In 31 years as a quality inspector, Tachibana, who sits behind me at work, has never given anything a perfect score. Not a part. Not a factory. Not, according to his wife, their wedding. In Japan, he is the man who says no. He has rejected bolts for being one-tenth of a millimeter shy. He has rejected a supplier over the font on their packaging. In September, he spent two weeks in Texas. A customer's plants. Houston to San Antonio and back. Every day on the highway with an engineer named Wendell Ray Tubbs, who goes by Bo. Tachibana has no off switch. So, on day one, he made a form. A4 paper. Twenty criteria. One hundred points. Clipboard. He inspected every American restroom on Interstate 10. For the record, Japan has some of the cleanest public restrooms on Earth. Our toilets have heated seats, a bidet, and more settings than my car. Some of them play music. He was not grading on a curve. He showed me the forms. I am sharing some with permission. He insisted I include the scores. GAS STATION, NAME WITHHELD Score: 31. "Door would not lock. Instead, a sign: KNOCK. I did not want to knock. Someone knocked on me." HIGHWAY REST AREA Score: 44. "A man was shaving in the sink at 6 a.m. He said, 'Mornin', partner.' Courtesy: 10 out of 10. Everything else: I am not able to write it." BARBECUE RESTAURANT Score: 66. "No lock. But a large man I did not know stood outside and held the door shut for me without being asked. 'I got you, buddy.' Lock: 0. Security: 100. I was protected like a president." CHURCH FELLOWSHIP HALL (invited to a potluck) Score: 71. "Sign: JIGGLE HANDLE. The handle has been jiggled since 1987. Everyone in the congregation knows the jiggle. A woman named Miss Inez, 84, came in to show me the jiggle. She did not knock. The jiggle is passed down like a family recipe." FAST FOOD Score: 12. "I will not discuss this. Bo says this one is 'a rite of passage.'" By day five, Bo was texting the scores to his wife. His wife was texting them to her Bible study. By Wednesday, twenty-two women in Baytown, Texas, were waiting for the restroom report every evening. Then Tachibana noticed the billboards. A cartoon beaver in a red cap. Smiling. Counting down the miles. Making jokes about how much longer you'd have to hold it. Bo saw him looking. His whole face changed. He got very quiet, the way a man gets quiet before church. "Brother," he said. "You are about to see something." Buc-ee's. If you are not from Texas: calling it a gas station is like calling the Grand Canyon a ditch. More than a hundred pumps. A store the size of an airport. A wall of jerky. A man dead center of the store chopping brisket and shouting "BRISKET! FRESH BRISKET!" like he's announcing a birth. Tachibana walked past all of it. He had a job to do. He went into the restroom with his clipboard. Bo waited outside. Ten minutes. Twenty. At thirty, a small crowd of men had gathered around Bo. At forty, one of them went in to check. He came back out. "He's on his knees," he reported, "looking at the grout." At forty-four minutes, Tachibana came out. Pale. He held up the form. 100. The first 100 of his career. The men around Bo did not know what was happening. They clapped anyway. For a restroom. One of them shook Tachibana's hand and said, "Congratulations," and then asked Bo, quietly, "On what?" Then Tachibana asked to meet the person responsible. In Japan, quality is not a company. Quality is somebody. The manager went and got her. Her name is Gloria. She's 61. Nine years on those restrooms. Nights and weekends. Ballcap. Rubber gloves. Readers hanging from a beaded cord. She thought she was in trouble. She raised three grandkids on that job. Two of them are in college now. "My grandbabies are getting educated on these floors," she told Bo. She said it like a woman pointing at a cathedral she built. Bo asked her how she kept it like this. Every hour. For nine years. "My mama cleaned motel rooms in Beaumont for forty years," Gloria said. "She told me one thing. Clean every room like somebody's mama is about to walk in." Tachibana read it on his translation app. He went very still. What Bo didn't know yet, what none of us at the office knew, was this. His father cleaned the restrooms at a train station in Tokyo. Thirty years. Every night. Nobody ever thanked him. As a teenager, Tachibana was ashamed of it. He never once told his friends what his father did. He became an inspector, he said, so somebody would finally look closely at the work nobody looks at. His father died before he could tell him that. Tachibana didn't say any of that. He just bowed. Deep. The way we bow to a teacher. Then he held out his form the way a Japanese company presents an award. Arms straight. Paper facing her. Gloria looked at Bo. "What's he doing?" "Ma'am," Bo said, "I think he's giving you an award." Tachibana typed into his phone and turned the screen to her. "My father did your work. Nobody ever gave him this. Please take it for him." Gloria read it. Then she let her readers drop on their cord, put both arms around a Japanese quality inspector in the middle of Buc-ee's, and held on. His clipboard stayed out to one side, perfectly level, for the entire hug. An inspector does not drop the clipboard. Twenty-two women in a Bible study in Baytown got that report at 6 p.m. Bo says the group text has not recovered. Tachibana is back in Tokyo now, rejecting things. Last month, he inspected our office restroom. The building is from 1971. It scored a 58. Then he did something new. In 31 years, his form had never had this line. He added it just beneath the score. "Person responsible: Mrs. Kurosu. 100." She has cleaned our floor for twenty-nine years. Before last month, I'm ashamed to say, none of us knew her name. He says Texas taught him to score them separately.