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There's a small wooden sign above my friend's sushi counter in Tokyo. Two words. NO PHONES. Hamaguchi has run that counter for 31 years. Eight seats. No menu. In 31 years, he has broken that rule once. For a man from Ohio. First, the Americans. About half his customers are American now. Hamaguchi speaks zero English. His wife, Akemi, works the front and translates for him at night. She's been keeping a list. "He just handed me a piece of fish. With his hand. Directly into my hand. I feel like we've been through something together." "Babe. I've been eating sushi for twenty years. That wasn't sushi. None of it was sushi." "Is he mad at me?" "No, that's his face." "He's been making that face for an hour." "That's his happy face." "He put the wasabi on for me. He didn't ask. I trust this man more than my doctor." "Can I get a fork? ...I'm kidding! I'm kidding. Sir, please don't look at me like that." "I'm not crying. The wasabi is crying." "How much is this?" "Don't ask." "I'm asking." "Don't." "...Okay. Worth it." A grown man from Georgia bowed to a piece of tuna. Then he apologized to his wife for bowing to the tuna. Then he bowed to the next one. Akemi says Americans are the only customers who thank Hamaguchi for every single piece. Japanese customers thank him once, at the end. Americans thank him twelve times, out loud, like he just rescued their dog. He pretends he doesn't care. He cares. Then, last March, the man from Ohio. Otto. Seventy-one. Thirty-eight years at a steel mill in Youngstown. Big hands, burn scars on both wrists. A suit that was too short in the arms. He had booked one seat. Paid in full. Six months in advance. He sat down, looked up at the NO PHONES sign, and asked Akemi, very quietly, if he could break the rule. On their honeymoon in 1977, Otto took his wife, Lorraine, to a little Japanese place in Cleveland with paper lanterns. She ate a California roll and said, "Someday, the real thing." Forty-nine years. The kids. The mill. The layoffs. The mortgage. They finally saved enough, and then Lorraine got sick. She can't fly anymore. So she made him go without her. "Eat everything," she told him. "And tell me everything." Back in Ohio, it was four in the morning. Lorraine had set an alarm. Propped up in bed, glasses on, waiting. Akemi looked at her husband. Hamaguchi looked up at the sign. Then he reached up, took it down, and slid it under the counter. Then he did something else. He pulled out the empty stool next to Otto, set a small dish stand on the counter in front of it, and leaned the phone against it. Facing him. So she'd have a seat. For two hours, Otto described every piece to her like a man calling a ballgame. "Okay, Lorraine, this one's orange. It's shining. It looks like it's proud of itself." "This one's eel. I know. I know. Just trust me." "No idea what this one is, but if Jesus ate fish, he ate this one." "Lorraine, I've been eating fish sticks for seventy-one years. I owe everybody an apology." The other six customers stopped talking. A Japanese businessman at the far end put his own phone away and just listened. Every time Otto got a piece, Hamaguchi made a second one, and placed it on a little plate in front of the phone. At the end, Hamaguchi wiped his hands, turned to the empty stool, and bowed to Lorraine. A deep one. The kind we save for weddings and funerals. Then, in English, he said three words. Akemi had never heard English come out of him before. "Next time. You come." Lorraine cried. Otto cried. Akemi cried. The businessman pretended he had something in his eye. It was not the wasabi. In June, a letter arrived from Ohio. Shaky handwriting. A pressed flower inside. "I've still never set foot in Japan. But I've eaten at the best sushi counter in Tokyo. I had the seat on the left." The NO PHONES sign is back up now. But taped under it, in Akemi's handwriting, there's a small card in English: "One exception: Lorraine." America, you send us men who work forty years in a steel mill and then spend it all describing fish to the woman they love. Please keep sending them.

WaPo's David Lynch: "Anemic job growth has pushed more than 280 million Chinese into gig economy jobs, up 75 percent from 2019, according to the China New Employment Forms Research Center."