At 5:45 this morning the alarm — a small wind-up clock on the dresser, not a phone — sounded for about twelve seconds before I switched it off. The window was still mostly dark. I drank a glass of water from the carafe I had filled the night before, put the kettle on, and stood in the kitchen with my hands resting on the counter for the minute it took the water to come close to boiling. The kettle is old. It clicks twice before it stops. I poured the water over leaves of sencha in a small earthenware pot, waited the minute, and carried the cup to my desk by the window. Outside, a single crow had already started up somewhere over the train tracks. The day had begun.
This is my morning. It has been roughly this morning for about three years. It looks, written out, like the kind of routine the slow-living press tends to romanticise — quiet, unhurried, photogenic if anyone were to photograph it, which no one does. What the written version omits is the years of failed routines that preceded it. This essay is about both: the morning that has lasted, and the mornings that did not. The second part, I think, is the more useful one.
The morning, in detail
Begin with what is actually there, because the abstraction is easier when grounded.
The alarm goes at 5:45. I have a window of about twenty minutes around this — sometimes I am up at 5:30 of my own accord, sometimes I lie in bed until 5:55 before I move — but 5:45 is the centre of gravity. I do not look at my phone. The phone lives, deliberately, in a small wooden box on a shelf in the hallway, which I will open at some point after 8:00. This rule has no moral content. It is simply that the first hours of a day spent looking at a screen are first hours I cannot get back.
I drink a glass of room-temperature water. I make tea — sencha most days, matcha on Sunday mornings, a darker hojicha on the cold days in February when I want something that tastes like winter. I drink the tea at my desk. The desk is the one I have written about elsewhere — a small surface, one beautiful imperfect cup, an A5 notebook open to today's page.
For thirty minutes, sometimes forty, I write in the journal. The writing is not for anyone. Some of it is the day's intended work, in the form of a short list. Some of it is whatever was on the surface of the mind when I sat down — a sentence that occurred in the night, a worry I want to put on paper to stop carrying, a fragment of an idea for an essay. The writing is by hand, in pencil. The pencil is a Tombow Mono I sharpen with a small knife at the end of each week.
At some point between 6:30 and 7:00 I leave the apartment. I walk to the small post office four blocks from my building. I do not always have post to send; the walk is the point. The post office opens at 9:00, so the walk is a loop around its closed entrance, past the small shrine on the corner, and back. The route takes twenty-five minutes at the pace I walk it. By the time I return, the city is properly awake, and I am properly awake, and the writing day can begin.
That is the morning. It is, by design, almost unremarkable. The remarkable part is how long it took to find.
The failed routines, honestly
I want to list the routines that came before this one, because the slow-living literature tends to skip directly to the routine that worked, which is misleading.
In my late twenties, I tried the 5:00 a.m. routine that was popular at the time. The argument was that an extra ninety minutes before the world woke up would compound into a transformed life. I lasted eleven days. I was tired by lunchtime, irritable by 4:00 p.m., and asleep by 9:00 p.m. — which meant I was awake at 5:00 only because I had effectively shifted my entire day, not added anything to it. The routine was not slow. It was just early.
I tried, for several months, a morning routine built around exercise — a short run, a stretch sequence, a cold shower. The components were fine individually; assembled into a routine, they took an hour and required a level of physical commitment first thing in the morning that I could not sustain through a Tokyo summer or a Tokyo winter. The routine survived through April. By August it had quietly disappeared.
I tried a meditation-led routine for nearly a year — twenty minutes of sitting practice as the first activity of the day. This one came closest to lasting. What ended it was not the meditation but the surrounding architecture: the app, the timer, the cushion, the small ritual of setting up the practice. The setup took three or four minutes, and on mornings when I was tired, those three or four minutes were enough friction to skip the practice entirely. A routine that fails on tired mornings is not a routine; it is a fair-weather habit.
I tried a journalling routine that involved three different notebooks — a gratitude log, a morning pages document, a planner. The notebooks contradicted each other. By month three I was using one of them and feeling guilty about the other two. The guilt was the productive output of the routine.
I tried, briefly, the kind of optimised morning that the productivity literature recommends — water, light exposure, exercise, cold shower, journal, deep work block, all before 8:00. I lasted four days. The routine was not a morning. It was a small unpaid job.
The routine that finally lasted is the one I described above. It is shorter than any of the failed ones. It contains fewer activities. It has no app, no system, no scaffolding to maintain. It is, on its own merits, less impressive than several of the routines that preceded it. This is, I have come to think, why it lasted.
