Built for discerning travelers
who want the real Japan.

Designing trips for the few.

What I do now is the natural sum of everything that came before: a private, bespoke Japan concierge practice for travelers who don't want to do this on Google. I work with a small number of clients at a time. I design each itinerary live, on a call with you. And I stay in your corner from the first conversation through the last reservation in Japan.

Building Japan's restaurant network, one owner at a time.

When Wolt — now part of DoorDash — moved into Japan, I joined as their first salesperson in charge of restaurant scouting and company food evangelist. My job was simple in description and impossible in practice: build trust with the owners of Japan's most discerning restaurants, one conversation at a time, in cities where most foreign companies never even got a meeting.

I spent years walking into restaurants across the country — Tokyo, Osaka, Hiroshima, the small cities and the smaller towns — sitting down with owners, learning what made each place special, and earning a spot on their list of people they trust. By the end, I had a working knowledge of 2,000+ restaurants across Japan — 500+ of them I'd visited personally — across 45 of the country's 47 prefectures.

That network — the real one, the relationships, the chefs who'll take my call — is the engine behind every itinerary I design now.

My passion for food started with sharing it.

Somewhere between meetings, I noticed the part of Japan I loved most was the eating — and even more, the sharing. I'd find a tiny place I couldn't stop thinking about, then drag colleagues there. Then friends. Then friends of friends. The list of restaurants I quietly built started to take on a life of its own.

The deepest version of this was tea. I started taking friends out to meet tea farmers — driving into the countryside, sitting in their fields, learning how matcha and sencha are actually grown by the people growing them. It turned a drink into a relationship, and a relationship into a route. Many of those farmers are still on my speed dial today.

This chapter is where the concierge work really began — not as a business, but as the way I instinctively share Japan with anyone I care about.

The first Westerner they'd ever hired.

My first real job in Japan was at GUNZE — a 130+ year-old Japanese company headquartered near Kyoto, and I was the first Westerner they'd ever hired. I joined the medical-device division, where I spearheaded their U.S. market expansion and helped establish their new entities back in Japan.

It was a traditional, deeply Japanese environment, and being the only foreigner in the building meant I had to earn every inch of credibility. The experience taught me Japan from the inside out: how meetings are run, how trust is built, how decisions actually get made.

Those years gave me Japanese business fluency — the kind that doesn't come from a textbook. I learned to read a room, to understand what's said and what isn't, and to genuinely earn the trust of the people sitting across from me. It's the foundation everything else in my career has been built on.

It started with sushi and Nintendo.

I grew up in Ohio, about as far from Japan — geographically and culturally — as a kid in America can get. But two things grabbed me early and never let go: sushi, and Nintendo. One was a taste I couldn't stop thinking about. The other was a whole imaginative universe — designed in Japan — that I lived inside of.

By the time I was old enough to choose where to go in the world, the choice was already made for me. I'd already decided I had to live in Japan. So I did — first as a seven-week intern, then on a one-way ticket, and then for eight years that completely re-shaped how I see the world.