Sharp Start

I started off the day sharp—quite literally. Living in Japan for about eight years now, it’s surprising how much you continually learn.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know

Albert Einstein

After having lived thirty years, I’m starting to feel like I really don’t know anything. Still, I try my best to stay open-minded and willing to learn. As a tour guide, sometimes it’s in my best interest to study things outside of my personal interests. Fancy kitchen knives, for example, sit well outside my normal bubble of knowledge.

Slicing Through Time

Blade working in Japan has a long and storied history. I’ve digested a couple of videos, books, and workshops about the art of crafting blades. The handcrafted process is built on thousands of years of tradition. Those who once used their skills to make weapons of war now craft cutlery.

If the process of making blades is so interesting, why don’t I know more about knives?

  • I’m not that great of a cook
  • Those knives are half my salary
  • My Daiso knife still cuts things
  • Nice Knives require upkeep.

Right Blade for the Right Job

Japanese blades aren’t made equally. While most handcrafted knives in Japan are made with the utmost quality, every knife has a different use, shape, and bevel. At high-end knife stores, the blades also have an aesthetic character that depends on the sword maker. Once you’ve decided on the blade, its purpose, and the design, you also have to choose the handle.

image via dream of japan

Form, Function, or Fashion?

One afternoon I met guests at a sushi restaurant. After lunch with another guide, they asked me to help them shop for knives in Kappabashi. It’s always strange to watch someone spend more on a knife than I make in half a month. Maybe it’s a life stage thing—something I just can’t relate to yet.

I imagine them later, wine in hand, telling the story of how they bought it. Maybe that’s the real value. The knife’s pristine steel told its own story too—patterns etched into the blade, handle, and bevel. Care went into every step, from forging the steel to engraving the customer’s name. Watching it get packed into a box, I hoped its new home would treat it with reverence.

Conversation and Connection

When I first started this job, small talk with guests was one of my biggest challenges. I could memorize and review facts about Japan’s locations, history, and customs, but having casual conversations? That proved harder. One way I’ve learned to connect with people is by opening up about myself. When you let your walls down, others often follow suit.

To crack open my ribs and show them the black lump of coal I call my heart has allowed me to have better small talk.

I’m more open on this blog than anywhere else, but that day our conversations went from finance to Japanese customs to shogun history. One thing I remember talking about was finance. I’ve always been financially illiterate, but I’ve been trying to get better. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been putting away nearly 10% of my monthly income into a savings account.

If I ever want to get out of the vicious cycle I’m in, I’ll need to do more than that. Part of growing up is taking a percentage of those savings and investing them in various ways. The 50/30/20 rule is the classic split, but something is better than nothing. Knowing what to invest in is part of becoming a boring, stable adult.

Perhaps it’s more important to know about financial trends, world news, and politics. My head is filled with useless information like patch notes for games I play, new anime releases, and up-and-coming animated films. I’m not a critic—my writing is too long-winded. The only thing I’m great at being a harsh critic of is the object that meets my gaze in the mirror every day.

Alone With My Thoughts

I promised myself I’d keep better track of my life—through scheduling, tracking, and logging. But I’m writing about this particular day over a month later, so I’ve lost some of the finer details. In their place, I’ve had time to ruminate and take perspective. Taking a step back from my sense of self helps me see the big picture.

How do I feel? Am I heading in the right direction in life?

It might sound ridiculous to “discover how you feel,” but in our modern world, I find I’m numbing myself with constant input—reels, podcasts, music, games—leaving no space for quiet reflection.

My blog is a way to make that space. The likely probability is that these words will float in the formless ether, in digital obscurity, forever undiscovered—until the web payments stop. When the server dies, so will the words. Still, that’s far longer than I’ll be around.

As someone who produces music, I think I’m starting to understand why they use the word “writing” for music. Sitting with yourself and discovering the self through words, notes, and thoughts—it’s the same process.

I am a collection of thoughts and memories and likes and dislikes. I am the things that have happened to me and the sum of everything I’ve ever done. I am the clothes I wear on my back. I am every place and every person and every object I have ever come across. I am a bag of bones stuck to a very large rock spinning a thousand miles an hour.

Macaulay Culkin

Hama Sushi

It’s a little ironic, but one of my favorite restaurants in the area is a sushi shop. I can’t eat fish, but they’ve got plenty I can eat—thinly sliced beef, pork, and other delectable meats atop vinegared sushi rice. It gives me the sushi experience without the allergic reaction afterward.

Qualifying for British GP

As much as I would have loved to clock out and sleep, I wanted to see how this year’s British GP qualifying would play out. While it’s often an Oscar Piastri vs. Lando Norris pole fight, Max Verstappen pulled off an incredible lap to take the top spot. Sometimes qualifying can be just as exciting as the race itself.

The hard part about following a sport on the other side of the world is that by the time qualifying ends, it’s already quite late at night.

I took a moment to sit up and think: Where did my day go? How did I spend it? Looking over my personal to-do list and calendar, I realized things were only being added. Too much to do, too little time.

  • TO-DO-: List
    • Need to organize personal events on the calendar now
    • Organize Blog Post
    • Redesign the home page
    • Finish the YouTube script
    • Organize Life in General

I took some time to try starting CS50 again. I want to learn how computers work and how to manipulate them properly. I’ve attempted this course several times and never made it through a single video. After restarting yet again, I decided to just call it a night and go to bed.

To Wrap Up This Knife Analogy

I’ve been wrestling with the big, vague idea of “bettering my life.” It’s a heavy concept to chew on all at once. Like slicing through a tough cut, the only way forward is to break it down into bite-sized, actionable pieces. That’s how I see failing forward — cutting big ambitions into smaller, more manageable slices, knowing I’ll miss the mark sometimes but keep moving anyway.

I’ve been behind on my goals, and I’ve fallen short of blogging, logging, and vlogging my way through this strange, chaotic experience we call life. But I’m learning to treat those shortfalls as progress worth celebrating — every slip still sharpens the blade.

Lately, I’ve been reading Kobe Bryant’s book, which has been pushing me to keep going.

I’ve been reading Kobe Bryant’s book, so it helps to get me to push forward.

To sum up what mamba mentality is, it means to be able to constantly try to be the best version of yourself.

Kobe Bryant

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