Daily Yamabushi

When you start new projects, you never know what type of skills they will require, and what type of skills you will learn. It’s really quite surprising. For the Mountains of Wisdom project, I wanted to get a website up quickly, and I had the idea of using a database and dynamic pages, which I hadn’t thought of previously. This has since necessitated a bit of ingenuity (for me at least) in the excel department.

I’ve taught myself excel and website creation before, only the basics, but now I feel pretty confident in being able to get a website up using a spreadsheet in a relatively short amount of time. Just yesterday I learned how to make sentences using data from other cells, which is probably a pretty basic thing but I just never had the reason to do it before. Once you know how to do these things, you realise how simple they are, and want to do them again and again.

I’m convinced projects are where it’s at. There’s so much to gain from wanting to solve interesting problems. Not only is the problem interesting, the solving of it is also interesting. So in the end, I guess it becomes a matter of finding interesting problems to solve that also create value; a collection of which gives you quite an experience.

If the umpire makes a mistake, that mistake is multiplied if they try to make it up to the other team by being lenient on them. Best to forget about it and focus on not making the mistake again and being fair.

No matter how recent the mistake, changing your mindset, trying to forget about it and focusing on the next chance is usually the best course of action. The only time it’s not is when there is a lesson to be learned.

I’m attempting to build a website for what I think is the fifth time now. I’m back to using Wix, which is what I originally used, but I’ve also used WordPress and Squarespace extensively before. I chose Wix for this project solely because I found a way to make a website from a database, but there are still some areas I want to edit that I can’t, as mentioned in yesterday’s post.

WordPress offers total control over everything, only it can be annoying to have to update individual plugins without which you can’t do some simple things. Hosting and domains are also outside the WordPress system, but this isn’t that big of a deal.

Squarespace is really easy to use, has a great interface, but lacks some certain features, like making sites from databases, that I wanted at this time.

Wix is like a halfway point. It is intuitive, but there is a lack of templates like the other two (there are templates, but once you’ve started a site, you can only use the templates you started with. It’s quite annoying). Except with Wix, you can customize the website with your own code. I just don’t know how to do that.

I’m coming into website creation without knowing much at all about coding, and it’s not that hard at all these days. It’s a matter of doing it I guess.

The website creation is getting easier. I have a better idea of what I want things to look like, and a good way of building just that. The problem with working with different builders, though, is that things work differently, and you have to know how to do the same thing but on different systems. Overall, it’s not too hard.

If you just need a simple website, use Squarespace. If you have a few more demands, look into whether Wix addresses them, and if you want to do something a bit more difficult, try WordPress. The Brizy Plug-in I’ve used has worked wonders, by the way.

Finding limitations in something you put so much faith into sucks. I had put a lot of faith into Wix, thinking that I could easily upload a spreadsheet and build 100 pages at once, but I have undeniably come across a number of problems.

For one thing, I can’t get the map to show the correct address, or any address for that matter. The second thing could potentially be more major, depending on whether I can find a workaround or not, but I can’t add custom fields to a blog post, or a blog post to a page made with custom fields. There could still be a way to do so and I just haven’t found it yet, but they don’t make it easy, that’s for sure.

I can do all this on WordPress using the Brizy plugin, but my WordPress site has crashed more than once for reasons that I cannot explain, and I’ve had to get professional help in. It’s possible the problem was my domain host, who it turns out do quite a bit of upselling.

For now though, I’m making a lot of progress on the website, and I quite like the design I’ve come up with, I think you will too. I’m starting to understand the nuts and bolts of Wix to a reasonable standard, including its limitations, and I think I can get a good site up relatively soon. Watch this space.

I think the reason Japanese people love Crocs (which I find abhorrent) is because they’re just the right amount of shoe. In New Zealand, what others call flip flops, or as Aussies call thongs, we call Jandals, and from what I heard, it comes from a Japanese sports team wearing what was most likely geta, and then the Kiwis put ‘Japanese’ and ‘sandals’ together. These days you don’t see geta that much, and the same with jandals as well, unless you’re at the beach.

Crocs on the other hand, are pretty popular. Crocs have a huge advantage in that they’re easy to put on, people in Japan generally loosen their shoe laces if they have them to make them easier to put on and take off (meaning they don’t always wear shoes properly), and they are almost the perfect mid point between jandals and shoes meaning they’re great for summer. I think they’re also just enough shoe, so that your feet don’t also get as dirty as Jandals or sandals for that matter.

