Looking back, Nami Kawahara, 37, sees her life and career stitched together in a series of five-year plans. The details of these plans are methodically charted out in hundreds of notebooks, some of which she has squirreled away in Sho, the Zen-like oden restaurant she opened in Kyoto in 2016.
The first of these plans came to her when she was in junior high school, and much like the daikon radish and soft-boiled eggs in her oden vat, that plan — to run her own business — had been stewing for a while.
The impetus for Kawahara's plan was born out of the Great Hanshin Earthquake that ripped through her hometown of Kobe in the early morning of Jan. 17, 1995. The quake, which left a trail of destruction and devastation, also destroyed the small foundry her father ran. From that day forth, her father had a blunt message for his daughter: Come high school graduation, you've got to make your own way in the world.