Tsurezure — what this word means

Tsurezure (徒然) is an old Japanese word. It names the state of sitting quietly with time on your hands, letting whatever surfaces in the mind drift by — half-thoughts, small memories, the things you notice only when you are not busy.

Seven hundred years ago a monk named Yoshida Kenko wrote a whole book in that spirit. He began it: “with nothing better to do, all day I sit facing the inkstone, setting down the idle thoughts that cross my mind.” It became one of the most loved books in Japan.

This blog is written the same way. I keep a game shop in Japan. Old consoles and cartridges pass through my hands every day — cleaned, repaired, packed, and sent to people across the world. In the quiet hours between, I find myself thinking: about the people who made these machines, about what a thirty-year-old game still has to say, about the strange and human business of sending a piece of someone’s childhood to a stranger in another country.

Tsurezure is where I write those thoughts down.

— Taisei Shimizu, Enjoy Game Japan