I don’t want to preach or anything, but there is one thing that I think everyone should at least try to do, that only few people do actually do. Financial independence, or as I see it, investing 25 times your yearly expenses so that you can perpetually live off the 4% in gains you’ll make (give or take).

On the surface, this might look like greed. Voluntarily pulling yourself out of the job market can seem like you’re leaving the job up to someone else. But I see it as the complete opposite of greed.

By gaining financial independence, you give yourself the choice on whether you work or not. What this means is, you then have the freedom to do things that you otherwise wouldn’t have if you were to entirely rely on a pay check.

Things like volunteering to help people who you wouldn’t have been able to help if you were working full time. Building things that take time and money that you don’t have with work. In this light, even relying on a pay check could be seen as selfish.

In my case, I’m already planning things to do once we do reach financial independence, only we’re pretty far away from that at the moment. This blog is one of those things, and I have a few other projects in mind that I am already working on.

As I see it, when we reach financial independence, the work definitely does not stop. It might change, but it shouldn’t stop. I want to work until the day I die, just not necessarily for money.

There are jobs here in Japan that simply couldn’t exist in New Zealand, and in the case of this one, there are times when they shouldn’t exist. The main reason they can exist here but not in NZ is because the wages here are so low. The minimum wage here is just over half NZ’s.

I often complain about how our taxes are going towards parking wardens who simply aren’t necessary. And it gets worse because people trust them rather than checking for safety for themselves, which you should always do.

I just witnessed a near full speed accident with a car pulling out into a two-lane road, and if it had happened, it could have totally been the parking warden’s fault. I was in the left-hand lane and the parking warden was standing in front of my car telling me to stop so he could let other cars in once the lights had changed.

When they did change, the warden let in two cars in front of me, the first one into my lane, which is fine, but the second one wanted to cut across our lane in an attempt to get to the lane to my right. Next second, a car was moving at full speed down this second lane, and if the car that cut across hadn’t slammed on the breaks, and the other car hadn’t maneuvered out of the way, there’s a high chance someone could have died. All because of someone doing a job that shouldn’t really exist.

Thank god nothing happened. Please be careful out there and never trust someone else in situations like this when you are driving!

I would say that if you are a positive person, this would in most likelihood make you more likeable. If you are a positive person, you are constantly looking for the positive in others, and genuinely liking someone else, or at least showing that you like them, makes you more likeable. Similarly, I think the opposite is also true. The phrase ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ comes to mind, as we have been shown to be less likely to be liked if we are the bearer of bad news. Positive people are either able to or are inclined to put a positive spin on things that could be construed as negative. This would mean, even with the giving of bad news, depending on how it is portray, they could still be seen in a positive light, which makes them more likeable.

Obviously I’ve been reading a bit of psychology, and obviously again I am generalising, but in my own case, I have found this to be true. I tend not to share bad news if I can avoid it, or if I do, I always try to see the positive in it, and I always try to portray that positiveness to the other person. A lot of this is because I don’t want people to pity me, so I try to show them how even though the situation is bad, I am still thinking positive, and that I honestly do think that things will be ok. They might not be the same, but they will always be ok. I have also learned firsthand that humans have the uncanny ability to come to terms with at least most things, if given the right amount of time.

This sort of mindset I think means that by nature I am a positive person, and I think this leads to more likeableness in general.

I’ve been reading Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, a book I decided to buy after hearing about it on a recent Freakonomics podcast. So far I’m about 100 pages into this 500ish page tome, and I have to say I am quite enjoying it.

There’s a part where Cialdini talks about multi-racial schools that really piqued my interest as I’ve always wondered how Japan would be if they were more welcoming to non-Japanese people.

If you want to know, I am extremely pro-immigration if it means taking in people who are escaping some of the very harrowing places I have heard firsthand accounts of. This is of course because of the human reason, but also because these people in general contribute quite a lot to the economy as well (will have to find my sources, sorry).

In that regard, I would like Japan to accept more immigrants than it currently does, but this does of course come with the caveat (or possible caveat) that doing so would affect the social harmony.

I have no doubt that it would, unless a few precautions were in place. Cialdini’s book highlights some ideas that I think on a large scale might work. One of which was that if schools are focused on students competing against one another, then multiracial schools aren’t exactly a good idea. However, if the onus is on collaboration for mutual benefit, then things do go relatively well.

