Ichigo Ichie

This is my submission for the BlogBlog Party – August 2026. This month’s theme is “Ichigo Ichie,” hosted by ikuka. If you have a blog of your own, come join us!

I first learned the phrase “ichigo ichie” from a Japanese drama I watched in college, The Japanese the Japanese Don’t Know (日本人の知らない日本語). To this day it’s still one of my favorite Japanese words.

Back then I tried all sorts of things to learn Japanese, like keeping a journal on Lang-8¹ for native speakers to correct, or looking for language-exchange partners on JCInfo.net².

If all you care about is efficiency, I wouldn’t really recommend this route. You can probably picture how it goes: the guys are only there to find young, pretty Japanese women, and language exchange is obviously not the goal; and it isn’t easy for the women to find someone genuinely there to talk. Even so, I met two wonderful partners.

1

The first was a woman in Osaka studying Chinese. After a few emails we kept in touch over LINE, checking in on each other’s lives now and then. In 2016, when my girlfriend at the time and I visited Osaka for the first time, I worked up the courage to ask if she wanted to meet up for a meal, and to my surprise she agreed right away.

She loved Taiwan and spoke Chinese really well. I’ve talked with plenty of Japanese people who like Taiwan, but not many can speak Chinese that fluently, so there was hardly any gap in our exchange, none of that awkwardness where I want to practice advanced grammar while the other person’s Chinese stops at “hello” and “thank you.”

That day we had fugu hotpot. The table next to us happened to be celebrating a birthday and broke into the birthday song, so we clapped along too. When they cut the cake, the strangers at that table even passed each of us a slice.

I think that moment right there was ichigo ichie made real. When the bill came, she flatly insisted on treating us and wouldn’t let us pay no matter what.

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The other was a man I met on JCInfo.net, an actor. We swapped LINE accounts at first, and I’d share my college life with him. He was an incredibly kind person; throw out any topic and he’d reply in earnest.

Everyone has their own center of gravity in life, though, and our exchanges soon faded. Five years later, in 2019, when I’d just finished my interviews and was about to leave for Japan, a message came through from him:

I was still living in a run-down apartment near Xingtian Temple back then, so I took him to a place I love, Liang Su Shang Hao. Their charcoal-grilled chicken-thigh toast is unbelievably good: the tender chicken, the runny soft-boiled egg, and the peanut butter make a combination you just can’t stop eating. Afterward he messaged to tell me he’d really enjoyed the day.

Time has passed and we haven’t been in touch these last few years, but looking back it still makes me happy. Sometimes I feel that work, money, learning, all of it, is ultimately about giving yourself more chances to run into encounters and memories like these; or, turning it around, about making yourself more capable of leaving someone else with a happy memory.

Being able to gather like that for no reason at all, simply enjoying a good time together, may only grow more precious in an age like ours.