The first time I properly noticed Japan - not as a country on a map but as an idea that rearranged how I think - was through food. Not a trip, not a film, not anime. A bowl of ramen in a tiny basement restaurant in Soho, sometime around 2012. The kind of place with twelve seats and a queue out the door and no sign worth noticing from the street. The broth was extraordinary, but that isn't what stayed with me. What stayed with me was the attention. The way every element of the bowl had been considered. The soft-boiled egg wasn't just cooked - it was cooked to a specific degree of doneness that most people wouldn't even notice, let alone care about. The noodles had a particular texture. The chashu was sliced at a particular thickness. Nothing was accidental.
I remember thinking: someone cared about this more than they needed to. That sentence - "more than they needed to" - has shaped almost everything I've built since.
The details you don't notice
Japanese design has this quality that I've never quite found anywhere else: the most important details are the ones you aren't supposed to notice. They work on you without you knowing they're there. The curve of a handrail. The weight of a door. The way a shop assistant wraps a purchase. The silence in a garden. These aren't decorative choices. They're expressions of a philosophy that says: the quality of an experience is determined by the care you put into the parts nobody will consciously register.
This is the opposite of how most Western design works, especially digital design. We tend to make our effort visible. We want the user to see the animation, notice the gradient, appreciate the clever interaction. Japanese craft doesn't need you to notice. It just needs you to feel.
I think about this constantly when I'm building products. Not every product needs this level of attention - sometimes speed matters more than polish, and I'm a firm believer in shipping fast. But there's a difference between choosing to ship rough and not caring about the details. The first is a strategic decision. The second is a lack of taste. Japan taught me to care about the difference.
Oishii and the food obsession
Oishii London started as a selfish project. I wanted a good guide to Japanese food in London and I couldn't find one that matched what I was looking for. The existing resources fell into two camps: restaurant review sites that lumped Japanese food in with everything else, giving it no special treatment and no specialist knowledge, or enthusiast forums that were deep on information but had the design sensibility of a 2004 message board.
What I wanted was something that reflected the way Japanese food culture actually works. In Japan, a ramen shop isn't "a restaurant." It's a ramen shop. The categories matter. The distinctions matter. A tonkotsu place is a different thing from a shoyu place, and both are different from a tsukemen place, and treating them all as "ramen" misses the point. The specificity isn't pedantry - it's respect for the craft.
So I built Oishii London as a guide that takes Japanese food as seriously as Japanese food takes itself. It doesn't just list restaurants - it contextualises them. It explains what makes a great izakaya different from a good one. It distinguishes between styles of sushi service. It treats the food with the same attention to detail that the best Japanese chefs bring to preparing it. The design is clean and considered because the food deserves a setting that matches its quality.
Kodawari: the obsession principle
There's a Japanese word - kodawari - that doesn't translate cleanly into English. The closest approximation is "an uncompromising devotion to a pursuit." But even that misses the nuance. Kodawari isn't just about being good at something. It's about caring so deeply about a specific thing that you can't stop refining it, even when everyone else thinks it's already good enough. The ramen master who spends thirty years perfecting a single broth recipe. The knife maker who hand-forges each blade. The barista who has opinions about water temperature differences of one degree.
From the outside, kodawari can look like madness. Why would someone spend three decades on soup? But from the inside, it makes perfect sense. There's always another fraction of improvement available. There's always a detail that could be better. And the pursuit of that fractional improvement isn't a burden - it is the point. The joy is in the refining.
I recognise this instinct in myself, though I would never claim to practice it with the discipline of a Japanese craftsman. When I'm building a product and I find myself adjusting the border radius of a card by one pixel, or tweaking the spacing between elements by two points, or rewriting a single line of description for the fourth time because the rhythm isn't quite right - that's a tiny echo of kodawari. It's the sense that "good enough" isn't actually good enough, at least not for this particular detail in this particular moment.
What Japan taught me about products
Japan didn't teach me to build products. Claude Code taught me that. But Japan taught me something equally important: what products should feel like. The standard to aim for. The difference between something that works and something that feels right.
When I build a product, I'm not trying to make it Japanese. I'm trying to apply the same principle that Japanese craft applies: care about the parts that nobody will notice. Make the thing feel considered, not just functional. Treat every detail as though someone who cares deeply about quality might encounter it and judge you by it - because they might, and they should.
This shows up in small ways. The font choices on my sites are deliberate, not default. The colours are chosen with purpose, not pulled from a template. The way information is organised reflects a point of view about what matters, not a mechanical arrangement of data. The loading speed is fast not because I think users will time it but because slowness is a form of disrespect for the person's time. These are all lessons from Japan, filtered through fifteen years of working in advertising and design and then applied to products I build in my kitchen with an AI tool.
Learning the language
I'm learning Japanese. Slowly, badly, with the enthusiasm of a beginner and the progress of someone who doesn't practise nearly enough. I built a Japanese learning app as one of my projects - partly because I needed it, partly because building the tool helped me learn. Hiragana, katakana, basic vocabulary, restaurant Japanese. The essentials for someone whose relationship with Japan is mediated primarily through food and design.
Learning the language has deepened the obsession rather than satisfied it. Every new word opens a window into a way of thinking that's subtly different from English. The way Japanese handles levels of politeness. The way context does so much of the work that words alone don't need to carry it all. The way a single kanji character can contain an idea that English needs an entire sentence to express. It's like learning to see in a new colour spectrum - the world doesn't change, but your perception of it does.
Attention as a practice
The deepest thing Japan taught me is that paying attention is a skill, not a personality trait. You can get better at it. You can train yourself to notice more, to see the details that most people walk past, to register the care (or lack of it) that went into every designed experience you encounter.
Walking through London now, I notice things I never used to notice. The way a coffee shop has arranged its counter. The typography on a shop sign. The texture of a menu. The weight of a door handle. Whether the music in a restaurant matches the food. Whether the lighting in a bar has been thought about or just installed. These are all design decisions, and they all contribute to how you feel in a space, even if you never consciously register a single one of them.
This is the gift Japan gave me: the ability to notice. Not just to look but to see. Not just to eat but to taste. Not just to use a product but to feel the quality of the experience - or the lack of it. It makes you harder to please, certainly. But it also makes everything you build a little bit better, because you can't unsee what you've trained yourself to notice.
Every product I build carries a little piece of that ramen shop in Soho with it. Someone cared about this more than they needed to. That is the standard. That's always the standard.
