After landing at Narita at around 11:00 JST, I fumble around and manage to buy myself a sandwich and a Skyliner ticket. So far everything seems to be fine.

Then getting into town at Tokyo Station, I quickly find out none of the ATMs will give me money. I try a bunch of them. I try all my cards credit and debit.

Throngs of people rush past me as I walk around forlorn frantically trying things and coming up with scenarios. Mostly I’m just waiting for Germany to wake up. At the same time I continue to amass a stack of “issuer declined” notices from different banks and teller machines.

What is working:

• I took €150 out at BER airpport which I exchange for yen at random money exchange counters.
• I get on some public WiFi outside Tokyo station and buy a Shinkansen ticket online with my credit card. Their website is bad and hard to use but not broken enough thankfully.

What isn’t working:

• I have a hard time paying for stuff with my credit card. It seems I changed the PIN and forgot to put the new one into my password manager.
• I’m out of practice using a credit card. In Berlin I usually tap my phone at the terminal. In Japan phone payments are not widely accepted.
• I learn later that in Japan they don’t like to give cash out against a credit card generally.

The main choice now before me is whether to stay put here or get myself to my accomodation. My next five days of sleeping are already booked and I just bought a train ticket online. That means I still have most of the money I exchanged, but the part of Japan that I’m going to is very very rural.

I figure that if need be, €150 can last me for a week or more if I only eat FamiChicki and other convenience store foods. So I hop on the Shinkansen passing through the gates with the QR-code of my digital ticket.

At Nagoya station I try some more machines. Support at the German bank says they’ve reset a bunch of things. None of them work.

At this point I’m tired and fully resigned. I buy a train ticket to Iseshi and stare out the window for two hours. After I arrive, I get word from Germany that there’s been a payment system malfunction with my bank and that lots of people had issues with their cards.

That also means the malfunction is over. I rush to the nearest ATM and take out a bunch of cash. I’m super elated and with the money I just got I buy myself dinner twice, to celebrate.

I go back to the hotel and lie down on the tatami floor. Happy that it is over and that my real undertaking can start properly now. After six very stressful hours, I’ve arrived.

Major lessons learned:

• Bring cash on holidays. If I had brought twice as much, I would not have stressed out that much about this.
• Have more than one bank. This episode has made me regret closing my Dutch “real” bank account a lot.

I quickly walk over from the lovely Mizuhokan to the Ise outer shrine. The site is beautiful. I learn that the empty lot next to the shrine is where they build the building anew every 20 years. A tradition, shikinen sengu, I had heard about before but didn’t think it would be here. They started the 63rd rebuilding this year.

My inspiration for this walk—the amazing Craig Mod—gives his permission to skip this section, so I go to Iseshi station, grab some breakfast and wait for the train to Tamaru near the edge of the city. I’m walking Craig Mod’s GPS trail following it sometimes even including the exact road crossings. Having a ghost whose trail you walk in is uncanny but also the only way I can swing this in the first place. The wayfinding this provides and the research it saves are indispensable.

I drop by the Higashitokida shrine and am seriously impressed by the sense of space it creates nestled in the trees, accessible through its gated gravel path. Leaving the shrine feels like coming back to the real world.

The rain is a permanent fixture which could explain why I see so few people out and about. In my first hour of walking lots of kids cross my path on their way to school wearing their uniforms and helmets.

I take shelter at the local post office to wait out the worst of the rain. A jovial old man jumps out of his car and asks me where I’m going. Misedani he feels is beautiful but I’m too early because the leaves haven’t turned yet. It’s been way too hot this year. He goes in to do his business. I go on with my walk.

The Japanese weather forecasts report on the colors of the leaves. I wonder why Germany doesn’t do this given how nice autumn colors here can be.

Making my way from one provincial road to another, I arrive at the first pass, Meki-toge. It’s hardly challenging with just a couple of steep segments and switch backs. Moving off the road and making your way over the mountain is beautiful and feels secluded even if civilization is only a couple of hundred meters away.

