On paper, my 2025 sakura pilgrimage looked perfect, honed not only by hours of combing through blooming forecasts, but also after more than a decade of trial and error.
Arriving in Japan, however, was another story. For one, authorities at Narita Airport decided with neither warning nor explanation to temporarily halt the entry of anyone with a non-Japanese passport, creating a human traffic jam comprising the passengers arriving on no less than a dozen widebody aircraft.
Things eventually proceeded as normal—I was able to pass through in less than a minute, due to a Trusted Traveler credential—but is seemed a bad omen for the trip, even before the train ride into the city: From my window, I saw precisely zero trees in full bloom, to say nothing of the weather—conditions outside the train, and those in the forecast for the foreseeable future.
You can imagine then, why I was shocked to arrive that evening at the Meguro River (a place I nearly decided not to go, on account of what I had—or, rather hadn’t—seen from the train) to find its famous somei yoshino in their most perfect expression. But even then, there was a caveat.
“No stopping,” the masked crowd control officer made an “x” with his arms as he spoke in English, stopping just short of physically pushing me off the bridge as I got my camera ready for the money shot. “No photos.”
Although I obviously disobeyed his directive (and those from his dozens of volunteer colleagues, who were assembled every few feet in the area), their presence disturbed me—and not just because it illustrated how, once again, Japan’s efforts to slay the “overtourism” vampire were worse than the monster itself.
Among other truths, it reminded me that more than a decade had passed since I first walked under a billow of cherry blossoms in Japan. Lordy lordy, a voice from my distant past rang out deep within me. Look who’s 40.
As the plane took off from Haneda Airport my third morning in Japan, I wasn’t surprised that Tokyo (and later, all of the Kanto region, minus the tip of Mt. Fuji) disappeared beneath a thick quilt of clouds. The weather outlook for eastern Japan, as I mentioned earlier, was bleak.
I was surprised, however, during the final approach to Shikoku island’s Kochi city (where conditions, officially, were “sunny”) to find the blanket very much intact. It broke just as we were landing; by the time I reached the city’s famous castle, the sky was as clear as the forecast had foretold.
False alarm, I sighed, as I stood under an entanglement of sakura and matsu, though not quite with relief.
Insider the castle museum (which I only visited to get a better view of the structure, one I hadn’t previously visited in over eight years), a shoji inside the display case depicted a similar scene—cherry blossom and pine trees, this is—albeit significantly multiplied, and thus significantly beatified.
It was the world I wanted to live in, or maybe I world I had once lived in.
I had nearly re-visited Kochi in both 2019, when I took a dedicated Shikoku sakura trip and in 2021, when I was living in Kyoto and could’ve easily made the journey. But I didn’t, and so here we are.
Walking through Kochi Sunday Market as it closed, I found my eyes drawn to a citrus seller under the stocky palms. He held a yuzu that was nothing short of golden; he was far more handsome than he had any right to be, though he was wearing gloves so I couldn’t see if there was a ring (I’m sure there was).
I wondered how old he was—probably 50, though he looked 40, or even younger. Just then, that saying—Lordy Lordy, look who’s 40—entered my consciousness again.
Suddenly, I remember where I’d first heard it: A Black Eyed Pea restaurant outside of Indianapolis, on a green-sky summer afternoon when a tornado could’ve dropped out of the sky at any moment. I still don’t remember whose birthday it was, or why my Missouri family was in Indiana.
All of this—the blue sky; the golden yuzu; the model-good looks of the random merchant—seemed so distant from me the next morning, that it was almost as it if had never happened.
Well, all of it except the sakura—which, if anything, were in even fuller bloom in the interior reaches of Kochi-ken than they’d been in the city, in spite of the higher altitude and colder temperatures.
One particular machi (more of a cho-me, really) had stood out, with no less than a hundred trees extending in either direction of where I parked my car, along a river (more of a stream, really) that was more iridescent than it had any right to be.
This (and an unexpected peach grove) ended up being the high point of my day, not only in terms of scenery, but also as far as my mood was concerned.
The thing about being alone, you see, is that it’s just you and your thoughts. And I’ve noticed, over the past 40 years, that mine go to a place of darkness—despondency, even—without the moderating force of human contact.
Japanese authorities issue “mega-quake” warning, read the clickbait notification in Apple News. Southern region of Kochi especially at risk.
