Tabibito (旅人) — one who travels: a traveler
“Daigo?”
For a moment, I could only smile.
It was the summer of 2025, and I was walking through Kamakura with my family and friends from the United States. Kamakura is a coastal city south of Tokyo, known for its temples, shrines, and its history as the center of Japan’s first samurai government. For many visitors to Japan, it is not the first place that comes to mind. That was exactly why I wanted to take my friends there.
We had seen the Great Buddha at Kōtoku-in, an enormous bronze Amida Buddha that has watched over Kamakura for centuries. We had walked through Tsurugaoka Hachimangū, the great Shinto shrine at the heart of the city, where the ponds were covered with lotus leaves in the summer heat. Then we wandered through Komachi-dori, the busy shopping street near the shrine.
There, I thought of an old college friend.
His name is Goro Koizumi. For generations, his family has run Sansuido, a shop devoted to Kamakura-bori, the carved and lacquered woodcraft of Kamakura. Now he is the owner. I had not told him I was coming. I thought we might simply take a look inside and see if he happened to be there.
He was.
Goro was alone, cleaning the shop. He looked up at me.
“Daigo?”
It had been sixteen years since we had last seen each other. I walked over and hugged him. We both broke into a big smile.
I reintroduced my wife, Yvonne, whom Goro had met on our last visit in 2009, and introduced our children and friends. We looked around the shop, admired the work, and caught up for a few minutes before continuing our day.
Later we rode the Enoden, the small railway that winds from Kamakura along the Shōnan coast toward Enoshima. The children spotted a little turtle in a pond as we climbed the island. I looked up at the modern glass observation tower that now stands there and remembered the old, rusty lighthouse I had visited when I was young.
It was just a family day in Japan.
There was no business discussion that day, but that small reunion with Goro stayed with me.
A Coast That Grew With Me
I did not grow up in Kamakura itself. I grew up in Yokohama, in the same Kanagawa Prefecture.
As a small child, Shōnan and Enoshima felt like places my father took us as a summer treat. Shōnan is the name people use for the stretch of coast along Sagami Bay, including places such as Kamakura, Enoshima, and Kugenuma.
There was no internet to keep a child entertained. No smartphone in the back seat. If we wanted something to do, we went somewhere.
In summer, my father would drive us to the beach. I remember the heat. I remember spreading a blanket on the sand and getting sand all over my body anyway. We ran back and forth between the water and the beach, built little mountains, and poured seawater over them.
Around Enoshima, there were small shops and food stands. I can still remember the smell of corn grilling with soy sauce, and sazae, a kind of sea snail, cooking in its shell. Soy sauce hitting something hot has a smell that can pull you back through time.
Route 134 along the coast could become completely jammed in summer. My father did the driving. I was probably asleep in the back seat.
As I grew older, the area slowly became part of my own world.
My middle school and high school were in Ōfuna, close to Kamakura. Later I spent six years at Keio University’s Shonan Fujisawa Campus. By then I could drive myself. After a long day of classes or projects, friends and I would head toward the coast.
Sometimes it was food. Sometimes it was a date. Sometimes we just wanted to feel the salty air.
Shōnan had its own music and surf culture. Southern All Stars played everywhere. I was never a surfer, although my father was. I was happy simply watching people surf, finding a restaurant near Route 134, or sitting somewhere with friends after dark.
One night, Goro, another college friend, and I went to Inamuragasaki very late. We stood above the ocean and looked into the darkness. There was almost nothing to see except the white edges of the waves as they broke below us.
We did not have a deep conversation about our futures. We were just three college friends who were not quite ready to go home and sleep.
I had no idea then that I would leave Japan.
Two Years That Became Twenty-Five
Moving to the United States was never part of my life plan.
When I finished college in 1998, Japan was still living through the long aftermath of the bubble economy. Many of my friends were having a difficult time finding work. I did not know what kind of company I wanted to join, and I was deeply involved in computer research, so I continued to graduate school.
My work involved computer-aided design and surgical simulation. I had opportunities to present research overseas, and little by little, leaving Japan stopped feeling impossible.
Then an opportunity came through my professor: a visiting research position at Georgetown University, working on surgical simulation in a joint project with the U.S. Department of Defense.