At the guardian deity there is a box with a trail booklet. Even though it’s quite thin, it goes back years because there are so few people on this trail. The person signing in before me did so three days ago.

Then comes a long uninspiring stretch along the main road. At this point I’m hungry and sick of the rain and the cars. I cut around the route to make my way to Cafe de Touhenvoku which with its funky interior and pizza toast on the menu reveals itself to be a genuine Kissa. I order the Katsu Curry and scarf it down. How excellent it is to eat something warm after a whole day of walking through the rain.

I consider taking the train at Tochihara to skip to the end but my legs still being good, I loop back to the track and continue along the route. Good that I did, because otherwise I’d have missed a romp through the riverbed and a bamboo forest.

From what is already a quiet road behind the rail tracks I go down to the river. It feels like another portal into a different world. The trail carries me along the stream which is reduced to the point where a small makeshift bridge gets me over it.

Then I pass through a bamboo forest the likes of which I only know from movies. It’s dense, imposing and makes this detour from my detour well worth it.

A brief stop at bread and coffee in Kawazoe which true to its name sells bread and coffee, and children’s toys. From that point on the walk is an incessant plod along the road. My painful feet and the fading light sap my morale. Official sundown is at 16:45 but that doesn’t mean much if there’s a huge mountain between you and the sun.

I pass a bunch of derelict buildings and a very weird one which turns out to be a church/cult.

Mr Bear, the roadside stop pictured above, didn’t make it unfortunately. It’s one of many shuttered businesses along the road here.

The stretches of this walk along the road will not be appreciated much by hiking purists. In my treks through the Alps, any route that takes you on more than the absolutely necessary amount of tarmac—noticeable by the click-clack-ing of your hiking poles—is considered to be unacceptable.

By now I’ve walked for more than an hour along the road and will have at least another half hour ahead of me. My legs are increasingly feeling the weight of the 9+ hours I’ve been underway. I see on Google Maps that there will be a bus passing by in five minutes. Not giving it a second thought, I get on at the Shimo-Mise bus stop. The entirely empty bus takes me the rest of the way to Misedani station. I hobble the final steps into my hotel.

I’m staying at the Fairfield which is bougie and has a continuous stream of foreigners passing through. My shower today will not be in a communal ofuro. In town there aren’t that many restaurants open during the week. Many places are open during the weekend when there are more people in town.

I find a bowl of ramen and alcohol free Kirin at a “famous” ramen place where lots of kids with their parents eat. The ramen is nothing to write home about but the electrolytes and vegetables are very welcome. My legs come back to life.

The stats for the day say 33,53km and some 42k steps (strava).

Today was brutal but it established what the upper limit of my output can be. Walking here needs to have an exit plan at around 3pm before dusk sets in. It’s obvious now that I’ll not be able to walk to Shingu in five days. I retire to my hotel room and plan the next day’s steps.

For historic reasons my bank in Germany is the GLS Bank, an alternative and esoteric bank that pretends it’s good. Their statement after the fact was the following:

Von Sammstag bis Montagmittag lag eine Störung vor, sodass Bankkarten als auch Kreditkarten nicht funktionierten.

This is quite staggering. It means they had a disruption to all card payments from Saturday until Monday afternoon.

I don’t consider a three day disruption to be acceptable for any service, but especially in banking there are supposed to be very stringent compliance requirements around uptime that should make something like this impossible.

The GLS does not ship any new features like ever, if they also can’t keep what they have stable, then there is no point.

I was curious and the good custom in our industry is to disclose details of the incident as well as about the remediation you undertook and will still do to make sure this does not happen again.

Their response to my request was:

Bitte haben Sie Verständnis dafür, dass wir zu bankinternen Störungen keine Details mitteilen. Sie können gewiss sein, dass wir die Ursachen ermitteln und präventiv arbeiten.

