Just three years into his first job, as an editor at one of Tokushima City’s vibrant local entertainment magazines, Takao Yamasaki wound up in the hospital from exhaustion and lack of proper nutrition. Instead of popping a multivitamin, downing another energy drink, and getting back to the desk, he decided to abandon his fledgling media career and go into the restaurant business, providing nutritionally balanced meals for his overworked and underfed friends and colleagues. The YRG Café, named for a nutritional concept taught to children about eating something yellow (carbohydrates), something red (protein), and something green (vegetables) with each meal to ensure a balanced diet, has been running for six years now with this unlikely restaurateur at its helm.

Tokushima prefecture is mainly agricultural, supplying the nearby cities of Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto with rice, vegetables, and fresh seafood. Takao personally tries to use local produce as much as possible in his daily lunch specials. In addition to being a place to get a healthy meal, the café is also where local creative types gather to talk shop, and Takao even has a small corner set up to sell hand-made goods that he and others have made. Upstairs in the loft is a dusty laptop that he uses to design show flyers, update his website, and draft MC scripts for events his friends have asked him to host when he’s not busy singlehandedly cooking food, serving tables, and cleaning up.

“I like to sew clothes too, when I have time,” he says. “Unfortunately, I’ve been busy lately. I lost my help staff again. He found a new dream and suddenly told me he wanted to quit. There are always a lot of artists and editors and stuff around here, outgoing, positive people doing what they love. He was influenced by that and remembered an old dream and decided to leave to pursue it. That happens to me a lot.”

Takao started the restaurant with a rented space, no business experience, and little knowledge of cooking aside from what he learned as a boy, helping his mother prepare meals for big family get-togethers. He credits his ability to jump in and try something new to an influential encounter he had as a teenager.

“I had a friend I’d go skateboarding with. He was American, actually. Jason. He came to Japan to get rich. Jason was always asking me, ‘Do you know any kind of new business I could get into?’ What did I know? I was in high school. All I knew about was skateboarding, so I said, ‘You could make a skateboarding video and sell it.’ I mean, as if! Some crappy video of us skateboarding, who’s going to buy that? But he was like, ‘OK, let’s do it!’ And he went and bought a video camera and there he was, the next day, filming. He was like, if you get an idea, do it, right away! Now he’s got a bakery and a whole bunch of mobile bread shops. Trucks that drive around town selling bread. He taught me to walk the talk. If it weren’t for him, I’d still be in the same place now as I was six years ago, saying, ‘Yeah, wouldn’t it be cool to have a café.’”

Claire Tanaka is a Canadian writer and translator based in Tokushima City.