What I learned from the failures
Three things, in retrospect, that were doing the actual work.
The first is that a morning routine should be subtractive rather than additive. Each failed routine added activities to the morning — exercise, meditation, journalling, a complex tea ceremony, a productivity ritual. The routine that lasted removed activities — particularly the activity of looking at a phone, which is the dominant morning activity for most people in Tokyo and elsewhere. The space the removal produced was the routine. Everything else fit inside it.
The second is that the routine should be made of materials, not of decisions. The kettle, the cup, the pot, the loose tea, the pencil, the notebook, the wind-up alarm — these are physical objects that prompt the routine without requiring willpower. A routine that depends on remembering to do something, or choosing to do something, will fail on the days when remembering or choosing is hard. A routine that is laid out the night before in the form of objects on surfaces will run on the difficult days too.
The third is that the routine should leave room for doing nothing. The minute spent standing in the kitchen with my hands on the counter, waiting for the kettle to click, is not a productivity loss. It is the routine. The slow-living writing that lists efficient morning routines tends to fill every minute with a beneficial activity. This produces a morning that is dense and pleased with itself and difficult to repeat. A morning that contains a few minutes of standing still is a morning that can survive a difficult night.
The Tokyo of these mornings
A small note on context, because the routine is not separable from the city.
Tokyo at 6:30 a.m. is a city of small details rather than grand vistas. The cherry tree two streets over has a single early-flowering branch that I pass each spring. The shutters of the rice shop come up at 7:15 most days, the older shopkeeper sweeping the entrance with a bamboo broom that has been worn down at one edge. There is a vending machine on the corner that has, for as long as I have lived in this neighbourhood, stocked one particular brand of cold barley tea I like. None of this is photogenic. All of it is what makes the walk worth taking.
The morning routine, in this sense, is not just a personal practice. It is a relationship with a particular city at a particular time of day, repeated long enough to know the city in that condition. I would not have the same routine if I lived elsewhere; I might not have a routine at all. The routine is the route as much as it is the morning.
What the routine has produced
I want to be honest about what this morning has and has not done for me, because the slow-living literature can over-claim.
It has not made me more productive in any obvious way. The work I do during the day is roughly the same in quality and quantity as it was when my mornings were chaotic. It has not made me happier in a measurable sense; my temperament is mine, and a morning routine cannot shift it more than a few degrees. It has not transformed my life.
What it has done is provide a stable beginning to the day that does not depend on the weather of my mind. On the mornings when I wake up tired or anxious or sad, the routine runs anyway, and the running of it does not require me to feel any particular way. By the time the walk is over, the difficult mood is usually a degree or two less difficult, and the day is approachable. This is, on its own, a meaningful daily benefit. It is not transformative. It is sufficient.
I have also noticed, slowly, that the routine has produced a particular kind of writing — calmer, more attentive to detail, more willing to sit with a sentence — that I associate now with the morning hours and that I find harder to produce in the afternoon. Whether the routine causes the writing or merely accompanies it I cannot say. The two are bound together by now in a way I do not feel curious to untangle.
If you are trying to build one
I am wary of recommending this practice, because the morning routine that suits one person rarely suits another, and the literature on this subject is already overstocked. Two suggestions, only.
Begin by removing one thing from your current morning rather than adding anything. The most likely candidate is the phone. Try, for two weeks, leaving it in another room until after breakfast. Notice what you do with the space. The routine, whatever it eventually becomes, will grow into that space rather than being imposed on top of an already crowded morning.
Then add, slowly, one material element — a kettle you like, a notebook you keep open, a particular cup, a walking route. The element should be specific and physical, not a category. "Drink tea in the morning" is a category. "Use this pot, with these leaves, in this cup, at this desk" is a practice. Practices last; categories do not.
If a printable morning-pages template helps you start — a single sheet, lined for the kind of short hand-written list I described above — there is one in the small Etsy shop alongside the kakeibo journals. It is the sort of low-grade artefact that, used well, fades into the practice and is eventually forgotten about. That is the goal.
The morning, after a few months, will start to run itself. After a few years, it will start to feel like the only sensible way to begin a day, and you will have forgotten that it was ever otherwise. This is the good news and the warning, in the same sentence. The slow morning, once earned, will not let you go back.
I write a quieter weekly letter from Tokyo on Substack, if you would like one in your inbox on Sunday mornings. It is the kind of thing you can read with a cup of tea, before the city wakes up.