Nice to meet you. My name is Chihiro Okazaki.

I've been asked to write the "food" column for MEYAME. In this first installment, I'd like to introduce myself. I hope you'll enjoy it.

▲A photo of when I invited friends over to enjoy spicy food and wine

In February 2021, I left my hometown of Hiroshima and moved to Tokyo.

I currently work at a grocery store in Tokyo, selling food products and planning and managing events.

Before moving to Tokyo, I worked for a company involved in the tourism industry, mainly in Onomichi City, Hiroshima Prefecture, where I was in charge of planning and producing interior decorations and fixtures for new business launches.

I had the opportunity to meet people active in a variety of fields and regions, including architects, photographers, graphic designers, chefs, and potters, and to learn about a world that I had little exposure to before.

I met Yuri Watanabe ( Yuri-chan ) , the store manager at MEYAME, at that company, and we naturally became friends even though we were in different departments.

▲January 2020. A photo of a natural wine shop we visited together when we went to visit the apparel shop in Takamatsu where Yuri-chan was working at the time.

About five years later, the coronavirus pandemic hit, and as the world changed, I began to think about how I wanted to live my life and what I wanted to value in the future.

Gradually, I began to see work related to food.

I had many relatives and siblings, so eating meals together was a part of my daily routine during my childhood.

In summer and winter, relatives who lived far away would return home and gather in large numbers. They would line up to visit the graves during Obon and to make their first visit of the New Year to the shrine, and then a party would begin, with adults eating and drinking until late into the night. Such a scene was common.

After entering the workforce, I started cooking for friends and family more often, and realized that although I like eating out, I really enjoyed spending time around the dinner table at home and entertaining people, so I began to have a strong desire to be able to create such an environment myself.

This experience prompted me to decide to change jobs, and now I work in the city at a restaurant that values ​​supporting small-scale producers from all over Japan and communicating the background of the ingredients they use.

When I was first approached about writing a "food" column for MEYAME, I was a little hesitant as I had no knowledge or connection to the clothing industry, but MEYAME's concept of "clothes you want to keep forever" overlaps with the idea that I value in my work with food - "I want to cherish things I want to keep using forever, and the choices I make , " and I realized that although the genres are different, the roots are the same.

I am very happy to have been given the opportunity to connect with food through the filter of "MEYAME = clothing," and I am writing this article with a bit of nervousness and excitement about what kind of message I will be able to convey.

Yuri-chan, who also loves good food, and I exchanged information about restaurants that we were interested in, and when we were in Hiroshima we often went out to eat while going for drives.

Most of the time, I ask him to accompany me to a shop that I'm interested in, and since I particularly like natural wine, my selection of shops is biased, so whenever we meet, it's always a wine shop.

Even though Yuri doesn't drink much, she's a kind person who said, "Okay, let's go!" and came along and enjoyed the time together.

Next time, I would like to write about my encounter with natural wine, which was one of the reasons why I decided to pursue a career in food.