Chikae Howland | Hikarui | The Anthology
Half-Japanese, and based in the UK, Chikae O.H. creates resources for living beautifully and intentionally, deeply attuned to the ways our environments shape our wellbeing.
Services: Brand Voice & Tone / Copywriting / Ghostwriting / Editing / Editorial Direction. 2024 — 2026
A sustained two-year creative collaboration spanning copywriting, ghostwriting, editing, and editorial direction across multiple strands of Chikae's evolving practice, rooted in intentional, human-centred living as a gentle counter to the world's overwhelm.
My work included the development of brand voice and website copy for Hikarui and the Little Black Book — a curated membership platform acting as a home for self-discovery; a museum of resources for living beautifully, intentionally, intuitively. The writing sought to hold the particular quality of Chikae's philosophy: bitesized, sensory, and grounded in the lived experience of navigating the world as a polymath and highly sensitive person.
As Editor in Chief and lead writer of The Anthology — Hikarui's online magazine — my work encompassed editorial direction, interviews with creatives, research, and the writing of seasonal anthologies exploring themes of alignment, slowness, and the art of living well. The role involved not only producing the writing but shaping the editorial vision of the publication as a whole.
“The meeting of inner and outer worlds, the Little Black Book is a home for self-discovery, a curated museum of resources for living beautifully, intentionally, intuitively.””
“From Middle English proces, from Old French procés, from Latin processus meaning “a going forward, advance, progress,” from procedere “to go forth.” Process speaks to movement, to the ongoing flow of becoming, to the journey itself as destination.
Process encompasses everything — it’s the through-line connecting every aspect of how we move through the world. Work and life aren’t separate entities but part of the same ecosystem, each feeding the other. It’s taught me that home isn’t a fixed place but the ability to find stability within complexity, to trust the natural rhythm of change and growth.
We live in a culture obsessed with endpoints, yet no one is complete and will never be complete. So why spend so much energy fighting against our natural state of becoming? Accepting myself as perpetually in process has been profoundly liberating, giving permission for life to be imperfect, unresolved, beautifully incomplete.”
“As autumn unfolds across the northern hemisphere, there’s something especially magical about how this season reveals itself in Japan. The way morning mist clings to temple gardens, how the light spills through persimmon trees, the ritual of leaf-viewing that draws entire families to mountainsides ablaze with colour — autumn in Japan feels like poetry made tangible.
Aki 秋 — Autumn
While cities from New York to London mark the season’s arrival with their own rhythms, Japan’s relationship with autumn runs deeper than surface observation. It is woven into the cultural fabric through centuries of seasonal awareness, where the subtle shift from summer’s humidity to autumn’s crisp air becomes reason for celebration. The Japanese language captures these fleeting moments with such precision — words that honour not just the spectacle of crimson maples, but the quiet pleasure of the first autumn fruits, the quality of October light, the sound of leaves underfoot.”
“When I am writing, I am calling back to those whose works came from that space of dailiness. There’s a commonality in the books I gravitate towards these days, a litany of women who did not hide in the face of their own limbo, who instead ground into it, drawing out some kind of universal truth in the process. I find much of myself in these words; I fold into them the way I fold into my own, full-bodied, searching.”
