Chapter 2: The Question That Changed Everything
From Tanegashima to the World — Chapter 2 of 7
← Chapter 1: The Boy Who Poured Tea · Series overview
Chapter 2: The Question That Changed Everything
I arrived in Davis, California, at 17, speaking almost no English.
My strategy for making friends: wear a kimono to school on the first day.
It worked.
Davis High School, 1997
The kimono got people curious. Curiosity opened conversations. Conversations became friendships. I learned more English in the first three months than I had in years of classroom study, because I was not learning grammar — I was learning how to connect with people.
But California was teaching me something else at the same time. Something I had not expected.
The McDonald’s Question
One afternoon, I walked into a McDonald’s.
In Japan, I had grown up with a deep understanding of what food could be. The dashi my father made. The precision of Kyoto cuisine I had read about. The way my mother thought about nutrition.
I sat down with a burger and I thought: this is not very good.
Not terrible. Just — ordinary. Processed. Lacking any real depth of flavour. The ingredients did not seem to know each other. There was nothing in it that reminded me of anything living.
And yet.
The restaurant was full. There was a queue out the door. And when I looked around the city, there was a McDonald’s on every main street. When I looked around the country, there were thousands of them. When I looked at the world — tens of thousands.
The most successful food company in history was selling something that was, by any serious culinary standard, not very good.
I could not make sense of this.
San Francisco and the Second Realisation
On a weekend trip to San Francisco, I went to a Japanese restaurant.
I was hungry for something familiar. I was expecting something close to what I had grown up with.
What I got was a performance of Japanese food — the shapes were right, some of the words were right, but the ingredients were shadows of themselves. The soy sauce was generic. The rice had been sitting too long. The fish tasted of freezer rather than ocean.
I sat there feeling genuinely sad.
Not because the restaurant was bad — by local standards, it was fine. But because I knew what Japanese food actually was. And this was not it.
And then the two experiences connected in my mind.
McDonald’s: not very good, but everywhere. Japanese food in America: had the potential to be extraordinary, but was being presented at a fraction of its real quality.
The question formed clearly, for the first time:
What if someone made real Japanese food — actually good, actually honest — with the kind of reach that McDonald’s has?
I was 17. I did not know how to answer that question. I did not know it would take another 25 years.
But from that moment, I never stopped thinking about it.
The Gap Between Quality and Scale
Most people assume quality and scale are opposites. That you can either make something truly good (expensive, slow, limited) or make something for everyone (fast, cheap, compromised).
McDonald’s built an empire on the second assumption. The fine dining world built its reputation on the first.
The gap between them — the place where fast and honest could coexist — was completely empty.
No one had ever seriously tried to fill it with Japanese food.
I wrote nothing down. I told no one. But something settled into the back of my mind and stayed there, quietly, for a long time.