This is the vector I was "supposed" to draw by tradition to announce my holiday in Japan from 26 December 2022 to 5 January 2023, but even at mid-December I still hadn't started on the sketches for my European trip from five months back – partly because of my full-time job and partly because summertime daylight left little room for private reflection. I decided to postpone the Japan "postcard" and prioritise finishing the Europe sketches, which itself took several more months because of a new addiction to the Lean theorem prover. But here is the promised postcard at last.

I had all my photos to draw inspiration from, and chose the scene of Lake Taishō beneath the most prominent mountains of the Kamikōchi aka Japanese Alps, the literal and metaphorical high point of my trip despite spending its entire latter half in Tokyo. Some parts of my photo were obscured by clouds and barren trees, which for simplicity's sake I pulled away and reconstructed to my liking.