Introduction
On January 1st, I posted a selfie in my kimono to Instagram.
It was a full-length shot—me standing in front of our family’s kamidana, a shy smile on my face, sleeves carefully arranged, the deep plum color of my furisode catching the morning sun. In the caption, I wrote:
“Welcoming 2025 in tradition 💮 #FirstSunrise #KimonoLife #TokyoMama”
Ten minutes later, I was in the kitchen reheating ozoni while replying to New Year’s messages on LINE, updating my blog draft on my laptop, and telling my son for the third time that no, he couldn’t just eat mochi and call it breakfast.
This is my life.
It’s half silk and half screen.
Half ritual, half real-time notifications.
I was raised in a household where New Year’s Day was sacred. My grandmother would wake before dawn to begin the osechi preparations, laying each dish like a prayer: black beans for health, shrimp for longevity, and datemaki for knowledge. We would watch the first sunrise in silence, bundled up in coats and quiet reverence. We would bow to our ancestors, eat slowly, and speak softly.
Today, I do many of the same things—but with a smartphone in hand.
There’s something both beautiful and bewildering about living between two worlds. I can fold my obi perfectly thanks to my grandmother’s teachings, but I also know how to edit a Reel showing that process for my followers abroad. I light incense at the butsudan, then switch tabs to check my inbox. I recite blessings with my family, then post “Akemashite omedetou!” on Threads.
Am I performing tradition or preserving it?
Am I digitizing culture—or diluting it?
I ask myself this more often than I admit.
Sometimes I feel like a bridge. Sometimes, a translator. Sometimes, just… stuck.
I’m a Tokyo housewife in 2025, juggling ancient customs and algorithmic feeds. My days are full of contradictions—beautiful ones, frustrating ones, often funny ones. I’ve worn a kimono while video-chatting with relatives in Canada. I’ve said “itadakimasu” before a meal I photographed for a recipe app. I once attended a neighborhood shrine visit and live-tweeted it by accident.
This blog is my attempt to make sense of it all.
To show you what it’s like to stand in tatami socks while typing in emoji. To raise children who know both how to bow properly at a shrine and how to troubleshoot the Wi-Fi. To live a life where formality and flexibility dance in the same small apartment.
Because maybe I’m not the only one balancing between obi and online.
Maybe you are, too—wherever you are.
Let’s start this journey with the New Year, where past and present always seem to hold hands.
From my tatami floor to your screen: 明けましておめでとうございます。
Happy New Year.
The likes rolled in faster than the kettle could boil.
“Gorgeous!”
“Such grace—thank you for sharing your traditions.”
“I wish I could wear a kimono like that.”
“Can you link where you bought your obi?”
“Living for this ✨✨✨”
At first, I smiled.
It felt nice to be seen—especially through the filtered lens of admiration. But then, as I scrolled through the comments, a familiar unease began to creep in.
Was that really me they were seeing?
The truth was, that kimono had taken nearly 45 minutes to put on—with two YouTube tutorials, a half-panicked call to my aunt, and one near-meltdown when I realized I’d tied the obi upside down. My son had knocked over the tripod twice. And I’d strategically cropped out the laundry drying behind me in the tatami room.
I don’t live in an Edo-period drama.
I live in a 3LDK apartment with Wi-Fi dead zones and a fridge that beeps when you leave it open too long.
And yet, online, I look like I’ve just stepped out of a painting.
There’s something intoxicating—and slightly dishonest—about curating culture. Especially when that culture isn’t just aesthetics but ancestry.
I’ve begun to notice this more and more—how “tradition” is becoming performative, not just preserved. It’s easier to share a photo of osechi than to explain how much work it takes to make it (and how much store-bought osechi costs these days—hint: a lot). It’s easier to post a video of a quiet shrine than to share that my son was whining about being cold the whole time we were there.
Still, I post.
Still, they like.
And still, I wonder if I’m somehow betraying both my heritage and my truth.
When my grandmother wore a kimono on New Year’s Day, she didn’t do it for clicks or comments. She did it because it meant something. It was her way of saying: “I honor where I came from. I carry it forward.”
But in 2025, carrying something forward sometimes means putting it online.
That afternoon, I called my mother. She was in Chiba, recovering from a cold, so we did a quick video call. When she saw me in my kimono, she beamed.
“You look just like your grandmother,” she said.
“Even the way you hold your hands—see? Just like this.”
And suddenly, the likes didn’t matter. The algorithm didn’t matter.
What mattered was that I had shown up in a way that connected the generations. That even if my obi was a bit crooked, I was part of something—stitched into a lineage that no filter could enhance or diminish.
Later, I asked my son to help me take off the kimono. As I folded each piece—carefully, lovingly—I told him what each part was called, what it symbolized.
“Do I have to wear one someday?” he asked.
“You don’t have to,” I said. “But I hope you’ll want to.”
He nodded thoughtfully, then went back to his game.
Sometimes I wonder what he’ll remember.
