Yily Nelson, classical and Spanish guitarist, performs in the Long Island Rail Road concourse at New York Penn Station.

A classical guitarist performs “Feelings” in the Long Island Rail Road concourse at  New York Penn Station.

Brian: I was planning to do Ippudo tomorrow night for dinner.

Me: I’d recommend going to Ippudo at an off time unless you want to wait a while to get seated.

Brian: It’s all about the story. I want to capture the madness.

I don’t have a habit to lug my DSLR out to restaurants. It’s not easy to be inconspicuous with a camera the size and heft of a small saucepan. In an effort to not put staff and other patrons on alert, I find my compact does the job of documentation ably, if not bringing the optical firepower to deal with challenging light conditions. Maybe I’m overly self-conscious. Perhaps when I find my way to that one thing about which I’m as passionate as my new friend is about ramen, I won’t care how I look either.

Brian MacDuckston is the writer and photographer behind Ramen Adventures, one of the most extensive English language blogs covering the ramen scene in Tokyo and beyond. You may want to hide your utensils before viewing, lest you inadvertently damage your monitor by lunging a spoon or pair of chopsticks at it. I learned that Brian was planning a rare trip back to the US to visit family, but also with a barnstorming tour of our top ramen hotspots (Hawaii, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York) in mind. I generally avoid stalking strangers over the internet, but this seemed too much of a great connection to pass up. Though my attempts to make ramen entirely from scratch in my kitchen (here, here and here) probably put me into the upper tier of obsessive enthusiast already, Brian is the ramen geek’s ramen geek. Fortunately for me, Brian is also gregarious and immediately agreed we should get together over a meal.

So it was that I found myself at Ippudo NY during the peak of the dinner rush. We waited an hour for our seats but, in a twist of irony, between pre-ramen beer, sharing and learning about each other, and meeting Sarah, another Ramen Adventures fan who had met Brian in Tokyo, I wished it had been even a little longer. I took advantage of being tucked in the corner and solidarity in dueling heavy artillery to get the kind of photos that only come out well with a big sensor and super wide aperture lens in Ippudo’s nightclub-like ambient lighting.

What’s funny about all this (unslakable demand leading to constant lines, the house music, chic decor and lighting), and as Brian was quick to point out, is that Ippudo in Japan is a high quality but completely normal chain of restaurants. The team behind the marketing for the New York branch has done an admirable job of re-branding it as an ultra-unique haven of exotic cuisine. Not bad for something that’s considered cheap and accessible comfort food in its land of origin. I love having Ippudo here, but the status it has achieved says as much about its own trailblazing as the lack of market competition. Ramen chefs of the world: New York (and plenty of other places) would welcome you with open arms.

Watching Brian photograph and make mental notes about our experience was something akin to being in the studio audience for the taping of a TV show. You realize that what you see in the final product is the distillation and stylization of the most important elements the creator wants to use to convey a message. When we each tell our own stories, we help others know who we are by drawing out those aspects about which we are most excited. We have to capture the madness.

A percussion, bass and vocal trio performs “Unchained Melody” for straphangers waiting on the platform at Lexington Avenue – 53rd Street Station.

I’ve been experimenting with video as a potential storytelling tool to add to my palette. I shot a large amount of test footage to get a feel for what my camera can and cannot do. I put together a short film of ramen preparation at Kambi Ramen House from clips that actually weren’t too bad!

I recently met up with four other alumni from the Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy (ICS for short), where I attended classes as an exchange student for a few months in 2008. This was the first time a group of us had organized a get together in New York and, to the best of my knowledge, the first meeting in the US. The program is just over 10 years old and, at around 180 students, is relatively compact and intimate. As such, there aren’t too many of us out there in the world (yet), particularly outside Asia. We make up for it as best we can with frequent virtual communication, but it’s difficult to share a pitcher of beer over Facebook. We hadn’t realized there was a group of us close enough to meet until a handful of people, including me, simultaneously sent notes to the head of alumni engagement asking if there were any plans to organize events in the US and what we could do to help. Within 48 hours, we had contacted everyone in and around the city and set a date, time and place to meet. Problem solved.

