Miniature Japan Downloads & RevenueMiniature Japan: Sleep & Calm · App Store

Miniature Japan
Drift off in a Japanese city

Sapporo, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Fukuoka, Naha.
Six Japanese cities, small enough to hold.
Sapporo's TV Tower and Odori Park, Tokyo Bay and Tokyo Tower,
Kyoto's Kamo River and Kiyomizu, Osaka's Dotonbori and Tsutenkaku,
Fukuoka's Nakasu food stalls, Naha's Shuri Castle and Kokusai-dori.

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, jazz, or nothing but the town itself.
All of it is generated on your device, and apart from jazz, 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 plane drifting high over Fukuoka.
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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Travel six tiny nature dioramas in Cozy Japan: Hakoniwa Travel, also on the App Store.