Here’s how you get to Omotesando Koffee in Tokyo: take the Chiyoda (C) metro line to the Omotesando station. Once you arrive at the station, walk to exit A2 (there are a lot of exits in this station, and if you take the wrong one you could be wandering around for hours). Walk out the exit up the stairs (taking care to note the “up” and “down” arrows on the stairs so you know what side to walk on).

At the top of the stairs walk out and then take the first street on the right, a tiny alley-size street. Watch out for cars and trucks and bicyles, all competing for space. Walk up this street, past the Lawson’s and the HMV on the right, past the Starbucks on the left, until you come to a T-junction wih a chopsticks shop on the right and a Royal Host restaurant on the left. Turn left.

Walk past the See’s Candies on the right and then, the next block, past the parking lot on the right, and then take the next street right, along an even-smaller residential street. Just after you cross the next street, look for Omotesando Koffee on your left; watch out for the square metal sign near the opening to a small courtyard. It looks like this:

If I had to pick one transcendent destination on our trip to Japan last month, it would be Omotesando Koffee, this tiny perfect coffee shop in a quiet residential neighbourhood. We visited half a dozen times over two weeks. I loved the coffee; Oliver loved the cubes of baked custard; we both liked enjoying the March sunshine sitting on a bench in the small garden.

You walk into Omotesando Koffee through this garden, and then up a step into the main room of an old, simple house (be sure to watch your head on the way in; you’ll bang it if you’re anything like me). Inside there is a steel frame cube containing a counter, a coffee machine, and a single person, a friendly man who will take your order and make your coffee.

The coffee is really, really good. The “kashi” – Oliver describes it as sort of like crispy crème brûlée – was Oliver’s favourite morning food in Japan. There’s jazz on the stereo inside which drifts out into the garden, where there are a couple of benches to sit on, one of which you can – almost – keep dry on if it’s raining. It’s amazing that it’s such a quiet, calm and peaceful place given the crazy busy intersection that’s only 5 minutes walk away. Here’s what our coffee sounded like one morning:

I found Omotesando by way of Peter Bihr, who has now steered me right on two continents. If you’re a lover of coffee and design and calm, I highly recommend a visit next time you’re in Tokyo.

The 20th anniversary of our “short visit to Prince Edward Island” passed unmarked in mid-March. I first applied for a job here in February of 1993, foolishly saying, in my job interview, that I could start work “in a couple of weeks.” Apparently it takes longer to move your life across the country than “a couple of weeks,” but we made it happen by leaving Catherine back in Peterborough, Ontario for an additional month to mop things up and to wind down her own committments there.

I started work at the PEI Crafts Council, on an 18 month contract, on March 15, 1993. It was an ACOA-funded project to develop a database of suppliers to the crafts industry and Catherine and I never talk seriously about the idea of staying on the Island once the contract was up. But, as it happened, we ended up buying a house (a tiny house on the Kingston Road for about $40,000; how could we not!), and Catherine built herself a studio, and I transitioned from local database work to work on the (then novel) Internet with the Province, and we had Oliver and before we knew what hit us, we’d stayed a lot longer than 18 months.

Half the time I’m pretty sure that we’ll live out our years on Prince Edward Island, happy in the community we’ve developed around ourselves; the other half of the time this prospect deeply disturbs me and I start browsing the apartments for rent in Kreuzberg or Malmö or Tokyo or Bilbao. Presumably it’s this duality that prevents me from ever attaining full-Islanderhood.

In the meantime, let me take this opporunity to thank all the people who’ve helped us along the way; Prince Edward Island is an easy place to love and a hard place to like, and your kindnesses to us have made our lives richer and easier. I hope we’ve been able to reciprocate even a little.

In April of 2033 I’ll either be posting my “40 Years on Prince Edward Island” post as a 67 year old or I’ll be fondly recalling our two decade stint on the Island from the porch of my villa on the Adriatic. Only time will tell.

Regular readers may recall that I’m somewhat stationery-obsessed. Drop me in a new city and I’d far rather visit the local stationery shop than almost anything else. It’s why, in part, I love Berlin so much.

Stationery is obviously an important part of the cultural landscape in Japan: the quality, and breadth of products available was awe-inspiring. The Ito Ya store in Tokyo Ginza was dizzying: 5 floors of everything from name seals to date books to fountain pens to fine Japanese paper. It was a miracle we emerged with me only having spent $100. But it’s not only at the high end: I saw a better selection of stationery in “100 Yen shops” (aka “dollar stores”) than at any dedicated stationery shop in Canada.

One of the items seemingly unique to Japan was the pack of “word cards.” I saw these for sale everywhere, and the form-factor was pretty standard: a deck of small blank white cards, perhaps 50 or 100, bound together with a locking metal ring. Like this example from the Maruman company:

I’d never seen anything like these in other countries, and I asked my Japanese friend Nori about them; he confirmed that they’re extremely popular in Japan, and that they’re a “tool for students for remembering foreign words, historical facts, chemical formulas and so on, writing a name or title on one side and something need to remember on the other side.” The name for these in Japanese is is 単語カード, or “tango kādo” and a Google image search shows the variety of designs they’re available in.

The old “Enter Quietly, Please” sign on the theatre door beside our office has always bothered me. And so, faced with a strong desire to procrastinate this morning, I decided to develop an alternative. I especially like the rousing romantic duet between Abraham Lincoln and a cowboy that’s being interrupted.