the restaurant project

Wow, over a year since I blogged. Pathetic! Anyway, for anyone still reading, I'm revving it back up this year as part of a New Year's resolution to try new restaurants. I wanted to track my progress, and I realized, I already have a handy place to do that. So Collarbone High is born again! I'm trying not to turn it into a food blog, because there are already hundreds of bloggers who write about food far better than I ever could. Instead, I'll just do a brief write-up of each new place I try, and I'll aim -- but not promise -- to write about other topics as well.

I abandoned the blog before because I was having a hard time striking the right tone. I realized what the problem was when my friend Tim told me he missed my stories about coping with life in Tokyo. And therein lies the snag -- after a little over two years here, I don't have to cope with Japan anymore. I just live here. Occasionally a comical misunderstanding or language-barrier snafu will arise, but those occasions are getting fewer and farther between. I no longer have the "gee whiz Japan is weird!" naivete that entertained people reading in the States. I don't want to write an expat blog, either, or to pepper my posts with references to people, places and Japanese terms that would make sense only to my friends in Japan. So I kind of got stuck. But the restaurant project has given me a focus and a new reason to write. It's good to be back!