【番外編＃147】しっくりくるまで！眼鏡と料理のトライアンドエラー

How ICL Surgery Ignited a Glasses Obsession

Fukai has had poor eyesight since middle school, relying on glasses and contact lenses for years. Five or six years ago he underwent ICL surgery — a next-generation procedure that implants a contact lens inside the eye, surpassing LASIK — and woke up the morning after with his vision fully restored. He enjoyed the freedom for a while, but before long he found himself missing glasses. "I want to wear them even though I don't have to," he explains. That paradox led him to start collecting frames purely as accessories, and he now owns around seven pairs: light-filtering lenses, blue-light-blocking lenses, and color lenses among them. His conclusion: "Nothing changes a person's impression more than glasses — more than a hat, more than clothing."

The Details That Make Glasses Work — Nose Pads, Pupil Position, Side Profile

Fukai draws a sharp line between mass-produced frames and artisan-made ones. The combination of materials in the frame, the shape, height, and material of the nose pads, and the size of the lenses all determine how well a pair of glasses suits the wearer. Beyond the frame itself, he stresses two factors most people overlook: the distance between the eyes and the lenses, and the impression the glasses create when viewed from the side. "Almost everyone only checks the front," he says — but the side profile is where a lot of the fit is decided.

He shared a story about accompanying a colleague — referred to internally as "Toshi-chan" — to a glasses shop in place of a one-on-one meeting. He described it, laughing, as "a benefit where the CEO personally helps you pick your glasses." He also offered Higuchi (樋口) a candid recommendation: his current square frames would be flattered even more by a Wellington shape or a more emphatically rectangular frame. His broader stance is unequivocal: "There is no such thing as a person glasses don't suit — only a person who hasn't found the right pair yet." The two made plans to visit a specialist select shop together, including one carrying frames from the Sabae production region, where artisan craftspeople are involved. Fukai himself sticks to the same frame year after year, swapping only the lenses annually to change the color or the way they catch the light — a low-effort way to refresh the look.

Trial and Error in the Kitchen, One Variable at a Time

Fukai used to avoid cooking deliberately — "I didn't want to develop yet another set of preferences," he says — but becoming a parent forced his hand. He started with the goal of making something as easily as possible, then gradually shifted toward making something genuinely delicious. His current focus is Italian food, specifically one dish he returns to repeatedly: pasta with tomatoes and eggplant.

His method is methodical. He keeps the pasta type constant and changes only one variable per attempt — the brand of canned tomatoes, how much pasta cooking water goes into the sauce, the cooking time, and the amount of sauce. He admits he hasn't yet achieved consistent results every time. "What keeps me going," he says, "is the discovery that following a recipe actually works — it actually tastes good." He intentionally excludes seasonal variation in the vegetables from his controlled variables, treating it as noise outside his influence.

All three hosts converge on the same conclusion: the gap between a skilled and an unskilled cook lies not in technique but in the ability to picture in advance what a dish should taste like — flavor creativity.

Cuisines as Music Genres: An EQ Analogy

The conversation about cooking evolves into a broader framework when Higuchi maps seasonings onto the frequency bands of a music equalizer. Salt and soy sauce occupy the mid-range (roughly 1–4 kHz); wasabi sits around 8–10 kHz; chili pepper and black pepper push into the highs above 12 kHz; dashi stock corresponds to the deep low end — kick drum and bass frequencies in the 20–120 Hz range.

Applied to national cuisines, the analogy shakes out as follows. **Italian pasta is rock**: a heavy mid-to-low thud with chili riding on top in a "scooped" V-shape EQ — the kind of genre that a beginner can get to sound decent relatively quickly, like an instrument that is fast to pick up. **Japanese cuisine is jazz or orchestral music**: frequencies span the full dynamic range, separation between individual elements (ingredients) is high, and the slightest misalignment is immediately audible. It resists compression; there is nowhere to hide. **Sichuan cuisine is heavy metal**: oil and chili push every frequency band at full power. The catch is that a domestic gas burner cannot reproduce it — it needs the equivalent of a concert-venue sound system, meaning a professional-grade flame. Without that, the analogy goes, it simply doesn't land.