19 -When Skill Becomes Joy
From day one, every technique was broken down into reason and method.
How to hold the knife.
Where to place your thumb.
How to combine vinegar, sugar, and salt so rice doesn’t just “taste good,” but tastes balanced.
Nothing was “just do it this way because tradition says so.”
Every class fed my curiosity.
Nothing felt like blind obedience.
It felt like investing in a new version of myself.
Now, as I write this, more than three years have passed since I enrolled at Tokyo Sushi Academy.
Looking back in my memory, I can say without hesitation: it was one of the biggest—and best—investments I have ever made.
That investment has borne fruit in the form of a single, simple skill: the ability to make sushi with my own hands, and to make people genuinely happy with it.
For fifteen years as a salaryman, I almost never experienced direct gratitude from clients.
Today, every time I shape a piece of nigiri and place it in front of a guest, I receive something I had been missing all those years—
a smile, a “thank you,” a sense that what I did with my own hands made someone’s day a little brighter.
Actually, this is exactly what I want to make you experience the same feelings when you make sushi.
Of course, back then—standing at the cutting board, concentrating on my grip and my knife angle, the pace of class—I had no way of knowing that such a future was waiting for me.
