Paris is supposed to be romantic.
Tokyo is supposed to be a mystic wonderland.
I’ve been to both about the same number of times—okay, a few more trips to Tokyo than Paris, but not by much. Enough to know that whatever clichés people attach to these cities don’t really survive contact.
Two of my favorite movies are Sabrina—the remake with Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond—and Lost in Translation with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson.
In Sabrina, Julia Ormond’s character goes to Paris and somehow becomes more herself. Paris gives her confidence. Taste. Poise. A sense of arrival. It’s the city-as-finishing-school fantasy: you show up unsure, and you leave fully formed.
In Lost in Translation, Bill Murray’s character goes to Tokyo completely lost—jet-lagged, disoriented, confused as fuck—and ends up forming a quiet, temporary connection with a twenty-something stranger who’s just as untethered as he is.
One city is supposed to help you find yourself.
The other lets you admit you don’t know who you are.
Well, we’re back in Japan again.
This time to ski.
We kept it a secret until Justin found out on the day of the trip, when a calendar reminder popped up on my phone about the flight to Tokyo. He thought he was going hiking in the mountains.
I hate that he can read now.
This trip felt different.
Justin had just finished his first real finals. He’d never really seen this much snow before. We were in Echigo Yuzawa, and the snow was incredible—thick, constant, unapologetic. It reminded me of snow days in New York, when the world felt paused and permission was granted to do nothing.
That first evening in Yuzawa, heavy snow falling, we were walking back to the hotel when Justin said, “I want to stay here forever.”
You know what, son? Me too.
I’ve never fallen in love with Paris. But I fell in love with Yuzawa in that moment. Or at least for a brief moment.
Because then my brain kicked in.
Sure, I could stay here forever—if money were no issue. If I didn’t get sick of Japanese food. Depending on what kind of house we’d live in. Whether we’d have a car. Who would shovel the snow every day.
Okay, I’m ruining this perfectly romantic moment.
Yes. I could stay here forever.
With a few asterisks.
We deliberately chose to ski for only two full days.
The last time Barbara and I skied was more than a decade ago in Beijing. I fell so much snowboarding that I’m fairly sure I gave myself a concussion. She’s worried about her lower back, so she decided not to ski this time.
And then there was Justin.
We didn’t know if he’d even like skiing. How he’d handle falling down over and over. The ski lift is high and feels dangerous. It’s cold. It’s wet. There are so many people. What if someone bumped into him?
Too many possibilities.
So we booked just two days as a test run. If he hated it on day one, we could cancel the second day and figure out something else to do.
Justin seeing this much snow for the first time
We hired a coach, along with my friend’s kid.
In walks a six-foot-three, blond-haired, blue-eyed nineteen-year-old. One of the moms asks where he’s from.
“Denmark,” he says.
This is followed by a fucking round of applause. Woos. Aaahs.
I hate him already.
I’ve never gotten a round of applause for telling someone I’m from Taiwan.
His name is Rasmus. He’s taking a gap year and spending four months in Japan.
Asian parents don’t know what a gap year is. Do you mean being held back in school by choice? Who does that?
I scheduled my own lesson at the same time, with a different coach—a twenty-something woman from Chengdu.
Good luck, Rasmus. Have fun taking care of two little boys.
I’d glance over every so often to see how they were doing. I was practicing the V-shape stop while they were still trying to put on their skis. I was already taking the lift up, and when I looked over again, Justin was running around throwing snowballs.
I thought, okay, maybe this isn’t for him. Let him just have fun.
So I stopped looking over and focused on my own lesson.
I only signed up for two hours. The kids had four each day.
As I finished my final run before lunch, I felt good about myself. I was making turns. I only fell once in the entire two hours.
I felt good.
I looked over at the kids. They were finally practicing what could loosely be interpreted as skiing.
I tried to be encouraging.
“You guys are doing a great job!”
