The journal · 日誌

Notes from the field, on the Saturdays that count.

Method pieces, property literacy, and town-by-town field notes. We publish when the index changed or when we learned something on the ground — never to fill a calendar.

Latest · From the editor · July 2026

Why we cover six prefectures, not sixteen.

The snow country has a legal definition, a railway definition, and a marketing definition. Ours is narrower than all three — here is the reasoning.

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Property
June 2026How to read an akiya listing like a local.Municipal listings compress a house's whole story into a dozen fields of terse Japanese. Every field is load-bearing. A translation of the translation.7 min →Snow
June 2026The January window: timing the deepest month.Everyone knows January is the month. Fewer know which half, and why the answer differs on each side of the Sea of Japan divide.4 min →Field notes
June 2026Field notes from Senboku, where the index begins.Our property index starts its town-by-town build in Senboku-shi, Akita — samurai houses, a caldera lake, and the cheapest serious snow-country inventory in Japan. Notes from ten days on the ground.6 min →Method
June 2026What 'updated every Saturday' actually means.A short note on cadence, sources, and what we will and won't publish — the closest thing this site has to a constitution.3 min →