Forty Years in Two Days

Today’s guests were Sue and Susan, two friends traveling together from Oregon. Partway through the class, while we were shaping our fourth or fifth piece of nigiri, Sue mentioned, almost in passing, that she’d done a homestay in a town in western Japan forty years ago. She still has a photograph on her phone of a dish her host mother made for her back then — she pulled it up to show me — and she told me that the local sushi she ate during that stay has stayed with her all these decades, more vividly than almost anything else from that trip.

I hadn’t expected the conversation to go there, but it explained something I’d noticed from the moment class started. Sue had worked, years ago, for a major Japanese electronics company, and she still speaks a little Japanese from that time. All through the class, whenever a sentence could be said in Japanese instead of English, she said it in Japanese. I answered her the same way, in Japanese, without really thinking about it — and I could see, instantly, that it meant something to her that I hadn’t anticipated. It wasn’t a translation exercise. It was closer to being met.

We finished shaping the last pieces, sat down, and ate what we’d made while we talked through what the class had actually covered — the rice, the knife work, the two or three mistakes everyone makes on their first attempt. It was an ordinary end to an ordinary class, as far as I could tell. Then Sue said, quite simply, that this had been the most fun she’d had in Japan.

I laughed and told her that didn’t seem possible — she’d landed in Tokyo two days ago. She corrected me, gently. She meant all of it: not just this trip, but the whole forty years, back to the homestay and the host mother and the photograph still saved on her phone. Out of everything, today was the one she’d point to. I didn’t expect that sentence, and I’m not sure I’ve fully gotten over how much it meant to hear it.

What I kept turning over afterward wasn’t the compliment itself, but the reason behind it. One of the things I’m actually trying to do in this class, every time, is have a real dialogue with my guests rather than deliver a script — the same belief that’s taken me down a slightly strange path to get here in the first place, through accounting and photography and tour guiding, none of which handed me a fixed set of lines to repeat. I’d always assumed that dialogue had to happen in English, because that’s the language almost every guest and I default to. Today I learned that assumption was smaller than the truth.

For a guest like Sue, someone who has an old and genuine relationship with Japan, what she may actually be looking for isn’t a patient English-speaking host. It’s a chance to use the Japanese she already has, in a real situation, with someone who will actually answer her back in kind rather than switch to English out of politeness. That’s not an opportunity that comes along often in a short trip. Most of her interactions here were probably conducted the way most tourists’ are — in English, by necessity, with Japanese reduced to a greeting or a thank-you. For an afternoon, at my counter, that reversed.

I don’t think I can plan for this in advance. I can’t know which guest is going to turn out to be, in some quiet way, a little bit Japanese inside — someone with forty years and a homestay and a company badge somewhere in their past. But I can stay alert enough to notice it when it surfaces, and answer in the same language it arrives in, rather than the one I default to. Today, that was the entire difference between an ordinary class and the best afternoon in forty years. I’ll take that as a reminder of what I’m actually supposed to be listening for.

A few hours later, Sue left a review that put better words to all of it than I managed in the moment:

“(I wish more stars were available!). Kenji-san offers an end-to-end sushi-making experience that goes beyond the kitchen. You get to see the market, understand Shinto connections, build some knife skills, and make nigiri sushi. With Kenji-san’s approach, you feel like you’re with a sushi professional and a friend.”

Reading it back, I noticed she’d laid out the whole arc of the morning in order — the market, the shrine, the knife work, the nigiri — not just the part where the rice ends up in your hands. And then that last line stayed with me longer than the rest: a sushi professional and a friend. It’s an odd pair of words to hold at once, and I’m not sure I’d have known how to describe what I’m aiming for as cleanly as that myself. I just know that for a couple of hours today, with someone who’d been carrying Japan around with her for forty years, it happened to be true.