Will he recall the taste of ozoni, or the smell of incense, or just the way I always paused to take a photo before we ate?
Will he remember that I tried?
Because that’s what this is, really: not perfection, not performance—but trying.
Trying to honor the old ways while living in the new ones.
Trying to carry something forward, even if I have to drag it through the digital mud a little.
Trying to be both the woman in the kimono and the woman behind the keyboard—and letting both be real.
A few days after New Year’s, I received a message in my inbox.
“You should be careful mixing tradition with social media. Kimono isn’t cosplay.”
It came from a stranger—no profile picture, no introduction. Just those words.
And yet, they hit like a slap.
I stared at the screen, not knowing whether to laugh, cry, or respond with a well-worded essay.
Instead, I just sat there, the hum of the kotatsu heater filling the silence.
My first instinct was defensiveness. Who are you to tell me how to honor my culture?
But then came the second wave: Wait… are they right?
That comment unearthed an internal tug-of-war I hadn’t fully acknowledged.
Was I celebrating or commodifying?
Preserving or performing?
Tradition, for my mother and grandmother, had always been tied to purpose. There were rules. There was reverence. There was routine.
But my generation? We remix.
We wear kimono with sneakers, host tea ceremonies on YouTube, and discuss Buddhist concepts on Twitter threads. We post about ikebana in the morning and binge Netflix in the evening.
It’s messy. But it’s real.
And yet—somewhere between authenticity and aesthetics, I’d started to lose clarity.
Was I wearing the kimono because I wanted to feel connected—or because I wanted to be seen as someone who felt connected?
Was I living my life—or just documenting it?
That night, I opened a photo album my mother had given me years ago. Yellowing edges. Tape coming loose. Inside were pictures of her and my grandmother, both in kimono—standing in front of shrines, laughing in the kitchen, holding babies (some of whom were now raising babies of their own).
There were no captions. No filters. No hashtags.
And yet, every photo spoke louder than anything I’d ever posted online.
I looked at one photo in particular—my grandmother in her navy komon, holding a tray of mochi. She wasn’t smiling for a camera. She was just being. Present. Grounded. Quietly powerful.
I realized something:
Maybe I was never meant to replicate their exact steps.
Maybe it was enough to walk my own path—with intention, with respect, and yes, with imperfection.
And maybe, just maybe, tradition isn’t something you preserve like glass—it’s something you live, like breath.
It shifts. It adapts. It bends—but it doesn’t break.
The next morning, I posted a different kind of photo.
No makeup. No edits. Just me, folding the kimono back into its wrapping cloth, with my son beside me in his pajama pants, asking if we could have cereal instead of leftover mochi.
I captioned it:
“Tradition isn’t a costume. It’s a conversation. And I’m still learning the language.”
I didn’t get as many likes this time.
But the comments felt warmer. Truer. More like whispers from women who were also trying to balance the sacred with the scrolling, the quiet with the curated.
And in that moment, I realized something even more comforting than the warmth of the kimono’s silk against my skin:
I’m not alone.
It’s been a few weeks since that moment with the anonymous message and the photo album.
Since then, I’ve been quietly untangling things—both literally and metaphorically.
I folded the kimono and placed it back in its paulownia box with care, not because I felt I had to protect some cultural relic, but because I understood something new: it’s okay to pause.
It’s okay to step back and reflect, to question your role not as a custodian of tradition but as a participant in evolution.
I once thought “tradition” meant doing things exactly as my ancestors did.
Now I see it differently.
Tradition, I’ve realized, isn’t a blueprint. It’s a dialogue.
It whispers in tea leaves and family recipes. It shows up in the way I greet the shrine gate or pause before the first meal of the year.
It lives in stories I tell my son while folding laundry and in the quiet way I wipe down the genkan floor every evening, just like my mother.
It doesn’t need to be loud.
It doesn’t need to be public.
It just needs to be real.
My son asked me recently, “Why do you always wear that fancy robe on New Year’s?”
I smiled. “Because it reminds me of who I am—and where I come from.”
He nodded. “Okay. I want to wear one next time, too.”
Not because I told him to.
Not because I made a reel about it.
But because he saw something in it that resonated.
And that’s what I want to keep passing on:
Not just the fabric, but the feeling. Not just the form, but the meaning.
So now, when I log onto Instagram or post on my blog, I try to keep that balance in mind.
Some days, I’ll share a video of me grinding sesame seeds for goma-ae.
Other days, I’ll post nothing and just let the silence stretch across the tatami floor.
I’ve learned not to measure my identity by engagement metrics.
Because the truth is:
I’m not just choosing between kimono and keyboard.
I’m weaving both—threading the past through the present to create a pattern that is uniquely mine.
And if I ever falter again, if I start to wonder whether I’m doing this “right,”
I’ll go back to that photo of my grandmother.
Not to copy her—but to remind myself:
She didn’t need validation.
She just lived.
And so will I.
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