My thinking goes, this means for there to be any chance that this could succeed, we would need an overhaul of the education system to focus on that collaboration for mutual benefit, rather than the current system that is very much focused on competition amongst students. I should mention that this does not mean there should be no competition, friendly competition can be a great motivator, rather it should be accompanied with these opportunities for collaboration for mutual benefit. As it currently stands, there is a lot of competition here, even amongst seemingly similar types of people, that for someone from the outside just looks like petty infighting that really gets you nowhere (Sakata and Tsuruoka for example, although this does seem to be changing).

I realise I’m both stereotyping and generalizing quite a lot, so please don’t take this thought experiment literally, but you’re smart enough to know that, right?

I started making a spreadsheet of all the 100 Mountains of Yamagata a few months’ back, and today it sent me down a bit of a wormhole looking for a way to turn the information into a website straight off the spreadsheet. I found one way to do so through Wix. Squarespace you probably could do it, WordPress as well, but I couldn’t find an easy way to do so on either, or a way that doesn’t involve coding. Wix had a database feature that did exactly what I wanted.

This changes everything. With this, it would be extremely easy to populate a website with hundreds of pages in a relatively short amount of time. I wouldn’t be surprised if using databases in this way was what people were already doing and I just didn’t realise it, but this thinking only came about because I thought the pace at which I was adding mountains was way too slow, and I that I should just add them without actually having climbed them. The aim is to help people by giving them a resource to climb the mountains themselves, and I can do that without having climbed them myself, there’s plenty of information out there, only it’s all in Japanese on a pretty old website (yamagatayama.com).

This blog and the mountains of Yamagata blog are both made using templates, but they come with the (in my opinion) huge disadvantages of WordPress, which are that there are so many moving parts just to do simple things, any of which could easily crash the website, and you also have to pay separately for everything. WordPress is like Frankenstein’s monster in that regard. It is of course entirely controllable, but this demands a lot of background knowledge, and being able to populate a website using a spreadsheet to me is a game-changer (if I decide to go through with it of course). I also calculated the costs I was spending on hosting, an SSL certificate (that doesn’t work properly) and my domain. Wix came out either a similar price or even cheaper (after the first year you have to pay for your domain, which I think makes it more expensive).

Over the years I’ve built up a pretty intricate knowledge of the local road system, and I think I know it pretty well. So when I’m trying to get somewhere, I obviously try to find the quickest route. But sometimes, what you think is the quickest route isn’t because of unexpected things like road works and traffic. At those times, is it fair to blame yourself for getting it wrong?

At the start, I feel stupid for having taken the ‘wrong’ route. But then you were just doing the best you could with the information you had on hand. That’s the best you can hope for, no point worrying about whether things could have gone differently. And especially for things finding the fastest route, if you get upset over something like that, it can be quite dangerous. Best to just let it be and to live with the decision that’s already been made.

My digital detox of putting the phone down to charge at 6pm hasn’t worked twice this week because I didn’t get my blog post done in time. On these days, you truly do understand the advantages of such restraint.

There really is nothing to gain from having access to your phone at all hours, I realise that now that I have my phone in my hand and I’m attempting to watch a TV show properly, but I still feel compelled to use my phone.

I was thinking that my digital detox could have a weekend, but am now reconsidering my views. It’s probably easier to just go cold turkey from 6pm every day. Similarly, a break from SNS may also be a good idea. That’s the thing that’s really keeping me on I think.

Was biking home today along a windy riverbank. As always, I was trying to go fast, and there were these two high school students ahead that I tried and succeeded in overtaking. Ride on about another km and I turn around before making a turn and realised one of them was using me for drafting! Not going to lie, I was well impressed he knew to do that 🙂 his friend was well behind so it obviously had made a difference. Glad I could help.

We have to be on the lookout for such opportunities. You never know when someone could give you a good boost!!

This is something I wish I had the foresight to see when I was studying Japanese so vehemently all those years ago. I hope it helps. If you’re learning the language for fun, and you enjoy it, keep at it. If you’re learning the language also for the sake of professional development, also find something else you can learn alongside.

Remember, language is a tool for communication. That’s all. Studying the language for the sake of it is fun and everything, but if you’re putting all your bread into one basket, and that basket is language learning, you’re going to want to find another basket to bring along.

Say you do succeed at acquiring the language to an acceptable level. Congratulations. Then what? If you have this other basket there are two great advantages. If you feel your language skills aren’t up to scratch, you can fall back on this other skill, and if your language skills are up to scratch, you can combine the skills together to create a valuable niche.

Being able to translate and interpret is great. Being able to translate and interpret with domain knowledge, is amazing. You started learning the language so you could use it right? Having this other skill means that you can better use the language from the outset.

