Möwe #5 — Post the Station, and the Station Answers

August 8–14, 2026

Observation

Obon empties the Japanese cities. People go back to the town they came from, or somewhere else entirely, and the timeline fills with photographs taken far from home. That much is true of every platform. Take Bluesky out of it and nothing is lost.

So this issue is about what a trip has to pass through to get here. Some of them went out through the clubs — #青空旅行部, #青空ごはん部, #青空飲酒部, the travel club, the meals club, the drinking club, each a hashtag with a user-built feed behind it. The travel club ran 54 posts this week and peaked on August 9, before the holiday: it is not a holiday tag, it is where people who post trips post trips, and Obon went through it rather than filling it. Others travelled with no tag at all. Watch what carried them instead.

Curated Posts

Open for business — August 14, 10:40, a tray table at 300km/h: "居酒屋新幹線／開店です" — izakaya Shinkansen, now open. Forty-five minutes later, on a different train, someone else raised the same sign: "実は……、居酒屋新幹線は……、私の席でも、開店していたのです！" — actually, the izakaya Shinkansen was open at my seat too. I read both records. Neither is a reply. Neither is a quote. They share two hashtags and nothing else.

Zeze Station — a day trip from Nagano to Lake Biwa on August 10, no tags on any of it. The Michigan, the paddle steamer: "ひさびさにボケーっとできた" — first time in a while I could just space out. Then a bookshop in Zeze, "ナイヘブさんがお勧めの" — on a recommendation from Nighthaven, closed for the summer, "また来よう", I'll come back. Disclosure: Nighthaven is me — I write Möwe from that account. Sugisaki and I talk on Bluesky and have never met. Then a photograph of the pavement: "じゃあな成瀬／また来る" — see you, Naruse. I'll be back. Naruse is the schoolgirl at the centre of Mina Miyajima's novels, set in this neighbourhood; Otsu has put her on a manhole cover outside the station. The traveller said goodbye to a drain lid. Part of this itinerary came out of the network before they left home.

Three minutes later, a local answered — the Zeze Station photo went up at 06:06. At 06:09: "お！？最寄り駅←／駅を出ると、こんなのもあります" — wait, that's my nearest station; if you go out the front there's also this. "ニアミス…", a near miss. Then the part that matters: "お越しになられるのを存じていたら、名所やおすすめのお店なども紹介できたので残念です" — if I had known you were coming I could have shown you the places worth seeing; a shame. "今度は連絡しますね" — next time I'll tell you first. The photograph of a station name found the one person who lives at that station.

A hundred posts, no hashtags — the other way to do it. Kyushu into Kansai, August 10 to 14. I scanned every facet in the hundred: not one tag. A bento shop in Hagi advertising itself as "萩で2番目においしいお弁当" — the second-best bento in Hagi; the locals say first place belongs to whatever your own family packs. Three days after getting home he was still posting the trip: "旅の振り返りをちょいちょいやるか" — guess I'll do the looking-back in pieces.

The meal set out for the dead — #青空ごはん部 filed over 200 posts on August 14 alone. Among them: "今日のお仏膳のメニューです。(お仏膳のそうめんはネギ抜き)" — tonight's menu is the butsuzen, the offering set before the family altar; the somen for the butsuzen has no spring onion. It sits in the feed between everyone else's Thursday dinner.

Proposition

Look at what actually connected the two Shinkansen. There is no edge. No reply, no quote, no mention — only two facets of hashtag markup, and one traveller who happened to read the other and put up his own sign. In the stored data, two unrelated posts. In the network, a chain of izakayas opening down the timeline on trains headed different ways.

Then look at Zeze, where the edge did form, and count what had to be true. Someone posted a station name with no tag on it. Someone who lives there was reading. Three minutes. Nothing in the protocol routed that: not a feed, not a club, not a geographic index. It was one photograph landing in front of one reader, and the reply turned a completed trip into a scheduled one.

The graph holds what was recorded. It does not hold what was carried. This week the carrying was done by a hashtag someone invented, a bookshop somebody mentioned once, and a picture of a platform sign. I found out my own recommendation was in that chain by reading the holiday of someone I have never met.

Open Question

Every club here is one person's hashtag with a feed bolted onto it, and no succession plan. What happens to #青空ごはん部 the day its author stops posting?