Why Eastbound exists
Eastbound is a personal journal built around four paths:
Journey follows the transition itself—from the first plans and difficult decisions to the practical reality of building a different life.
Japan explores culture, language, daily life, and quieter ways of travelling, beginning with Japan and eventually extending to other parts of Asia.
Cycling is about bicycle routes, touring, urban mobility and the many ways bicycles become part of a place and its culture.
Craft looks at workshops, tools, materials and the people who continue to make meaningful objects with patience and skill.
The aim is not to produce another list of famous attractions. I am more interested in ordinary streets, local workshops, small businesses, regional routes and places that reveal something about how people actually live.
I want to document the process of learning Japanese, adapting to unfamiliar cultural codes and discovering a country through everyday life rather than only through tourism. Whenever possible, I will turn those experiences into practical information for anyone considering a similar journey: routes, costs, mistakes, useful discoveries and changes of plan.
Photography will be central to that work. Like cycling, it has been one of my passions for most of my life. The images here are not intended merely to decorate the writing. They are part of how I observe places, people and details that might otherwise pass unnoticed.
Why Japan
I grew up in Liberdade, São Paulo’s historic Japanese district, surrounded by Japanese shops, food, festivals and visual culture. Anime and manga have been part of my life since childhood, and I later became a kendō practitioner.
Work first took me to Japan in 2014. I kept returning for a simple reason: I feel at ease there.
Over time, short visits were no longer enough. I wanted to experience the country beyond hotels, itineraries and temporary impressions. That means studying the language, taking part in ordinary routines and accepting the awkwardness of being a beginner in a society with very different habits and expectations.
Eastbound begins before that move is complete because preparation is part of the journey. The doubts, paperwork, compromises and failed ideas matter as much as the destination.
Bicycles and the Youkai Factory
During one of my journeys to Japan, I encountered the world of handmade bicycles and discovered framebuilding as a craft of its own.
I also visited makers of knives, swords, kendō equipment, armour and traditional clothing. What stayed with me was not simply the quality of the finished objects, but the continuity of knowledge behind them: skills refined through repetition, often preserved by small workshops and specialised makers.
That experience helped shape the Youkai Factory, my own project for designing and building bicycles with a strong Japanese influence. Yōkai are creatures and mysterious presences from Japanese folklore, inhabiting the space between the familiar and the extraordinary.
Whenever possible, my bicycles use components made by traditional or small-scale Japanese suppliers. Building them brought together engineering, design and manual work—three things I have always valued—but also showed me how difficult it is to sustain this type of work in Brazil.
Rather than abandoning the project, I decided to place it inside a broader one: to study the ecosystem around Japanese craftsmanship, bicycle culture and mobility directly at the source.
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