If you’re wondering what else you can do, I would recommend learning something like marketing so that you can best make use of your communication skills. I’d start with This Is Marketing by Seth Godin.

Tim Ferriss says when you’re undertaking a new project, try and make it so that even if you fail, you win. That’s the sort of mindset I went into my YouTube and 100 mountains project, although I don’t think I’m failing.

I’m starting to really enjoy making videos. I’m a complete novice, until now everything I’ve learned has been through trial and error but mainly YouTube sensei. It gives me a buzz to look back at the footage I got and imagine how I’m going to piece it all together. It’s also really fun to get out there and try and get the stuff in the first place.

I’m also starting to pick up on areas I need to be careful of when filming, such as low light locations that are hard to capture on a GoPro, panning, and also when walking to avoid the bobbing effect.

This is exactly why I started this project. I wanted to gain a new skill, and I’ve already learned enough that I can at least make a relatively entertaining video. As always though, I need to look ahead and find areas where I can grow, such as learning to edit quicker, and also looking for video ideas that can be useful for others.

On a side note, it feels really good to have built a collection of videos up. I’ve only just started, today’s video is mountain number four technically, and I’ve already filmed number five, but I’m really excited to see how much I can improve over the course of this project. So much so, I encourage you to also begin something similar if you’re feeling the inkling.

Even if I were to somehow fail at this project, I feel that I have already won. I guess that means I need to find something else to potentially fail at.

When things are unpredictable, which is always and which we are basically born to hate, start with an idea of an ideal situation and work your way back, but do it with the knowledge that it will never work out as planned exactly. That things don’t work out as planned is exactly what makes it interesting.

You can try your hardest to make things go as planned, but you’ll undoubtedly change your mind, and how that transpires is always interesting to see. And if you’ve gone into things with the ideal in mind, you should at least be somewhat happy with what transpires, even if, or especially if, they don’t transpire as planned.

A few weeks back I wrote about putting my phone to charge at 6pm and not looking at it for at least 12 hours (that second part I may have just made up). The same goes for other devices too, like my iPad and computer, although I do allow myself to watch TV.

This has worked amazingly well. Besides specific nights when I stay up until 2:30am to watch NZ win the World Test Championship, I have found that I naturally go to sleep rather early, starting to feel tired around 8:30-9. Then I wake up rather early too, around 5-5:30, fully rested mind you.

To be honest, I am very surprised at just how sleepy I get once the sun goes down. The problem is, it has kind of cut into my reading time at night because I just get too tired. I’ve had to shift to reading in the morning a bit, but recently I’ve been using that time to do a bit of writing.

Either way, I highly recommend this. Put your phone to charge at around 6pm, then forget about it. After a week or so you forget that feeling of not having it, and you can better concentrate on other much more important things like spending quality time with family.

I had this weird thing where I was going to try and do the Dewa Sanzan last on my list of 100 Famous Mountains of Yamagata, thinking that I wouldn’t be able to do them justice. Actually, I thought I would never be able to do them justice, so that I might as well give up. But this is just foolish.

Thinking you won’t be able to do something justice is clearly the resistance making it’s way into your brainwaves. It is just an extremely elaborate excuse. Take steps to at least get started on the project, you may not be able to do it justice, but you can at least try.

For me, thankfully yesterday I was invited by a friend to share Mt. Haguro with him (he knew I was a Yamabushi), and this was a great chance to do a bit of filming (with my friend’s permission of course).

There’s so much to Mt. Haguro that I’ve learned over the years, I really could write a novel about it (perhaps I should?). I should have a video out sometime in the next few weeks. I already have one on the Haguro Kodo that should be out this week, but this one doesn’t cover the main side that much.

So I’ve started trying to make a coherent page of Mt. Haguro, and I already know it’s going to be a challenge to fit everything in. Not trying would definitely be a fools errand, and I have everything I need to give a good attempt at doing the peak justice, although to really do it justice everyone would have to do Yamabushi training… Hopefully I can convince some people to join 🙂

Today I spent the day climbing Mt. Haguro with my friend, who is actually my student who I have been teaching for I think more than five years now. He is doing a project where he has to introduce where he lives, and he reached out to me and asked to learn about Yamabushi.

So naturally we went up Haguro. One thing I really wanted to show him, that I want everyone to know actually, is that the mountains will always be there.

For Yamabushi, mountains and nature have a special meaning, and that comes about through worship of the Kami and Buddha of the mountains. This for me is showing appreciation to nature for giving us everything.

