Chapter 8: The Vision Found at the Bottom of the Sea
From Tanegashima to the World — Chapter 8 of 10
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Chapter 8: The Vision Found at the Bottom of the Sea
Looking back, Otogo’s vision was not decided in a meeting room.
It was decided somewhere quieter, and somewhere harder. As if I had sunk to the bottom of a deep sea, alone, asking myself the same question over and over until an answer surfaced.
What Yachiyo Taught Me About Vision
In the Yachiyo days, the sushi bar drew a wide range of guests — well-known figures, CEOs of large companies, government officials, embassy staff. From them, the lesson I absorbed most deeply was the importance of leadership and vision.
I have come to believe that a vision is a road.
A road that allows the people working with you to walk forward together, hand in hand, without getting lost. To shape that road clearly and lay it out for them — that, I felt, was the most important job a founder has.
But putting that road into words is not easy.
Two Months of Silence
When I am working on something this important, I shut almost everything else out.
No friends. No golf. No drinks. The only people I see are family and staff. I quiet the outside until the only voice left is the one inside me.
A month passed. Nothing came. A second month passed. Nothing came.
Every day I asked myself the same questions.
What do I want to do through Otogo? What kind of contribution to society do I want to make? Why am I doing this in the first place?
It felt like sitting in zazen at the very bottom of the ocean. Quiet, but heavy. Nothing audible from outside, only a noise inside myself.
That is how deep I was digging.
The Image That Connected Everything
Then, after about two months, I saw a piece of news about war. There was a photograph of children — thin, vulnerable, suffering.
Before any thought, I felt something move.
If I could bring these children onigiri, I think they would be happy.
In that instant, things connected.
Let us do something that makes the world a little better.
That is what we should be doing. Through rice, we could start by helping the children near our shops eat slightly better, slightly more honestly. And if it grew the way McDonald’s had grown — across countries, across cultures — perhaps, slowly, we could nudge the world in a better direction.
That is when I decided.
Our vision is Make the world better.
This is it.
A Lighter Heart, and the Next Worry
When the vision was decided, my heart felt lighter.
But the next worry came almost immediately.
Can we really make this affordable enough to compete globally?
I had the ideal. But ideals do not run a shop. To bring the price down, hand-making would not be enough — we would need machinery.
But the moment you mechanise food, if the taste collapses, the whole point is lost.
So I made a rule for myself.
Mechanise. But the recipe must be made by a real chef trained in Kyoto. Even at scale, brand lives in the details.
The hunt for machinery began.
The Onigiri Machine Decision
I called every friend I had made over the years. I searched online. I found that onigiri machines were no longer the bulky things of the past — Japanese engineering had made them remarkably compact. Shipping costs had come down. If something broke, the machine could be sent back to Japan for repair, rather than flying an engineer to Australia.
Three companies dominated the market.
Two were nearly fully automatic. Onigiri came out finished, ready to use. 1,500 per hour. On paper, very attractive.
One was different. A clump of rice would drop down, and a “hand-shaped mould” would form it the rest of the way. Semi-automatic. 600 per hour — less than half the throughput.
By the numbers alone, the semi-automatic looked like a clear loss.
I went back and forth. Samples were hard to obtain. There were no online reviews. I was making a judgment with very little to stand on.
Then the semi-automatic company called me.
What they said pulled me in completely.
“We had 1,000 chefs each grip a rice ball. We measured the pressure of each grip. Then we shaped our hand-mould to match the average.”
The moment I heard that, a thought arrived.
Then this machine could make rice with the softness of a mother’s grip.
Production capacity was less than half. But the obsession with taste and texture was, if anything, stronger on this side. I have always loved data. And here was a company that had not relied on instinct alone — they had measured, recorded, and reproduced.
I felt the future in that.
So I decided. The slower, semi-automatic machine.
If speed was the only criterion, there were better options. But Otogo’s centrepiece was going to be the onigiri itself, and I did not want to put a compromise into the very centre of the brand. If it was going to sit at the heart of what we did, then the first thing to protect was not throughput — it was the core of taste itself.
What Goes Beside the Onigiri
Once the lead was decided, the rest of the world started to take shape.
What goes well with an onigiri?
Karaage. Soup. They appeared naturally.
But here, again, I refused to compromise. If “brand lives in the details” was the rule from Kyoto, then the supporting cast could not be allowed to be merely supporting.
- Karaage — marinated in soy for 30 hours, slowly absorbing flavour. Cooked in a pressure fryer so that quality holds even at volume.
- Soup — not just soup, but dashi. Made with bonito, mackerel, and round herring flakes — the recipe I had learned in Kyoto, used directly.
Quick, Healthy, Affordable. That was the concept.
And then I thought — if the dashi is the centrepiece of the broth, what noodle should sit in it?
That is where another fork in the road appeared.
Soba or Ramen — A Vision-Sized Decision
When I looked at the numbers, the ramen market is roughly three times the size of the soba market.
If the question is market size, the answer is ramen.
If the question is vision, the answer is soba.
Soba — lower in calories per serving, lighter, more aligned with Quick, Healthy, Affordable. Closer to what a person might eat every day without guilt.
Ramen — bigger market, easier sell, more familiar to a Western audience.
Another fork in the road.
But I think this is exactly how Otogo became Otogo — through small accumulating moments like this one.
Do we go where it is bigger, or where it is more like us? Do we choose what sells, or what compounds as a brand?
What This Chapter Is Really About
This chapter looks like a chapter about a vision and a couple of equipment decisions.
But really, what it is about, is the moments where two roads diverge, and you have to decide which one is yours.
Bigger or truer. Faster or more honest. Easier today, or compounding for years.
Otogo, again and again, took the second one.
The next chapter is the one where I ask the question that sits beneath all of this:
Are we actually eating well?