Dec. 30, 2024: Wishes for a wonderful 2025, dear friends! Here’s to Perfect Days ahead

Monday Morning Magic from Inkandescent® PR + Publishing Co. — When it comes to finding the perfect movie the whole family will like, we often turn for guidance to our son Dylan. Last semester at grad school, where he is studying architecture, he was turned on to an amazing film: Perfect Days. What a holiday treat! The magical message of this beautiful story blew me away, and its wisdom has lived in my heart ever since.
As we embark this week on 2025, I want to share it with you in hopes you’ll find solace in the little things, as does Hirayama, the hero of this story. He is a man who enjoys a simple, peaceful routine of watering his plants, painstakingly choosing the perfect tunes for his morning drive to work, reading books, and cleaning the public toilets of Tokyo. While Perfect Days celebrates the quiet moments in life, Hirayama’s untold backstory and the circumstances leading to his meticulously cultivated life run deeper.
If you are like me, I am sure you will relate. I feel there is a lot to be concerned about in the coming years — as a woman, a Jew, a journalist, and as an American living in a country that is increasingly foreign to me. In the weeks since the election I have vacillated between being petrified (which isn’t helpful) to horrified (better, more like fuel for what I’ll create next, but still that feeling stops me in my tracks).

Empowered Together logo by Cynthia de Lorenzi, founder Success in the City
Thanks to the encouragement of my wisest guides, I have at last landed on being hopeful — because with their support, I know I’m not alone. In 2025, together we will be building the Inkandescent family bigger and better than ever before. Look for more details about our Empowered Together project in the weeks to come. We hope you’ll join us for monthly roundtable discussions led by thought leaders in our tribe, classes you can take and teach, and so much more! Click here to meet the badasses who have joined the Empowered Together Network.

Hope Katz Gibbs, president and founder, Inkandescent.us
For a dose of peace and a dollop of positivity, I hope you’ll join me in my Hope project. Start by spending an evening watching Perfect Days. Scroll down for more details about the movie.
Until next Monday: I thank you from the bottom of my heart for being part of the Inkandescent family and wish you and yours much love, joy, and many Perfect Days ahead! — Hope Katz Gibbs, founder and president, Inkandescent® Inc. Inkandescent.us
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Exploring Perfect Days
I encourage you to watch this heartwarming, award-winning drama by filmmaker Wim Wenders, which premiered on May 23, 2023 at the 76th Cannes Film Festival.
Bravo:
- It competed for the Palme d’Or and won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury
- The Best Actor Award went to its star Kōji Yakusho (pictured right)
- The movie was nominated for the Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards, becoming the first film directed by a non-Japanese filmmaker to be nominated as the Japanese entry.
Here’s the story: Yakusho plays Hirayama, a man who enjoys a simple, peaceful routine of watering his plants, painstakingly choosing the perfect tunes for his morning drive to work, reading books, and cleaning the public toilets of Tokyo.
We meet him as he heads to work as a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo‘s upscale Shibuya district, across town from his modest home in an ungentrified neighborhood east of the Sumida River. He repeats his structured, repetitive routine each day, starting at dawn. He dedicates his free time to his passion for music cassettes, which he listens to in his van to and from work, and to his books, which he reads every night before going to sleep. He reads stories by William Faulkner and Patricia Highsmith, and the essays of Aya Kōda. His dreams are shown in flickery impressionistic sequences at the end of every day.
Hirayama is also very fond of trees and spends time gardening and photographing them. He has a sandwich every day in the shade under trees on the grounds of a shrine and takes analog photos of their branches and leaves and the ‘Komorebi’ (木漏れ日)—sunlight filtered by the leaves.
Sounds like a great project for 2025! Click here to learn more about the plot.
Enjoy!