Golf and Zen: Lessons from a Decade in Japan

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It's been ten years. A decade since I first established PIPI in Tokyo, a young entrepreneur with a vision to revolutionize how travelers experience Japan through innovative property management and hospitality solutions. I came to build a business in the inbound tourism sector, to create spaces where visitors could feel at home in a foreign land. I expected regulatory challenges, market fluctuations, and the relentless demands of the hospitality industry. What I didn't expect was that my most profound lessons about resilience and presence wouldn't come from a boardroom, but from the quiet, manicured greens of Japan's golf courses, where my wife and I escape during off-peak hours to practice our swings.

Like many seeking balance in the demanding world of hospitality entrepreneurship, I took up golf not as a business necessity, but as a refuge. But here in Japan, it became something more. It evolved into a practice, a moving meditation that mirrored the very challenges I faced as a founder in the inbound tourism industry. The game became my modern-day Zen practice, a regular pilgrimage to the church of the "here and now." This is my attempt, inspired by a certain philosopher of motorcycle maintenance, to explore the quality of that journey.

The Two Games: Inner and Outer

Every entrepreneur in the tourism and hospitality sector knows the "Outer Game" all too well. It's navigating Japan's evolving regulatory landscape—the 2018 Minpaku Law that fundamentally reshaped the vacation rental market, the constant adaptation to new licensing requirements, the delicate balance between growth and compliance. It's weathering catastrophic disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic that brought international travel to a complete standstill. It's the mechanics of hospitality operations, the tangible reality of occupancy rates, guest satisfaction scores, and platform algorithms. In golf, this is the swing, the stance, the choice of club, the reading of the green. A well-executed Outer Game is essential. A flawed swing will send the ball into the woods, just as a flawed compliance strategy can shut down your entire operation overnight.

For years, I was consumed by the Outer Game. When the Minpaku Law was announced in 2018, I believed survival was purely a matter of perfecting our operational mechanics. I restructured our entire business model, obtained every required license, optimized our property portfolio. My golf game reflected the same obsessive approach. I would arrive at the driving range and mechanically hit ball after ball, my mind churning through regulatory scenarios and financial projections. But for all my meticulous preparation, both my company and my handicap remained stubbornly resistant to improvement.

The breakthrough came on a crisp autumn morning at a course in Karuizawa in 2019, just months before the world would change forever. My wife and I had arrived early to take advantage of the weekday discount rates. I was on the seventh hole, a challenging par-five with a narrow fairway. I had already lost two balls trying to force a perfect drive, my mind a chaotic storm of technical advice. Then my wife, who had been quietly observing, simply said, "Stop trying to control everything. Just hit the ball."

It was in that moment that I truly understood the "Inner Game." This is the game played not against regulations or pandemics, but against oneself. It's the battle against fear, anxiety, and the illusion of control. It's maintaining focus when your entire industry faces existential threats, leading a team through unprecedented uncertainty, holding onto a vision when every external indicator suggests you should give up. In golf, it's the ability to quiet the mind, to trust your body, and to be fully present in the single, fluid motion of the swing. That day, I stopped trying to control the ball and simply allowed myself to hit it. The shot was effortless, pure, and it sailed perfectly down the fairway. It was a lesson that would sustain me through the darkest days of the pandemic that followed.

Zen in the Swing: Mushin, Shoshin, and Wabi-Sabi

That perfect shot in Karuizawa was my first conscious experience of Mushin (無心), or "No Mind." It's a state of effortless action, where the conscious, analytical mind steps aside and allows intuition to take over. On the golf course, it's that rare moment when you stop thinking about the thousand technical details and just… swing.

I've had similar moments in business—times when, after weeks of agonizing over an impossible decision, the answer appeared in a quiet moment of clarity. It was the intuitive leap in March 2020 to immediately pivot from short-term vacation rentals to long-term housing for stranded residents and essential workers, a decision that kept our company alive when tourism evaporated overnight. It was the gut feeling to invest in our own hotel brand, LANG HOTEL, rather than remaining solely dependent on platform-based vacation rentals. These were my Mushin moments, breakthroughs born not from more analysis, but from less.

