The Japan Trip

the story of how Japan became not only the destination but the major plot point

I have been trying to get to Japan for about 7 years.

Back in 2017, I was a brand new 27-year-old mother.

I know 27 isn’t that young, but in many ways, it is. I wasn’t planning to become a mother until at least my early thirties, when I had some semblance of my life figured out—money, a stable job, a long-term partner picked out, and a retirement plan in place. There was a long list of theoretical qualifiers that would be met before I found myself with a baby in my belly.

I had many ideas of what the mother version of me would look like, and when I got pregnant at age 26, I was none of those things.

It’s funny how the idea of life changes in a second.

I had been in Portland for almost exactly a year and had recently found myself working as an Assistant Manager for an amazing French restaurant in a busy neighborhood. One night, at the beginning of October, a handsome Sous Chef from another popular restaurant came in with some friends, and we glanced at each other from across the bar. A few nights later, we ran into each other at a local dive, and we quickly fell into a full-blown restaurant energy fueled infatuation.

I found out I was pregnant a month later.

We were engaged in December and Mickey was born July 22, 2016.

I am sure you have a lot of questions, as there always have been and always will be. I will probably answer them in a later post, but for now, this is meant to give context to the setting of my life when I first made Japan a necessary destination.

The year after his birth was filled with lots of trials. However, one of the major difficulties was finding a job in restaurant operations that could fit into my new life. I had to find a role that could pay for childcare, offer at least minimal benefits, and accommodate a partner working restaurant salary hours, which average 10-14 hour days. And not working was not an option. We needed two incomes to support our very modest life.

Luckily, Portland is rich in food and beverage businesses of all different kinds. It is the reason why I moved here from Los Angeles. It’s the industry here to a certain extent. The city is filled with farmers, food processors, distributors, importers, exporters, specialty food & beverage makers & sellers, and the list goes on and on.

Portland is a food city lauded by locals and tourists alike. We are proud of it and committed to it.

I had taken a job opening a new restaurant as General Manager because of the pay and benefits, but by month three of the pre-opening process, it became apparent that the company that was employing me would not accommodate, understand, or support my new status as a mother. So, I needed to find another gig fast. We were weeks away from an open date, and I literally could not afford to work in the circumstances (hours, duties, etc.…) that were expected of me.

At the time, I had spent five long years honing my experience running restaurants. It was what I wanted to do, what I could do, and what I had experience doing. And if I wanted to make a salary that would allow my family to survive, I had to do it. I could not switch industries and start over as an entry-level employee.

The week I decided to quit the GM job, I was on Facebook and saw that my friend Erica had posted that she was hiring a Director of Operations to oversee her three tea cafes. I emailed her immediately, and by the next week, I had the job.

When I was in LA, I was a part of the management team that opened the ACE Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. And when I look back at my career, I can confidently say that this is the job that changed it all. It was goddamn amazing to be a part of that process. I could write multiple chapters of a book on what opening and working in that hotel was like. It still seems like a dream that I conjured. A dream that gave me the experience and outlook in which I am able to lead the life I do now. So again, more on the ACE experience to come in a later post.

The skillset of overseeing multiple venues at once gave me the experience necessary for my job with Erica at Tea Bar.

Erica opened her first cafe on Killingsworth a month or two after I moved to Portland in 2014. At the time, I worked down the street at a bar called Expatriate. Before service, most days, instead of getting us coffee to sustain us through the night, I would drive down to Tea Bar and grab myself and the crew matcha lattes.

Erica pioneered the popularization of matcha and tea drinking in the mainstream food scene in Portland. Her Killingsworth cafe served traditional Japanese matcha in chawans after hand whisking. She also imported her own products from Japan and hand-blended loose-leaf tea. Her commitment to quality and education around tea was unmatched at the time.

As a long-time, loyal customer and fellow tea-obsessed human, I was ecstatic to work with her and her all-female team.

By the time I joined, Tea Bar had three very busy cafes in different parts of the city, and I would spend my days overseeing operations and staff at all three.

In the year I worked for Erica, we launched a matcha soft-serve program (which was so much fun) and continued to grow her matcha wholesale business. Remember, this was in 2017, when specialty coffee shops barely had tea products at all. The mentality was, ‘Throw a few commercially made tea sachets and a bad ‘chai’ on the menu, and you are set.’

So Erica and I spent our time convincing people that matcha was worth a place on their menu. We had to share our business numbers to convince owners that it had a growing consumer base. And we openly predicted that people would be drinking matcha instead of coffee in the very near future.

Erica also paid me a living wage, offered me benefits, and understood my circumstances as a new mother who had to support a family financially.

To say the least, I learned a lot from Erica and my time working with her. Matcha Freak would not be here if I had not landed that job with her. She is an aggressive, unapologetic entrepreneur in a land of passive-aggressive male business owners. Still today, women owners make up only a small percentage of food and beverage businesses. When she launched Tea Bar in 2014, it was even smaller.

Erica lived in China and speaks Mandarin fluently. She also frequently traveled to Japan to visit the tea fields from which the matcha was sourced.

After spending my 20s with my head down and running restaurants 24/7, I started dreaming of what it would be like to visit Japan while I was working alongside her. I wanted to step away from the chaos of America and learn a brand new culture and way of life, a way of life that seemed exactly what I needed when America felt harsh and uncaring.

Ever since then, Japan has been the number one destination on my list. Not to the city streets of Tokyo but to the people and plants that makeup Japan’s countryside.

When I travel, I do it with the intention of meeting people I already have connections with. I have never visited any country as a complete tourist with no purpose other than to see the sights, and I never plan to. It's important for me to continue a story that has already begun and experience the local culture from the perspective of those who live there.

Travel access is great in the modern day, but flying to places just to say you have and seeing things just because you want to is not a conscious way of experiencing the world. I need to have context in order to feel like I have direction. I need a reason to be there that connects to the people that are there. If I don’t, I feel like I am exactly like the colonizers who spread out just because they could. Using up precious resources just because they had access and wealth to do it.

I have felt this way since I was a kid. Maybe it was growing up without money. Maybe it was because I grew up near Native American reservations, where I saw hoards of people visiting native land and treating it like an amusement park without knowing anything about the tribes that were forced to occupy that land or the histories behind them.

For whatever reason, this has been a lifelong value system that I cannot shake.

I am so thankful for my past and current relationships, which have given me a reason to visit Japan and invest in a direct trade relationship with a community of Japanese farmers and producers. They have given my passion (tea and plants, duh) so much life and context.

This trip reflects this moment in my life and the many moments that came before… career, motherhood, independence, healing, growth, and dreams of what my world is and can be.

I have nurtured and tended to this trip and the idea of its potential for more than half a decade, and it has finally arrived.

Until next time.