23 Years Later: Taking My Family Back to Japan

Fun fact about me: I didn't study abroad in college. Instead, after a couple of years working in consulting, I quit my job and moved to Japan for a year to teach English. It was the most adventurous thing I had ever done.. and for 23 years, I've wanted to go back and share that place with my family.

So how did it finally happen?

Honestly? Lollapalooza.

I was looking up whether there was a Chase lounge at Lolla when I discovered I was sitting on hundreds of thousands of points...right as Hyatt was about to change their point structure. Use them or lose them. I asked Claude (yes, the AI...we're close) where I should go.

It said Tokyo.

Sold.

The Lost in Translation Hotel

We stayed at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, and if that name sounds familiar, it's because it is THE hotel from Lost in Translation.

Our very first night, we had dinner at the New York Lounge, which features heavily in the movie. The skyline stretched out below us in every direction. Very fancy. So naturally, my daughter ordered a plain cheeseburger... a request so baffling to the kitchen that it arrived with the cheese sitting on top of the bun. She ate it anyway. 10/10, no notes.

But the views. THE VIEWS. I could not stop photographing them...and somewhere around day four, I realized I wasn't photographing the view anymore. I was photographing my son looking at the view.

Will, in his red hoodie, perched at that enormous window with a city of millions below him. I started shooting through his glasses, over his shoulder, from his point of view. That series followed us across the whole country... the Park Hyatt window, our Kyoto window, the bamboo grove. They might be my favorite photos I have ever taken.

I spend my working life helping people see themselves. Turns out on vacation, I just wanted to see Japan the way my kid was seeing it...for the very first time.

One more thing about the Park Hyatt: their team is extraordinary. When we found out THE DAY BEFORE that we'd gotten into the wildly popular Kirby Cafe (a saga involving a 4 AM alarm, reservation forms in Japanese, and eventually hiring help), I already had dinner booked that same night. In Japan, you do not cancel a reservation. The Park Hyatt staff shuffled timing and made it possible for us to do both. Two dinners. One night. Zero stress. That is hospitality.

Tokyo with kids is its own kind of magic

A few things I did not expect:

7-Eleven became a daily ritual. The kids discovered the leftover money on their Suica train cards also buys snacks, and Jim made us all try the famous egg sandwich (thank you, Anthony Bourdain). The hype is real.

Japanese bread sent me down a research rabbit hole. For years, Japan sent bakers to France to learn the craft. Now French bakers go to Japan...because the Japanese do everything THAT well. Also, they put a bear on the toast. A picture of a bear makes any piece of bread taste better. This is just science.

We ate ramen in individual cubicles, just you and your bowl and zero distractions. My family of four, in a row, silently slurping. Introvert heaven.

A typhoon hit while we were there, with rain going literally sideways.. so we called an indoor day, lost ourselves in floor after floor of Kiddy Land, and finished at TeamLab Planets, where my whole family willingly walked through art for hours and nobody complained once. 

Kyoto is the exhale

Tokyo is a deep breath in. Kyoto is the exhale.

We took the shinkansen down and the whole pace changed. Lantern-lit alleys. Shrines tucked into the green. In Nara, the deer bow to you... ight up until you buy the crackers, at which point they turn into linebackers. My children were not emotionally prepared. They still talk about it.

We did a traditional tea ceremony, where the kids' official review of matcha was "it tastes like grass"... and yet they sat through the whole ceremony, followed every step, and tried every sip. They don't have to love the tea. Watching them be that respectful inside someone else's tradition was the souvenir.

I dragged everyone out of bed at 6:30 AM for the bamboo grove, because at 7 AM it's just green light and quiet...and by 9 it's shoulder to shoulder with tour buses. We got through right before the sky opened up, then spent a lazy, rainy morning in a little tea house eating bakery bread that felt like a cloud.

And here's the full circle moment: we stayed at the Westin Kyoto...the same hotel I stayed at with MY family, 20-some years ago. The hotel has changed a lot. So have I.

The part I'll keep

On our last day, it rained. We went anyway... afternoon tea, then the gardens with umbrellas up, feeding the koi while the rain came down. Somehow the rain made everything greener and quieter and ours.

At the Meiji Shrine earlier in the trip, we bought little charms and wrote prayers for our world. Watching my kids walk into that quiet forest in the middle of the world's biggest city, so respectful, so present... that undid me a little.

23 years between my Japans.

I hope the next one doesn't take that long.