hawkesbury River Station.

And then it crosses over the Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge, built in 1946 - the other side of the bridge is an area known as the Central Coast, which is officially outside of Sydney.

I was curious how far it is to Brooklyn from Sydney's Central station. Looks like you can get here in a speedy 65 minutes by train (considering how it feels so remote, that's actually not bad). But the downside is the train for here only departs once an hour, so you wouldn't want to miss it!

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