Beany Brain: loving our jumping-bean brains!

Welcome to this issue of the Beany Brain! I hope today’s newsletter will bounce us up as we contemplate the upsides and challenges of being neurodivergent, a little beauty, some creativity, and just general yeehawesomeness.

Table of Contents

• Beany Brain: loving our jumping-bean brains!

  • Welcome to this issue of the Beany Brain! I hope t …

• My 5-Senses Portrait of Kanazawa

  • Ha Ha Haiku

  • “How To Find Community in 2025”

    • Yeehawesome!

  • Wonderful Wednesday

  • Today’s Beany-full Summary:

My 5-Senses Portrait of Kanazawa

We’ve been back in Japan for over 3 weeks now so I figured it’s time to look around and notice a few things to share with you about our city of Kanazawa. (Here’s my 5-senses portrait of Marlow, UK, where we just spent 4 months.)

All in the name of reacclimating to our Japan home.

(Actually, I just really do love thinking about the 5 senses and also writing.)

Again, I got the idea for the 5-senses portrait from the writer and podcast host Gretchen Rubin.

So without further ado or much ado about something…

Seeing:

• Visitors who come to Kanazawa love to dress up in kimonos and there are loads of rental shops where they’ll let you pick something out and then dress you in it. The girls walking around sightseeing look like bright butterflies.

• Vegetable plots abound here in Kanazawa on the edges of the city, and even in between houses and around the edges of parking lots sometimes. They are so neat with rows of onions and other veg, plus flowers around the perimeters.

• We sometimes see wildlife in our neighborhood: the dreaded Asian palm civet, anaguma (badgers), kamoshika (serow), snakes, bugs, and lots of birds.

• Mountains and oceans in the same place! I love that about Kanazawa, which was something I loved about living in Seattle too.

• Great architecture: the Umi Mirai library, the Ishikawa Prefectural library, the station.

• Traditional shops and vertical wooden slats.

• Gold leaf—Kanazawa is known for it. It’s on decorative walls, support beams, murals, tiles, Buddhist altars, gift items, and even ice cream and coffee.

Hearing

• The crows every Tuesday and Friday for trash days. Caw caw caw!

• Our tofu delivery lady, Horie-san, comes every Monday night around our neighborhood and her little truck has a speaker on top playing a special song to alert us to get ourselves outside to buy some tofu!

• Sometimes in the middle of the night I hear bosozoku biker gangs riding through the main streets, revving their crazy engines.

• Summer means cicadas and then crickets screaming in the trees. Enough to make your ears ring if you walk outside. Loud enough to hear through closed windows and doors.

• The 5 PM neighborhood loudspeaker that sounds like a bell/alarm, alerting the kids to go home.

Smelling

• The gardenias blooming in early summer. Their scent is absolutely intoxicating. We missed it this year!

• Neighbors sometimes burn incense for their family altars and it comes through our windows—it’s a distinctive scent.

• Rice cooking in the rice cooker—it’s a lovely toasty fragrance that makes my stomach rumble every time I smell it.

• The toasted-green-tea-like scent of handcrafted tofu being made.

• We have the ocean nearby so sometimes I can just about smell the salted air.

Touching

• A marble-y stone tub at the local onsen (hot springs bathhouse)—so smooth.

• The metallic flaps on the post boxes when I mail a letter or postcard.

• My summer slippers have little plastic rounded spiky things on the sole that give my feet a nice wee massage.

• My new chair’s knobbly fabric texture.

• The (yummy and) crunchy consistency of lotus root. (Here’s some that accidentally froze in the fridge.)

Tasting

• Kanazawa is on the Japan Sea coast and has the best seafood!

• Kinjiso is a leafy veggie grown in this area, with dark green on one side and a purple underside. It has a very distinctive taste that I love, and I especially like it raw in salads.

• Hojicha is a specialty tea here, made by roasting the green tea leaves in porcelain over charcoal. It’s mellow and yummy.

• Ishikawa-grown rice! Yes, we have become rice snobs.

• A new-to-me tofu shop right here in Kanazawa has become a favorite. Mori No Tofuya, run by Mori Shinpei, is a one-man tofu factory and it’s darn good. He also makes the best miso, but he doesn’t have a license to sell the miso so he just gave us some for free. Lucky us! (That’s the front of his factory/shop in the photo above with vertical wooden slats.)