By the time I got to Uwajima Castle (the smallest of Japan’s 12 original castles, which is technically in Ehime-ken), I could’ve jumped off the small hill where it stood, if my tendency when alone had been as dramatic as it is despondent.
Instead, a tap on the shoulder. “Take a picture?” The man asked in English, but did not hand me his smartphone. He continued, “with my wife?”
I had no idea whether to take the request as a compliment (she and/or he found me handsome) or an insult (I was merely a curiosity, on account of being foreign). But the few seconds of interaction ended up being exactly what I needed.
As I bid the two of them farewell, the clouds over the tenshu began to dissipate.
Arriving in Okayama, I should’ve felt relief. Although I’d be traveling all around the Setouchi region over the subsequent six days (and even spending the night elsewhere on one of them), I would have a “base” here for nearly a week, something I virtually almost never do.
But instead, I felt panic. Well, that’s too dramatic perhaps—I hadn’t suffered abuse, harm or indignity.
In fact, I had spent my afternoon—a day trip to Aichi prefecture’s Inuyama Castle, which saw me go four hours out of my way round-trip—extremely upbeat, in spite of the apocalyptic sky overhead.
They fit the place, I told myself as I walked through the jokamachi toward the castle keep, reflecting on how central this particular fortress (alongside Kochi-jo one of just 12 in Japan to survive the Meiji Restoration intact) had been to the legacy of Nobunaga, who was perhaps the most consequential Samurai warlord, and certainly among the most violent.
Which is to say that as I began walking toward my Okayama hotel hours later, I’m not even sure what possessed me to check the weather. In hindsight I wished I hadn’t: It predicated clouds, with few exceptions, most of which were rain.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: I whine a lot about the weather. And this is fair; it’s true.
But you have to understand that during cherry blossom season in particular, having a bright blue sky to contrast with the flowers is basically a necessity, at least as far as photography is concerned. Please spare me the cope about “dramatic” skies and how much you apparently love them.
Indeed, with the the exception of those few hours in Kochi on Saturday, I hadn’t seen the sun for more than a few hours at all during my trip by the time I made my way toward Okayama’s Smile Hotel.
But a funny thing happened as I made my way westward, the sky becoming even more ominous the further I went, as if that was even possible.
I thought back to a past trip—one outside of Japan, with my husband, and one incidentally where I hadn’t encountered a single drop of rain.
We had just arrived at the La Jolla Cliffs north of San Diego, and while I won’t bore you with the details of the disagreement (or try to decode what the cliffs’ famous sea lions were saying), I will tell you what my husband told me.
“Stop killing hope,” he insisted—commanded, really. It wasn’t a wish or a request.
With that, I realized that the way forward was not to pull the plug on any part of my trip, let alone the whole thing. It was to work around the weather.
The next morning, as luck had it, the clouds broke on the horizon as the Shinkansen I was on began speeding toward it.
I was ultimately (or, rather, initially) bound for Shin-Iwakuni, and for a bridge that holds an outsized important in my Japan travel story, in spite of my having been there only once before this.
The owner of my hostel (yes, I used to stay in those) in Hiroshima on my first trip to Japan in 2014 has recommended that I go there (Kintai Bridge, this is) on a day trip. Confused as to why I’d want to get on a train to see a bridge (and too incurious, apparently, to do a Google Image search), I declined.
I regretted that decision every day until I finally went in 2017.
And I regretted it then, too: I was too early for the cherry blossoms—that year’s cherry blossoms were too late for me, more accurately—rendering the scene (which depends highly upon the presence of sakura) inert.
As I drove toward it eight years later, it was immediately clear that blooming conditions weren’t going to be an issue.
At the same time, I did not expect myself to be nearly as taken by the bridge, nor as fixated on capturing it from all angles, as I ended up being.
The plan for the day had been to spend a very short while there in the morning, make an (extremely circuitous) excursion along the Shimanami Kaido cycling route (but by car, obviously) and then return to Iwakuni in time to ascend the castle ropeway before it closed.
The bad news? I spent at least twice as long at Kintai-kyo in the morning as I intended, which meant that after exploring the surreal Kousan-ji (perhaps the most unique cultural attraction in the entire Setouchi region) and visiting the Kirosan Viewpoint (which was marred both by clouds and by smoke from the Imabari wildfires), I was about 10 minutes too late to make the last ropeway departure.