Knowing that you can always go to the mountains, whenever you need to, that is a great reassurance, and I wish for everyone to remember this. The mountains are both unforgiving and forgiving at the same time. All you need to do, is surrender to them.

So, I told my student this exact phrase; Shonai will always be there, the mountains will always be there.

I used to think a lot about how they decide the songs to be released as singles from an album. The most shocking one for me at least was that (IIRC) Under The Bridge was originally not going to be a single. How do they decide which songs are good enough to be released? How do they decide how many songs to release as singles?

Or maybe a better explanation would be with tv episodes in a series. You would want to put the good stories at the start to get people hooked, but wouldn’t that mean the not so good stories become a sort of filler for the season?

My answer is that the only way to get by this is to always make sure you’re doing your best work, to always put your best foot forward, to make sure that the quality is there in everything you produce.

In the end, who decides if something is good or not? If your target audience like it, isn’t that good enough? Then I guess it’s just a matter of expanding your target audience, or your target audience expanding itself through the network effect.

Either way, it’s pretty funny how the term jumping the shark came to be. I vaguely remember seeing that episode when I was little (they had re-runs of Happy Days on TV in NZ). But it’s odd because they would have had a big enough audience that that shouldn’t have mattered as much… but what do I know!?

I have a weird inkling or feeling that a salary or being paid by the hour is limiting, that ‘this is what a person of this stature deserves’, or ‘this is your lot in life’ only encourages people to settle. It’s been like that for me a few times until now. Of course for certain people this may be exactly what they want, but I still feel they are limiting themselves. As long as they’re cognizant of that I guess.

That’s one reason why I could never get why companies don’t allow outside work, which was the norm and very much still is here in Japan (even for one poor friend of mine who was only working part-time!!). This is too hard to police anyway, how do investments play into the equation?

I like having side projects on the go not just for the sake of doing them, but for the potential of them blowing out of proportion. This is by no means the reason to do the project, that’s the complete wrong reason to do something, but building multiple chances for things to blow out of proportion is an exciting part of the equation.

So, I refuse to settle. I’m going to be trying different projects for the rest of my days, and I highly encourage you to do so too, no matter what it is.

One big part of Yamabushi training that can take a little bit of time to get your head around is that as much as possible, we don’t like to give any explanation or details or even background to the trainings before they begin.

The logic is that doing so would give you expectations that will have an effect on how you experience something. Any effect as such is a burden that can stop the experience from being an effective experience.

Sometimes I like to go into an experience with the mindset that I am to experience the experience for the sake of the experience. This means I’m purposely trying not to think how I will explain the experience when I get home, or how I can record the experience for something in the future.

This is something I’ve been struggling with a little with the 100 Mountains of Yamagata project, but I tell myself that the first part is to record for others, and the second part is my experience. However, paradoxical maybe, I think this also helps when I’m climbing a mountain not for the purposes of recording it. It means I am better able to enjoy the experience for the experience. And this further motivates me to get the mountains project out of the way 🙂

In August, I’ll be turning 33, the same age Jesus was when he died, and I feel I should add that I’m already halfway-through living the amount of time my dad did (62). My grandparents all lived past 75, with the oldest falling just before their 90th birthday, so if I go by my grandparents, I should live long, but there really is no guarantee on things like this as my dad’s situation would attest to (and as much as I hate to admit it, the same goes for mum). I like to think because of my situation I have a greater appreciation for life than others in my demographic, and I sometimes use this as an excuse to do things impulsively. If I’m trying to decide between doing something and not doing it, for example, I tend to lean towards doing it, whereas in the past I may not have been so adventurous. In a way, this blog is a result of that type of thinking.

However, I don’t think you need such horrific experiences to remind yourself to live a little. Even just reflecting on what you have, and the Stoic activity of picturing what life would be like without certain people, the ones closest to you, this can be enough to push you into action, and to appreciate life more.

P.S. If what you have in mind has a risk of harming others, find something else for now. I have a friend who very recklessly does things without regard of others all because they became tired of the situation. That is the exact behaviour that allows such a situation to continue, and we all need to take responsibility for each other, especially those most at risk of getting seriously ill or even dying from COVID-19, the exact people my friend hadn’t even considered when they did what they did.

What is it? And why can you do it for hours? Either way, that’s what you should be doing with your time, once you have your bases covered of course. If that covers your bases, even better! If it has potential of covering your bases, work on making it so it does!

