Why I Don’t Count Stars

• 02/10/2026
• The dialogue, Blog

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

— Steve Jobs, Stanford University Commencement Address, 2005

There was a stretch in my twenties when I was lost about my career. Not quite a company man, not quite independent. Ashamed of being no one in particular, I read compulsively, as if the answer might be hiding in the next book. Back then, reading whatever Kazuyo Katsuma, the accountant-turned-author, or Takafumi Horie, the famous IT entrepreneur, or Kenichi Ohmae, the McKinsey consultant counted among the world’s business gurus, published next was a kind of lifeline for me. At the same time, I carried a quiet resignation: I could never become a star like them. Maybe an ordinary life was all a mediocre person like me was allowed. It was in the middle of that feeling that I came across a book by Kazuhiro Fujihara.

What it proposed was this: take three experiences, each rare enough to put you in the top one percent, and multiply them together. A hundred times a hundred times a hundred makes you one in a million. Reading it, I didn’t so much understand it as want to believe it. Not because it had been proven. Staying in accounting, there would be no raise, no promotion — just another day trudging through a tunnel with no exit, feeling my way through the dark. For someone who thought of nothing but escape, it looked like a sliver of light. Maybe even these hard days, depending on how I spent them, could change who I’d be in ten years.

Looking back, this wasn’t the first time I’d moved because I trusted someone. Through three years of high school, I threw myself into studying English above everything else. Finding a teacher I trusted then is what got me into one of the country’s top universities. Trust the teacher, put in the work, and the results follow eventually — I’d already lived that once. Maybe that’s exactly why, decades later, I could leap toward the theory of an author I’d never met.

My four years of university put me inside what was, at the time, one of the country’s most advanced IT environments, where I learned to read and write HTML. Once I entered the workforce, I spent a total of fifteen years in accounting, sharpening a way of thinking built on numbers. After going independent as a tour guide, I focused on FIT — foreign individual travelers — and refined the kind of hospitality that genuinely delights a small group of guests. Then the pandemic hit, and every tour I had stopped overnight. During that time, I spent my days as a food photographer, shooting my way through three hundred restaurants across Tokyo.

English. IT. Numbers. Hospitality. Photography. At the time, I had no idea what any of it would add up to. I just kept trusting Fujihara’s theory, investing in one new skill every three years.

In 2022, I began learning sushi. I opened my class in 2023, and three and a half years later, I’ve hosted thousands of guests. Only now do I understand: English, IT, numbers, hospitality, photography — all of it flowed into this one point, sushi, and only there did it finally take shape. Just as Steve Jobs’ famous words go, the dots only connect when you look back.

English, IT, accounting, hospitality, photography, sushi. The joy of having the abilities I’d built for myself recognized by guests as real accomplishments — I had, at last, discovered the joy of earning money because I was seen as worth paying.

In the food world, the most famous form of recognition is the Michelin star. For someone who runs a cooking class rather than a restaurant, it should, by rights, have nothing to do with me at all. So how much is that “irrelevant” Michelin experience actually worth? I decided to do some counting.

I did some digging, and it turns out that the number of people currently working at Michelin-starred restaurants in Tokyo comes out to roughly 1,000 to 1,200. I’ll leave the detailed math for another essay, but once you factor in staff turnover, the number of people who could claim, over the past ten years, to have “worked at a Michelin-starred restaurant” comes out to something like 4,000.

In other words, this credential isn’t the proof of having passed through some narrow gate that people assume it is. In Tokyo alone, more than four thousand people are in a position to hang the same sign on their door. I chose not to use that yardstick.

A Michelin inspector visits anonymously and leaves having judged nothing but the technique and consistency on the plate. What that reflects is the quality of a single dish, served on a single day — none of the conversation that led up to it, none of the four hours spent together. A guest who leaves a star for my class on Google Business Profile, on the other hand, has gone through the whole experience first — the walk through the market, the hours spent working with their hands, the small talk, the moments of laughter — before rendering their judgment. Both use the word “star,” but what that star actually captures couldn’t be more different. Realizing this is what decided, for me, which yardstick to use.

Of course, there’s nothing objectively correct about this choice. The theory of multiplying three one-in-a-hundred experiences together isn’t a proof either — it only holds within the world as I can see it, a fundamentally subjective yardstick. And I’m fine with that.

The very person who sat at my counter and spent four hours with me is the one who, on their way out, leaves a star on Google Business Profile. To me, that is worth far more than a star handed down by an anonymous inspector who judged nothing but a plate. Because that star carries not just the taste of the food, but every word we exchanged that day, every hour that passed, every moment we laughed together. Just as I received Fujihara’s theory not as proof but as something to resonate with, I want my guests to leave their stars not out of verification, but out of the feeling of having actually been there. What I hand over across the counter isn’t a title. It’s a once-only stretch of time that only that person can ever judge.

At the end of a day of teaching, once the knives are sharpened, night falls and I finally sit down at the MacBook I’ve used for three years now. Once again, a guest from today has left a star. Reading the review, I replay the day in my head. Did I really give them something worth their time? Did they leave with knowledge and experience that will serve them somewhere further down their own Sushi Journey?

Night after night, I’ve been stacking up stars like this, one at a time. Looking back, without noticing, it has become a single path. And over that path, stars are scattered across the sky, flickering. Not the one fixed, unmoving star handed down by Michelin, but countless small stars, each lit by someone who sat across from me on a given day.

Just as Steve Jobs’ famous words go, the dots only connect when you look back. What I’ve been accumulating, it turns out, was never dots. It was stars. And I want to keep lighting one more, every night, and keep tending this sky that only I could have made.