I am Takahisa Ishii, 56 years old local guide living in Japan. I became a guide 3 years ago and level 8 now.
When I started activity, I was looking for the job, giving up the dream to be a successful private investor. I found a job but quit in about a year and opened my own restaurant. Let me tell you the story.
I used to work for the restaurant chain operating company for 12 years, but I quit the job to be independent and aimed to be a private investor. As you can easy imagine, nothing is so easy. All I got was losing money and control of mind. So I decided to join the corporate again. In this period, I started local guide activities. I found a job at a restaurant chain operating company again. However it was a terrible, extremely stressful company such as “The boss denies everything what I propose”, “The boss gets angry if he does not like”. One day the boss asked me to quit, so I did so. In this period I kept the activities and visited mostly restaurants including the company owned, and sightseeing places. Since it is so tough to find a new job at my age in Japan and I did not like to face the same situation again, I came conclusion to open my own restaurant and I became the owner and the chief of small restaurant. I have a busy but peaceful time everyday. I have one day off a week I cannot visit so many places, but am trying to go to one place a week.
The merits of local guide activities I felt for these three years are
Give me a motivation to go out once a week
I might go out much less if I was not a local guide, since sometimes no motivation there or I have a big stress.
Keep me refreshed for both body and soul
Refreshing not only the body, breathing outside air, looking something I never see, tasting something I never had, touching somesthing I never have but also the soul. I have been able to release the stress through activities.
Have a small but useful pride as a higher level guide
In the usual life, nothing gives me the pride, but local guide gives me the pride as a higher level guide, which was pretty helpful for mind balance since I lost the confidence sometimes.
Show foot prints and the feeling of the moments
This is the big merit for me. I used to use “Evernote” as my visit memo. However, after becoming a local guide I use a post to google map as my memory.
Also looking back the posts, I can come across the feeling of the moments I visited. These were good times and bad times. Both are good memories for me if those are the past.
So I will keep doing activities.
Takahisa Ishii