Tonight my son fell asleep lying on my chest; I cannot imagine anything more beautiful. His whole existence is beautiful – the pure innocence of a child. The trust he puts in us without even thinking about it – I was lying in bed thinking of what I possibly could have done to deserve it, to […]
When I came to Japan the first few times I knew almost no Japanese and tried to pick up a few words by listening to other people talking. Standing in front of a traffic light I heard children saying 赤 赤 赤 青 (aka aka aka ao) – so I learned that red was aka and
Times are changing; when starting to write this I feel like this will probably be my shortest blog post so far. Why? Because of a recent triple punch on my stamina (catch up on another triple punch story here). It all started when my wife was going to Tokyo and left my son and me
Every now and then my wife goes to Tokyo for work. This time she was away for three days leaving my son and I to handle two nights without her milk. So what to do between morning and nightfall to enjoy the day and also to make us as tired as possible to make the
I have never seen our son as happy as the past week. His cousins and uncle came to visit us and it was like a new bigger world suddenly opened up to our boy. Not being stuck with his dad all day, but instead having two children giving him their complete attention made him grow
Hanami, 花見, literally meaning flower viewing but mostly used for cherry blossom viewing, is I think one of the most popular and favorite past times in Japan; this season everything has the cherry theme, from coffee to sweets to clothes, and everywhere there is a cherry tree, people are stopping and taking photos of the
From time to time I have the chance to do some photography work for the wonderful people at Våges in Sweden. Våges is a company owned by four brothers and sisters and they make beautiful and ingenious candleholders. I did a lot of work for them when I was still living in Sweden, but even
Sometimes when I start to think about what to write in the next blog post, I feel empty, like there is nothing to say, nothing that makes sense to make a post about; this feeling was stronger than ever this week. Thinking about Ukraine, feeling completely under the weather for a few days after having
The slight shift in in temperature, required to make the air coming in from the sea feel soft instead of chilly, has come. The sun is warming the playgrounds from early morning, and suddenly we start to meet friends that we have not seen since autumn. It is like the children and their parents (for
I cannot get enough of the mountains here in Japan. Every day I feel drawn to them, to see them, to feel them, to walk among them. It is almost like they talk to me through the air I breath, the cold winds that sweep around my face, the dense forests. The air at home when
When I came to Japan for the first time 15 years ago, I was mesmerized by the Japanese toilets, not so much by their design as by their functions. In Sweden I was growing up having a toilet with a pull up handle to flush; when I grew older we got a state of the
Coming home from our long morning walk (read here), it was high time to make lunch. Our 20 months old child is now capable of bypassing all child locks in our house; he easily enters the kitchen part of our living room, he easily opens the child locked kitchen drawer, he finds his way to