How I fit pro mahjong, music and the gym around a remote job

“I don’t have time for hobbies.”

I understand the feeling. My day job is leading customer success for Asia Pacific and Japan at Vercel, and since 2025 also running Japan as interim country manager, fully remote from Osaka for a company headquartered in San Francisco. It is not a quiet job.

Next to it: I’m a professional mahjong player with the Japan Professional Mahjong Association (NPM), which means league games. I assist Kosho Tsuchida’s mahjong class at the RIHGA Royal Hotel Osaka. Since July 2024 I’ve been doing live English interpretation of M.League, Japan’s professional mahjong league, at night on pro Kei Nakabayashi’s YouTube channel. I play piano, I sing, and I lift weights.

I don’t have more hours than you. What I gave up on is the idea that every one of these gets attention every week. The rest of this post is how that works in practice, including the parts that don’t.

Fixed commitments go on the calendar first

Some hobbies come with a schedule somebody else sets. League days, the class, the M.League season (which runs from autumn into spring). Those go on the calendar the moment I know the dates, as real blocks my team can see, the same as a customer meeting. If a block is private, people book over it, and they’re right to.

Working from Osaka for a company in San Francisco also has a shape you can plan around. The overlap with California falls in my morning, Japanese customers take the business day, and M.League plays in the evening, Japan time. On paper that fits. In practice it only fits if the workday has a hard edge, and a broadcast that starts whether or not I’m ready is the best hard edge I’ve found.

Remote work removes the commute and the door. Nothing tells you the day is over, so something else has to.

Sort your hobbies by the energy they cost

An hour of interpreting and an hour of piano cost very different things.

Here is roughly how I sort them:

Kind of energy	What uses it
Deep focus	Work, league games, simultaneous interpretation
Social	Assisting at the class, refereeing, customer meetings
Physical	Lifting
Restorative	Piano and singing, most days

Interpretation is the expensive one. Nakabayashi commentates in Japanese and I put it into English live, about a game where a single discard can change everything, for viewers who range from beginners to people who know more than I do. Conference interpreters usually work in pairs and swap every half hour or so, and there’s a reason for that.

So the rule I try to keep is simple: don’t stack two deep-focus blocks back to back unless one of them can’t move. The broadcast can’t move, so on broadcast days it’s the rest of the day that has to bend.

And sleep. Back in 2009 I wrote on my mahjong blog, in Spanish, that it’s important to be wide awake and calm to play. It turns out that applies to interpreting, to league games and to a morning call with San Francisco. Sleep is the one thing I’d tell you not to trade.

Keep a small version of everything

Some weeks work wins: an event, a quarter closing, a customer who needs you now. Those weeks are going to happen, and pretending otherwise is how hobbies quietly die.

What helps is having a minimum version of each one, small enough that a bad week can still afford it:

• Mahjong: review one game record (haifu, 牌譜) instead of playing.
• Piano: ten minutes, no goal.
• Singing: the shower counts. I checked.
• Lifting: a short session with the main lifts only.

Restarting from zero costs far more than keeping a thin thread going. Two weeks off the piano is nothing. Two months, and you’re negotiating with yourself every time you sit down.

Piano and singing don’t need a ranking

I’m a big J-rock and visual kei fan, and I’m still very much learning both. Almost everything else I do comes with a score. Mahjong has league standings and Tenhou ranks; work has goals and quarters. Piano and singing don’t, and I have no plans to give them one.

That also makes them fragile. Nobody is waiting for me at the piano, so it’s the first thing a full calendar pushes out. The fix is boring: give it a slot as fixed as the others and treat it as an appointment with nobody in particular.

The gym, on GACKT’s advice

I met GACKT in 2017 and started weight training on his advice. For a visual kei fan, that meeting was already a lot. When GACKT tells you to start lifting, you start lifting.

Nine years later it’s the hobby that pays for the others. A remote job can mean a whole day without leaving home, and mahjong means hours sitting perfectly still, so lifting is the counterweight. I’m not going to give you a program; I’m not qualified, and GACKT is busy.

Does any of this make me better at work?

I’d rather not pretend mahjong is secretly a management course. Mostly I do these things because I like them. That said, a couple of overlaps are real.

Interpretation and my job use the same skill: hearing something in Japanese and making it make sense, in English, to people who weren’t in the room. At work that’s explaining Japanese customers to global teams. At night it’s explaining why a pro just folded a hand that looked like it was about to win.

Mahjong also hands you a result after every game, in points, with no room for spin. After a bad league day, a difficult meeting feels a lot smaller. Then again, after a good league day it also feels smaller, so maybe that one is just perspective.

The hard stops help most of all. A workday that has to end at a fixed time is usually a better one.

(The news and an interview about the M.League broadcasts are on the speaking page.)

Look at your calendar for next week. Which of your hobbies has a slot, and which one is still waiting for free time?