On weekday mornings.
While people rushed to work, we stood in front of the shutter.
Higashi-Mukojima in Sumida, Tokyo.
There was a forgotten garage facing a busy street, as if it did not belong there.
We opened the shutter as the morning sun came in.
The darkness faded and the dust caught the light.
We drank coffee and got to work,
and it felt good to build a base on a weekday morning,
a mix of rebellion and freedom.
The Possibility of Emptiness
It was a place created by Shunsuke, Yasu, and me.
The garage was completely empty.
That is why it could become anything.
The sound of a power saw cutting wood.
The smell of tools.
Hands stained with paint.
Something took shape every time one of us said “I want to do this.”
YouTube was our teacher, and failure taught us better than any textbook.
Since it was right in front of my family home, my father often stopped by.
His hands could build anything, hands anyone would want help from.
But we wanted to build this place by the three of us, and he knew that.
He would smoke with us, then leave without a word.
Maybe becoming an adult is learning how to measure distance like that.
Tank Top Meeting
Tank Top Meeting : part2
The night we finished the bar counter, we all pretended to be bartenders.
We competed to see who could act the most like a stylish bar master.
Holding canned coffee like cocktails, we took that stupid game very seriously.
A sofa with a broken leg and a lone bulb hanging above.
Atmosphere mattered more than completion.
When we worked overnight and slept there, we were always serious about one thing.
We played rock paper scissors for the sofa. Losers slept on the wooden boards.
That was the unspoken rule.
There was a time when inconvenience itself was fun.
Coloring Book
Building the First Toast
Sushi Party to Celebrate Our Bar Counter
Completed = Opened
An elderly couple lived upstairs.
We thought we must be bothering them, so we brought some snacks.
They smiled and said, “Do not worry. Enjoy yourselves.”
That one sentence made our garage nights a little more free.
If someone said “I am here now,” we gathered without question.
It was calmer than a cafe and more comfortable than a bar.
The garage became the center of our lives.
Here, any topic was welcome.
Work.
Dreams.
Anxiety.
Love.
Family.
Future.
In this place, we searched for the path of our lives with everything we had.
Even on nights full of worry, simply being here saved us.
In days ruled by time, a quiet margin existed just for us,
a gap left open in the city, almost like a miracle.
Ashtray Full of Stories
Man Cave
Friendly Chaos
Borrowing the words of Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of TED conferences,
most things in life do not work out.
The same thing happened to the garage.
When we rented the garage, there was one condition.
We will not mention the details, but something happened that we thought never would.
We had to return the space completely empty.
At that time, I was living overseas,
so I could not be there for the final moment when it became empty.
Through the small screen of my phone,
a photo of the garage, completely cleared out, arrived.
Just a few months earlier,
it had been a place where we laughed, created, talked, and slept,
and now it was nothing but a blank space.
I could not explain it,
yet pride felt stronger than sadness.
Why?
The reason does not really matter.
Only the shape is gone, the texture of those days is still here.
A secret base built as adults supports our lives farther into the future than the ones we made as kids.
The value of a finished result is not much.
What matters is who you spent time with and how much time you spent.
Both success and failure are just outcomes of trying, there is no need to cling to either.
More than success, I want to hold onto the growth that comes from the challenge.
The garage is gone, but it changed our lives in a real way.
The sound of lifting that shutter still echoes.
Waiting for the next secret base to appear in our hands.
– The Blueprint –
