THE ART OF TRAVEL

Every visitor to Japan leaves knowing how to be a better host, writes ANNA HART.

Hospitality.

The art of… hospitality

The best souvenir a traveller can cart home is a new habit, pastime, social grace or tradition. Japan, I can confirm, is an extravagant buffet of nuanced social niceties, life-enhancing rituals and cultural rites. Exactly two years ago I flew from Los Angeles to Osaka, for a 10-day trip that felt an awful lot like an intensive personal improvement bootcamp. I arrived in Osaka feeling like an unkempt, jet-lagged, unruly urchin. The gleaming cleanliness of the airport terminal immediately made me feel more grotty, as if I'd been in my aisle seat for approximately 64 hours, carefully smearing bacterial samples from different passengers’ dinner trays on my pulse points. The ferocious efficiency of the high tech TOTO toilet in baggage claim made me feel like a clumsy and inept country bumpkin; yes, I was socially outranked by a Japanese toilet. And compared to the serene, smiling immigration officials, I was a volcanic John McEnroe at Wimbledon in the early 1980s, hot-headed and volatile, even though I only swore mildly under my breath as I rummaged for my passport.

Soon I found myself at the Ritz-Carlton, sipping artfully prepared, exquisitely served and beautifully presented tea, and wondering how my homegrown hospitality measured up to Japan’s stellar display. Surely any visitor from Kyoto to Belfast would be horrified by our filth, our chaos, our well-meaning but ultimately slapdash approach to virtually everything? What would they make of our loud voices that simultaneously refuse to take anything seriously yet sound like everything is a big deal? How could a Japanese tourist possibly enjoy our mud, our moss, our puddles left all over the street for days? And that’s even before we’ve offered them a mug of tea, which is pretty much garnish to a big sticky bun or mound of homemade biscuit.

I know there’s something fundamentally adolescent about cringing about your homeland, but I immediately saw that Japan would be a learning experience for me, a chance to transform. Japan is one enormous Swiss finishing school for modern humans.

I imagine it is travellers from nations renowned for friendliness – Australia and New Zealand will always score highly on this – that are most charmed, if intimidated, by such expert displays of hospitality in other nations. After all, a warm welcome and friendly interactions are a point of national pride for us. So I studied this Japanese art of hospitality, wondering what tricks I could bring home. Omotenashi is the umbrella term for the Japanese next-level approach to hospitality, visible in everything from the politeness of 24-hour 7/11 stores to the way food is meticulously prepared and presented. Omotenashi is all about attention to detail, reading the room, and graciously anticipating the needs of guests before they even realise what they want themselves. Japanese hospitality spares us the trouble of even having to realise what we want. It’s that good.

Another tenet of Japanese hospitality is the ancient concept of ‘wa’, or harmony, rooted in some 2000 years of Shinto, Buddhism and Confucianism. Wa holds that calm cooperation in a community contributes to the common good, and that mutual respect should underpin all our interactions. Wabi-sabi, meanwhile, is more often associated with design, or accepting things as they are and finding beauty in imperfection. But this also feeds into the Japanese welcome, in that expectations are to be let go of, and every moment is to be cherished.

In fact, there is a phrase, ichi-go ichi-e, which adorns scrolls in tea ceremony rooms and

Instagram memes across Japan, which translates to “one chance, one meeting”, reminding guests and hosts to be fully present. I also found myself charmed by the ritual of temiyage, or beautifully presented thank-you gifts and displays of gratitude. I’ve always had a bit of a slapdash approach to wrapping presents. I didn’t quite ascribe to the old “it’s the thought that counts” adage, but I did believe that it was what was inside the gift wrap that counts. But after 10 days of being presented with gifts wrapped in beautiful furoshiki (decorated cloth) or elaborate printed paper, I was forced to reconsider my lifelong use of brown masking tape. Sometimes it is the smallest and seemingly superficial details that have the biggest impact.

My own brand of hospitality is sincere, and it’s warm, and it is relaxed. It is a very good foundation for being a wonderful host. But it was Japan that taught me hospitality could be an art form, not just an instinct.

Japan is one enormous Swiss finishing school for modern humans.