It is March 19th, 1971, and I am 23 years old. It is my first day in Japan. I descend the stairs at Haneda airport. I don’t know what to expect. I step off the bottom step, and something happens when my foot touches the tarmac. There is a click, a shift, a change. As my foot touches the ground in Japan, I sense that this moment is the beginning of something. A door opened in front of me as another closed behind me. It almost seems like a pair of rose-colored glasses have been placed over my eyes, revealing a wonderland I could not have imagined that would touch, stimulate, nourish, comfort, and energize me for the next half-century.

Going through the door of my new apartment in Sendai for the first time was like entering a toy house with its tatami floors, fusuma doors, and shoji-covered windows. My futon bed could be folded up in the closet during the day, and everything I owned could fit into my closets, leaving a spare, minimalist apartment. At night, I could pull my folded futon and blankets out of the closet, and during the day, I kept my legs warm in my kotatsu.

I found many surprises in my compact new kitchen, and my education began when I opened the wooden cabinet doors and found many ceramic styles from kilns all over Japan. Having been raised with fashionable Melmac plastic dishes, I was fascinated to find so much variety before me. There were finely milled wooden bowls coated in what I would learn to be urushi lacquer, the magical substance that the Japanese have been coating functional ware for 9000 years. I went on to discovered one point of ingenuity after another. One drawer contained urushi chopsticks and conventional silverware. Another drawer was filled with gadgets made from bamboo or wood, such as cutters, a whisk for making matcha, basting brushes, spoons, chopstick rests, and containers for spices shaped like gourds. Yet another held tiny plates for soy sauce, ceramic sake cups, sake flasks, coasters, and compact equipment for serving leaf tea.