This past year was JP’s 10th. Before I started writing this blog, I struggled to see anything through. I would flit from project to project, from interest to interest, without finishing or accomplishing much. Now, I’ve been writing an article each week, at the least, for 10 years. Thanks to JP, I began to chase my childhood love for writing. I have published 9 books and have many, many more in the works. So, if you are a blogger too, don’t underestimate the practice of regular writing. Over time, the discipline changes you in ways you don’t notice.

This past year was a year of death. Sounds dramatic, I know. Other than my cat, Shikamaru, only a few members of my extended family passed away. No, by a year of death, I refer to my immersion in Bushido. I dived deep into the thoughts of Bushido for a pair of writing projects. I discovered a lot of interesting things about it. First, Bushido isn’t a unified philosophy as we’ve been led to believe in the West. Rather, it’s a fragmented, regional exploration of morality. However, no matter which region I studied, or writer I read, everyone based their ideas on the reality of death. Perhaps it was because of COVID killing my grandmother and many, many library patrons. Perhaps it was because of Shika’s death. But no matter the reason, my dive into Bushido this past year has taught me much. Contrary to what post-World War II Americans think, many Bushido writers challenged the idea of the death cult and of seppuku. Many writers even considered suicide to be dishonorable because it deprived people of your service. Dying to make amends or for honor or for other cliched samurai values is to demean life according to writers like Yamamoto Ujihide:

While it is said that there is no medicine for cowardice, to die for gratitude, to die for justice, to die for power, to die for hatred, and to die for profit all are disregard for life.

My deep dive into Bushido has made me reconsider my relationship with time. I still squander much of it. As the Roman Seneca wrote:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

I’ve learned how to slow down my perception of time as a part of my study of death. Namely, by learning and trying new things. When you learn or try new things, your sense of time slows down. When you keep to the same routine, learning or doing nothing new, your sense of time speeds up. There’s nothing worthwhile for your mind to remember. I’ve been taking all sorts of art classes this past year to test this, and I found it holds true. I’ve also reduced my time watching anime and streams in favor of reading more and playing more video games. So too, my sense of time lengthened.

I used to be able to read for hours, but I had noticed my ability to focus has waned. This year, I decided to work toward fixing this. The Internet encourages us to consume media in small bits. This flitting from bit to bit, micro-post, or short video trains the mind away from focusing for a long period of time. Reading books works against this training. As the year passed, I found my ability to concentrate for longer periods of time improving. It’s still not where it was before the Internet and adulthood’s responsibilities pickled my brain. But improvement is improvement. With this lengthening of concentration came a lengthening of my perception of time. I would read for what felt like hours, and it turned out to be 30 minutes. This wasn’t the unpleasant feeling of hours passing. You know that sensation at the end of the workday, when 5 minutes felt like 60 minutes. This was a pleasant extension of time; one that left me feeling rested.

As a part of my quest to learn new things and so extend my sense of life, I began writing JP’s articles using Markdown. Markdown is a plain-text system that allows you to write documents that can be converted into HTML. Word documents, Rich Text, and other files. Markdown is easy to learn, and it lends to faster writing. Even something small, like learning and using Markdown, is still an act of learning.

So, what are you doing to train your concentration and lengthen your perception of time?

Now, I’ve written about the importance of not caring about stats and numbers when it comes to blogging, but sometimes I pay attention. This past year, Google made various changes (and people’s interests have shifted) that reduced the number of JP’s views by around 150k. Part of this is the continued shift toward video. We see this at my library: people don’t want to read. They would rather consume video. I suspect people will return to reading eventually. But for now, video reigns. Video is passive compared to reading, which is a part of video’s appeal. Frankly, I find video clunky when I need to reference a tutorial or something of the sort. Text is superior when using a reference. There’s no rewinding or skipping around as in video. Of course, I’m a bit of a curmudgeon in this regard! In any case, this is something to keep in mind if you too are a blogger who wants to keep a focus on writing instead of moving to video.

As for JP’s next year, I’m a cheater. This article is number 67 on the docket. Of course, I don’t publish the articles in the order I write them. Writing ahead grants me freedom to take breaks to focus on my books or to dive into articles that require a lot of research. On the docket is a series of anime I’ve revisited and a blog-writing series that shares what I’ve learned in the past 10 years of blogging…only with more depth. I’ll be honest, my interest in anime has waned, and I’ve become more selective about what I watch. This ties back to the Bushido adage that has become my motto: “Remember death.” Life is too short for bad anime. Time truly is a zero-sum affair. Time spent watching a terrible anime steals time for writing, reading, or some better form of entertainment. Of course, there are lessons to learn from terrible story-telling.

This upcoming year, I plan to write other animation breakdowns like my breakdown of Marin’s Embarrassment and Marin’s smile from My Dress Up Darling. One breakdown I plan comes from Robotech. Would you like to see more of these animation breakdowns? They take a lot of time for me to write.

I’ve also begun to read more manga. So don’t be surprised if manga-related articles start appearing. In many ways, manga is faster for me than watching anime. Most manga can be read in 20 minutes or less. It’s a good way for me to increase my reading stats! Pity I don’t track the number of books I read, eh? Some of you may be wondering, but I suspect I read a book a week. I’m often reading 2 or 3 books at once, which is pretty normal and even a bit lax in the library world. And no, you can’t read at work. Libraries are too busy for that! My workdays vary from speaking with a guy who sat with God on the dark side of the moon (It’s all about peace and love in the old 1960’s hippy sense) to telling one of the local NEETs to go home and shower because he’s making people gag with his aroma, all the way to preserving a ledger dating to the 1850s. I gotta do some librarian work time to time, after all.

As for my books, I hope to release the sequel to Kanzashi. My editor has been working on this sequel, Hotaru, for awhile. I have a few other manuscripts, a few that don’t have to do with Japan (I hope to write more stories that deviate from the niche I find myself in), that I plan to shop to traditional publishers. In 2022, I released Tamamo, which may start a new series of stories based on folklore. If you haven’t read it yet, Tamamo takes the folktale of, well, the demon fox Tamamo but tells the “real” story before propaganda turned her into a villain. The book takes place in an alternative Heian period, but it mostly follows the trajectory of the actual history.

Well, that’s enough rambling. For those who’ve read this far, and have stayed with JP over the years: thank you! Every writer craves readers. If you’ve just joined my this year, welcome and thanks for reading!

As always, I’m open to questions, article suggestions, and anime/manga recommendations.

May you have a blessed, productive, and slow-paced 2023!