Big in Japan 🇯🇵

Building a newsletter to curate cool and interesting news from Japan.

Hey everyone. It’s been a while since my last issue. I got busy and distracted with some personal projects, but the ideas keep coming. My latest creation is another newsletter called Big in Japan, a weekly curated newsletter about cool sh#t in Japan.

The Backstory

I’ve lived in Japan now almost half my life and genuinely love it here. Some things are bongo nuts, like how the city office still processes everything via paper, but mostly, I love everything about living here. I miss living in Tokyo sometimes (lived there for many years), but we try to visit once per year (back when travel was a thing). Bottom line, I love Japan and love reading about the food, cars, culture, and fashion. So, I thought, why not put together a weekly newsletter highlighting some of the things I read. Since I’m a product of the ’80s, of course, I called it Big in Japan. Cue song in the head for hours. 😂 If by some chance you’ve never heard the song, you can listen here on Apple Music. I’m sure it’s available on Spotify too.

Curators Are The New Creators

This statement resonated with me. If you Google "Curators are the new creators," you will find many articles with the title explaining this new business model. In a nutshell: We all have too much information to process these days. Sometimes it's nice to have someone else curate for us, and we can skim the highlights. What's not to like, right?

The Tool Stack

Big in Japan is a different type of newsletter than this one. Here, I'm writing the content, but with BIJ, I'm curating the content. Revue is much better suited to the task of curation. Combine Revue with Twitter and an RSS newsreader, and you have a pretty simple curation process. I save anything I read during the week to categorized docs within Craft, my new favorite notes tool for iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS. I could use Notion for this task too, but I like the quality design of Craft.

I have a primary Big in Japan doc within Craft, a Music from Japan doc, an Art & Lifestyle doc, and a fashion doc. All of this is currently a work in progress, but I'm ok with so far. I also have NewsletterOS by JanelSGM that I may start using at some point, but I'm trying to keep it simple right now.

Landing Page

I created the landing page using Carrd. It took me about 15 minutes to finish this part. I spent more time picking a photo from Unsplash than I did building the landing page. I plan to switch out the photo periodically. Some will be my photos, some will be stock.

Big in Japan, like One to Better, are long game projects. Both scratch a personal itch providing me an outlet to share. Oh, I built the logo using Canva.

If you like reading about cool sh#t from Japan, subscribe for free and let me know what you think.

Cheers,