Chapter 4: The Door That Closed
From Tanegashima to the World — Chapter 4 of 7
← Chapter 3: The Education I Didn’t Expect · Series overview
Chapter 4: The Door That Closed
After Kyoto, I was ready to take what I had learned somewhere further.
New York felt like the next logical destination. It was where the world’s attention gathered. If Japanese food was going to cross into a global conversation, New York was the room where that conversation was happening.
And there was one place in New York that represented the absolute peak of Japanese cuisine in America.
Masa.
The Trial
Masa, in the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle, was — and remains — one of the most talked-about restaurants in the United States. At the time, dinner for one person cost close to $900. The chef, Masayoshi Takayama, had built something extraordinary: a counter omakase experience that made people understand, sometimes for the first time, what Japanese cuisine at its most serious actually was.
I applied. I went through a trial.
I passed.
September
And then September 11, 2001 happened.
The world changed. Immigration rules in the United States tightened significantly and quickly. The visa pathway I had been counting on was no longer straightforward. The door I had just opened, through skill and preparation and luck, closed.
Not slammed. It simply… was no longer there.
The Lesson
I spent time sitting with this. It would have been easy to feel that the failure was mine — that I had done something wrong, that I had not been good enough.
But that was not true. I had passed the trial. I had demonstrated the skills. The world had simply changed in ways that had nothing to do with me.
This was a lesson that Kyoto could not teach:
Skill is not enough.
You can be excellent at what you do. You can prepare, demonstrate, earn. And then something completely outside your control — a geopolitical event, a policy change, a market shift, a pandemic — can close the door anyway.
The question is not whether this happens. It happens. To everyone who tries anything for long enough.
The question is what you do with that information.
Do you conclude that effort is pointless? That preparation doesn’t matter?
Or do you learn that strategy and flexibility are as important as skill? That you need not just one door, but the ability to find other doors? That your plan needs room for the world to behave in ways you did not expect?
I chose the second.
I began looking for other doors.
The Path Continues
Sydney was one of them.
I had a connection there — a small thread, the kind of connection that only means something if you are willing to pull it. My wife Rumi was willing. I was willing.
We did not have much. We had skills, a philosophy, some small savings, and the habit of doing what was needed.
We got on a plane.