The good news? Twilight at the bridge was even more magical than broad daylight had been, which is saying something. Earlier in the day, I’d walked over the its treacherous, medieval steps, and reflected on the fact that only then, a week after my arrival, did it feel like I was even on a sakura trip.
It dawned on me at that time (and popped up again, as spotlights illuminated the structure in a deep cobalt) that this had not been accidental. No, I had forced fate’s hand in the matter; I had saved Persephone from her proverbial plucking, and spared the world from Demeter’s plague.
In choosing, at last, not to kill hope, it had reminded me of its power when left to exact it.
Peter Thiel is now one of the great global bogeymen—justifiably so, perhaps—but 12 years ago at the DLD Conference in Munich, I found him inspiring.
Or perhaps more accurately, the gravity of what he seemed to be saying made me feel so uninspired by what I was doing, as a fledgling travel blogger—as a 27-year old who, quite frankly, did not feel like I belonged in that room at all—that I aspired to conduct myself as assuredly as he did, the substance of what he was saying notwithstanding.
The good news is that by the time I arrived on the tony “art island” of Naoshima at 40, I no longer felt any doubt as to whether or not I was permitted to be in a given place.
Others, it seems, are not yet as convinced.
“This bus is for hotel guests only,” the masked man dismissed me, after waving a couple and a family onto the vehicle waiting at the island’s Miyanoura Port without a second thought.
This was ironic, of course, given that I was dressed stylishly, and each of them had an aesthetic that ranged from frumpy to hopeless.
Still, once I confirmed my reservation status and boarded, I look with curiosity upon one of my fellow passengers in particular. On his face was a pair of weathered (though maybe not vintage) Oakleys, on his head a beanie whose mustard color made it look expensive, even if it appeared ordinary otherwise.
Driving across the island—which I often tell myself I’ve visited in the past but where, upon approaching the Benesse House “museum hotel” I realized was not the case—it became apparent that objective fashion sense or not, my old money brethren may in fact have been dressed more appropriately.
Naoshima, frankly, was hit by the ugly stick; ragged brush covers most of its craggy landscape, a pattern broken only by the occasional installed palm tree—or, in this season, a fuchsia rhododendron bush or two.
And art, some of it compelling—the room at the Chichu Art Museum containing Monet’s lilies is an example of this—some of it just attention-seeking.
Frankly, I thought as I walked away from the Chichu Garden (I’d been turned away for trying to access the museum earlier than my designated ticket time), I hope the person who thought up this entire concept is wealthy beyond his wildest dreams.
Which is not to say I view the place or my experience there entirely through the lens of cynicism—far from it. Monet excepted, I also found myself drawn to many of Yayoi Kusama’s works (the Pumpkins, but also the on-the-nose “Narcissus Garden” at the so-called Valley Gallery.
As far as Benesse House itself was concerned, I felt torn. Certainly, being asked multiple times when I entered whether I’d purchased a ticket (as non-guests need to do), in spite of being the only person there (and perhaps the only one on the entire island) dressed distinctively stung.
Particularly when, upon enjoying my lunch of an undercooked chicken thigh at the hotel cafe (which over looks a somewhat industrial expanse of the Seto Inland Sea), I overheard the conversations of The People Who Belong™.
“Do they have Chinese food here?” an obnoxious American empty-nester asked her tour guide, who was clearly practiced at holding back laughter. “I guess they don’t have any Chinatowns, though. Japan has never liked immigrants.”
Her friend chimed in. “You know, this reminds me,” she laughed. “Remember that wonderful Chinese meal we had in Aspen, before the kids went off to college?”
Later in the afternoon, walking along Benesse Beach toward the Yellow Pumpkin, the lightest possible rain falling on my head, it dawned on me that I had arrived—in many senses.
The first one is that in spite of the doubt with which some people greeted me, I had fearlessly claimed precisely what I wanted from this experience, clasping it from the ether with surgical precision.
The second was that after an entire week in Japan, I was finally back in the “travel” mindset. Like Mark Scout or Helena Eagan the moment the elevator arrives on the Severed floor, it felt like there was a single moment of here I rebooted in this version of myself, the one who doesn’t allow weather to dictate his enjoyment or creativity, or even think of using it as justification to cancel.