The contract was for two years.
When I left Narita Airport in October 2000, I fully expected to come back.
Those two years became twenty-five years of life in America.
America became home in ways I never could have predicted. I studied at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. I worked in technology. I moved to Silicon Valley. I married Yvonne. We had children. Eventually I started my own small business.
Around 2005, while I was living in Pittsburgh, my parents sent me a large collection of Japanese dishes, plates, glasses, and other things for the home.
They were useful objects, not museum pieces. But having them around changed something.
I started cooking more Japanese food. I would choose a plate carefully, arrange the food, take a picture, and enjoy the small moment I had created. A dish could make an ordinary meal feel connected to somewhere far away.
I did not have the word Tabibito for that feeling yet.
But I knew what it meant to let an object carry a little bit of home.
In 2009, when Yvonne and I visited Kamakura together, Goro gave us a Kamakura-bori tray to celebrate our marriage. It had the familiar chisel marks and a plum-blossom design. We brought it back to America, and we still use it on our dining table. Long before Tabibito existed, one of Goro’s pieces was already part of our everyday life.
Turning Fifty
In December 2025, I turned fifty.
That number mattered to me more than I expected.
I had arrived in the United States when I was twenty-four and turned twenty-five two months later. Now another twenty-five years had passed. Roughly half my life had been formed in Japan, and half in America.
At the same time, my relationship with technology was changing.
I had been writing code since I was fourteen. It had been one of the great joys of my life. Now AI was rapidly changing what it meant to write software and to run a small technology business.
I still love technology. I still work with it every day. Tabibito is not an escape from technology.
But I began to feel that I wanted another part of my life to move in the opposite direction.
I wanted something physical. Something made slowly. Something that would bring me into contact with people, places, materials, and stories that could not be reduced to what appeared on a screen.
I had traveled to Japan several times during 2025. Each visit reminded me how much I valued the things there that were made by human hands, often in small workshops, by people who had spent years learning one craft.
The idea for Tabibito began to take shape.
Tabibito, 旅人, means “traveler.”
At first, the name felt natural because I had spent so much of my life traveling between Japan and America. But the more I thought about it, the more personal it became. My life had also been a journey through research, technology, business, family, and the ongoing question of where I belong.
By early 2026, I knew what I wanted Tabibito to do.
I wanted to find Japanese craft that felt completely at home in Japan, yet could also live naturally in an American home. I wanted to bring those pieces across in small numbers, without asking the makers to change what they had been making.
Coming Back to Goro
In March 2026, I returned to Japan again, this time to celebrate my father’s eightieth birthday.
I also made an appointment with Goro.
This visit to Sansuido was different from my surprise visit the summer before. I already had Tabibito in mind, so I looked more carefully.
Kamakura-bori has a history of roughly eight hundred years. It developed in medieval Kamakura, where woodcarving and lacquer techniques grew around the city’s Buddhist culture. A piece is carved from wood and then finished with layers of urushi, traditional Japanese lacquer.
Sansuido was full of beautiful work: trays, hand mirrors, chopsticks, and pieces carved with flowers and traditional patterns. But the piece that pulled me in was much simpler.
It was a thick square plate.
Across the surface, repeated chisel marks radiated outward. In Kamakura-bori, these blade marks are called tōkon (刀痕), literally “traces of the blade.” The first character, 刀, means blade and is also the character used for katana, the Japanese sword. The carver is using a small carving blade, not a sword, of course. But standing in Kamakura—a city shaped by samurai history—I could not help making the connection. Instead of smoothing away the trace of the tool, the craft lets those marks become the design.
To me, the plate felt raw and powerful. I found myself thinking about Kamakura’s samurai history—not because tōkon is a “samurai pattern,” but because its directness and strength somehow felt at home in the city where Japan’s first samurai government took shape.
The plate had a heavy presence, even though katsura is a relatively light wood.
I picked it up and kept looking at it.
There was also a larger round plate made with the same idea. The round one felt gentler. The square one felt almost muscular. Both were strong enough to stand alone as art.
But I could also imagine using them.