That they are a backward and not particularly customer friendly organization is something that’s not news to me. And I definitely do not trust that they will track down the root causes and prevent them from happening again.

The only question is whether there are any other German banks that are any better than this.

Sports and Health

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It was a year where I didn’t seriously injure myself and could continuously practice sports. That’s already a huge improvement.

I started going to the gym regularly in the evenings after the kids are sleeping. After some initial hesitance I started doing barbell exercises. The goal is to squat and deadlift at least my bodyweight of 75kg. I’m inching this up very slowly and am currently at 40kg.

Going to the gym is made possible by my Fitbod subscription. Exercising regularly is much easier, if I don’t have to think or plan what I’m going to do. That means either a human or an app should tell me what I need to do. Given that the gym is paid for by my work, I can justify the steep monthly cost of Fitbod (here’s a 14-day guest pass).

I’m doing winter cycling on the trainers at the gym while I debate whether I should get one for at home. That makes me one of those crazy people who wears a chamois to the gym.

It was a great year for cycling. I bought a proper road bike, the Bianchi 2024 Sprint ICR and I managed to join group rides (mostly those of the MAAP LAB Berlin) more or less weekly without having a single mechanical or crash. knocks on wood

But then during a solo ride in the last week of the year I managed to slip and fall over. More than the minor damage to my knee and my carbon frame, it was my ego that was bruised.

Studies

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I read a bunch of papers (one write-up) around LLMs and found the field to be overhyped. I don’t think that single percentage point increases in performance and conversions of BFS algorithms into LLM prompts are worth writing up. Things are moving so quickly that you can’t sit around waiting for breakthroughs to make their way into the literature.

Learning Japanese continues and I’m now at Wanikani level 22. I’m not sure what my next goal is going to be. After my trip to Japan my motivation is somewhat on the rocks.

The main problem is that once you start studying Japanese, you cannot stop. I’m not stopping, but I’m dialing it down to maintenance mode.

Books

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I already posted about how bad of a year 2025 was for reading. Not sure whether I’ll find the time to do better next year.

Movies and TV

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I’ve moved the tracking of everything that I watch over to Trakt saying goodbye to Letterboxd.

Just like with fitness, I need an app that will tell me exactly what I need to do right now. Without it, I’ll very easily lose track of this. Trakt is excellent at this and offers it in the free version. I pay for premium to get some of the more advanced list management versions.

The movies I watched in 2025:

• Wicked
• Moana 2
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Lilo & Stitch
• KPop Demon Hunters
• Encanto
• The Greatest Showman

Trakt tells me that’s 901 minutes spent on movies.

Wicked was lovely on the big screen. Of the kids movies I watched: KPop Demon Hunters is impeccable, Moana 2 was unnecessary, Encanto was strangely forgettable, Lilo & Stitch not as bad as I would expect. The Greatest Showman may be flawed but it is full of bangers.

The tv series I watched in 2025:

• Bluey S3
• The Wheel of Time S2
• The Bear S1+S2+S3+S4
• Neon Genesis Evangelion
• Dennou Coil
• Asura
• Cyberpunk Edge Runners
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes S1
• Heated Rivalry S1
• Kaiju No.8 S1

All of these were spectacular and interesting in their own way. The Bear really meshes with so many things I like and like to do. Asura is effectively just a very long Kore-eda movie. LotGH is peak.

Trakt tells me that this is 4567 minutes spent on episodes. It’s clear who’s the winner here.

Games

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I don’t really track this anymore, but what I can note are the following.

Expedition 33 was a highlight. I saw it on Tiktok and immediately knew I had to experience it. Not having a console I played it via cloud gaming on my Macbook.

Playing a parry/dodge game over a cloud setup is pure masochism, but with difficulty set to easy, it was kind of doable. The gameplay loop is satisfying but after a while the level design formula gets a bit tedious. What stood out were the music¹, the writing and the major set pieces in the boss battles and in the environment.

