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

“I don’t have time for hobbies.”

I get it. 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. On top of that I play professional mahjong with the Japan Professional Mahjong Association (NPM), interpret M.League into English live at night, play piano, sing and lift.

I don’t have more hours than you. I stopped expecting every one of these to get attention every week.

Fixed commitments go on the calendar first

Some hobbies come with a schedule somebody else sets: league days, the mahjong class I assist at (Kosho Tsuchida’s, at the RIHGA Royal Hotel Osaka), the M.League season, which runs from autumn into spring. Those go on the calendar as soon as I know the dates, as real blocks my team can see, like a customer meeting. A private block gets booked over, and people are right to.

The shape of the week helps. 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 fits only if the workday has a hard edge. Remote work takes away the commute and the door, and nothing else tells you the day is over. A broadcast that starts whether or not I’m ready is the best hard edge I’ve found.

Sort your hobbies by the energy they cost

An hour of interpreting and an hour of piano cost very different things. Work, league games and simultaneous interpretation take deep focus. The class and customer meetings take people. Lifting takes the body. Piano and singing, most days, give some energy back.

Interpretation is the expensive one. Since July 2024 I’ve interpreted M.League, Japan’s professional mahjong league, on pro Kei Nakabayashi’s YouTube channel: he commentates in Japanese and I put it into English as he talks, 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.

My rule is to never stack two deep-focus blocks back to back unless one of them can’t move. The broadcast can’t, so on broadcast days the rest of the day bends.

And sleep. In 2009 I wrote on my mahjong blog, in Spanish, that it’s important to be wide awake and calm to play. The same goes for interpreting, for league games and for a morning call with San Francisco. Sleep is the one thing I wouldn’t trade.

Keep a small version of everything

Some weeks work wins: an event, a quarter closing, a customer who needs you now. Pretending otherwise is how hobbies quietly die. So each one gets a minimum version, 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.
• 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. After two months, you negotiate 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 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, the meeting alone was a lot.

I still lift. A remote job can mean a whole day without leaving home, and mahjong is hours of sitting perfectly still, so lifting is the counterweight. I won’t give you a program; I’m not qualified.

Does any of this make me better at work?

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

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.

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

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