After lunch, I stayed inside. The kids went back to their lesson with the six-foot-three kid. I ordered a beer and fried chicken at the restaurant and hung out with the moms, mostly killing time and scrolling on my phone.
Then, out of nowhere, someone said, “They’re going on the lift.”
I looked up.
I couldn’t believe it.
Justin was on the lift by himself. Rasmus took the other kid—the younger one.
What?
You can’t let Justin go on the lift. He’s not ready. What if he falls? What if he drops his poles halfway up? What if he gets scared and starts crying?
So many what ifs.
To my surprise, the two kids skied down the slope without falling.
Then they did it again.
And with each run, things got smoother than the one before. Fewer stops. Better balance. Less panic. They started turning where they were supposed to turn.
It kept going like that for the rest of the afternoon.
And then all through the second day.
By the end of it, something had clearly clicked.
I couldn’t have been prouder.
Justin could easily have kept skiing for another two days, and we seriously considered it.
We probably wouldn’t have survived the hotel situation, though.
The hotel we stayed at was a typical onsen hotel. Nothing fancy, but it did the job.
The first night, after a long commute, all we wanted was a hot shower. Of course, the hot water was out. The entire hotel had no hot water—including the onsen.
So we went to sleep on the tatami mats that first night, dirty and exhausted.
The next morning, Barb and I woke up sore and stiff. Justin bounced off the thin mats, wide awake and eager to ski.
Who is this eager beaver?
Every day back home, it’s us rushing Justin out the door for school.
Now he was doing it to us.
The bed situation was bad, but I was hoping the breakfast buffet would redeem things.
It didn’t.
Don’t get me wrong—it wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t wow. Still, it was enough for me to work with.
Because to me, a good breakfast buffet isn’t about how good the individual items taste, or even the totality of the spread. It’s about what you can do with what’s available. How different things can be combined to make something better than they were on their own.
It’s about seeing the permutations.
I was about to Rain Man the shit out of that buffet.
The real challenge on this leg of the trip was getting enough fiber so I could poop.
The buffet was full of traps. The rice station with curry rice. Dashi chazuke. The noodle station. All delicious. All dangerous. The salad bar offered a few sad leaves, some corn, and the usual suspects.
I was running out of ideas when I saw something I would not have touched in a million years.
Natto.
Without hesitation, I went for it.
I knew there were enough ingredients around to build a natto bomb. I hit the sashimi station for tuna, grated yam, and ikura. Then the noodle station for chopped negi. Then the soup station for seaweed.
And there it was.
My makeshift natto bomb.
It was glorious.
A natto bomb is an enigma.
It’s an amalgamation of things people instinctively dislike: okra—a sticky, mostly tasteless vegetable; grated yam—another slippery, gluey substance; and, of course, the main character, natto itself, yet another sticky offender.
Individually, they’re all problematic.
Together, somehow, they work. It’s insanely healthy. And—against all logic—actually quite delicious.
Justin watched me eat this with genuine curiosity and asked, “What does natto smell like?”
I peeled back the wrapper and handed it to him.
Woo boy.
That’s rough.
The best way I could describe it was that it smelled like old gym socks.
And I was being kind.
In the forty-seven years of my life, I’d never willingly chosen to eat natto. I’d walked past it hundreds of times in supermarkets without batting an eye.
But as I’ve gotten older, something has started pulling me toward fermented—and often stinky—ingredients.
I reach for fish sauce far more than I used to. The stinkier the cheese, the better. I’ve even recently gotten into shio koji.
One of my personal heroes, Anthony Bourdain, believed that travel changes you. That it leaves a mark. Sometimes that mark is uncomfortable. Sometimes it isn’t pretty. And that’s okay.
Japan—Tokyo in particular—has always been deeply inspiring to me. This trip did that again, but it also surfaced a few uncomfortable truths about myself. I’ll save those for another write-up.
All in all, I came back knowing a little more about myself than when I left.
By way of dirty gym socks.