Day 116: ‘Kodawari’ or an Attempt to Reach Perfection: A Quick Read about Japanese Professionalism

Remarks: This post is sort of a repost of a previously published article. I rewrote it a bit to make it shorter and more concise. I couldn’t believe how long-winded and off-the-topic the original article was. It was so hard to read! I hope this one is an improvement. Comments welcome!

2014–2015 was the only year in my life during which I only had access to one TV channel on my dorm room’s television: NHK World TV from Japan. It was and still is the only official English language television channel aiming at telling the world everything that was great about Japan.

Growing up with Japanese graphic novels (manga), it didn’t take long for me to acquaint myself with the NHK World TV. Within a month, it became the source of my binge-watching habit.

My favorite show was The Professionals, a one-hour documentary series focusing on Japan’s best professionals from various fields. Little did I know that, boy, when it comes to professionalism, no one can really go all above and beyond like the Japanese. As for me, I once thought that being a professional is simply to have a stable “paid job.” In Japan, however, being professional is to be truly passionate about what you do no matter what work it is. You can be a professional grocer, farmer, bartender, coffee barista, dancer, the noodle stall owner, street performer, and so on.

Here is the key: Undergirding this professionalism among the Japanese is the concept of kodawari (こだわり) roughly translated to the “obsession, fixation, hangup, determination, fastidiousness, pickiness about something.”

Some translate kodawari as “an attempt to arrive at perfection.”

Japan has always been a nation where many professions easily find their places in society no matter how niche-oriented what they do are. The anthropologist Merry White, in her book Coffee Life in Japan, translates it as “the kind of passion that is almost bordering on obsession.”

In the book, the coffee baristas were the embodiment of the very core spirit of kodawari — they’re attentive, critical, and ritualistic, about what they do. They treat every cup of coffee as if it is a work of art. From operating the intricate siphon coffee machine to the ultimate details of the art on a cafe latte, these baristas poured their heart and soul into making the “near-perfect” cup of joe for the customers. Anyone who could feel the very core spirit of kodawari could also feel the sensationally embedded in the taste of the coffee.

A professional barista in a coffee fair in Fukuoka in 2019. Every time he hand poured a new cup, it looked as though he was mediating. There was a clear and strict pattern to his techniques and every cup smelled and tasted great. Source: Author’s Own Smartphone Camera

What makes Japan an interesting country, at least for me, is precisely this kind of respect for professionalism. In Japan, professionals from all walks of life are respected for the expertise and for the quality of the products or services that they deliver.

Japanese appreciation for professionalism not only makes these professionals wanting to continue to develop themselves, and pass on their expertise to the next generation, but also make young people want to become professionals — precisely because they know that there is always room for growth. This mentality helps to proliferate both professionalism and small businesses. You don’t have to have a large sum of capital to pursue what you love. It’s the love and passion (and perhaps some sense of economic feasibility) that make one stand out in the battle between professionals who want to deliver products and services which belong to the best of their class.

In one of my favorite episodes of The Professionals, Japan’s most respected greengrocer Teruaki Sugimoto showed us his passion for selling vegetables. He’s known by everyone in his profession as “the greengrocer who knows more than anyone in Japan about delicious produce.”

In the Kita-Senju Neighbourhood of Tokyo where more and more people are turning away from the local grocers and toward convenient stores to buy mass-produce vegetables and fruits, the 67-year-old Sugimoto was still all about handpicked, artisanal, and high-quality vegetables that he personally inspects, bids, and buys from the wholesales market by himself. To outsiders, he may look like a stubborn old man who has devoted his life to vegetables; but, to his customers, Sugimoto’s passion for selling vegetables lies beyond his interest in making money. He wants to be on top of his game, which, as he defines, is to serve his loyal and new customers with the highest quality vegetables, as well as in helping the farmers, without whom he wouldn’t be able to do what he does.