None of us at this gathering had actually met before, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell a few moments after everyone was properly situated with vittles and frosty libations. It brought back one of my first memories from meeting my classmates in Tokyo years ago. I was told that one element they felt made ICS special was the emphasis on ba (場). Ba has a literal definition as a physical space, location or occasion. It also has the more abstract connotation of people coming together and meeting at an intellectual level in the shared experience of relationship building, idea shaping and creation of knowledge. Ba can also be a blend of both the tangible and intangible concepts. Ba is a little complicated. I think my friend Karen had the best shorthand explanation for getting the concept into one’s head: “You can go to the bar to have ba.” (In Karen’s Australian accent, the elongated vowels and dropped r make the two almost indistinguishable.) Worked for me.

While in Tokyo I experienced classroom ba, cafeteria ba, conveyor belt sushi ba, wandering around ba, drinking ba and many other variations on a theme. The other night, we found ourselves at Katsuhama, an izakaya that specializes in tonkatsu: tender, juicy, breaded and deep fried pork cutlet. I’ll pause a moment to let the mental image linger. Ba doesn’t necessarily require food and drink, though they certainly do not hurt. This got me thinking about what other places make good platforms for ba. Cities are full of them. There are the obvious ones, like coffee shops and pubs. Squares and parks can certainly have ba. I think one can even find ba in buses, trains and their associated infrastructure.

In urban planning parlance, the term third place, while not a direct equivalent, gets at many of the same issues. Third places (the first being one’s home, workplace the second) are social environments that are seen as hosts for community interaction and engagement, and are a key element of what gives a neighborhood its identity. Organizations like Project for Public Spaces make it their mission to understand how this works and how to create more of it.

Dense urban communities and transit oriented development have the direct environmental benefit of reducing the need for car travel. They also lay down the latticework that supports, nurtures and binds together a network of first, second and third places. While environmental impact is not something at the top of every agenda, creation of a ba infused neighborhood that you can care about is an aspiration I think almost everyone can get behind. Kanpai!

JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI is the story of 85 year-old Jiro Ono, considered by many to be the world’s greatest sushi chef. He is the proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat, sushi-only restaurant inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station. Despite its humble appearances, it is the first restaurant of its kind to be awarded a prestigious 3 star Michelin review, and sushi lovers from around the globe make repeated pilgrimage, calling months in advance and shelling out top dollar for a coveted seat at Jiro’s sushi bar. (Magnolia Pictures)

Characteristics that often come to mind when we think of a subway station are, in best cases, utilitarian and spartan. Too frequently, the list also includes cold, drab, and depressing. If we assume this to be a generally accurate assessment, then the teaser for Jiro Dreams of Sushi may appear to be a curious creation of fiction. But Jiro Ono and his sushi restaurant are very much real. This documentary tells the story of his 75 years of dedication to his craft and ascent to the apex of his field.

Granted, the subway station is none other than the stop in Ginza, Tokyo’s answer to Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, but I’d like to think it still makes the point that the impact of subways (and transit networks in general) can extend well beyond their primary function, serving as a platform and catalyst for many other types of activity. Far from being lifeless points of departure, stations and their surrounding neighborhoods can themselves be vibrant destinations. Across town, in the buzzing hubs of Shinjuku and Shibuya, there is so much going on inside, above, below, and around the train stations one could conceivably wander around the length of a day and never end up beyond sight of the complexes. Even moving away from Tokyo’s dense core, one still finds at least a market or convenience store and other basic services co-located with most stations.

Coming back to Jiro, the utterly unpretentious setting for his life’s work is not a half bad metaphor for his approach to the food itself. Jiro eschews unnecessary embellishments. The sushi epitomizes simplicity. Lay customers and professional peers alike are routinely amazed that his uncomplicated approach can give rise to something so delicious. What they don’t see is that the complexity is there, just not in the final result. The success of the restaurant depends entirely on planning that happens before any piece of fish is served. Jiro and his team select only the best raw material, give utmost thought and care to their techniques, and constantly seek improvement. All can benefit from such a considered approach to designs and labors, whether preparing a prized cut of tuna or building the infrastructure that supports our communities.