Critical Role started their campaign 4 and having followed the online RPG scene through Tiktok clips for a while now, I decided to see what the fuss was about. The first episode together with the rest of the ouverture is spectacular. It’s a narrative victory of setup, emotions, reveals and backstabbing. I’m not sure if they’ll stick the landing, but for now I’m very much bought in.

I’ll have to delve into what makes this worthwhile. For now I can point to two things. There is an element of let’s play parasociality that you have with any game stream or impro podcast. Add to that a very meticulously brewed high fantasy setting that’s better than what we get on television: open ended runtime, infinite production values, no cancellation after one or two seasons.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was discounted and became the game we played during the Christmas break. I led exploring the city on Mount Qaf with my kids on a lower difficulty following right on my heels.

It’s a great game where the platform mechanics continue to layer on top of each other together with some very nasty puzzles bordering on the outright sadistic. I’m super proud to see the grit and skill my kids have shown because easy only affects combat, not the platforming.

Persia provides a vast and mostly unknown to us landscape of culture, artifacts and mythology to serve as backdrop for this game. A lot of it is undoubtedly historically not accurate, but that does not make it any less nice to look at.

Podcasts

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The two podcasts I listen to most consistently are Ones and Tooze and Past Present Future. Those are both remnants of my Talking Politics period². Maybe I should add Helen Thompson’s podcast as well and have a full lid?

Other than that I semi-regularly listen to:

• The Adam Friedland show
• The Catskills Podcast
• Cortex
• Developer Voices
• Escape Collective (only during the Tour)
• Feminist Shelf Control
• KALT’ın Podacst’ı
• Oxide and Friends
• Podcast Filosofie
• De Shitshow
• Stavy’s World
• Vergecast

I more or less stopped listening to Trashfuture finding the jokes and the commentary repetitive and boring.

Travel

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It was a much better year for travel than most years before this.

London was a work trip in spring and it was one of my best London trips ever. I stayed in Chelsea, I cycled everywhere, drank lots of great coffee, ate a ton of great food, went to a club, went to a play on the West End. I did so much and there’s so much left to do. I don’t know what took me so long to appreciate London like this.

Iceland was the first trip we took our kids on a plane and then round tripped the island on our way to the family horse farm. Iceland is lovely but empty. Not sure what would make me go back there other than to visit family or if I could do some hard hiking/cycling/riding.

Japan drove me crazy with reports from everybody and their mother visiting so I had to go. After missing the summer window, I booked for November not knowing that that’s one of the best months to visit Japan. I walked the Ise-ji for a large chunk and then I ran around Tokyo for a couple of days. It was even better than all the social media.

Iceland and Japan in the same year is low-key ridiculous but this was also the year at work where I get 20 consecutive extra holidays.

End

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Lots more things to cover that happened in 2025 but for now this will have to be it. Despite some marked down periods, all in all it was a good year. On to a much better 2026.

(This update has been delayed for a week because I fell quite ill just as the new year came around.)

Crucially, at street scale, on-street parking is not allowed, which opens up the streetscape for people, on foot and on bike, for conversation and activities, and yes, for moving goods and people around but as a secondary ‘enabling’ activity to the life of the street itself.

https://medium.com/slowdown-papers/18-from-lockdown-to-slowdown-tokyo-as-slowdown-city-822dc0b6f3cc

I had picked my hotel to be on the right side of the city to be off to a running start so I could visit places right from the very first day. So landed at Narita, got my Mifi and while waiting to checkin I made my way to.

Little Nap Coffee Stand

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I had a quick lunch and walked to the Little Nap Coffee Stand (checkin, tip) which I had seen a video of over at My First Coffee and was totally smitten with. As promised the store was beautiful and the coffee was excellent.