Teruaki Sugimoto from NHK World TV Facebook Page

“Always protect the farmers,” is his motto. In a way, he’s a merchant — a middleman — who doesn’t produce anything. All he does is just to profit from the farmers whose sweat and blood turn into products for him to sell. So, he’s grateful for being fortunate enough to be doing what he is doing; hence, he believes that it’s important to protect the farmers whose hard labour is the bloodline of his family’s career for a generation. The blurb on The Professionals’ site summarizes it all:

The approach that sums up Sugimoto’s way of doing business is “always play offence.” And rather than buying everything at wholesale markets, he has developed his own channels for procuring select produce. Sugimoto says, “There are still many delicious things that people haven’t tried. I have to get out there and promote them. That’s what a greengrocer should do.”

Sugimoto concludes at the end of the short documentary that, to him, to be a professional is “to not to rely only on the past achievements but to strive to be better and better every day.”

The story of Teruaki Sugimoto in The Professionals got me thinking about what it means, personally, to be a professional. Professionalism is, in some ways, about duty, but on the other hand, what it is really about is how life could be given meanings.

First, kodawari teaches us about the benefits of being content with life, which may be the only things that life needs. Second, being true to what you believe is to be true to the very essence of what you do always put you in the flow and give some meaning to an otherwise reckless life.

Day 115: Some Truly Useful Japanese Concepts

If not because of COVID-19, I would have travelled to Japan again for 16 years in a row. In some years, I travelled to Japan more often than once. My love for Japan went all the way back to when I was about three-year-old, reading my very first manga (or Japanese graphic novels). 

Although I can’t make Japan my profession, I always read carefully into Japanese life, especially its traditional and recent concepts. Some of which have helped me to escape my darkest moments. 

Here are some on my list and how I interpret them.

1. Wabi-Sabi — “Th beauty of imperfection,” is my favourite translation among many. Wabi-Sabi is about the acceptance that mistakes and errors are parts of our lives. The idea is not trying to find what is so beautiful about the imperfect things in and about you, but to realize that the record of such imperfect is itself beautiful and therefore one should not even waste time to try to find it. 
2. Kodawari — “An attempt to the absolute perfection” is probably the closest translation. Even though we aren’t perfect (hence Wabi-Sabi), it doesn’t mean that we should not put our heart and focus on things we enjoy doing. Pushing the limit of our own capacity to perform, as near perfection as possible, is at the heart of this concept. In Japan, you can see “kodawari masters everywhere from a noodle shop to a cafe, to a wood-carving studio, to the lab of a Nobel Prize laureates. Psychologically, what kodawari does to you is putting you in the state of flow, whereby your sense of space and time gets distorted as you are no longer thinking about what you doing but “flowing” within it. Certainly, there’re some evidence that the more you put yourself in the flow when you do something, the higher chance your skill will improve. 
3. Konmari — Love her and her approach to tidying up or not, we all love Marie Kondo, the most famous living tidying up guru in the world. I read all her books, despite my resistance at the beginning. “I know how to tidy my own stuff,” said my inner voice. As it turns out, I have learned so much from the techniques that Marie Kondo spearheads. The core message is the classic one: Less is more. How to systematically and practically evaluate what’s useful in life and what’s not? How to let go of things that are more liabilities than valuable? How to not feel so bad when you throw away what was once so important to you? I have become a minimalist partly thanks to my being introduced to Marie Kondo’s words. 
4. Bushido — Is “ways of warriors.” A few words that come to your mind may be honour, sacrifice, respect and fairness. All of those are true. But even more true and deeper for me is the sense of responsibility. We are living in a world ridden by the forces that are compelling us to think that our problems and issues are not due to our own doing. Some would even go so far as to say that it’s the structural vis-a-vis systemic problems that none of us can do anything about. While that might be true to a degree, what we should not forget is that a warrior would not surrender just because the situation gets tough. They take the situation as a given and fight to their last breath. 
5. In’ei Raisan — “In Praise of Shadow,” a concept that comes from the name of the book written by the master of letters Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. His comparison between how brightness and darkness are not universally cherished cross-culturally gives us a glimpse into the forgotten bliss of mother nature. The idea in this short book spurs a wave of interest in the layers of darkness and how they make us appreciate our surrounding, making us want to understand things before making an effort to intervene the way human beings like to do with just about everything they cannot put a spotlight on. But sometimes, it’s simply amazing just to look at something visually enticing whose form is not immediately specifiable but the clue is embedded in the gradation of the seeable along the line of shadows from pitch black and hollow light.