Field Note•Nov 15, 2025•6 min read
The Kiosk That Broke the Spell
A boutique ryokan in Kanazawa understood omotenashi—until a check-in kiosk interrupted the warmth. What happens when technology degrades care instead of enhancing it?
Omotenashi
Field notes on anticipatory care—documenting how small teams make hospitality human under real constraints, and exploring what transparent intelligence might look like.
What I'm Investigating
Most hospitality AI is a black box. You automate, it responds, but operators have no idea why—or how to correct it when it fails.
I'm exploring an alternative: cognitive systems that can explain their reasoning, show their work, and learn from human practitioners. This journal documents field research, technical experiments, and conversations with the people who make care work.
Field Observations
What I'm learning from walking hotels, cafés, vacation rentals—timing rituals, sketching service flows, asking what breaks.
Technical Experiments
Architecture explorations, prototype tests, things that worked and things that didn't. BDI frameworks, natural language reasoning, explainability traces.
Practitioner Conversations
Interviews with GMs, front desk staff, cleaners, owners—the people who see around corners under constraint.
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