Thanks for coming along on my 5-senses journey of our beloved Kanazawa.

Ha Ha Haiku

My aim is to share a funny haiku with you every week in every newsletter, whether it’s one of my own or one I curate for you. HA. Ha. Haiku.

“How To Find Community in 2025”

I read an interesting article in The Guardian the other day, and I’ll give you the gist.

The main point: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. (That’s the good kind of statement in all caps, if you know what I mean.)

As a neurodivergent person, I sometimes feel on the periphery of things even if I’m in a big room full of people. I have to really mask and work hard to mingle, and then I’m exhausted later.

But anyone can suffer from loneliness, and so I share this for all of us.

We all know we’re more fractured, lonely, and less community-oriented than we used to be. So Yale professor Dr. Laurie Santos told the journalist who wrote this article:

She also suggests:

I won’t belabor it: I think we all know and understand that it’s important to combat loneliness through community.

One of the ladies interviewed in the article says she gets frustrated by the barriers to volunteering, and I concur. Last time we visited my parents I tried to volunteer at the local food bank but I was barred by not having had an FBI background check. I understand why these things are important, but I didn’t have the time for that.

Others say that volunteering is an antidote to the craziness/darkness in the world. I agree with that too.

It’s a bit tricky in Japan: If you do something for a neighbor or friend, they will feel “giri,” an obligation. You have to tread carefully or you’ll start what Stephen and I call a “giri war.”

Anyway, the article by Australian Tom Gill got me thinking more about this topic, about the good mental health aspects of community, about keeping my eyes and ears open.

What builds community for you in your neck of the woods?

Yeehawesome!

Yeehawesome! is a happy-brain roundup in each issue of Beany Brain. What’s happening that’s good in brain land? What’s bringing me joy?

1. I sometimes look through images of Mary Sumner paintings just before bed to get the good thoughts going before I sleep, but this week it’s Clarice Cliff Art Deco teapots. They are amazing. Have a gander sometime—there are loads of photos online.

2. I found my favorite pink-and-white-striped cotton top at a secondhand shop last summer. Well, the other day I found its fraternal green twin at the same shop! It’s the same brand, same size, everything. Unbelievable. An extra gift.

3. Our rice paddle was getting old and the plastic was chipping, so I found a new one that is made by a company right here in our prefecture, and it stands up on its own. Outstanding! It’s now a new and upstanding member of our family.

4. This 12-minute video by Christine Sine was very encouraging. She’s an Australian author and speaker living in Seattle who is a retired doctor from the YWAM (Youth With a Mission) Mercy Ships. Here in this video she’s talking about harvesting the produce from her garden in Seattle (they get 400-500 pounds of apples just from their 3 semi-dwarf apple trees, plus all kinds of veggies from the garden!). Christine also laments the passing of the summer season, looking back in gratitude and looking ahead in anticipation to the next season. She reminisces about being on the Mercy Ship called Anastasis and says every time they left a port they had a service of gratitude and remembrance for the things that happened in that port, and then someone would give a talk about the next port so they could look ahead. What a great idea for any time of change in life.

Beany Brownie Points and Extra Bonus Funniness

Wonderful Wednesday

Wonderful Wednesday was a day once a year in college when they would suddenly and surprisingly call off all classes and we’d play all day. The cafeteria provided special fun food and we’d do stuff outside like slip ‘n slides and jello wrestling in sumo suits. This segment of Beany Brain is dedicated to that memory of silliness and fun—no words, just a photo from the week that I’ve taken or found that reminds me to let the joy in. Since Beany Brain is published on Wednesday every week (at least, Wednesday in Japan), I hope you enjoy this Wonderful Wednesday.

Today’s Beany-full Summary:

• I wrote a 5-senses portrait of our beloved Kanazawa.

• An article in The Guardian talks about community, volunteering, and working on antidotes to the darkness and loneliness in the world.

• Go forth in Beany joy. What will help you feel yeehawesome this week?

Thank you for reading this installment of Beany Brain! You’re very welcome to hop on by any old time.

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