We landed in Japan in the March of 2012.
Sakura season again. Not our first time. Enough to know when to slow down.
It was a bleisure trip before the word became fashionable. Work in the mornings. City in the afternoons. Long nights walking. Tokyo does not reward rushing.
Our first stop was AGC Asahi Glass Corporation. We had already worked together on innovation chemicals for protective coatings and multisensory glass. Touch. Resistance. Surfaces that respond without speaking. This was the first time we met in person. Clean rooms. Polite bows. Precise words. The kind of meeting where everything important is said quietly.
Outside, the city resumed its pace. Inside, materials were treated like living things.
Art Tokyo felt contained and precise, like the city itself. The fair did not shout. It presented. Galleries stood clean and restrained, works spaced to breathe, conversations kept low. You moved slowly, not because you were told to, but because the rhythm demanded it. Contemporary Japanese art sat next to international voices without friction, each piece carrying discipline rather than spectacle. There was rigor in the materials, patience in the concepts, and a quiet confidence that did not need validation. At ART TOKYO, art was not entertainment or provocation for its own sake. It was practice. You left without bags or slogans, but with images that stayed, sharp and unresolved, the way Tokyo prefers them.
That same week, the streets told a different story. The launch of Supreme x Comme des Garçons pulled lines across neighborhoods. Fashion as ritual. People waiting without complaint. Limited editions move Tokyo the way seasons do.
At the same time, Nigo was opening new chapters. Human Made was coming to life. So was Curry Up. Clothing and food. Identity and appetite. Tokyo understands that culture is never one thing.
We stayed in Shinjuku, hosted in a high loft that felt suspended above the city. Windows everywhere. Neon at night. Silence when the doors closed. You could see the city breathe. Trains moving like veins of light.
One lunch we visited the Rotary Club of Tokyo for the first time. Formal. Warm. Human. That friendship did not stay in the room. It lasted. Some connections do.
And then there was Sakura. For the second time in our lives. Still enough to stop us. Petals falling with no concern for permanence. Walks in parks where locals ate, laughed, and left no trace. Food that tasted real. Broth with depth. Rice with purpose. Places where tourists rarely appeared and no one seemed to mind us being there.
Tokyo never explains itself.
It lets you observe.
That spring, glass innovation, street-fashion, food, and friendship aligned. Work did not interrupt life. It merged with it. Sakura made sure we noticed.
