Nostalgic Scenes, Great Food, Warm People:Japanese Falling in Love with Tainan

TIL Space is a simply and brightly decorated restaurant located near Tai­nan’s National ­Cheng Kung University. As the lunch rush winds down, co-owner Kei Ta­ka­ha­shi writes two phrases in Japanese on a whiteboard. “Memorable things that family members have said,” and “things Taiwanese and Japanese respect and admire” are the discussion topics for today’s meeting of the TIL exchange group.

The seven or eight customers who file into the restaurant at meeting time include Taiwanese students looking to practice their Japanese, working folks who used to live in Japan, and Japanese studying Mandarin in Taiwan. Ta­ka­ha­shi kicks off the laid-back Sunday-afternoon “Taiwanese–Japanese exchange” with a quick introduction, then the conversations in Mandarin and Japanese begin.

Chef Toru Onishi and his wife Tsai Hsin-hsuan like the slower pace of life in Tainan. Onishiya, their charming restaurant, serves up authentic homestyle Japanese cooking.

The TIL in the restaurant’s name is short for “travel, information and language,” and provides a succinct summary of its mission statement. The 29-year-old Ta­ka­ha­shi founded it with 33-year-old Ka­tsu­hiko Oku­ni­shi specifically as a venue for language exchange.

Both men know Taiwan well. Ta­ka­ha­shi, a Tokyo native who studied design at university, first visited ­Taipei, Tai­chung and Kao­hsiung eight years ago while on a week-long vacation in Taiwan. He learned still more about it through work and his relationship with a Taiwanese girlfriend. Oku­ni­shi, meanwhile, became very interested in Taiwan while working with Taiwanese students at Osaka International University.

Seeking a reprieve from overwhelming job stress, the two began studying Mandarin at NCKU in 2012. After four months of classes, they decided to stay and put their long-held entrepreneurial dreams into practice.

Oku­ni­shi says that he often had friends in Taiwan asking him for advice about traveling and studying in Japan. Recognizing that the market demand for such information was far greater than he’d imagined and that Tainan had few eateries offering language-learning and cultural-exchange opportunities, the two men decided to create TIL Space.

Oku­ni­shi wanted their venture to offer something more casual than typical language education, and liked the idea of enabling customers to learn while chatting over food and drinks. TIL therefore set aside two-hour blocks of time on Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons, and provided customers with conversation starters such as “Japanese you won’t learn in school,” “Tokyo fashion guide,” and “the Kan­sai dialect of Japanese.”

An average of more than 20 people have attended each of these sessions since TIL opened its doors in ­February.

“We’re planning a sushi party next,” says Oku­ni­shi.

While they have had parental support for their decision, their overseas entrepreneurial venture looks odd to Japanese eyes. Ta­ka­ha­shi explains that the notion of “employment for life” remains prevalent among the older generation of Japanese, and parents still believe that it’s crucial for their children to find steady work after graduating from school. Though the younger generation don’t fully subscribe to their parents’ values, Ta­ka­ha­shi and Oku­ni­shi’s friends were nonetheless surprised by their plan to go into business in Taiwan.

The handsome Ta­ka­ha­shi and the sunny Okunishi have been living in Tainan for nearly two years now. When asked why they like it, both say, “I love the food!”

Many a Japanese expat has fallen under the spell of Tainan’s delicious food and warm, friendly people.

Oni­shi­ya is a charming little Japanese restaurant on the other side of the city. Though 28-year-old co-owner Toru Oni­shi hails from Ao­mori, a northern Japanese prefecture known for its hot springs, he’s a typical Taiwanese son-in-law. The professional chef moved here from Japan earlier this year to open the restaurant with his Taiwanese wife, Tsai Hsin-­hsuan.

A travel lover, Oni­shi heard about the culinary and cultural wonders of Taiwan while on a working vacation in Australia in 2012. Only vaguely familiar with the historical links between Taiwan and Japan, he decided to take a working holiday in Taiwan as well, and made Taiwan’s night markets his first destination.

The appearance in local night markets of someone with less than fluent Mandarin often piqued the curiosity of fellow shoppers, and Oni­shi frequently found himself taken under the wing of elderly grannies.