As the sun began to disappear, wisps of pale pink streaking so subtly across the sky that you wouldn’t have been able to notice them had you not been intent on doing so, it dawned on me that virtually no part of the future Peter Thiel foretold on that snowy January night, the second Friday of 2013, had ever come to be.
But the version of myself that was trapped beneath a cocoon of doubt and self-loathing did, at some point, emerge from his chrysalis. So, uh, checkmate.
My grandmother—my only living grandparent—has been living in a home for the past two years, though a recent injury has seen her moved (permanently, I think) to the rehab wing. Something about the situation has made her much more candid than she used to be.
“I can’t believe you like spending time with those people,” she exclaimed when I told her that I was going back to Japan yet again, though she quickly softened her statement. “I mean you just have to understand how many of our boys we lost because of what Japan did.
“I’m sure they’re perfectly nice people, these days.”
What’s funny is that with the exception of people who work in the service industry (and my cabal of friends in the Kansai region), I rarely communicate with locals in Japan. Sure, I get the occasional ohayō or konnichiwa, but never really speak to anyone long enough to get a sense of their kindness (or lack thereof).
In many situations, this is just as well. For example, because of the number of moving parts I had to synchronize in order to get my trip up to Mt. Shiude (a magnificent viewpoint for the Seto Inland Sea, with sakura framing it) just right, I had to be so focused that even a single moment of conversation might’ve messed everything up.
Or at least that’s what I’ve been telling myself as I execute one thing after another, moving about Japan methodically as I always do, as if my itinerary is a hit list.
Today, after jumping into a decrepit rental car at Shin-Shimokoseki Station, my first two marks were Shimonoseki City’s Karato Fish Market (where I once again didn’t try to the fugu-no-sashimi) and the Akiyoshido Cave. Where, to be fair, a local woman did try to engage me.
“I guess I do speak in a difficult way,” she laughed and said in Japanese, assuming that I couldn’t understand her rather than the fact that I wasn’t really paying attention.
To be sure, after spending nearly four hours exploring the Samurai town of Hagi (which I’d visited, briefly, back in 2019, but where I didn’t dig especially deep), I was so content that I was basically obliviously to everything and everyone else around me.
Well, except for one person.
“Where are you from?” She shouted at me from across the street, in Japanese.
I answered wrong, not having fully heard her. “The parking lot.”
She laughed and, after I corrected myself, suddenly began engaging me in English. Her daughter, it seemed, lived in New York. She has been there once, along with a list of national parks in the American West that far exceeds my own.
“I went to Vegas, too,” she finished. “But I hate Vegas.”
“Me too,” I said, and moved over to her side of the road. The divide between us was awkward and unnecessary.
Like the family I’d met at the Shizukiyama viewpoint over the Hagi Castle Ruins minutes earlier, she was surprised that I knew Hagi at all, but seemingly delighted to see me.
Or maybe she wasn’t, and she was just pretending; maybe she was just lonely. In total we talked for less than five minutes, which often isn’t long enough to ascertain the truth.
I almost walked away without getting her name, but slowed my roll and asked her for it.
“Tai,” she smiled mischievously, explaining that this version of the word could mean “beautiful” or “strange”; her second character was a suffix (ko) that girls and women often used.
After she asked me whether I was sleeping in Hagi or not (I wasn’t), we bid each other farewell. As I walked away, far more moved by the brief connection than I’d expected to be, I reflected on the fact that you never again see the vast majority of people after you interact with them the first time.
Of course, just because I likely wouldn’t see Taiko again did not mean her impression wouldn’t last. I can’t wait to tell my grandma about the kind woman I met, and how her kindness had felt like it was the farthest thing from war.
I try to avoid referencing cliche Japanese philosophical concepts (both on this blog and in my own mind). But as I changed plans at the last minute the other day, I couldn’t help but think of kaizen, or continuous improvement.
I mean, I did have doubts about making the trip to Tsuyama Castle that day, though not because of the fortress or its thousands of sakura trees, which I could tell based on conditions in Okayama would be in full bloom.
No, it was more about my day’s already grueling schedule, with a minimum of five hours and three trains awaiting me.
At the same time, this was a shot I’d been waiting for years to get—and, given that I can now bear the stress of planning a cherry blossom trip every other year at most, would need to wait until 2027 at the earliest to get, if I didn’t go now.
