Something calm and profoundly soothing

As a fan of public toilets...

Do you need to watch something calm and profoundly soothing—something that can remind you of the many small joys in life and in daily habits? Might I suggest the 2023 film by Wim Wenders, Perfect Days?

E put it on earlier this week when I wasn’t particularly in the mood to watch anything in particular, and I wandered in and out while cooking dinner and doing some household chores. I found it hard to turn away, and ended up watching most of the movie. It follows a man who works as a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo, from the moment he wakes up in the morning, dons his uniform, cares for his collection of tiny trees (Japanese maples), buys a canned coffee from a vending machine just outside his home, and selects a tape to listen to on the drive; through the workday—including his lunch hour, when he takes film photos of the light filtering through the trees in the park; and into the afternoon and evening, when he visits a bathhouse, watches sumo, dines out, and returns home to read before turning in for the night.

The days are broken up by short dream-interludes in black and white, featuring the play of light and shadow through the leaves. This is “Komorebi,” the “Japanese word for the dancing shadow patterns created by sunlight shining through the rustling leaves of trees,” as Sean Burns writes in his review for WBUR.

Inevitably, little things crop up that disturb Hirayama (a riveting Koji Yakusho) and his well-worn routine.

I can’t exactly review it, since I didn’t watch it in full, but I really appreciated and loved what I did see, and I want to (re)watch it in full.

Hirayama is attentive and meticulous in his work, as in his hobbies. He is tender. He is patient. He is kind.

He made me want to be more attentive, meticulous, patient, and kind.

And even though it’s an urban story, it often lingers on the softer parts of the city—the trees, the parks, the water. When not working, Hirayama gets around on his very stylish bike.

And, as a fan of public toilets, I’m obsessed with the backstory of how it got made: “It started with an invitation by Koji [Yanaï, the co-producer] to come and see these toilets [The Tokyo Toilet] that had opened, so to speak, during the pandemic. The Olympics were postponed, and at the time, there were no foreigners there, so, these beauties happened a little bit without being seen. Koji asked me if I could come and have a look at them and if I find inspiration to either photograph them or maybe make a short film or a series of short films about them.” Instead, Wenders was inspired to craft a feature film.

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One of my favorite nuggets from Helen DeWitt’s book, The Last Samurai. I just really loved that the character for ‘thick woods’ was doubled to mean ‘deeply forested.”

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(Deep breath) reading list

Good

• If you only read one thing from this list, let it be this lovely essay by Boyce Upholt about the largest tree east of the Sierra Nevada. (My favorite line, if I had to choose? “That makes for a place alluring to mink and bobcats, but not to many humans—a fact that may be reflected in what the French first called the creek that drains these woods: Rivière à la Chaude pissie, the river of hot piss.” [Garden & Gun]

Fine, I guess

• Treat others how you want to be treated: Last month the Canada Border Services Agency announced it will no longer issue permits for Pacific Crest Trail hikers to cross into Canada at the northern terminus of the trail. Previously, hikers could continue to hike eight miles north to a resort and road crossing and catch a ride there, but now they’ll have to turn around at the terminus and retrace their steps 30 miles to reach the nearest road crossing. This was in the works before the presidential election and mirrors the US policy, which does not allow southbound hikers in Canada to cross into the states. (Gregory Scruggs for the Seattle Times, h/t Dawn Stover)

• We speak for the trees! Senators Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, and Mark Warner, of Virginia, introduced the White Oak Resilience Act of 2025 this week, which would allocate federal resources to conserving and bolstering America's White Oak tree population, which are important for US furniture manufacturing and bourbon production. [Killian Baarlaer for the Louisville Courier Journal]

What the fuck

• Doublespeak alert: Congressman Pete Stauber (MN-08) reintroduced his Superior National Forest Restoration Act [emphasis mine], which which would reopen over 225,000 acres of the Superior National Forest in the Boundary Waters headwaters to sulfide-ore copper mining, and automatically force the issuance of federal mineral leases to Chilean mining giant Antofagasta without review. [Detroit Lakes Tribune Editorial Board]

• “Twenty-two democratic and independent U.S. senators sent a letter Friday morning to newly confirmed U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum imploring him to reconsider drastic measures taken by the Trump administration to reduce the workforce of the National Park Service, warning that the deep staffing cuts could force some national parks to close.” [Ashley Harrell, SFGate]

• “It will be chaos. There will be a lot of dirty toilets and a lot of visitors unsatisfied with their experience, and hopefully not too much damage to the resource,” former National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis told National Parks Traveler. “But if you don’t have folks on the ground out there, we certainly saw this during the last shutdown [in 2018-19] when they didn’t staff the parks, and we saw vandalism, intentional damage.” [Kurt Repanshek]

• Doug Burgum signed six orders on his first day in office, directing agencies to speed up permitting of energy projects and unwind environmental protections, promising to eliminate at least 10 regulations for every new one introduced. [Reuters]

• The leopards won’t eat my face: The Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, including REI, supported the nomination of Governor Doug Burgum to be the next Secretary of the Department of the Interior, based on his “support for outdoor recreation, the outdoor recreation economy, and the protection of public lands and waters.” [National Parks Traveler]

(I know I’m just a tiny little newsletter with limited reach, but I would be so very eager to hear from anyone who belongs to any of those organizations, or is otherwise represented by those groups, about how they feel about this.)