Hurrying by way of Kosetsu-en backyard in Hakodate for the second time in as many days earlier this month—it’s November 2025 as I’m scripting this—the fiery maple stopped me in my tracks.
It was the second time I’d seen that specific tree, to make certain; I had spend the higher a part of an hour photographing it (and myself beneath it) the earlier afternoon. Preserve going, I advised myself, shuffling by way of a listing of all of the locations I deliberate to go to throughout my impending street journey. You’ve already bought the pictures you want.
However that wasn’t true. The sky on the time I captured the tree had been cloudy, coloring the leaves (now a piercing crimson, a punishing scarlet) a fluorescent, flamboyant fuchsia that merely hadn’t executed justice to the majesty of the arbor, to say nothing of deficiencies in my very own look that had failed to help me in transposing my imaginative and prescient into megapixels.
The outcomes of my unwitting pause spoke instantly and clearly for themselves—and never simply when it comes to the primary one you’ll see among the many 30 I’ve shared under.
No, they elucidated one thing extra profound—the Japanese precept of kaizen, roughly—that has come to outline my creativity over the previous 20 years, and that will additionally go on to claim itself repeatedly throughout this explicit journey, typically throughout self-critical moments.
Should you hadn’t made that left-hand flip on the final second, I scolded myself weeks later, upon returning to Bitchu Matsuyama Citadel in Okayama for the second time the identical morning, you’d’ve missed the shot you’ve waited 5 years to get.
I’d woken at 4, you see, and pushed to a viewpoint overlooking the fortress in time to see the dawn over it and the unkai (sea of clouds) it typically swims in presently of 12 months. However it was solely upon going again to the tenbodai after mild had come over the horizon in earnest that I may seize the image I’d seen in my thoughts’s eye for thus lengthy on digital camera.
Certainly, there’s additionally one thing affirmative about my tendency to make appropriate choices at such existential junctures, each microcosmically (as with the Hakodate momiji and the Okayama shiro) and macrocosmically, within the context of my entire journey.
To some extent or one other, I spend the primary quarter-to-third of each interval I journey pondering that I won’t really undergo with the plans I’ve made. This is because of a mix of anticipatory anxiousness and unconscious reverse psychology; I’ve solely hardly ever embodied the proverbial executioner when push has come to shove.
On this sojourn, for instance, having arrived in Japan over a day late due to the operational catastrophe that’s American Airways, I believed that I would pull ahead the three days in Shanghai I’d deliberate as an epilogue, partially due to inaccurate data I learn in regards to the state of the colours in my first three stops.
I really went as far as to e book new (however, fortunately, refundable) flights from Narita to Pudong and again to Haneda, and a lodge for my revised dates as effectively.
Wanting again on all these strikes I made, I shudder once I consider how shut I used to be to forfeiting so a lot of my eventual triumphs, pictures (a lot of that are amongst my favorites I’ve ever taken) and the insights I gained from capturing them.
However once I take a look at it by way of the lens of kaizen (roughly), it appears each to be apparent and affirming: In fact I made the fitting choice in the long run, regardless of having no stable proof as I sped north from Aomori to Hakodate and from there south to Morioka that the leaves would the truth is be as yellow, orange and/or purple as they need to presently of 12 months.
Each second of the previous 16 years has served to refine the discernment crucial to acknowledge it, and to strengthen the muscle mass (bodily, sure, however emotional and mental, too) required to behave.
And each facet of this odyssey leveraged each element of the experience I’ve honed, from the checklist of locations and their sequencing, to timing all of them good to coincide with once I calculated peak colours would seem, to the occasions of day I’d go to every particular person website to optimize lighting and to maximise my very own stamina.
My hope, regardless of having blathered on for practically 700 phrases, is that the outcomes will converse for themselves. If to not my pictures expertise and data about how one can execute a visit with most affect, then to encourage your personal autumn journey.
(Assuming, you realize, that you just’re nonetheless on the fence about taking one.)