But the path to Mushin is paved with Shoshin (初心), the "Beginner's Mind." It's approaching every task with the eagerness and humility of a novice, free from the baggage of past successes or failures. After a decade in the inbound tourism business, after surviving regulatory upheavals and a global pandemic, it would be easy to become jaded. Golf is a powerful antidote to this. No matter how many times my wife and I have played a particular course, the next round is always new. The season has changed, the wind is different, our bodies feel different. We are always beginners.

Embracing Shoshin means I show up to every property inspection, every guest interaction, and every round of golf ready to learn. When we expanded into Thailand with our THAI LANG villa properties, I approached the new market with beginner's mind, setting aside assumptions based on our Japanese experience. It is the understanding that mastery is not a destination, but a continuous process of beginning again.

This leads to the most difficult, yet most liberating, lesson: Wabi-Sabi (侘寂), the appreciation of beauty in imperfection. Both golf and hospitality entrepreneurship are exercises in managing failure and imperfection. The 2018 regulatory changes forced us to close properties we had carefully cultivated. The pandemic wiped out years of growth in a matter of weeks.

For a long time, I pursued an unattainable ideal of perfection. I would agonize over a single negative review, letting it overshadow hundreds of positive ones. Wabi-Sabi taught me to see the lessons in these imperfections. A "bad" shot reveals a flaw in your technique. A regulatory setback provides invaluable insight into building a more sustainable business model. A pandemic, as devastating as it was, forced us to innovate in ways we never would have otherwise, ultimately making us stronger and more adaptable.

It is a shift in perspective, from chasing an impossible standard to finding value in the flawed, transient, and incomplete journey. It is the quiet beauty of a weathered stone lantern in a Japanese garden, a beauty enhanced, not diminished, by its imperfections and the passage of time.

The Course as a Microcosm of Japan

This journey of discovery has been inseparable from its setting. Playing golf in Japan, even during the budget-friendly off-peak hours my wife and I favor, is a unique aesthetic experience. The courses are meticulously sculpted landscapes where every tree is placed with intention, every pond reflects the changing seasons, every sand trap is raked into patterns of serene beauty. This is the same aesthetic sensibility found in a Zen garden or a traditional ryokan, a deep appreciation for harmony, balance, and the natural world.

The rituals of the game here also echo the nuances of Japanese business culture that I've navigated for a decade. The strict adherence to etiquette, the deep respect for fellow players, the emphasis on group harmony, the unspoken rules that govern every interaction—all of these reflect the principles that govern Japanese hospitality and business relationships. Learning to navigate the subtle rules of the golf course was training for navigating the complexities of Japanese regulatory systems and business partnerships. It taught me the importance of patience, of reading the air (kūki o yomu), and of understanding that what is not said is often more important than what is explicitly stated.

The 19th Hole: The Quality of the Journey

I came to Japan to build a business in the inbound tourism sector, and I did. It has been a decade of struggle, adaptation, and hard-won resilience. We survived regulatory upheavals that closed countless competitors. We weathered a global pandemic that brought our industry to its knees. We evolved from a vacation rental management platform into a comprehensive hospitality company with our own hotel and villa brands. But the most valuable thing I've built is not the company or the properties. It's the quality of attention I've learned to bring to the process, often discovered during those quiet mornings on the golf course with my wife.

The real goal, I've come to realize, is not a perfect golf score or a billion-dollar valuation. It's about being fully present in the swing, in the guest interaction, in the regulatory challenge, in the moment of crisis. It's about finding the still point in a turning world, especially when that world is turning in ways you cannot control.

Mastering the art of hospitality and the art of the drive are not so different. Both are endless, imperfect, and beautiful journeys. They are a mirror, reflecting our own internal state, our fears, our capacity for resilience, our ability to adapt and begin again. The golf courses scattered across Japan have become my dojo, the game itself my meditation. It is a practice, a discipline, a way of being. It is my Zen, and this is the art of maintaining it—through regulatory storms, global pandemics, and the simple, profound challenge of hitting a small white ball toward a distant flag.