With that, I made a last-minute reservation at Nippon Rent-a-car (I didn’t dare choose Toyota, where I’d canceled no less than three reservations in three days due to previous rounds of kaizen) and sped off toward Tsuyama, where I got exactly what I wanted.
In hindsight, as I knew it would, this modification made little difference to the overall difficulty of my trip, or to the fatigue it caused me. But it ticked a huge (and, likely, one-and-done) item off my list.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the events of the next day, which I spent five hours and three trains away in Gunma prefecture.
My day, you see, started with a fail. The “viewpoint” I decided to make my first stop was nothing of the sort, the overgrowth at “observation” deck that’s becoming all too common in Japan choking any semblance of a view.
Worse, the out-and-back journey up a winding road to get there (and to leave) took away two extra hours from the rest of my day.
This was damaging, psychologically, because it meant that in spite of leaving my hotel before 8, it was nearly 11 am (at Tatebayashi’s Tsuruuda River, where carp streamers are strung up above a river lined with cherry trees on either side) before I felt any sort of creative fulfillment.
Then there was the fact that I was having perhaps the worst hair day of my trip, if not of 2025 so far. Whether because of hard water or dry air, being in Gunma had sucked away all the volume and definition, leaving me with a flat (and, by the time I arrived at Okabe Road Station to try its famous leek ice cream, tangled) mess of keratin and hairspray that left me feeling irritated and unsightly.
Which was a shame, because the scenery everywhere I looked was so gorgeous. It was as if I driving into a Ghibli movie, the latest AI art trend notwithstanding, with the only contrast more charming than the pale pink of the somei yoshino with the periwinkle of the sky the line between the emerald grass and golden rapeseed that covered the ground seemingly everywhere.
Maybe this is what kaizen feels like in practice, I thought as I felt my mood improving, at least when I dared to escape my own mind.
The rest of the day passed at various points along this continuum, with wonderment at the places I saw (the mesmerizing vermillion gates of Koizumi Inari Shrine; the breathtaking paranormal from Takasaki Daikannon; the multitudes of daruma at Shoranzan Temple) and annoyance at the way I felt (and, I assume, appeared) fighting for primacy in my consciousness.
Arriving back in Maebashi, I returned my car and headed back to my hotel, where I hoped (without reason, it turns out) that the 14th floor public bath might offer a view of the sunset (or any view at all, really).
Even the very small porthole in the corner of the changing room was mostly blocked out, opening enough only to accommodate a cigarette being ashed, and certainly not a DSLR camera needing to be held completely still.
It was a strange echo of my morning viewpoint disappointment, reflecting parallel tendencies of the Japanese (reluctance both to prune trees and to install windows) that fail to leverage a country with great elevation differentials, both natural and manmade.
Sauntering back to the elevator with the same cynicism in my step that had undulated beneath me as I returned to my car hours earlier, I nearly missed the small freezer as I passed it, and nearly ignored it even when I noticed it.
I’m glad I chose to pay attention. Inside it was an ice pop which, while its branding as “Snickers” was both factually inaccurate and legally dubious, ended up being precisely the sweet finish I needed to a day when my mood swung back and forth between sour and salty.
I wasn’t expecting Fukushima’s Hanamiyama to live up to its name (which literally means “flower viewing mountain”), at least not in the way it did. Or, perhaps more accurately, at least not into the way it ended up doing.
When I arrived there, of course, I found both the quantity and variety of hana on the yama to be overwhelming.
From pale cherry blossoms to fluorescent peach blossoms, and from golden rapeseed to emerald bamboo, the only thing consistent about the scene was how all-over-the-place it was, in the best way possible.
Well, in almost the best way: Overhead, a sky so grey it was almost black hung heavily. Though thankfully not for long.
Indeed, although I had originally meant for Hanamiyama to be a quick stop on my way from Aizuwakamatsu (where I’d spent the majority of the previous day) en route to coastal Fukushima, I ended up hiking through the park’s various trails for nearly three hours.
By this point, my memories of Aizu (which I’d previously visited in fall and, frankly, was much better during that season) as distant as the now-invisible peak of Mt. Bandai, dreams of what I might find along the tsunami-ravaged kaigan as faint as the remaining radiation readings on most of the meters installed on either side of the highway.