Fuglen Tokyo

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Then I walked over to this place recommended to me by Companion Coffee. This Fuglen (checkin, tip) is a sister to a store by the same name in Oslo ¹. This place turned out to be more of a cafe with an event program and cocktails in the evening and a diverse group of Japanese people and expats hanging around with laptops during the day.

The decorations are lush Nordic wood and the Kalita Wave pour over that I had was terrific.

Omotesando Koffee

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Then after some more walking around at the end of the day I finally hit the promised place: Omotesando Koffee (checkin, tip) which had been recommended to me by countless people and where Eiichi Kunimoto practices his craft. I had an iced cappuccino here because —what I hadn’t counted on— the weather was extremely pressing and it was rainy humid and very warm all day. It stayed that way for most of my stay.

The iced cappuccino at Omotesando is more of a milkshake like concoction with the espresso shot put into a blender along with some ice and milk, the result is poured out into your cup and sprinkled with —I think— cinnamon. Drinking this at that moment in the idyllic garden of Omotesando was a near religious experience and felt like the best coffee I have ever had. I returned to Omotesando a number of times during my visit for the coffee, the amicable staff and the quiet ambiance of its garden.

Bear Pond Espresso

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The next day I walked from my hotel to Shimokitazawa, a 20 minute saunter in the heat through the quiet residential area of Hatagaya. I don’t have any pictures of Bear Pond (checkin, tip) because of their policy but this was the other summit of my Tokyo coffee experience.

Katsuyuki Tanaka (and Eiichi Kunimoto of Omotesando) are very different and have a totally different style of coffee and shop but both elevate making coffee to a level which can only be called artistry.

The ambiance at Bear Pond is slightly forbidding but with the American radio playing it is rather easy to unwind on one of the stools and wait for your espresso to be served. That espresso when it comes out is one of the shortest shots you have ever drunk and probably also one of the most intense.

I ordered an espresso on an empty stomach which I normally never do because it gives me problems. But this espresso was so smooth that not only did my stomach not get upset, it was so delicious that I chased it with another one. With the reduced quantity it becomes something of an effort to get every last bit of taste out of the cup.

I brought back a bag of Bear Pond’s house blend ‘Flower Child’ and even when made in Berlin (by the heroes of Companion Coffee) after two weeks, it still had that characteristic deep chocolate like flavour.

Cafe Obscura

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The next stop was Cafe Obscura (checkin, tip), a somewhat out of the way place with lots of nice leather sofas and good siphons on offer. Obscura also have a laboratory which I skipped in favor of this place. The siphon coffee is expertly made and really good.

Nozy Coffee

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Then it was a quick visit to Nozy Coffee (checkin, tip) which is a small but very nice looking coffee place. I had a solid cappuccino and saw that they have lots of beans on offer. Unfortunately I had no time to come back and bring some of these with me, but this place is one to look out for.

Be A Good Neighbor (Sendagaya)

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The following day started out at the tiny Be A Good Neighbor (checkin, tip) store in Sendagaya. The cappuccino and the cake were both excellent and the barista was very helpful in offering tips about where to get more coffee. Especially useful was his pointer to Paddlers which I started the next day with.

Streamer Coffee Company Shibuya

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I then walked on to Shibuya to try the coffee at Streamer (checkin, tip). The type of coffee which they serve here and which I had is a latte. I normally don’t drink them but in the light of trying out the coffee as it is being served locally I had one. Shockingly this was the first place in Tokyo I encountered where the coffee was not fantastic.

What Streamer does do really well is to be a nice place to hangout. There were lots of people in the store with and without laptops having a great time and relaxing which is exactly what I did as well.

On the Corner No. 8 Bear Pond

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The last stop this day was the Shibuya On the Corner Bear Pond No. 8 (checkin, tip) take-out bar which is a beautiful store front with attached coffee bar where you can sit on a handful of stools and recharge your phone or as it seems to be the intention: take out your coffee. You get an expertly drawn coffee with milk in it and a no photo policy is in effect here as well, so I can show you the cup I drank it from:

I did not visit the restaurant and instead had an awesome burger around the corner at Whoopie Gold Burger.

