A Message from the Representative

For as long as I can remember, food has been at the center of my life. Cooking beside my mother, who ran a cooking school, with vegetables we grew in the garden was play and lesson at once — a precious time in which I came to feel, with my own hands, how much an ingredient is worth.

My father's work often took us abroad, and the cuisine, the gestures, the culture and the spaces of the restaurants we visited shaped my sensibility. Long before I could grasp differences in flavor or technique, my body learned table manners, the handling of cutlery, and the sense of savoring a space as a whole.

What France taught me about the essence of food

The three years I spent in France as a student shaped my values deeply. With my host family, gathering at the table each day to talk over what had happened was simply ordinary; at the French restaurant where I trained, conversation arose naturally through food. In the town, people lingered on the terraces even on weekday afternoons — the very time spent over wine and a meal was treated as something of value. That culture of gathering around food was woven into daily life. In those warm days I came to know, from the heart, that food is not mere nutrition but a culture that connects one person to another.

At the same time, a certain unease at the “over-worked” flavors I met abroad became the occasion to rediscover the greatness of Japanese cuisine — cooking that brings out the ingredient, the expression of the four seasons, the care held within each gesture. There lives a culture delicate and profound enough to be proud of before the world.

This realization became my starting point, and from my university years I began visiting restaurants in earnest — several hundred a year, from casual eateries to Michelin establishments, and on to restaurants and wineries abroad, all confirmed with my own feet. Through that accumulation I grew certain that Japanese food holds the power to move the world, and at the same time a sense of mission grew steadily within me: to pass this precious shoku culture on, rightly, to the world and to the next generation.

Toward inheriting and renewing shoku culture

Today Japan's restaurant industry faces structural problems — chronic shortages of people, the difficulty of management, the absence of successors. I want to change the reality in which good restaurants cannot last, and to become a presence that carries the hopes of artisans and chefs into the future. It was from that wish that I founded JSTARs.

Guided by the conviction of carrying Japan's shoku to the world, we are building the foundation to inherit excellent food-service brands — Michelin establishments among them — and to convey their value to the world. Protecting the craft and the spirit of the artisans, fusing management insight with a global perspective, we will renew and advance the power that Japanese food holds within it. That is the mission of JSTARs.

“To create a stirring future for shoku.” Toward that end, we will join hands with everyone connected to food and continue to take on the challenge.