After a last-minute schedule change—I decided to push back my long-awaited return to Sado Island to June, when the now-parched rice paddies would be wet and verdant, and when I might actually be able to catch a Noh performance—this would end up being my last full day in Japan. I wanted to make it count.
As I passed a group of schoolchildren who I assume were born years after the wave receded and the dead were burned or buried, a thought crept into my head: You go from “is” to “was” with your last breath, as if your entire life amounts to the flipping of a switch from on back to off, where it had been for all of eternity before you were born.
As I drove south from Soma, whose beaches saw sakura combined with matsu and take in what might’ve been the ultimate Japanese scene, and the Hiragana city of Iwaki, I noticed an abundance of solar panels everywhere I looked that almost seemed absurd, as if it served as more of a forgiveness offering to the planet than an earnest bid to power eastern Japan.
My last stop of the evening was Rokkaku-do (which was technically in the very northern part of Ibaraki prefecture), a reconstruction of a gazebo that had been destroyed in 2011.
The beautiful older woman who sat in the ticket booth seemed surprised to see me, which made sense—I ended up being the only visitor on the spacious site during the entire time I was there; she seemed so sure that no one else would join me that she closed the gate as I left, a full 15 minutes before the posted time of last ticket sales.
Ibaraki, more to the point, is known as one of Japan’s least-loved prefectures, a fact its visitor numbers reflect. Then there was the attraction itself, which was not well-laid out, and which had precisely zero views of the structure in its context to be had over the entire acreage behind the pine walls.
I ended up having to scale a nearby observation tower, which was itself up a peninsula that seemed devoid of people, in spite of roads and parking lots and hotels being built, not to mention both the installation and stocking of several vending machines.
Looking down on the coast from my perch, with not so much as one other non-human animal up there with me, I wondered if this part of Japan had always been deserted, if perhaps there were places the wave devastated where no one was around to feel the devastation.
I wondered if anyone had even been at Hanamiyama, where in early March of 2011 at least three more weeks would’ve needed to pass before any significant flowering. Perhaps, by the time full bloom arrived that year, dozens or even hundreds of tourists were trekking its trodden trails, many of them unconcerned about (if not entirely oblivious to) the tragedy that had just stuck down by the seaside.
Perhaps there used to be more cherry trees at sea level intermixed with bamboo and pines, and they were uprooted and swept out to sea that year before their buds even opened.
They went from “is” to “was” before they even knew that they were in the first place.
In the eyes of young men scared but not stricken, flashes of future children flickered as they looked at their future wives, walking down the sidewalk just across from them, as a starry-eyed tourist drove tunnel-visioned amid the devastation.
Happiness, a sign I read on Thailand’s Koh Mak island in March, is to cherish what we have. Something about the particularly way the hana-no-fubuki (flower blizzard) blew threw the wind at Tokyo’s Ueno Park reminded me of this.
That, and the warmth. The chill of just two weeks ago was completely gone; before long, the heat and humidity of the summer would make the city feel uninhabitable.
As I strolled slowly through the park—I was making the 20-minute walk from Keisei-Ueno Station to Nezu Shrine, where I hoped the tsutsuji would be somewhere close to full-bloom—I did my best to revel in everything I had in that moment, be it the surprising percentage of still-intact somei yoshino blossoms, the just-blooming yaezakura ones, and even the seagulls flying to and from overhead, in spite of the seeming guarantee that one would shit on me.
In less than two hours from then, I’d need to board a Skyliner train bound for Narita Airport, where I hoped the quagmire that had greeted me upon arrival would not repeat when I attempted to depart Japan. Not that I had time for such worries.
Nezu-jinja and its azaleas (which did turn out to be in quite an advanced state of bloom, considering the date on the calendar) awaited, and so too did a reminder from my past.
And I mean very far back in my past: The entire afternoon called to mind a walk I’d had through Shinjuku Chuo Park on April 23, 2014, i.e. the very last day of my very first trip through Japan, which had ended up being a sakura trip of sorts, even if I hadn’t targeted that one nearly as methodically as this one, or any of the near-dozen between them.
Lordy lordy, I laughed, as I enjoyed the surprisingly un-crowded shrine, which would no doubt be inundated when its tsutsuji reached full bloom in a week, both with tourists and with inane rules meant at controlling them. Look who’s 40—and acting like it, at long last.