Paddler’s Coffee

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The next day I trekked to the area around Sangubashi station in the morning and had a terrific start of the day at Paddlers Coffee (checkin, tip) a brilliant setup lunch place with Stumptown coffee on offer. I had a spectacular iced coffee in the stifling heat.

Cafe Kitsune

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I then made it out to Cafe Kitsune (checkin, tip) whose presence I had just been alerted to. This is a fashion store in Omotesando where they have a fabled Slayer Espresso machine.

Then it was off to Kyoto to see some sights and sample the coffee outside of Tokyo. This was something of a disappointment, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Specialty Coffee Unir

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In Kyoto I found it rather hard to get a coffee that I would term drinkable. Most of the local brews are very dark roasted and ridiculously over extracted to a point that I can hardly drink them even with milk and sugar (or gum syrup).

One exception to his in Kyoto was Unir (checkin, tip) where they make a very nice cappuccino and which I visited a couple of times because of this.

アカツキコーヒー (Akatsuki Coffee)

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Based on some research I found Akatsuki (checkin, tip) which is a nice place in a different part of town. This place gets the filter brew almost right and the shop itself looks beautiful.

Omotesando Koffee

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What I didn’t know until my last day in Kyoto and after my camera broke down is that they have a branch of Omotesando (checkin, tip)in the city on the main shopping street in a fashion store of United Arrows. The same impeccable Omotesando branding and the same fantastic coffee. I’m half glad that I didn’t know of it before because given the Kyoto coffee scene I would have been at this place all the time.

Hood Cafe

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Then it was off to Osaka to do the same. My experience here was a bit better than in Kyoto but not much. Hood (checkin, tip) is a very nice coffee shop which manages to hit all of the cultural paraphernalia associated with third wave coffee and also serves a bunch of different beans and methods but still it does not seem to hit the level of Tokyo. Still they serve very good coffee even without comparing it to the stuff on offer in the rest of the city.

Espresso Bar Millpour

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Next up was Millpour (checkin, tip) which is a tiny place in the city where they make a near perfect cappuccino.

After that detour it was time to get back to Tokyo and to finish this visit.

The Monocle Cafe

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I dropped by the Monocle Cafe (checkin, tip) in the basement of a clothing store and was disappointed by the coffee though the food was rather ok. The coffee is not terrible, but it does not have the quality that you would expect from Monocle which is more or less the same for the rest of the store.

Be A Good Neighbor Skytree

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Then I made my way over to the Be A Good Neighbor (checkin, tip) store in the Skytree. The Skytree itself is a pandemonium of commerce where people are screaming at you all the time to buy something. Finding your way through the mall to the exact location of Be A Good Neighbor is no mean feat, but finally having arrived there the coffee is as excellent as in their other store. I would only recommend going here if you’re already in the area or god forbid entering the Skytree but then it is a welcome place to rest.

Sarutahiko Coffee

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I also did a round of Ebisu and found two very nice coffee places in that part of town. Sarutahiko (checkin) is a small shop but it seems to have everything necessary and made a very nice coffee. Definitely worth a visit.

Hitinui Espresso Bar

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A bit further on is Hitinui (checkin, tip) which is a tiny place and also doubles as a Tahitian dance school. I couldn’t check out the dance, but the cappuccino was excellent and the barista very friendly.

Identity Coffee Bar+Gallery

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Identity Coffee Bar+ Gallery (checkin, tip) also in Omotesando is a rather nice store and has an excellent selection of both Intelligentsia and Handsome beans which they prepare perfectly.

That was the roundup from my Tokyo coffee experience. I visited a couple of the places several times and brought back some bags of coffee but I am extremely impressed with the coffee culture and I’ll definitely be back.