Visiting The Superior Labor, Part 2: Staying in the Observatory

Welcome to Part 2 of our visit to The Superior Labor in Okayama. You can find Part 1 here. For some background information, since it’s been some time since our travel posts, this past summer, we visited Japan and Hong Kong. I had thought I was going to blog on the road, but couldn’t keep up—so here I am catching up.

The Superior Labor is a small studio and factory in Japan that makes high quality canvas and leather goods. I hate to understate things, but we are big fans of what they do. Over the last couple of years, we have collaborated on a few pieces with them—our portfolios and our pen and wallet cases—and these cases are some of our most sought-after items.

We were lucky enough to have a few days to visit The Superior Labor while in Japan, and Yoshimi-san, one half of the husband and wife team running the show, was kind enough to arrange for us to stay in the observatory.

It was more of a relief than we realized, after a couple of weeks of trekking around in a bustling, foreign city, to find a few days out in the countryside. The sky! The trees! Everything is slower and calmer.

The observatory was a lovely place to visit and stay. There was so much room around, and it was great for the kids to be able to run around, inside and outside, breathe in some fresh air, and to have some down time after a hectic schedule. We can’t wait to go back.

For those you so patiently waiting for news on the Superior Labor pre-order items, we’ll be receiving them in a few separate shipments, ranging from imminently! to over the next couple of weeks into late September.

***

In other news, I’m finally carving out some time to really go over and fill in my Traveler’s Notebook inserts for our trip. On the road, I’ve stuck in a few things—photos, tickets, ephemera collected—and scrawled in a few notes here and there, which hopefully will give me a bit of a framework for going back over everything.

I’m hoping to share more details and more photos in another post (obviously after I’ve had some time to tighten up some loose ends, ho ho), but it’s both lovely and startling to revisit things that happened only a month or two ago, but seem like a different life entirely.