By Dr. Daniela Ferdico
I bought a shirt in Japan.
It was not an expensive shirt. I didn’t buy it because it was special or rare, or something I couldn’t find elsewhere. I bought it because I needed a shirt at that moment.
What happened next stopped me completely.
The woman behind the counter took the shirt and folded it. Not the fold of someone completing a transaction, the fold of someone who cared about the object in their hands. Precise, deliberate, each crease placed with attention. She wrapped it in tissue. She placed it in a bag. She tied the bag with a ribbon, slowly, as though the ribbon mattered. And then she held the bag out to me with both hands, slightly bowed, and waited for me to receive it.
A $10 shirt. Handed to me like a gift.
I stood there for a moment longer than was probably normal, holding this bag, trying to understand what had just happened to me. It wasn’t the shirt. It wasn’t even the gesture, exactly. It was what the gesture communicated; that this moment, however small, however ordinary, deserved to be done with full attention and full care. That I, as the person receiving it, deserved that care. That there was no category of interaction too mundane to be worth doing beautifully.
I have thought about that moment many times since.
Japan has a concept — omotenashi — that is often translated as hospitality but means something more specific and more demanding than that word implies in English. It is hospitality without the expectation of anything in return. Care given not because it will be noticed or rewarded or reviewed online, but because caring for others, in detail, is simply the way things are done.
It pervades everything. Dinner is not a meal, it is a series of deliberate choices about flavor and texture and temperature and presentation, each element considered in relation to every other. Conversation has a different quality, it is more attentive, more present, the person speaking to you actually listening rather than waiting for their turn. Even the streets are clean in a way that reflects a shared, unspoken agreement about what public space deserves.
I had been obsessed with Japanese food and aesthetics long before I went. What I had not anticipated was how it would feel to be on the receiving end of a culture organized around the principle that everything: every object, every interaction, every moment deserves to be treated with care.
It is, I realized, the single most luxurious thing I have ever experienced. More luxurious than any hotel suite, any Michelin-starred meal, any first-class cabin. The feeling of being genuinely attended to, not as a customer, not as a transaction, but as a human being whose experience of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon matters.
The second thing Japan gave me I did not expect at all.
When I travel to Japan I like to counteract the business of Tokyo with a stay in a small onsen town. The first time I went to Japan, with my daughter as a high school gradation trip, she chose Kinosaki. Population just over four thousand, a single main street lined with willow trees and wooden ryokan, the kind of place that exists outside of ordinary time.
An onsen, for those who haven’t been, is a traditional Japanese hot spring bath. You go in without clothing. This is not negotiable and not optional. The baths are gendered, and you enter and wash yourself and lower your body into naturally heated water that has been rising from the earth for longer than any of the buildings around it, as thousands of people have done before you, in this same place, in this same water.
I was nervous about this in a way I am embarrassed to admit now.
I have, like most women, a complicated relationship with my body in public. The years of comparison and self-consciousness and the particular exhaustion of existing in a body that is always, in some context, being evaluated. I stood outside the onsen door and felt something close to dread.
And then I went in.
What I found inside was women. All shapes. All sizes. All ages. All completely uninterested in anyone else’s body because they were simply present in their own. Nobody performing. Nobody evaluating. Nobody doing anything except washing carefully, because the washing is ceremonious, unhurried, each step done properly before entering the water, and then lowering themselves into the spring and being still.
I washed. I lowered myself into the water. The heat was extraordinary, the particular heat of water that has come from deep in the earth, mineral-rich and ancient, nothing like a heated pool. The cold air above the water, the steam rising around me, the sound of the town outside the wooden walls.
And in that moment,I felt my body stop performing.
That is the only way I can describe it. The constant effort we experience of existing in public: the holding in, the holding together, the awareness of how one appears, simply stopped. There was nothing to perform for. Nobody was watching and nobody cared; the water was very hot, very old and I was just a body in it, like every other body, like every body that had been in this water before mine.
It was one of the most unexpectedly freeing experiences of my life.
I think about Japan when clients tell me they want luxury. I always ask what they mean by that; and the answers are usually about thread count and room service and the size of the bathroom.
What Japan taught me is that the deepest luxury is not material at all. It is the experience of being genuinely cared for. Of existing in a culture or a place or a room where the person across from you is fully present, where the thing in your hands was handled with attention, where your comfort and your experience and your dignity are treated as worthy of real consideration.
That is what the best hotels understand. Not the ones with the most marble or the most Michelin stars, the ones where the staff actually sees you. Where the details are not decorative but intentional. Where you feel, from the moment you arrive, that someone thought carefully about what it would mean for you to be here. It is not a coincidence that the hotel brand most consistently described by guests as making them feel genuinely seen — Aman — was conceived by a founder shaped by Japanese philosophy. Adrian Zecha didn’t set out to build the most expensive hotels in the world. He set out to build places where guests would feel exactly what I felt holding that paper bag with both hands. You cannot manufacture that quality of care, you can only be raised in it.
Japan showed me what that looks like at a civilizational level. I have been trying to replicate the feeling for my clients ever since.
Just with more clothing than the onsen.
Amansara, Siem Reap, Cambodia — the philosophy travels with the brand
Dr. Daniela Ferdico is a neuropsychologist and founder of Evocative Travel, a luxury travel practice that designs journeys around the neuroscience of who you are. Every itinerary begins with a conversation.
