Twice Cancelled, Finally Yonago: A Father and Son's Journey to Keep a Promise

It had been two and a half years since my son and I promised each other we would come back to Japan together.

At the time, we were in Osaka.

The hotel we stayed at during that trip was Onyado Nono. It had Japanese-style tatami floors and a large public bath. After bathing, guests could have ice cream, and late at night, the hotel served complimentary ramen.

My son liked the place quite a lot.

“Dad, next time, let’s come just the two of us.”

I answered without thinking too much.

“Sure. Let’s do that.”

Promises with my son usually begin that way. In the moment, I become the kind of cool dad who feels as if he can do anything for his child, and I make promises easily.

The problem is keeping them.

When you live as an office worker who receives a salary from a company, and as the head of a household with responsibilities at home, time slips away as if it had never waited for you in the first place.

And so, two and a half years passed.

This summer, I finally came back to Japan to keep that promise with my son. But before we got here, the trip disappeared twice.

Originally, our destination this summer was not Japan. It was Jeju Island.

We had booked the accommodation and bought the plane tickets. Since it was peak vacation season, we had also considered overseas destinations such as Thailand, Cebu, or Australia. But the exchange rate felt burdensome.

More than anything, there was one presence that weighed on my mind: our old dog, Uni.

Uni was getting old. Rather than leaving him at my mother-in-law’s house while the whole family went overseas, it felt more comforting to take him with us to Jeju. So the decision was not difficult.

“Let’s go to Jeju this summer.”

We chose the dates, booked the flights, and reserved the accommodation. I thought this summer vacation would be spent peacefully in Jeju with my wife, my son, and Uni.

But three days before departure, something happened at work.

A major RFP was issued by one of the clients I was responsible for.

RFP stands for Request for Proposal. In Korean, it is called a proposal request document. It is a document through which a client defines the requirements of a project and asks participating companies to propose how they would carry it out.

And I became the proposal PM for that project.

No one told me to cancel my trip.

In fact, my vacation had already been scheduled. But once I took on the role of proposal PM, my mind changed. When so many people were working together to create one proposal, it did not sit right with me that I, as the PM, would be away for several days.

In the end, I told my family.

“I don’t think I can go on this trip with you.”

My wife said it would be too difficult for her to take our son and Uni to Jeju without me. In the end, we canceled the family trip altogether. We canceled the flights and the accommodation. The cancellation fees were not small.

If I had not taken on the proposal PM role, we would have left for Jeju just three days later.

I was disappointed.

Still, at the time, I told myself:

Once this work is over, we can go again.

But the work did not end so simply.

From around that time, I was barely home. For nearly a month, I left for work before dawn, and by the time I came home, it was close to midnight. Weekends were not much different.

During my son’s school vacation, when he woke up in the morning, his father was already gone. By the time he was ready for bed, I was often still on the subway heading home.

That time must have felt longer to him than I had realized.

One day, while I was deep in work, my phone rang. It was my son.

When I answered, I heard his urgent voice.

“Dad, we said we would go to Japan together.”

Then he brought up the Osaka trip from two and a half years earlier. The hotel with the hot spring. The ice cream after the bath. The ramen at night.

Onyado Nono.

I remembered it too.

It was a promise we had even sealed with our pinkies.

I told him,

“Okay. As soon as this work is over, let’s go together.”

Once I said I would go, my son began persuading his mother. My wife also started moving. Not long after, a message arrived on KakaoTalk.

Osaka flights booked.

Onyado Nono booked.

This time, it really felt like we could go.

I went back into the proposal room. I kept telling myself that once this work was done, I would go to Japan with my son.

But then the client extended the proposal deadline by one week.

To me as a proposal PM, that extra week was honestly welcome. It was my first time taking on the role, and there were many things I was still clumsy at. I had not been able to lead the proposal team as smoothly as I had hoped. Considering the quality of the proposal, I was grateful for the additional week.

But the week that was given to me as an office worker became, for me as a father, another week in which I had to break a promise.

In the end, we canceled the Osaka trip too.

It was the second cancellation after Jeju. Another cancellation fee followed. To be honest, paying penalties twice felt painfully wasteful.

But more than the money, my heart felt uncomfortable.

I was sorry to my son.

I was also sorry to my wife, who had searched for flights and accommodation twice and prepared the schedules.

Because I had taken on work at the company, my promises to my family kept being pushed back.

And then, at last, we submitted the proposal.

There would be no more delays.

I contacted my son.

“Son, this time, let’s really go somewhere. Anywhere.”

The problem was time.

It was summer vacation season. And there were only a few days left before we could depart. My son and my wife began searching for flights again.

Places that seemed worth going to had no seats left. The remaining tickets were twice, sometimes three times, their usual price.

It felt as if the airfare were saying to me:

If you still want to go, pay the express fee.

Then my son sent me a KakaoTalk message.

“Dad, flights to Yonago Airport are relatively cheap.”

Another message followed.

“They say it’s like a quiet countryside town. And there’s an Onyado Nono there too. We can use the hot spring.”

Yonago.

It was a name I had never heard before.

I opened the map first. Osaka was a place I had visited several times, so I felt I could manage somehow. But Yonago—I did not even know where in Japan it was. To be honest, I felt a little afraid.

But when I changed the way I looked at it, that uncertainty seemed almost better.

A place my son did not know.

A place I did not know.

If the two of us went somewhere unfamiliar and got a little lost together, perhaps that would become the kind of memory that stayed with us for a long time.

“All right. Let’s go.”

And just like that, our destination became Yonago.