I am a Japanese chef who writes about food —
not as recipes, but as a 5,000-year record of human desire.

I was born in Japan and trained in the kitchens of Lyon and Paris. From there I cooked across Tokyo, Dubai, and Southeast Asia, where I now live, in Ho Chi Minh City.

Each of those kitchens taught me something different. Lyon taught me how precision becomes flavor. Tokyo taught me that flavor is inseparable from discipline. Dubai taught me that taste is political. Southeast Asia taught me that the best cooking often has no recipe at all.

What I kept from all of them is a single habit — of asking why.

Food is the most compressed record we have of how humans have lived, traded, believed, and suffered. A potato chip is not a snack — it is five centuries of salt trade, industrial frying, and mass-scale agriculture, translated onto your tongue in three seconds.

I write because I want to make that translation visible. Not because food history is obscure, but because the structures that shape our appetites are usually hidden from us. When we see them, we eat differently. We cook differently. We understand ourselves differently.

My books work across two registers. Some are essays — what would an Age of Exploration sailor do with potato chips?, what happens when a Heian aristocrat tastes modern shortcake? — that use a single object to crack open a civilization. Others are practical: the logic behind Japanese cooking, decoded into principles that work in any kitchen, anywhere in the world.

For me, both are the same project.

For a long time my books, essays, and kitchen thinking lived in different places. This site brings them together.

If you want to read one of my titles, the Library is the catalog — every current title across English and Japanese editions, linked to every Amazon marketplace where it sells.

If you want to understand where the writing comes from, this is that room.