Fruit on the table. A slice of cake. Bruschetta or prosciutto when friends come over. Japanese sweets with tea. Small bowls arranged for dinner.
That mattered to me. Goro has always encouraged people to use Kamakura-bori rather than become too afraid of damaging it. These pieces were made to live with people.
I thought about the dishes my parents had sent me in Pittsburgh twenty years earlier. The value was not only in looking at them. It was in allowing them into ordinary life.
I bought samples of both plates.
Looking With Two Sets of Eyes
By then I had also become clear about what I did not want Tabibito to do.
I did not want to ask Japanese craftspeople to make an “American version” of their work.
I did not want to tell an artisan to change the color, simplify the tradition, or redesign an object because I thought it would sell better in the United States.
I wanted the craft to remain itself.
My job was to look.
I had spent about half my life in Japan and half in America. I believed I had one set of eyes formed by Japanese life and another formed by American life. I knew what felt natural on a Japanese table, but I could also look at an object and imagine whether it would belong in a home in the San Francisco Bay Area, Houston, Chicago, or New York.
So I wanted to look, and look, and look until I found the places where those two worlds already met.
The square Kamakura-bori plate felt like one of those places.
It was unmistakably Japanese. Nothing about it needed to be redesigned. Yet I could picture it in an American home immediately.
That is the kind of bridge I want Tabibito to build.
After I bought the samples, Goro and I went to a small Japanese bar. We ordered sake and food and talked for almost four hours.
Most of the conversation was private and ordinary. We remembered our college days. We talked about our families and the years that had passed. We filled in the gaps. At one point I reminded him of that late night at Inamuragasaki, the three of us staring at the white edges of the waves in the dark. He had almost forgotten it, and he was happy that I still remembered.
I told him more about Tabibito. Goro was immediately supportive.
That did not surprise me. He has also spent time introducing Kamakura-bori outside Japan, including in Europe. He understands that a traditional craft can stay deeply rooted in where it came from while still forming new relationships with people elsewhere.
Kamakura-bori is not something that can simply be scaled like factory production. Hand carving and lacquer take time. When I later asked Goro for only ten plates, he told me it would take about three months to fill the order. Sansuido works with a small group of craftspeople, and the work moves at the pace of human hands.
For me, that was not a problem.
Tabibito was supposed to start small.
What We Carry Home
I have spent much of my life in front of a screen.
A screen can show me Kamakura from California. It can explain the history of Kamakura-bori. It can show me a thousand beautiful photographs in a few minutes. Today, AI can even create images, music, stories, and software almost instantly.
All of that can be useful. I know that better than most.
But a screen cannot replace the feeling of running a finger across a chisel mark that another person made by hand.
That mark is evidence.
Someone held a tool. Someone learned how to use it. Someone chose the pressure and angle. Then that person repeated the movement, again and again, slowly enough for an ordinary piece of wood to become something a family may keep for years.
And behind that person are teachers, traditions, customers, families, and a place.
That is what I mean when I talk about soul in craftsmanship.
It does not have to be Japanese.
Every person has a cultural story.
I am an ordinary person whose particular journey happened to take me from Yokohama to Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Houston, Silicon Valley, and back to Japan again and again. Your journey may look completely different.
But all of us came from somewhere.
I think about the dishes my parents sent me in Pittsburgh. I think about the tray Goro gave Yvonne and me when we were newly married. Neither one changed my life in some dramatic way. They simply stayed near us. We ate with them. We moved with them. Years passed, and they quietly gathered meaning.
Maybe you have something like that too. It does not have to come from Japan, and it does not have to be expensive. Sometimes an ordinary object is enough to remind us where we came from, who gave it to us, or what part of life we were living when it arrived.
My hope for Tabibito is not simply that you buy something from Japan.
I hope that, once in a while, something on your table or shelf makes you set the screen aside. Hold it in your hands. Feel its weight. Notice the marks left by a human hand. And think for a moment about the people and the journey behind it.
If something I bring from Japan helps you feel that connection, I will be happy.
If it makes you look again at something you already own, and remember your own story, I will be happy about that too.
Tabibito means traveler.
Wherever you began, and wherever you are now, there are people, places, and things that have traveled with you.
We are all tabibito.