After he’d been here three or four months, a friend recommended he move down to Kao­hsiung. There he met Tsai while on a group outing. When they married, people assumed that Tsai spoke fluent Japanese, and that her language skills had brought them together. The truth was just the opposite. “Actually, it was Toru’s Mandarin that was excellent,” laughs Tsai.

Though Oni­shi found work as a chef in an innovative Tokyo restaurant when the couple moved to Japan in 2013, they soon decided to return to Tai­nan to open their own restaurant, one in which Oni­shi would handle menu development and Tsai act as host.

Although Oni­shiya opened in March of 2014, Onishi kept the opening low key. In fact, it wasn’t until popular blogger “Boy London” gave it a writeup that it ­really took off. The restaurant ended up achieving steady business in less than the six months Oni­shi originally forecast, and has since become well known in the local community. The couple is now planning to expand the restaurant’s scope by adding child-friendly Japanese-language education to the menu, making it a place where customers can learn Japanese while enjoying a good meal.

Oni­shiya has brought a bit of Japanese flavor to Tai­nan. Oni­shi himself prefers to take life easy and jokes that while he’s still adapting to life in Taiwan, “Tai­nan sure knows how to live!”

Contrasting Japan with Tai­nan, he says that for all that Japan retains many relics from its past, most are large-scale historic sites. In their everyday lives, people quickly replace old items with new. Oni­shi says Tai­nan’s abundance of old buildings, many from the Japanese colonial era (1895–1945), that are still in use as shops, restaurants and homes reminds him of the Japan of 20 or 30 years ago and puts him in mind of his childhood.

Kei Takahashi (standing at left) and Katsuhiko Okunishi (standing at right) have realized their dream by opening TIL Space, a restaurant where Taiwanese and Japanese can chat together and learn each other’s languages, or use the bulletin board to find language exchange partners.

Hi­ro­yuki Ya­ma­moto sports a dark tan and a purely Taiwanese look as he tools around on his old San­yang motorcycle, but is another Japanese expatriate living in Tai­nan. Tsai met him outside the restaurant one day. “At first I thought he was an older Taiwanese man, but then I noticed his trimmed eyebrows and realized he was Japanese,” she says.

Ya­ma­moto is a generation older than Oni­shi, Ta­ka­ha­shi and Oku­nishi, and has been living in Tai­nan for a decade. He toured the entire island on his first visit here in 1998, then jumped at the chance to work in a Tai­nan hotel in 2004. He’s lived here ever since. He considered going back to Japan when the hotel closed four years ago, but ultimately decided that he was used to living in Tai­nan and wanted to stay.

Now a tour guide and Japanese teacher, Ya­ma­moto occasionally shows Japanese tour groups around Fort Zee­landia, Fort Provintia, the Confucius Temple, and other Tai­nan historic sites.

A ­Kyoto native, Ya­ma­moto isn’t much impressed by historic sites. His true love is the Taiwanese countryside. He often motorcycles to out-of-the-way places such as Tai­nan’s Yu­jing and Zuo­zhen Townships to enjoy a quiet afternoon walking in the countryside and chatting with elderly residents. When we met, the photo folder on his mobile phone was filled with shots from the Night Festival of the Siraya people, which he had attended with friends a few days previously.

Ya­ma­moto’s love of the Taiwanese countryside and the demands of his work have not only made him fluent in Mandarin, but also enabled him to spice up his conversation with some very authentic sounding Taiwanese. And in contrast to some starry-eyed recent arrivals, this old Tainan hand knows: “Living in Taiwan is work, too. You have to give some serious thought to what you’re here for.”

Taking in the National Museum of Taiwan Literature (the seat of the Tai­nan prefectural government in the Japanese era) and the Ha­ya­shi Department Store (a Japanese-era building that was Taiwan’s first department store), you can’t help but be struck by the magnificence of the period architecture. Now, the new arrivals serving up authentic Japanese food and culture on the city’s streets and byways are reigniting Taiwanese–Japanese cultural exchanges, and fitting in perfectly with Tai­nan’s charming blend of old and new.

Onishiya’s popular tonkatsu curry includes a crispy fried pork chop and tender scrambled eggs topped with the restaurant’s rich, fresh curry sauce.