A confession about No. 1, and why this letter is named after Niigata’s snow arcades
Hello to everyone reading Take Your Time – Gangi.
Greetings from Niigata.
Gangi is the monthly edition of Take Your Time, a newsletter and web magazine from me, Junpei Takeya, a writer.
I’ll mostly be writing in English. Now and then I may suddenly switch to Japanese, but technology these days is rather remarkable, isn’t it? If that happens, look at the top right of your browser, or right-click and open the settings, and switch to whichever language you like. I think you’ll find the translation surprisingly accurate.
Once things are ready, I’d also like to send out a weekly version called Lagoon. That one will be a little more casual, and mostly about Niigata.
Right. Shall we begin?
Sorry to make things confusing straight away, but I’m writing this issue (No. 0) after No. 1.
I have a confession to make. No. 1 was written with the help of AI. A joint effort between machine and human. Many of you will have noticed. Your instinct was right.
I took two years’ worth of diary entries and notes, removed anything unsuitable, and had the AI read them. The structure and the English were written by the AI. I added memories and scenes, and decided the direction.
Given how it came about, I want to say so plainly.
Apparently there’s now a word for it: ‘Claudefishing’. I’m aware that quite a few people react badly to being made to read something quietly written by AI without being told. Substack, the service I use to send this out, even has a built-in tool that checks whether a piece was written by AI.
On the whole, I think we should be making good use of AI.
Roughly speaking, these are my rules for using it as a writer:
- I use AI without hesitation if it frees up more of my time.
- Generative AI accounts for no more than 49% of the main text.
- I never use anything the AI produces exactly as it comes out.
- In creative work (photographs for articles, graphics and design in general), I keep its use as low as I can. (Though of course my clients’ wishes come first.)
- I take great care over copyright.
So there you have it.
Which means I’ve broken rule 2 at the very first opportunity.
But I decided that getting it out there mattered more.
If I time only the work of having the AI pull it together and write it up, it took just over an hour.
But if you count the total writing time, thinking included, it took an enormous amount of time.
In my defence, it took me a full seven years to bring Take Your Time together as a site.
It’s also true that it went through a good many twists and turns before it finally took shape.
Writers come in all sorts. Some are good at writing about other people and not much good at writing about themselves.
In the end, the thing you understand least is yourself.
The truth is, I meant to start something like this seven years ago.
But I lacked experience of every kind. Not just as a writer, but in life as a whole.
I couldn’t write anything.
That was because I couldn’t connect what I wrote about to myself.
I was only ever someone who reported on things outside me.
That’s no longer the case.
I’m feeling my way, really.
This newsletter, too, is me feeling my way.
But I suppose that can’t be helped.
‘Put it out first.’ Then improve it. That’s what I’m aiming for.
The Japanese are said to be perfectionists (though that’s less true these days). We think we have to make something perfect from the very start, and so we lose our flexibility. I have that tendency too. I made this new place so that I could make and share things another way, building, knocking down and building again.
And I thought that writing in English might help me escape that odd perfectionism.
A middle-aged man, old enough to know better, still trying to find himself. If you’d keep an eye on his struggles, and think things through with him, worry with him, share the odd small surprise…
That would make me very happy.
And it’s free. I intend to keep it that way.
…Having said that, I have switched on donations. If you enjoy it, please consider giving something.
It’ll go towards the costs of what I do. Thank you.
Gangi
I named the monthly newsletter Gangi.
I don’t mean to blow my own trumpet, but I think it was rather a good idea.
A gangi is a covered walkway, made by extending the eaves of a house out over the street so that people can walk beneath them, out of the snow. They’re a familiar sight in Niigata, where I was born and grew up.
You’ll find gangi (or things like them) outside Niigata too, but I don’t think anyone would be upset if I called them something very Niigata.
I find gangi genuinely interesting. There’s something about them that says ‘my house, and yet not my house’.
To put it more stiffly, they are private property that is also public space.
Each gangi belongs to whoever owns the building: a sake shop, a tea merchant, a private household. The local authority didn’t build them. And yet the space underneath is public, and anyone can pass along it, sheltered from snow, rain and wind. In this I think you can sense not only a culture, but something of how people in snow country communicate, how they relate to one another, what kind of people they are.
There’s a drier reason, too. The environment was harsh enough that you couldn’t survive without a spirit of mutual help.
This was an age when rice served as a kind of currency. In an agrarian society, winter is the season when you do nothing but eat through your reserves.
Having written all that, by the time I was old enough to notice, gangi were already disappearing.
Quite simply, being wooden, they deteriorated quickly. Owners died with no one to take over, or the upkeep became a burden, and many people stopped maintaining them.
Up until my grandparents’ generation, people born in the 1920s and 30s, I think the idea of otagaisama was still common: we’re all in the same boat, so we help each other out.
Now that so many of them have gone, I can’t shake the feeling that this spirit of mutual help is fading.
And having written all that… there’s more.
Many of my ancestors came from Sado.
Sado doesn’t have much of a gangi culture.
Because, surprisingly, it doesn’t get much snow.
Well, less than the mainland, that is. When it snows, it snows a fair bit.
Though only a single strait separates it from the mainland, Sado was very much a ‘different country’ (a kuni, one of the old provinces of Japan, which lasted from the ancient ritsuryō state until the Meiji era).
The people of Sado have a temperament of their own, I think.
And I suspect these gradations of temperament will vanish before we know it.
I’d like to introduce as many of them as I can.
Naturally, all of this will be the 100% subjective view of the writer Junpei Takeya.
Take Your Time is a place I built from scratch, so I intend to really get stuck in.