Related posts:

Train Culture

Clearing the Way

Scene Change

Train Culture: Starting Young

As we approach the one year anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that dramatically impacted eastern Japan, many are assessing what progress has been made in recovery efforts. Sobering reports have noted that, while the most dire situations have been contained and some debris has been corralled, life has still not returned to anything approaching normal for thousands of people and hundreds of towns. Equally worrying, many of the long-term problems evident long before the disaster continue to persist due to the absence of strong leadership and willingness to make difficult decisions in political, economic, and social realms. The book Reimagining Japan, a set of essays collected and edited by management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, digs deep into all of these issues with candor and criticalness, but also hopefulness. It was the last of these that the editors felt most conspicuous by its absence in contemporary discourse on Japan.

For those not familiar with current or historical Japan, the book is a great overview of the major forces that have shaped the country. For me, who first learned about Japan through its pop culture, the essays represent a comprehensive summary of my “reeducation” about the reality on the ground. The book covers a wide range of fields, so there is something for just about everyone. I’m personally interested in how Japan has been proactive in addressing environmental and urban development issues, but at the same time has so much potential for continued improvement and sharing its accumulated knowledge. Many of the challenges noted are faced by other countries (or will be in the future), which is what makes the prospect of finally addressing them so exciting. Japan could develop solutions to its systemic challenges and become a sought after source of expertise to others in the process.

After reading through all of the essays I was struck by one theme that seemed to return again and again, that Japan’s greatest barrier to growth is self-imposed trapping and blocking of ideas and talent. Insufficient childcare, glass ceilings, and outright discrimination prevent women from fully participating in the economy. A culture of risk avoidance and severe consequences for failure discourages would-be entrepreneurs from taking chances with aggressive, forward-looking business ideas. The insistence on consensus in organizations prevents individuals from raising concerns, particularly when they are opposed to prevailing opinions. These and so many other examples suggest Japan may already have the resources to solve many of its problems, if only its rigid systems could soften up just enough to allow talent to fill its leadership vacuum.

Planning for Fun and Profit

In an effort to get a firmer handle on my long term career planning, I’ve started actively reaching out for help and guidance from others. My friend Tim, one of my project managers from my IBM days, graciously accepted my entreaty to step in as my Mr. Miyagi. My earliest consultant Christa, who was the primary inspiration for creating my social media assets, continues to be one of my most enthusiastic supporters and sources of wisdom. A handful of other friends and colleagues are also stepping into the fold, and are collectively helping me begin to craft the executive summary or mission statement version of what will eventually be a detailed personal development plan. I’ll go into more detail as these efforts begin to bear fruit.

Corporate Eco Forum

Our webcast on the Sustainable Apparel Coalition was a big hit. I enjoyed working with our featured presenter, Rick Ridgeway, who had the patience of a saint as I wrestled with the technical limitations of our presentation software. We finalized the ballot of nominees for the 2012 C.K. Prahalad Award and had the CEF Advisory Board cast votes for who they felt most demonstrated exceptional, globally significant private sector action that exemplifies the fundamental connection between sustainability, innovation and long-term business success in a globalizing world. The result will be announced at our June 2012 annual meeting in New York. We’ve also collected essay submissions from member company employees competing in the 2012 CEF Member Challenge: Journey to Camp 41 in Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest. CEF will sponsor 5 winning employees from CEF member companies to attend an all-expenses paid sustainability leadership development program in Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest led by ecologist Thomas E. Lovejoy. Winners will be announced very soon. Next up, we will present a new webcast, The Business Value of Adopting the ISO 50001 Energy Management Standard, featuring Ed Pinero, Veolia Water Chief Sustainability Officer and chairman of the ISO 50001 committee, and Rick Duke, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy.

Compass Yoga

Christa’s nonprofit is moving forward with our first foray into strategic planning, mapping out priorities for the next year and beyond. I’ve taken up the mantle of creating metrics for measuring impact of our programs.

Net Impact Service Corps

We seem to be stuck in a low gear as we try to launch this semester of Service Corps. We learned from our last experience that we need to first identify specific nonprofits with confirmed interest to participate in order to market the program to prospective volunteer consultants from among the Net Impact membership. This time around, we’re having trouble even getting the nonprofits to engage, as many seem to be grappling with so many issues that they can’t spare staff hours to manage additional projects. It will be disappointing if we can’t get things off the ground, but at some point we may have to decide to stop fighting against the universe.

