Happy June!
I spent the last couple days of May on a little road trip around the Izu Peninsula. The latter half of May had been looking rather rainy and I was scared that the June rainy season was making an early appearance, but I saw the weekend was looking rather sunny so we made the last-minute decision to get in some camping.
I bought some coffee beans from a local roaster, took a lot of photos, and I think I spotted 3 new bird species (exciting) so I will be putting that all up on the blog in due time.
This month was a rather busy one on the blog as well - I posted more than 20 posts, which I’ll do my best to speed-run you through below.
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New hikes on the blog
This month I published 3 new hikes. The first one was to Mt Ishiwari - this mountain was actually already on my blog, but last time I visited I didn’t manage to get a clear view of Mt Fuji, so I went back for a re-hike and updated the blog post with some new pictures.
The drive home from Mt Ishiwari turned out to be rather eventful, as my Jimny’s rear tire suddenly punctured while we were driving on the highway. We didn’t really notice any debris while we were driving but I suppose we must have hit something?
This was my first time having to use my car’s insurance or deal with any sort of emergency situation, and I was surprised by how smooth it was. Within an hour a tow truck had pulled up and swapped the tire over to the spare for us. Also I’m super glad it coincidentally happened on a hike I was doing together with my husband, and that he was driving at the time (I did the drive there and he was doing the drive back). I think I would have freaked out a bit more if I had been driving the car, or if I was alone.
With the Jimny out of commission, my next hike for the month was a very local one to the Minami-Takao Seven Summits (under an hour by train from Tokyo). Looking at the hiking I’ve done this year, I’ve mostly been doing fairly short 3 - 4 hour hikes, so I knew I needed to start getting back into some longer ones. Minami-Takao is not too exciting, but since it’s 16km over 5 - 6 hours it’s a good training hike.
And my third hike for the month was Mt Asama, a volcano in Nagano. I really, really enjoyed this one. Mt Asama has been closed off for the past 3 years due to its risk of volcanic eruption, and so this peak hadn’t been on my radar for 2026. But the trail suddenly re-opened again just over a week ago, so I decided I may as well go for it!
With my wheel freshly replaced on my Jimny, I did my usual thing for hikes that are a bit far away from Tokyo - I drove out the afternoon before, stopped by at an onsen, slept in my car and then started my hike nice and early the next morning.
Mt Asama was my 67th hyakumeizan and my first one for the year. I have my eye on two more that I might try and go for in June, but with the rainy season soon upon us, I’ll have to see how the weather turns out.
Planting cherry tomatoes and baking
Last month I mentioned that I had planted two cherry tomato plants on our balcony. Now we’re 6 weeks in, the plants have gotten huge.
Funnily one of them seems to like growing much more than the other so there is a bit of a height difference, but the bigger one is getting close to 180cm tall now.
The tomatoes have been green and growing for quite a while now, but just this past weekend, a couple of them are excitingly starting to change to a more yellowish colour.
On the baking front, this month I tried scones and also had a second attempt at bagels.
My review of baking scones is that they are much easier than bagels, as you don’t have to let the dough rest and rise or any of that fiddly stuff. Just mix the ingredients together and put them in the oven. However I’m realising that scones have a very distinctive, lumpy shape… and without that weird lumpiness they don’t quite look like a scone?
As for the bagels, last time I messed things up as I didn’t know the difference between active dry yeast and instant yeast. This time I messed up again because the recipe called for letting the dough rise for an hour. Mine rose too much and over-fermented so the dough turned into a bit of a gloopy mess. Next time I will have to visually watch it double in size and then count that as “done” rather than wait for a specific amount of time.
… bagels are finicky, but I want the satisfaction of being able to make them properly, which is what is making me want to go back for a third time.
Adding light mode to the blog
This month I also did a bit of fiddling with my blog’s code and introduced a new light mode. You can now toggle between light and dark modes via the little moon/sun symbol in the top right.
For those of you that have clicked around my blog, you might know that most of my site was dark mode by default, except for the books section, which was in light-mode. So the trickiest part of this was trying to make a dark mode books section which looked good.
Adding a new coffee section to the blog
While I was poking around in the code, I also graduated my coffee-related posts to their own coffee section. I now have 8 sections on my blog. For the sake of my navigation which is already rather full, let’s hope I don’t add any more.
