Just like Japan
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.