Ten Years of Convenience Store Food, Until I Learned What Dashi Is

I grew up in the countryside of Ehime, in Japan.

After that, I got a job at an advertising agency in Tokyo. I came from the countryside. I had no knowledge of the industry and no special skills. Every day I just tried hard to learn the work. I had no time to cook. I ate convenience store food every day.

Then one day, I went to eat at a Japanese restaurant with a counter.

When I sat down, the chef put a shot glass in front of me. Inside was a gold-colored dashi. He said, “Every dish I serve you today is based on this dashi. Please taste this first.”

I still cannot find good words for how it felt. It was a gentle taste, and a deep one.

I am Japanese, but I had never tasted it

I think there is no Japanese person who does not know dashi. It is in miso soup. It is under simmered dishes. It is under noodles. It is at the bottom of almost every dish we are served.

But if someone asked me, “What is dashi?”, at that time I thought it was the granule type that you dissolve in hot water.

I am Japanese, but I realized I knew nothing about Japan.

After that, I wanted to work with Japanese food. I started visiting the people all over Japan who actually make the ingredients for dashi. Kombu kelp. Katsuobushi, dried bonito. Dried shiitake mushrooms. Iriko, dried sardines. We say “dashi” as one word, but the ingredients are different in every region.

I thought a lot about how to share the beauty of dashi with everyone. But people today are used to convenience. I thought it would be hard for them to spend time and effort on cooking, the way people did before.

With dashi, the important part is the aroma, and drawing the umami out of the ingredients. While I was thinking about this, I began to feel: this is similar to drip coffee.

So I studied a drip-style Drinkable Dashi. I worked on how to bring out the aroma and the umami, and I was able to make it into a product.

And finally, I opened a shop for Drinkable Dashi

In March 2016, I opened a small shop in Mishuku, Tokyo. It was dashi as a drink, like coffee or tea. Drinkable Dashi did not exist in the world, so customers did not know what to do with it.

“Is this soup? Or tea? Can I not use it for cooking?”

Almost every time, this was the question.

Sales did not grow. This continued for years. Should I make the taste easier to understand, like soup? Or was the feeling I had, the first time I drank dashi, wrong? I struggled with this every day.

But I could not let my company die. I helped other companies develop their products, and somehow I kept going.

Then in 2020, with COVID, everything in the world stopped at once.

After all those desperate years, I was able to return to the beginning. Why did I start this work?

I want to connect with the world through food

Umami is a Japanese word. But natural ingredients all over the world have their own umami. Cheese. Anchovies. Tomatoes. Cured ham. Fish sauce. Dried mushrooms. A soup that someone’s grandmother simmered all afternoon, in some country.

Japanese dashi does not assert itself. It is a plain taste. But it is gentle enough to hold other ingredients, and it has the role of bringing out their character and making the whole dish harmonious.

I want to connect with people around the world through food.

I want to respect each country’s ingredients and cooking methods, and at the same time introduce the umami culture that Japan has valued. And I want to connect with people around the world through food, and share it.