He doesn't speak Japanese. He's opening a ryokan in a town tourists skip

Read time: ~6 minutes.

Ray Hoe made money in the stock market during the pandemic and did what many Singaporeans do next: bought property. Except his was a 77-year-old ryokan in Toyama, a city on the Sea of Japan coast that most travellers see only through a Shinkansen window. He had never run a hotel, had never visited Toyama, and does not speak Japanese. Next month, Hooray Toyama opens.

🎬 The Story

Ray is 41, Singapore-born, the child of two draftsmen — the people who turn an architect's sketches into technical drawings. His mother worked in the studio of the architect who later founded Banyan Tree Hotels. All of this comes from his profile in Vulcan Post (August 2026), the source for every fact below unless we say otherwise.

After university in Canada he joined Jones Lang LaSalle, spending years selling London, Tokyo and New York property to Singaporean buyers. The clients who stuck with him were the hospitality developers. "They were the coolest people. Most generous, most fun, most artsy," he told Vulcan Post. "I thought: one day I want to be a hotelier like them."

The chance came about 15 years later, in an unglamorous form: pandemic-era stock gains and time on his hands. He ruled out Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo from the start and looked at Hokuriku — Toyama, Ishikawa, Fukui — for the hiking, the seafood, and a policy bet. Japan is targeting 60 million inbound visitors by 2030, against roughly 36 million in 2024, and much of that plan depends on pushing visitors beyond the big cities, as the article notes. "More people will be willing to go deeper into Japan rather than seeing the same things," Ray said. "And I thought: why not? Let's try Toyama."

The building had its own story. Founded by a grandmother 77 years ago and run by three generations of one family, it was renovated at a cost of millions and reopened in 2019 — months before the borders closed. Two years without tourists finished it, and it went to auction in 2024. Ray bid and lost. Assuming it was gone, he bought a small plot on the Shimanami Kaidō cycling route in Hiroshima instead. A year later the winning bidder decided to sell, and Ray redirected the Hiroshima money to Toyama. "I preferred not to buy a property where I have to build everything from scratch," he said.

What he got: 10,000 square feet over four floors, a commercial kitchen, a roof garden, a café seating 40 to 50, a yoga hall, a library, two onsens, and rooms already fitted out in ryokan style — 11 per Vulcan Post; the Trip.com listing shows 10. The price was seven figures, financed with an equity loan against his Singapore home plus savings. His advice on that structure is blunt: don't sell your primary residence. "If you sell it and something goes bad, it's very hard to climb back onto the property ladder," he said.

The running costs are where the story stops being romantic. Monthly operating costs average around S$30,000 by his account, spiking to about S$60,000 in months when the boiler and the elevator — idle for four years — both needed work. Ray has drawn no salary for close to a year and a half.

The language problem became a hiring filter. Toyama has no expat bubble, so he recruited bilingual locals: a half-Singaporean general manager, a half-Brazilian front-desk lead, a half-Filipino chef, a Thai barista, two Taiwanese staff with 20 years in Toyama, and a Japanese co-CEO raised in California — three full-time and six part-time people. "Because I can't speak Japanese, I'm attracting local people who can speak English and Japanese to come work for me," he said. "In a small town like Toyama, that immediately stands out." Their job is to be the bridge in a city where English menus are rare.

The product is deliberately not a traditional ryokan. No kaiseki dinner, which keeps rooms from around ¥14,400 a night (roughly S$120). Breakfast is house sourdough; when his baker fell through, his mother flew in for three months and trained the team with a starter carried from Singapore. "It's a mini resort in a small hotel in the city," Ray said.

The soft launch — friends and family over two months — produced one small proof point: a group of eight from Taiwan booked two nights and stayed a week. A TikTok clip of the build drew close to 700,000 views. The setbacks arrived on schedule too. The hotel licence only came through in June, four years in; shortly after, per Vulcan Post, his visa renewal was rejected under tightened immigration rules. He now runs the back end from Singapore while a co-partner handles the ground, and says he intends to head back.

He projects a 10% return over ten years and is in no hurry. The nearer measure is modest: open in September, earn the first real reviews, and prove that a Singaporean who doesn't speak Japanese can run a ryokan in a town most people have never heard of. "I felt that by taking on Hooray Toyama, I was giving it a chance to succeed," he said.

The takeaway

• Buy the renovation, not the dream. Someone else spent millions restoring the building and ran out of time. Ray's edge was patience and a redirected budget, not construction.
• Keep the contingency asset. An equity loan against a home he still owns, not a sale, funded the bet. The downside stays survivable.
• Turn your gap into your filter. Not speaking the language forced a bilingual team — exactly what foreign guests in a Japanese-only town need.

🌏 Around the Region

• Singapore: Winnie Ong started fashion label Young Hungry Free in 2012 at 19, during a gap year, by asking for her S$1,400 retail salary in advance and shooting from her bedroom on a second-hand DSLR. Fourteen years on the brand launches almost weekly in small, reorderable batches, and in 2025 Blackpink's Jisoo wore a piece on stage in Singapore after her stylist simply found the label — no campaign behind it. Vulcan Post (August 2026).
• Hong Kong: Pet-food subscription brand Buddy Bites, founded in 2020, has raised its first institutional round — a US$4.2 million Series A led by Digitalis Ventures — on the back of more than US$6 million in annual recurring revenue, with subscriptions at about 86% of sales, per BackScoop (August 2026). It sells in Hong Kong and Singapore and is heading to Taiwan next.
• Singapore: Kimly, the operator behind 84 coffee shops and food courts housing nearly 180 stalls, is seeking a move from the Catalist board to the SGX mainboard — a vote is expected at an EGM in January 2027 — saying the transfer gives it "a stronger platform to pursue larger-scale and transformative opportunities", per VnExpress (August 2026), citing the filing via The Straits Times. A kopitiam business growing up in public.
• Singapore: Timah Partners, a holding company that buys profitable small businesses whose owners have no successor and trains new CEOs to run them, has secured a US$46.5 million debt facility from UOB, RHB and Genesis Alternative Ventures, a year after a US$50 million Series A, per BackScoop (August 2026). For a founder in their sixties with a good B2B business and no heir, that is a new kind of exit.

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— The Editorial Team