Language Learning

I went into detail in a post about reaching milestones in my Mandarin and Japanese studies. I’ve since decided to give JapanesePod101.com a test drive. While I’ve confirmed my initial impression that there are several areas in which it is not as well developed as ChinesePod, it has few unique features of its own that are quite useful. Right now, maybe it’s more important that I’m studying something each day. As I get more familiar with the landscape of tools I can later think about which ones are the best for me.

All Eyes and Ears

I read through The Economist each week to get a general sense of what’s going on in the world. I also have a raft of sites and Twitter feeds that help me keep abreast of developments in corporate sustainability, urbanism, China and Japan. I’m almost finished reading Reimagining Japan, and plan to write up impressions after I have some time to digest. I made my first visit to WNYC’s The Greene Room to attend The Global Salon: Cities in Japan (photos). And in the brain candy department, I finished working my way though the anime Durarara!!. I’m now watching the recently broadcast second season of Danny Choo’s Culture Japan.

Ramen Roundup

I’ll leave things here with a moment of noodle zen:

Ippudo, Akamaru Modern with kakuni and nitamago

Minca, signature shoyu based blended torigara and tonkotsu, with extra chashu

Hide-chan, tonkotsu with chili oil

When I was a freshman in college, I looked up the Mandarin equivalent of “thank you” for an ill-conceived experiment communicating with restaurant staff while picking up Chinese takeout. In return I received a look of bewilderment, then a smile, and finally a barrage of unintelligible sound that I’m going to guess was an interrogative of some kind. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I certainly didn’t anticipate I would one day sit down to reflect on several years of daily study and look forward to those that lay ahead. In the same vein, it was a good number of years into my addiction to anime before I began to think about trying to follow along without subtitles, ultimately traveling to Japan to get a closer look at the reality behind the narrow focus and stylized depictions of its pop culture.

These are not my first experiences with second languages. I studied Spanish in high school. Though I enjoyed it, I had no native Spanish speaking friends and didn’t see the language fitting into my other interests and plans at that time. I stopped once I had met my credit requirements. For me, it was challenging to sustain interest and momentum without a compelling hook to anchor my efforts.

In college I took up Italian, which was a good complement with my family heritage and classical music training. I spent a summer in Italy playing in an opera orchestra and taking language instruction. I was far from cosmopolitan centers, so the locals spoke little or no English, which was a great immersion experience. Most famously, I wandered around Urbania a few days before my departure, asking merchants if I could dig through their garbage. Confusion was dispelled when I explained I needed packing material to pad the bottles of wine I was mailing back to myself. I think I learned as much or more by becoming part of the community than from the many hours of formal study. I returned to the US determined to maintain that progress, but was discouraged by the drop in learning speed in the absence of constant exposure. I ultimately ended this study as well, though I had uncovered another piece of the necessary support system. Drive could only go so far without the environment for learning.

I think language is a crucial component of understanding a culture. Each influences and, in turn, is influenced by the other. It is this notion that serves as a backstop to my current endeavors and keeps me coming back each day for more. My wife Min is Chinese. She and one of her cousins are the only members of their extended family to have lived and worked outside of China. Bridging the cultural gap between me and them, or even beginning to understand what it means to be Chinese, is a journey that probably won’t have a defined end, but most of the lessons to be learned along the way would likely be lost on me if I did not have the ability to communicate in their language. It’s also really difficult to order tasty food when you can’t read the menu.

My entry point to Japanese via cartoons was somewhat less profound, but that fascination and enjoyment was what led me to track down the real people, places, and things that inspired their two-dimensional counterparts. I started reading (translated) work by contemporary Japanese writers, following news, and when presented with the opportunity, traveled to Japan to live and study for a short period of time. Friends were made. Broken Japanese was spoken. Trains were taken. Ramen was eaten. Although I absorbed much in the few months I was there, in the long run I had only just scratched the surface. As with China, I can spend the rest of my life studying the business, culture, and language and still not fully understand everything I see and hear. But so long as I can learn one thing tomorrow that I didn’t know today, I’ll consider it time well spent.

