Hello. I’m Junpei Takeya — a writer, interviewer and documentary maker living in Niigata, on the Sea of Japan side of the country. The side most visitors never see.
For about ten years I’ve made a living asking people questions and then trying to do justice to their answers: in print, in photographs, on video, and on podcasts. I used to write about music. Before that I wrote a university thesis on the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and his years under the Nazis, which taught me early that the most interesting stories sit in the uncomfortable middle.
I think of my job as being an interpreter. Not of languages, exactly, but of places and people: drawing meaning out through conversation rather than arriving with conclusions.
Why this letter exists
Japan is endlessly written about in English. Niigata almost never is. And some of the historians who changed how Japan understands itself — Amino Yoshihiko on the people outside the rice-and-samurai story, Miyamoto Tsuneichi on the lives of ordinary villagers — remain barely translated.
Take Your Time is where I bring those two things together: one coast, read slowly, with good books for company. It runs on a monthly letter, Gangi, with a weekly one, Lagoon, to follow.
Elsewhere
・Eigo-Kamishibai (English-kamishibai)
My studio work — journalism, documentary and podcast production — lives at junpeitakeya.com.
My rules
Don’t reinvent the wheel: before trying anything, find out who has already walked that road. And don’t be reduced to a single job title — I once called myself a “hyper-hyakushō（百姓）”, after the old Japanese word for villagers who lived by many trades at once.
Thanks for stopping by. If you’d like the letters, subscribe here — and if you write back, I read every reply.