In order to meet his favorite taste of coffee, he started roasting.

Kinuzari was born in the town of Yubetsu in the Okhotsk region. He grew up in his hometown until he graduated from junior high school. From high school, he went to a high school in Sapporo, a strong basketball team, and started living in a dormitory. After graduation, he went straight to university in Sapporo. While in school, he became active in hitchhiking around the country and became interested in guesthouses, which he learned about during a trip to Southeast Asia.

Photo by ocarina

When I returned to Japan, I thought I would like to work in a guesthouse, so I did some research and found " Time Peace Apartment" (now closed) in Sapporo, which was a pioneer of the guesthouse boom in Japan. At first I worked there as a helper, but one of the staff members was going to start a new guesthouse, so I moved there when I graduated.

On the first floor of the guesthouse was Kawai Coffee, which specialized in specialty coffee beans and roasted its own coffee. Influenced by this, Kinuzuri-san gradually began to drink coffee with an awareness of the beans.

Photo by ocarina

But even though he tried many different kinds of coffee, he couldn't find a coffee taste he liked. I thought, "Maybe I can make better coffee by roasting it myself? So I started to buy green coffee beans and roast them in my store.

However, he was unable to produce the flavor he liked. Eventually, at a bean shop he went to, he came across naturally refined coffee and realized that "this is the taste I like," which led him to start roasting and selling coffee beans that are natural.

Photo by ocarina

In 2017, he launched " Kinubari Coffee " and gradually expanded his activities by opening coffee stalls at events and wholesaling beans.

He plans events to increase the number of adults playing in nature.

Time goes back and forth, but it was 2013 when he started working at the guesthouse. The following year, in 2014, Kinuzari founded a voluntary organization called "Earth Friends Camp (EFC). This was the result of activities that had been going on since his student days.

My father, a public servant, ran an outdoor club in my hometown, and he used to take me canoeing and mountain climbing from a young age. Because of this, I was interested in environmental education when I was in college. I personally obtained certifications and took courses, but when I was working part-time at an environmental NPO in Tobetsu Town, I suddenly thought, 'Even if I wanted to educate children about the environment, it would be meaningless if the parents were not interested.

Parents must first be interested in the environment and think that playing in nature is fun before environmental education can start. Mr. Kinuzuri felt this way and decided to make even a simple camping trip with friends into an event. and started producing events centered on the outdoors.

I don't think we have made a big impact on society, but when I see that participants who didn't know how to play outdoors are now actively climbing mountains and becoming more environmentally conscious, I think we are a little closer to what we wanted the world to be like," he said. I think we are getting a little closer to the direction we wanted the world to go.

The timing was right, and he went to Kamikawa-cho with his friends.

Eventually, people who had attended our events began to work with us, and we began to make more and more friends. The next turning point came in 2018. It was when Kinubari Coffee opened a stall at the autumn foliage event held in Sounkyo, Kamikawa Town.

I was staying in Kamikawa with my family for three days, and just then, Kamikawa Town started accepting applications for the Regional Development Cooperation Corps. And it was a little different from the usual recruitment. It was called the ' Kamika Work Project, ' and they were looking for people who would pursue interesting things and have an impact on the town.

The cooperatives were called "producers" and recruited in four areas: food, outdoor, lampwork (now crafts), and community. When Mr. Kinujari was somehow thinking, "If I were to do it, what would it be?" his wife gave him a surprising answer, "I think I'll apply for the Lampwork Producer position. Later that day, an EFC staff member began to say, "Well, I'll apply to be a community producer," and similarly, staff members who supported EFC's activities also began to apply to be outdoor producers. (Currently, there is also a job title of "Creative Producer.")

) "Well then, you've filled them all. Let's all move here together! And when we went for the interviews, we were really all hired. That was at the end of 2018.

Instead of relying on the land, we create a rich life by ourselves.

Emigrating with a group of friends. It is encouraging, but how did you feel about going to Kamikawa, a town you had no connection to?

I don't think it matters much which town I live in. At least, as long as I have friends nearby, I am happy anywhere. I don't depend on the land for an affluent life; I have to make it affluent myself..." In this case, more than one person is better than one. In this case, I think that more than one person can help me realize a richer life together.

He decided to move to Sapporo because, although he loves the city, he wanted to be closer to nature where he could play and raise his children in the same kind of environment where he grew up. If the timing had been different, they might have moved to a town other than Kamikawa, so perhaps it was fate in that sense as well.

Since arriving in Kamikawa, she has been busy roasting beans and serving hand-drip coffee in the café space of "Taisetsu Kamikawa Nukumo," a complex equipped with a playroom and free space, as well as providing monthly live broadcasts of information about Kamikawa.

Nukumo's free space

At the same time, there was talk of incorporating EFC in order to commercialize the activities we had been doing as a voluntary organization. I thought that, as an extension of what I had been doing since I was a student, if I could create many more opportunities for the general public to put themselves in nature.... Kamikawa has facilities suitable for outdoor weddings, and when I proposed this to the town hall, they were very pleased and said, 'If you can use it in that way, we couldn't be happier.

At that time, Kinuzuri was struck by a staff member who said, "We want to create a place where we, who live here now, can think together about making use of what we have to create connections with the outside world and improve our lives.

We want to create a place where we can connect with people outside of our daily lives and think together about how to improve our lives," he said. We said, "Let's create such a place together. That is why we opened the grand opening of " PORTO," an exchange and coworking space in Kamikawa-cho in October of this year.

The town will become more interesting if a breeze from outside comes in.

In creating PORTO, we placed importance on "creating a reason for people from outside to come. Community spaces tend to be for town residents only, so we also set up a counter that provides tourist information and offers immigration counseling. However, there may not be many people who come all the way out here just for that.

That's why we created the coworking space. I had seen people working on their computers in the parking lots of convenience stores, picking up free Wi-Fi, so I thought maybe if there was a coworking space, they would stop by."

When they advertised, they attracted more than 10 members, both in and out of town, and someone uses PORTO every day. With a regular breeze coming in from the outside, there is a sense that interesting chemical reactions will spontaneously occur. That is also one of Mr. Kinuzuri's aims.

I prefer to entertain myself rather than have others entertain me. Moreover, I really enjoy working together with others to make things happen that I could not do alone. I hope that new things will be born out of these accidental encounters.

In the near future, there is a possibility that I will have accomplished something that I have not even thought of today. It is this sense of excitement that drives Mr. Kinuzuri today.