“They had rules, and you had better obey those rules,” wrote Craig Mod of Imoya, a small, six-seat tendon restaurant he frequented as an American student in Japan in 2002 (Mod 2005). It was run by a cantankerous couple who served bowls of tendon to hungry, poor students—to hundreds of thousands of them over 50 years. The tendon was out of this world. Mod called it Michelin-star quality at McDonald’s prices. The restaurant was crowded. To keep people moving, it had rules. The cook’s wife was the enforcer.

No talking, only eating. That first rule. No books either. Get the customers through. Only eating. The wife would yell at you should you talk, or, God forbid, take out a book.

Phones? Heaven forbid. Phones in Japan in 2002 were flip phones, not the black doom-scrolling vehicles of distraction that we have today. There were no phones in Imoya. For five decades, it offered food at the lowest price for hungry students. There were no phones, no books, and no talking.

From 18 until I did fieldwork in 2010, or so, I never had a phone. I was bored and walked and traveled and daydreamed a lot. I had no phone. I did have a black and white, portable computer. Whether through being a poor student, or through luck of being of a certain generation, the “rules” I had to live by gave me time to think.

Mod remembers jazz clubs too. They had their rules. They were a remnant of a time when the only way to listen to new American music was in a club. The clubs that sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s in Japan were the only place to hear American music. (Haruki Murakami started a jazz club before he became a writer. That is the extent of my familiarity with the scene.) Mod says the jazz clubs were for listening to music, but not talking. Request a song, and you’d better be there when it played. (No bathroom breaks.) You went to listen. It was long before Spotify and Apple Music.

Mod wonders, what if cafes banned phones again? Or restaurants? What about university classrooms? Elementary schools and high schools are banning them. What if we did too, in the classroom? Ban computers and phones.

It would go badly, of course. These are useful tools at times. But why not have some cantankerous rules?

What would cantankerous rules in a classroom look like? What about a writer’s rules? Or an editor’s rules?

I’m not sure you can do that in the classroom. But there’s a place for contextual rules, maybe—rules that shift depending on the situation. A time for computers and notes, but a time for listening, for no phones, for talking. A time for paper and notebooks.

Why not make times for conversation, for experimentation with computers and large language models, for working on a computer or device, on paper and notebooks, for a walk.

What if we had rules for being a writer, a professor, a reader, a father, an academic? What if we had ways to keep them from overlapping?

But Imoya’s rules were enforced.

How would you enforce rules for yourself, or for students, like the woman in the tiny Imoya tendon restaurant near Waseda University in 2002?

Who will scream at you: no phone, no computer, no books? Who will give you time to eat and think?

Mad rules might help.

References

Mod, Craig. 2025. “No Phones in The Ten-don Shop: Thinking about shops with rules and how we could use some more.” https://craigmod.com/ridgeline/218/.