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What Japan Has Taught Matthew Hussey About Love and Life

Matthew Hussey · ▶ 13:36 · 10 min read
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Overview

Japan is expensive, far away and hard to get to. Matthew Hussey's producer asked why he keeps going back, and the question came up again when he announced another family trip there, this time with his four-month-old son. Part of the answer, he says, is that he simply loves the place. The other part is that he has learned a lot from it. In this video, which departs from his usual dating advice, Hussey describes what Japan has taught him about love and life.

10 min read

He adds two caveats up front. He is not an expert on Japan, and he knows how easy it is for a visitor to romanticize a place. That second caveat becomes a major theme later in the video.

1:09

The Craftsman's Approach

The first lesson Hussey describes is what he calls "the craftsman's approach." In Japan, he says, people seem to care intensely about whatever they do or make. There is an obsession with doing the job well and taking pride in the work. Sushi making is the familiar example, but he believes the attitude extends to everything.

His examples come from his own travels. One is a kissaten, a traditional Japanese coffee house, where the owner has spent 40 years making the same cup of coffee. Another is a tiny Neapolitan pizza place where one person has devoted their whole life to perfecting dough. He also mentions the care a shopkeeper takes in wrapping a purchase, and a business making artisanal cola that he calls "mind-blowingly good."

He points to the film Perfect Days, one of his favorites. It follows a man who cleans toilets in Tokyo, and the film treats him almost like a sushi master: he works with quiet devotion and insists on doing even the smallest thing beautifully. Hussey says that, in his experience, the film is not an exaggeration. It accurately portrays how he has seen many people in Japan approach their work.

He then compares this with England, where he grew up, and America, where he lives now. He does see excellence in both countries. The difference, in his view, is that people there often pursue excellence as a means to an end: a route to growth, scale or conventional success. Much of what he sees in Japan is excellence pursued at the expense of those things. He says he has come across hundreds of small businesses where the goal seems to be doing one thing really well rather than building an empire.

He draws a personal lesson from this: trying to be too many things at once has a cost. He coaches, makes videos, writes books, leads an organization and wants to be present with his family, and he wants to do all of it brilliantly. In reality, he says, excellence comes from doing less. If you care about quality, you have to care about reducing the number of things you try to do. He says he is currently working on this in his own life.

3:31

Collective Well-Being: Leaving Places Better Than You Found Them

The second lesson concerns collective well-being. Hussey notes an irony: Japan has very few public trash cans, yet there is almost no trash on the streets, and he calls it one of the cleanest places on Earth. His account is that when trash cans were removed, people got used to taking their rubbish home.

This affected him deeply. He has long held that you should try to leave people better than you found them. He says this often about dating, but he applies it to every kind of relationship. Since spending time in Japan, he has added a second tenet: leave places better than you found them.

He is careful not to present himself as a saint who always lives up to this. Still, he says the practice has made a profound difference in small ways. In a coffee shop, he no longer sees keeping the place nice as solely the owner's job. He treats it as his own responsibility, at least for the corner he occupies. That might mean pushing his chair back the way the owner arranged it, or returning his cup to the counter. He even applies it to public toilets and tries to leave the cubicle a little better than he found it.

He says he does not do this for recognition. He is not sure he has ever said it out loud before. It also doesn't matter much to him if the next person trashes the cubicle. He would prefer they didn't, but it doesn't make him regret having tidied it. He describes the practice as good for his soul. He has become prouder of how he moves through life and how he affects the spaces he is in. It feels more conscious, he says, and it has, strangely, made him like himself a little more.

6:38

Invest Where You Are

The third lesson is to "invest where you are." Hussey says Japan made him care about design, and especially about how much love he and his wife Audrey put into designing their own home.

What shocked him in Japan was how intentional spaces are. He describes walking into a random coffee shop that "has no business" being so beautiful, and finding carefully chosen cups and dishware, indoor plants and a curated theme, whether Japandi minimalism, cottagecore or retro nostalgia.

That attitude influenced their home. Inspired by Japan's listening bars, where customers order a drink, sit at the bar and listen to records, they built a wooden shelving nook designed to echo that style. They also replaced what Audrey calls the "bachelor metal" of his pre-marriage decorating with earthy colors, natural materials and wood, creating bright, clean spaces to live and work in.

For Hussey, the specific changes matter less than the fact that they put love and themselves into the house, thinking about what kind of space would bring them joy. He says this paid off on their most recent return. He came home with his usual "post-Japan melancholy," but walking into the house immediately made them excited to be home. He found that validating: the care they had put into the house the year before suddenly made sense. They had left a place they loved, which made them sad, but they had come back to another place they loved, one that made them feel happy and calm. That softened the blow so much that he felt genuinely excited to be home.

He connects this to romantic relationships. Your own "home," in his framing, is you: your confidence, your self-love, how you expand your mind, your friendships, your family relationships and your own life. Investing in it while you are dating or in love with someone insulates you from the worst kinds of heartbreak, the kind that happens when you build your home in someone else. When you invest in yourself, he argues, you protect yourself against future heartbreaks, whether from relationships you eventually have to leave or from people who leave you.

9:54

The Limits of Romanticizing a Place

After these three lessons, Hussey acknowledges that everything he has described is an "incredible romanticization" of a place he loves. He knows Japan has an underbelly he never encounters, and that every trait has its inverse. The cultural norms that make Japan fascinating and novel for visitors make it oppressive for many who live there. The focus on preserving a national identity produces a highly distilled Japan that feels like a wonderland to visit. In his view, it also makes integration extremely difficult, even for many people who have lived there their whole lives. He also notes that he is not a Japanese woman living in what he calls a deeply patriarchal society.

"I know that I do not know Japan. I visit Japan," he says, and he stresses that this is a big difference. He does not live ordinary daily life in Japan, and he doesn't even live his own daily life there. His Japan consists of days spent wandering tiny streets with no pressure to be anywhere or do anything. It includes consequence-free beers, large amounts of carbs and sugar, and drinking coffee after coffee in a way he never would at home. His weeks there don't resemble his real life, and not only because he is abroad. He takes a foreign version of himself with him. If he lived his actual daily life in Japan for a long period, he says, he might see it completely differently.

11:20

Japan as a Long-Distance Relationship or an Affair

Hussey compares this to a long-distance relationship. You don't truly know how compatible you are with someone until you live in the same place, perhaps under the same roof. In what he calls his "extended honeymoon" with Japan, he never finds out what his real life would feel like there.

He goes further and says it may be more like an affair. An affair can be exciting precisely because the other person stays outside the relationship, where their worst habits and character traits are never really experienced. Reality never hits, so the fantasy stays alive.

He clarifies that he is not saying the things he loves about Japan are inauthentic or imaginary. His point is that he sees them through a pristine, carefully curated lens that he has built up through repeated but intermittent exposure. Recognizing that his version of Japan is idealized doesn't reduce what he loves about it. It does restore a kind of balance, protecting him from the catastrophic thought that he will never be happy unless he lives there.

12:30

What He Allows Himself to Be There

In the final section, Hussey admits that part of what he loves about Japan is who he lets himself be when he is there. Japan is where he goes to feel things he rarely permits himself in everyday life: safe, carefree, easy on himself, spontaneous and anonymous.

That leads to a question he leaves open: could he let himself enjoy more of that mode where he lives the rest of the year? He would not bring home the unhealthy habits, which he considers unsustainable in daily life. He would want the freedom, the lightness and the sense of spontaneous exploration.

He ends by inviting viewers to share their own experiences: whether there is a place they have a love affair with, what they love about it, and what it has taught them.

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