Shiro Oguni was a TV director in Japan when he visited a group home for people with dementia. The residents cooked lunch for him. He'd been told it would be hamburgers. What came out was dumplings. Oguni was about to say something. Then he stopped himself. Did it really matter? The food was good. The people who made it were proud of it. Nobody was harmed by the mix-up.
That moment stuck with him for years. In 2017, he turned it into something no one had tried before. A pop-up restaurant in Tokyo where every server has dementia. He called it the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders. The name is the warning. Customers walk in knowing their order might come out wrong. They might get the wrong drink. The wrong dish. A server might forget what they were doing halfway to the table.
That's the point. At one of the early events, about 37% of the orders came out wrong. But 99% of customers said they left happy. Servers took orders, poured water, and chatted with diners. When something went wrong, customers laughed and helped out. Oguni said the restaurant was never about whether orders came out right. It was about changing how people see dementia.
He has said that kind of change can't come from people with dementia alone. It has to come from everyone else.
And for a few hours at a time, in one restaurant in Tokyo, it did.
Would I get arrested for posting this in the UK?
Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning.
Britain read it as an instruction manual.
62,000+ arrests for "communications offences" in five years (~34 a day).
So I made a music video about it.