Before anything was built, the land was blessed.

A temporary tent stood on the upper tier of the property, white canvas shifting softly in the early spring wind. Beneath it, a Shinto priest from Karatsu Shrine arranged offerings upon a small altar — rice, salt, sake, snapper, fruits and vegetables gathered from the season. Beyond the perimeter ropes marking the future outline of the building, the hillside remained quiet and unchanged. Tea trees scattered across the slope. Grass moving lightly in the wind. Cedar and mountain cherry holding the edges of the land.

The ceremony is called jichinsai — a blessing and purification performed before construction begins. A request for permission. An acknowledgment that the ground beneath us is not empty, not inert, but already inhabited by spirit and memory long before foundations are poured into it.

The priest’s voice rose and fell in long, rhythmic chants as incense drifted through the cool air. One by one, we approached the altar to pray. Then each of us — Hanako, our architect Hana, the contractor, and I — took turns symbolically breaking the ground where the building would soon stand.

What struck me most was not the solemnity of it, but the tenderness.

Even the act of building begins here with listening.

For some time, the path toward creating the salon has carried that feeling — less like forcing something into existence than following a series of quiet openings as they appear. Around that period, I drew the Death card repeatedly while meditating on the salon, a black-cloaked figure astride a white horse, carrying a scythe. In tarot, death is rarely about ending alone. It speaks equally of transition, of shedding, of the unseen threshold between one life and another.

And in many ways, the salon arrived through exactly that process.

After nearly two decades of living in Japan, I had grown accustomed to existing between places, returning to America each summer to reconnect with parts of myself that felt more difficult to access here. But somewhere within the slow creation of Mirukashi — through gathering guests around the table, through working with the land, through giving shape to this place — something shifted. What once felt divided began, quietly, to integrate.

The date chosen for the groundbreaking ceremony carried its own kind of alignment.

In Japan, important events are often scheduled according to the rokuyō calendar, six cyclical days associated with varying degrees of fortune. The date selected for the ceremony fell almost exactly one year after we finalized the purchase of the land itself. Only afterward did I learn that the day was tomobiki — an auspicious day for calling in friends.

It could not have been more fitting.

The salon has never been solely about meals. It exists to create closeness — between travelers and this landscape, between guests and the farmers, cooks, tea producers, and artisans who shape life here, and perhaps most importantly, between strangers themselves. Again and again, I have watched unfamiliar faces soften toward one another over the course of a few shared days until something resembling family begins to form around the table.

To break ground on a day devoted to calling in friends felt less like coincidence than confirmation.

Even the act of building begins here with listening.

As construction began, the building slowly shifted from abstraction into form. For more than a year, the project had existed mostly through conversations, sketches, and models passed back and forth across tables. The architects, Hana Greer and Héctor Barrantes Montes, approached the design not as the creation of an isolated object, but as a relationship between movement, light, landscape, and gathering. Again and again, they built physical models by hand — small studies of proportion and volume, larger interior renderings through which we could imagine the experience of moving through the finished space. 

The process never began with appearance alone.

Instead, we spoke about thresholds. About how guests might arrive. About the shifting quality of light throughout the day. About where the eye should come to rest while drinking tea. About how the building could remain open to the changing moods of weather and season without separating itself from the surrounding land.

The first time the wooden frame rose above the foundation, the feeling was startling. Until then, the building had existed only in imagination and miniature — measured, discussed, adjusted endlessly. But suddenly there it was, dimensional and unmistakably real against the sky.

Not complete. But becoming.

Fresh angles of timber and light. Shadows stretching across newly formed rooms. Openings where windows will soon frame the pasture, the tea fields, the distant water beyond the trees. Slowly, the building begins to gather the same elements the salon itself has always been shaped around — season, landscape, movement, and the quiet intimacy of shared space.

The structure rises gradually from the hillside, but even now, it does not feel imposed upon the land.

Only invited into it.

• All images courtesy of aki(architects)