Windows now glow from the room, not the glass. Shopfronts sit back, lit from above. Dotonbori is a stone canal, with Ebisubashi across it. Its railings glow at night.
Miniature Japan
Drift off in a Japanese city
Sapporo, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Fukuoka, Naha.
Six Japanese cities, small enough to hold.
Before sleep. Beside your work. On a night when you want to do nothing.
There is nothing to operate. Set it down and let it run.
■ You can stop the clock
Time normally runs 480 times faster than life. Morning light crosses
the town, clouds build at noon, dusk stains the roofs, stars come out,
and dawn returns. But you can also stop the hour wherever you like,
and simply stay there — in the night, in the rain.
■ A sleep timer
Choose how long you have, in days of this little Japan.
Five days is fifteen minutes; twenty days is an hour. One day runs
three real minutes, so whether you think in minutes or in skies,
the same list works.
Near the end the sound draws down over thirty seconds. When it is
gone the screen darkens and the town stops — so the phone beside
your pillow does not glow until morning. Touch it, and the hour
returns where you left it.
■ A night to sleep through
Windows light up one by one, and far off, the last train runs.
Above, a moon that waxes and wanes, and a Milky Way that deepens
on nights with fewer street lamps. Turn the screen away; the sound
keeps playing.
■ Sound
Ambient, lo-fi, music box, or nothing but the town itself.
All of it is generated on your device, and no performance repeats.
The instruments change with the city — koto and shakuhachi in Kyoto,
shamisen in Osaka, sanshin in Naha.
Every sound has a place it comes from. Waves arrive from the direction
of the sea, and turn as you turn the town. Crows call from wherever
they happen to be flying. The crows, the cicadas and the thunder were
all built from analyses of real recordings.
■ A sky that drifts
Clear, hazy, fog, rain, sudden showers, snow, blizzard.
The weather changes on its own, and no view comes twice.
Snow piles up in a Sapporo winter, squalls pass over Naha, dawn fog
settles into the Kyoto basin. And once in a long while, after the
rain lifts — a rainbow.
■ Words
Short poems drift by like subtitles, following the season and the hour.
Each day is named with one of the twenty-four Japanese micro-seasons.
■ Rare visitors
A shooting star deep in the night. A fox. The summer bonfires of Kyoto.
A humpback whale off Okinawa in winter — only when the moment is right.
Every scene and every sound is generated on your device, and works
offline. No ads, no notifications, no data collection.
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Street lamps now line all six cities: suzuran lamps in Sapporo, andon and riverside lanterns in Kyoto, red-tiled lanterns in Naha. At night they softly light the walls and pavement. Sapporo's red fox is smaller now, and walks slowly enough to find. View buttons now respond on the first tap.
Version 16.1
The developer, TETSUJI NEGORO, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
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Information
Seller
TETSUJI NEGORO
Size
7.2 MB
Category
Health & Fitness
Compatibility
Requires iOS 15.0 or later.
iPhone Requires iOS 15.0 or later.
iPad Requires iPadOS 15.0 or later.
iPod touch Requires iOS 15.0 or later.
Mac Requires macOS 12.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.