My coffee posts previously lived underneath the “notes” section, and what prompted me to make it into its own section is that I now have 23 coffee-related posts, which feels like quite a few. I’ve been on a bit of a coffee bean buying spree, and published 8 posts (wow) about coffee this month. Notably:
- A post on Japanese coffee roast levels
- Visiting Mermaid Coffee, which was a rather nice find in Ikebukuro
- A trip to check out KOFFEE MAMEYA in Shibuya
My current goal is to find my new favourite coffee roaster in Tokyo. My overall favourite so far has been Tsukikoya Coffee Roaster but that’s all the way in Yokohama so I want to find something that’s a bit closer to me. I’m open to any recommendations if you have any!
Books I read this month
I read 6 books this month, and it was quite a varied selection. The most fun to read was The Raven Scholar which is a fantasy book recently published in 2025 - a tiny bit YA-ish with some Divergent and Harry Potter vibes, but otherwise pretty good. For something much older, I read Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, a book by possibly the first-ever weeb, Lafcadio Hearn, which was published in 1894.
I also read The Score which is sort of a mix between philosophy and self-help and about how we shouldn’t overly focus on metric-based goals. I’ll admit after reading it I was left a bit underwhelmed since it doesn’t really have the answers to the questions it was asking, but the more I’ve sat with it after reading, the more I think I actually found it helpful.
And then for a bit of history, I read Judgement at Tokyo, which is about Japan’s war crimes tribunal after WW2. I don’t tend to read very many history books since it can be a bit of a slog to get through, but this one was fairly interesting (and I always feel like I should learn more about Japanese history, especially now since I live here).
When I look at the page views on my blog, the books section in general is a rather lonely one that not many people visit. I used to have the same problem with my hiking section, and what fixed it for me was writing round-up posts like the best hikes in Tokyo. I’m wondering whether at some point I should venture into the same sort of setup for my books section to make reviews easier to discover, but I think that might be a bit further down my to-do list.
Settling on a new sleep routine
I’ve been exercising super consistently this past month - I give myself 1 day of rest a week if I need it, but otherwise I’m going to the gym, running or doing a hike. So the next pillar I wanted to fix was my sleep / morning routine.
I’m quite good at getting enough sleep, and generally don’t use an alarm to wake up (the days of waking up bleary-eyed after a gaming binge are long behind me). But lately I’d started to hate the couch potato-ing we were doing every night, and it’s always such an “ugh” feeling when I need to wake up before 5am in preparation for a hike. So I figured it would be good to generally sleep earlier and wake earlier, so then it’s less of a pain for those hiking days. Nowadays we’re waking up around 6am, which at first was with an alarm, but I’m finding my body has gotten used to it and I can naturally wake up around that time without it.
The two things that I found useful to do were:
- Put my phone in a more inaccessible location. Sometimes I can start doomscrolling on social media which is never a good time. We have a loft storage space that you need to climb a ladder to get to, so leaving the phone up there has been pretty good. I have an Apple Watch so I can still get any notifications to my phone if necessary.
- Add a setting to our internet router so that it turns off at 8pm. This one is quite extreme so I’m glad my husband was a good sport and didn’t mind me giving this a go.
Previously we would tell each other “we should watch less TV at night”, and we got quite good at turning the TV off after an episode or two of anime - but then we would get the laptops out, which kind of defeated the whole purpose of that. Hence the router setting.
For a bit of inspiration, I also read both Daily Rituals and My Morning Routine this month. The former wasn’t too useful (unless you wanted to know that Beethoven would count out 60 beans each morning for his cup of coffee). The latter was more realistic with advice on how to build your morning routine around your partner and/or kids, but I’m not sure I’m fully onboard with having a strict morning routine. For now I just water my cherry tomato plants, make pour over coffee, and then eventually get around to some exercise. But nonetheless waking up earlier feels pretty good so I plan to continue it.
Walking around Tokyo
In amongst all the other posts, I almost forgot that I also did some walking, first between Ueno and Nippori, and then later between Osaki and Takanawa Gateway. These are all stations on the JR Yamanote line.
There’s 30 stations in total on the Yamanote, and about a 40km distance if you were to walk the whole loop. I think it would be pretty cool to explore all the stations on the line, so my plan is to slowly walk portions of it over time.
It’s starting to get a little hot, so maybe I can get in one more walk on a cooler day, or maybe I’ll resume this side project once summer is over, we’ll see.
What’s next in June
So in June I’d love to get in a hike up another hyakumeizan or two - but the rainy season (“tsuyu”) usually lasts for most of June, and into July as well. So I have vague plans, but will just have to wait and see if the opportunities for some good weather line up or not.
Otherwise, I have no concrete plans! Which is a great feeling. So I’ll just take it one day at a time and see what I get up to in June.
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