Hard to measure, but surely there. Vol. III

Where It All Makes Sense

― 見えなくても、確かにそこにあるもの ―

― すべてがつながるとき ―

Taking a leave of absence gave me space — a kind of breathing room I hadn't realised I'd been missing.

Travelling through Eastern Europe — Hungary, Czech Republic, and a few others — I slowly began to piece myself back together. With distance, I could look back at my time in Loughborough more clearly, more steadily. Facing critique was painful, but I hadn't walked away immediately. I kept pushing myself to stay engaged with my research.

The theory that had been holding my research together all along was a paper called "Relational Services," published in 2009 by Dr. Ezio Manzini and Dr. Carla Cipolla. I have never felt such warmth reading an academic paper.

There were researchers out there who felt the same things I did. People who cared deeply about the psychological dimension of service relationships — the ones that can't be seen, can't be quantified, and yet shape everything. I cannot overstate how much this paper sustained me.

"Service" is typically categorised by visible, measurable factors: the degree of human involvement, the type of product being offered. But what this paper set out to reveal was something far more fundamental — the essential difference hidden beneath the surface of services that conventional thinking would place in the same category. To classify service by quality rather than quantity — at the time, that was a genuinely radical idea.

The authors drew on the philosopher Martin Buber's concepts of "I-Thou" (a relationship of mutual recognition between persons) and "I-It" (a relationship in which the other is treated as an object) to attempt a new classification: "Relational Services" and "Standard Services."

Even services that look identical on the surface can be fundamentally different. Where the people involved — staff, guests, community — are genuinely meeting each other as human beings, where there is an exchange of feeling, a warmth of attention: that is Relational Service. Where the interaction is technically between people but emotionally hollow, where one person is treated less like a person and more like a transaction: that is Standard Service.

Take hotels. Even within the same category, the quality of emotional exchange between staff and guests varies enormously from one place to the next. The warmth of the people who work there, the values of those who run it, the spirit that quietly shapes every interaction — these things are invisible. And yet they are unmistakably, undeniably there.

"The café I just like, for no particular reason." "The hotel where I somehow always feel at ease." Relational Services gave quiet, careful language to exactly that "nantonaku" feeling. The answer to what I had been trying to articulate for so long — it had been written down, in an academic paper, all along.

While "Relational Services" held me up theoretically, there was something else that gave me confidence in practice.

An opportunity came my way — to participate as one of the co-translators of the Japanese edition of Designing for Services, a research anthology. I had begun working on it before taking my leave of absence. My PhD thesis had stalled completely. But the translation was different. By that point I had been living in the UK for over five years, most of it spent in academic settings, and my English had grown beyond recognition.  The woman who had once cried in a park because her IELTS scores wouldn't budge felt like someone from a different life.

Translating the work of researchers who were defining the field of Service Design across Europe was such an honour. — Around that time — 2015, 2016 — there were probably very few Japanese people who had been this close to the actual research environment. I was one of them. Taking the role of translator felt like a mission, not just passion. I was proud to contribute. And above all — having my name listed as a contributor and translator in a published book had been a dream of mine since childhood.

In the summer of 2018, I was in Milan for ServDes. 2018. There, I attended a workshop run by Dr. Ezio Manzini himself — one of the authors of "Relational Services," a person I had long admired. Dr. Manzini's workshop revived me. I left Milan and arrived in Budapest. The beautiful city somehow supported my resolve : I would return to the PhD life.

A few weeks after my decision, I received completely unexpected news from Japan.
My father had been caught in a serious fire and was badly injured.

On the flight home, I couldn't fall asleep at all. Because the image of him — burned, blackened — wouldn't leave my mind. I have said I won't go into detail about what followed after I returned. As I poured myself into supporting his recovery — his only child, with no one else to share the weight — the world was struck by COVID, and an uncertainty no one had ever seen before settled over everything. The will and the means to return to the UK had left me entirely.

In the years that followed, I quietly cut away almost everything connected to "the UK" and/or "Service Design" — and with it, most of the people who might remind me of either. Friends still living in Britain. Former Loughborough colleagues making their names in academia. People in Japan's Service Design community asking after me.

Every one of them brought it back: the fact that I had returned against my will, the things I hadn't managed to finish. I felt I had failed them. I was sorry. But if I hadn't done this, I think something in me would have broken.

Living among people who knew nothing of who I had been in the UK. Working in a field with no connection whatsoever to Service Design. That was the only way I could think of to keep myself from falling apart.

Fortunately, I found a company that had just listed on NASDAQ, full of the restless ambition of a startup — proprietary technology, rapid growth, a genuinely global footprint. What they needed wasn't a high score on a language test. They needed someone who could actually work in English, in a global environment — and my UK experience and English ability were exactly what they were looking for. The culture was one of autonomy, not micromanagement — unlike most Japanese companies. I felt at home.

The APAC HR director — educated in the UK — looked at my CV and said: "What are you doing here? Don't waste your talent."
I understood what she meant, and I appreciated it. But I had intentionally stepped back from my background. Going back was never on my mind.

It was around last year that I began to feel it clearly: I need to start something of my own. I have to.

Behind that feeling, several things had probably converged at once — circumstances, age, the state of the world, small everyday moments accumulating into something larger. And in the middle of all that searching, I found myself sitting with two questions: Why did I spend all those years building my English? And how do I want to live the second half of my life?

Then, one day, it landed: "If I die tomorrow, I'll have too much unfinished business. I'll have to crawl back out of my coffin."
I actually laughed, imagining myself pushing open the lid.

What I would be leaving unfinished wasn't the failure to achieve something. It was the failure to even try — to have wanted something, and to have simply not reached for it. To express, in my own voice, the things that are hard to measure but surely there. To find the shape of a phenomenon. To give it form. To lend it language. Whether that happens under the title of "Dr." or not — the essential thing I have always been trying to do has never changed.

For a long time, I believed that kind of work could only be done within academia, with the backing of institutional authority.
And because I had closed that door myself, I told myself I had forfeited the right to do it.

But starting Momo & Co. taught me otherwise. Even without an academic venue, even without a formal journal — I can write about beautiful services, and the philosophies and stories behind them. I can translate the ideas of Service Design into something practical, something useful, something that actually reaches people. And there are people who receive it.

My professional title doesn't have to be a single neat thing. The ratio of income to passion doesn't have to be one-to-one. The arc of a life, the accumulation of a career — none of it has to add up to something immediately legible to someone on the outside. Honestly, life rarely offers that kind of neat coherence. And that, I think, is what makes life interesting and charming.

What matters is that it all makes sense to me.

Since leaving the UK, I had been carrying guilt. Guilt that I couldn't honour the hopes of the person who had believed in me more than I believed in myself. Guilt that I had been her last PhD student, and yet had failed to include her name in the acknowledgements of my doctoral thesis — a thesis I never finished.

Her name was Kathy.

Her guidance, at the time, I couldn't absorb. I understood it intellectually. But I couldn't digest properly, couldn't let it become part of me.

Now, I think I finally can.

When something in everyday life moves me — a service, a space, a moment — I feel her behind it. Her research. Her words. The acknowledgement that couldn't go into the thesis lives, instead, in the ongoing work of my life. Everything I do from here is an act of acknowledgement. An act of connecting the dots.

 I am at the age where I can see the halfway point of my life coming into view.

Sometimes I hear voices:

"What's the point, at this stage?" "What are you even aiming for?"

My answer is simple.

So I don't have to claw my way back out of the coffin out of sheer frustration.

Not whether I achieve something or not — but whether I tried, whether I reached for it. That is all. That, right now, is what moves me.

Where It All Makes Sense

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