An excerpt from The Japanese Art of Omotenashi by Takeshi Mori

The rain arrived before I did.

I had taken the train from Kyoto to a small town in the mountains of Gifu Prefecture, where a ryokan — a traditional Japanese inn — sat at the end of a narrow road lined with cedar trees. The journey had been long. The last stretch was by bus, and by the time I stepped off, the sky had turned the colour of wet slate and the first drops were beginning to fall.

I had not mentioned the weather in my reservation. I had not called ahead to say I would be arriving in the rain. But when I reached the entrance of the ryokan, the door slid open before I could knock. A woman in a dark blue kimono stood waiting with a warm towel in one hand and an umbrella in the other — not for me to use going out, but to walk me the final three steps from the gate to the threshold so that I would not arrive wet.

Inside, the slippers placed at the step were already turned to face the direction I would walk. The tea in the room was poured at exactly the right temperature — warm enough to soothe, not so hot that I would have to wait. A small dish of wagashi, a seasonal sweet shaped like a chestnut, sat beside the cup. It was autumn. The sweet matched the season, and the season matched the leaves I had been watching from the train.

Nothing had been asked of me. Nothing had been expected in return. And yet everything I needed had been quietly prepared, as though the woman at the door had been living inside my afternoon, seeing it from the inside.

This is omotenashi.

What made the experience remarkable was not the action itself but the feeling it produced. I felt — and this is difficult to put into precise language — that I had been considered. That someone, somewhere in the hours before my arrival, had thought about me. Not about "the guest" in some abstract, procedural sense, but about me — the specific person who would walk through that door, in that weather, at that hour, carrying whatever I was carrying. The umbrella was not a policy. It was an act of imagination.

This is an excerpt from The Japanese Art of Omotenashi: Anticipating What Others Need Before They Ask by Takeshi Mori. Read the full book on Amazon.

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