Japan Lovin' with Michele Laudig

I came to this conversation on purpose with no script and no agenda—just a head full of questions for one of my favorite humans on this planet. Longtime Phoenicians will remember Michele Laudig as the food critic at Phoenix New Times back when I was slinging wine at Digestif. These days she wakes up in Tokyo—nine years in—still grinning ear to ear.

Michele's story is one of those slow-burn love affairs. It starts in semi-rural central Pennsylvania: a kid with a library card, coffee-table books on Japanese fashion and food, a seafood-shop upbringing, and a middle-school research paper on sushi complete with mail-ordered short-grain rice. At sixteen, fifteen hundred dollars saved in a shoebox buys her a plane ticket. Her grandfather calls it a once-in-a-lifetime trip. She had other plans.

We talk about her hardcore years studying Japanese at Columbia, the tea ceremony ladies at the Japanese Friendship Garden in Phoenix who cracked open a whole world, and the airport conversation at Google that finally—twenty years later than planned—landed her in Tokyo. We get into keigo and the humbling grammar of respect, shrines versus temples, why you bow at the torii gate, the sacred art of shutting up on a train, and what it means to be told "you're more Japanese than the Japanese" while accepting you'll always be, in some measure, a guest.

Since my own trip to Japan with my boys, that country has not left my mind. This conversation is my attempt to understand why—with help from someone who followed the pull all the way home.

Find Michele's beautiful Substack at quietcalling.com. Arigatou gozaimasu, sweet lady.