My father died in a car accident when I was seven. Whenever I missed him, I would look in the family photo album at this picture of when he had gone to Palau.
Rich Pelley, The Guardian, 12 April 2025 source ↗
The question
As a child, what career or life did you imagine for yourself?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 198 →A radio journalist or on the till at Marks & Spencer.
A visual artist.
Shirley MacLaine
American actress and author
At three, I knew I was too tall to be a ballerina, so that wasn’t going to happen.
Suzanne Vega
American singer-songwriter
An astronaut, a writer, a dancer.
More from Nobu Matsuhisa
View profile →My training took seven years. I didn’t learn how to make sushi for the first three years. I only got two days off a month, and slept on the restaurant floor. But I loved the job. I’d go to the fish market every morning. I got to open the restaurant and see the customers. I’d watch my mentor making sushi and would copy him under the table, practising with my fingers.
I started with very traditional style sushi and Japanese food, but then I went to Peru when I was young (around 23-24), and that’s where I got my Peruvian influences and ingredients. So when I opened my first restaurant in 1987, it was unique because in Los Angeles [at the time] the Japanese restaurants were very traditional.
I moved to Argentina, then back to Tokyo and then to Anchorage, in Alaska, where I ran a restaurant. After 50 days the restaurant burnt down – an electrical fire. I lost my dream. I lost my money. I lost my passion. I thought about suicide, but thinking of my family and my kids made me realise I had to wake up.
I don’t think I will ever be ready to retire.
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