When Osaka-based entrepreneur Ray Kruger, 60, takes a break from a 70-hour work week to reminisce, his stories command attention. He explains about the haunted Buddhist temple he owns in the mountains near Kameoka, Kyoto Prefecture, a 440-year-old registered national treasure still used for occasional funerals and village rites, and his hilltop villa on an island in the Seto Inland Sea, where he brings friends and employees for water skiing and boating.

He details visits to 90 countries and recounts the ups and downs of a former friendship with Hollywood action star Steven Seagal when Seagal was just a guy running an aikido dojo down the street from Kruger's office. He also describes the less glamorous aspects of operating a 21-employee travel agency and an English-language school at a time when many of his competitors have not survived.

Thin and wiry, with a shock of gray hair, Kruger exudes a low-key and friendly intensity. He grew up in a small town in northern Alberta, where his father ran a machine shop. After university in Alberta he and a friend motorcycled throughout the United States and Mexico, the first in a series of jaunts that would take him to dozens of countries over a seven-year period.