That’s me at the moment. Although I’m still very much an amateur, I really enjoy sharing about this part of Japan and the Yamabushi lifestyle. I’ve had a lot of fun already checking out the 100 mountains of Yamagata, and I’m only 5 peaks in. If I can somehow make this into some sort of living, well I think if I worked hard I could make the Yamabushi side into my living as well, then I’d be pretty happy.

I think I like it so much because I get to explore my creativity. Part of the 100 mountains challenge is to learn how to edit and simply create great videos. I already feel I’ve made a lot of strides and this is something that keeps me hungry for more. Not only that, but I’m trying to create the ultimate source of information for English speakers wanting to climb the mountains or simply looking for something fun to do.

I also hope that I inspire others to do something similar, to get out there, put in the effort, and make something that we can all benefit from.

But this doesn’t come from sitting on your arse. It comes from actually getting out there and trying something to see if you like it or not. And then trying it again and again until you find that, yea, it really is quite fun. so get out there, and get started!

Practice makes perfect. Or so they say. When you have to perform in front of people, it can be extremely nerve-wracking. There are only so many things you can practice for any performance. When it comes to the real thing, there are so many unpredictabilities, but those are exactly the things you shouldn’t worry about. What you should worry about is properly doing the things you can in advance; focusing on breath, focusing on posture both before and during, trying your best to memorise the lines. But also equally, not getting worked up when things don’t go as planned. That’s what unpredictabilities are, and by definition they can’t be prepared for, so make sure you focus on what you can actually control.

Of course there are some parts of your job that someone has to do. I feel immense amounts of pleasure doing my jobs, trying to make life better for all those I interact with, but sometimes there are things that I just really don’t feel like doing.

At times like that, I like to remind myself to think bigger than that, ‘that’s what you’re getting paid for’, and that it’s all in the name of making life better for those who you wish to serve.

Also, often once you do these things, you find out that it’s not so bad in the end either, and that practice doing them now will help you if you do it more efficiently if have to do it in the future.

I’ve been caught up in the past few days with a few such things. It can have an impact on the things I usually do want to do, so I find it’s best to try and batch them and do them as quickly as possible, or give yourself some sort of reward for doing so, like a cup of coffee or something. Although, it’s probably best to build systems so that these things are few and far between.

Sometimes when I get up early and step outside I’m reminded of the times I’ve stayed near the beach and I go for a swim first thing. Today was one of those days, and it could be because I woke up at 4am. I haven’t woken up that early since Yamabushi training, but I was just in time to catch the sunrise, it’s quite early here in Japan. I even managed to get a photo which is like the rice fields of Tatooine.

It’s crazy how productive you can be if you get up that early. Besides going for an hour or so walk, I also got in at least an hour of video editing and had plenty of time to bike(!) to work as well. Only thing is, I didn’t get this blog written in time, and my body is telling me it’s about my bed time, even this early 🙂 (9pm JST). Let’s see how tomorrow goes.

This also proves that I failed at my 6pm no device detox for today, another reason to get the blog done in the morning.

Since my last video on Mt. Takadate, which didn’t do so well at all, I’ve been thinking of ways that I can improve. You should think of ways to improve even if the video does do well, but to be honest, this video was a bit of an experiment. I wanted to focus on the visuals of the mountain to give the viewer a feeling of what it would be like to climb it, but the quality of the images wasn’t there, and I did it in a way that doesn’t focus on the reason why Takadate was on the 100 Famous Mountains of Yamagata in the first place. In the case of a low mountain like Takadate, this is probably the angle I should have taken.

Since then, I’ve filmed my next two mountains to share, The Hidden Side of Haguro, and another one that will be released in due course, and I think I need to do a much better job at getting good footage in the first place. My excuses both times were that I was with people more interested in climbing the mountain than filming the experience, which contrasts to Mt. Kinbo that I climbed with a friend interested in photography and videography, and Mt. Arakura that I climbed individually. This means I spent less time on what I now think are the more important things to capture while out on the mountain, such as a good introduction, and a good finish as well.

I’m sure it’s been said, but you can only do so well with bad footage. At a guess, I’d say it would be much easier to edit when the footage is there. So the next challenge for me is making sure that I get the best footage I can each time. I had it in the back of my mind that I could just ‘edit out the bad’, but this has proven to be entirely wrong.

These mountains are interesting places. I could hardly sleep the other night because I got so excited writing about my experience. Now I need to do a better job of portraying that excitement and getting people interested in climbing the mountains, which is one of my main aims of this project. But as I’ve learned, there’s no such thing as editing out the bad. The only thing you can do is get the good.