Staying interested has been the easy part. Where I’ve had to take deliberate measures has been in locating and choosing tools for learning, and creating opportunities for exposure in lieu of total immersion. In these respects, I have had more success with Mandarin than Japanese, but I’m in the process of making adjustments to both.

I started Mandarin studies with the Pimsleur method audio lessons. It was a good way to get acquainted with the sounds of the language without the distraction of writing and explicit grammar study, but after a few cycles through I needed to move on to broader and more challenging content. I had picked up a few textbooks and located some web-based materials, but the inert nature of the books and scattershot content of the websites made them difficult to utilize. There were opportunities to take formal classes at universities and community organizations, but the physical location and schedule constraints never quite seemed to work with my existing obligations. Discovering ChinesePod was the breakthrough that addressed many of these hurdles. While not a complete solution (which the service candidly notes), it was the wellspring of content and engagement that I needed to really start moving forward. It consists of language teaching podcasts centered around topic areas and stresses the use of contemporary language (as opposed to wooden, antiquated textbook models). The shows are complemented with online study materials and exercises specific to each lesson, as well as a growing collection of general tools and resources. I have been using ChinesePod regularly since the fall of 2009, in which time I’ve worked through 1,281 podcasts. That number includes the entirety of the “Newbie” and “Elementary” libraries, the first two of five difficulty levels, which I just recently cleared.

Now that I’m squarely in the midst of “Intermediate” lessons, I need to address learning gaps in order to push my Mandarin to be more functional. ChinesePod’s standard service, which includes the podcasts and study materials, is a great tool for listening comprehension and character recognition. The discussions, both in the podcast and on the chat boards, are engaging and frequently dip into cultural background and current events behind the language. As the creators acknowledge, ChinesePod’s strength is in providing exposure and context to the language, but it’s not meant to replace other methods and tools. For instance, it doesn’t offer a structured approach to learning grammar and doesn’t include conversational speaking unless you opt for additional Skype-based individual instruction. Handwriting practice (which I’ve chosen not to pursue at this time) is enabled through the site’s partnership with Skritter, but isn’t the main focus. For me to get a more solid foundation in the language structure, those textbooks will ultimately need to reappear, though this time I ought to have a much better idea of what to do with them. I got a jump start in speaking practice while Min’s parents lived with us last year. Now that they’ve returned to China I’ve slipped back to a bad habit of passing up opportunities to speak with Min because it’s still far quicker and easier to use English. It is frustrating to try expressing an adult thought with a limited vocabulary, but I’m going to have to get used to stretching if I want to improve.

Japanese has been more of a mishmash of source material, ranging from phrasebooks to audio lessons and websites of varying quality. I have yet to come across a comparable site to ChinesePod for learning Japanese (hint hint, Praxis Language). Initially, I had only planned to learn basic conversational spoken Japanese, but found that these resources were even insufficient for that. Now I’m evaluating where to go next in search of learning opportunities, but also stepping back to rethink through what I want to ultimately achieve. I decided that it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to add Japanese reading, as it borrows much of its writing system from Chinese. More importantly, I thought about my already deep interest in Japanese culture and plans to incorporate study of its approaches to infrastructure and urbanization into my long-term professional trajectory, and came to the realization that I’m going to have to take my speaking well beyond “please”, “thank you”, and “give me ramen with all of the toppings” if I truly want to immerse myself in these areas. Looks like I have some work to do.

Learning second languages as an adult has taught me a great deal about the process of learning, helped me understand my own strengths and weaknesses with regard to absorbing new information, and caused me to question behavior I observe in other realms. In my current work environment, I’m frequently expected to become an instant expert in tasks I’m taking on for the first time, execute quickly, and make no mistakes. This would be an absolutely disastrous approach to language study (and I have my doubts as to whether it’s a reasonable or valuable in any context). I work to make my Chinese and Japanese study efficient, so as to fill my available time with as much exposure as possible, but there is no substitute for consistent, applied practice (with ample allowance for experimentation and mistakes) over long periods of time. In this path, results do not come rapidly, make themselves apparent only in subtle ways, and often involve a bit of stumbling before getting a solid footing. It is not for the impatient or perfectionist. I’ll look back in 10, 20, and 30 years and be glad that I was neither.