About SatoYori

Japan’s countryside is changing.

For generations, the villages and small towns of rural Japan have developed their own foods, recipes, and ways of cooking. Many of these dishes were never written down. They were learned at home, passed from parent to child, made from ingredients grown nearby, and adapted over decades—or even centuries—to the landscape and seasons of a particular place.

Today, many of those traditions are at risk of disappearing.

As younger generations have left rural communities in search of education and careers in Japan’s larger cities, villages across the country have grown smaller and older. Homes have been abandoned, schools have closed, and in some places entire communities are slowly disappearing.

When a village disappears, something less visible can disappear with it: the food.

A recipe known by a handful of families. A particular way of preparing a local vegetable. A pickle made only in one valley. A soup served at a village festival. A dish a grandmother has cooked for fifty years without ever measuring the ingredients or writing the recipe down.

These are small pieces of Japan’s culinary history, and once they are gone, they can be extraordinarily difficult to recover.

Our Mission

SatoYori is dedicated to finding, documenting, and preserving the recipes and food traditions of rural Japan.

We travel through rural communities, particularly those affected by depopulation, to learn about the foods that are still being made there. We eat at small restaurants and inns, visit farms and markets, talk with local residents, and, whenever someone is willing to share, record the recipes and stories behind the dishes we encounter.

Some are well-known regional specialties. Others are ordinary home-cooked meals that may never have appeared in a cookbook or restaurant. We believe both are worth preserving.

Our goal is not simply to create another collection of Japanese recipes. We want to record where these foods came from, who made them, why they were eaten, and what they meant to the communities that created them.

SatoYori is our attempt to give these recipes another home—one that can remain even as the places they came from continue to change.

Share a Recipe

SatoYori cannot find these recipes alone.

Some of the most important recipes are the ones that will never appear in a cookbook or an online search. They live in family kitchens, handwritten notebooks, memories, and the knowledge of parents and grandparents.

If you know a recipe from rural Japan that you believe should be preserved, we would love to hear from you.

You might have a recipe passed down through your family, a dish associated with your hometown or village, an old handwritten recipe, or simply a memory of something a parent or grandparent used to make.

You do not need to have exact measurements or formal instructions. If all you have is a description, photograph, family story, or memory, please send it. Those details can be just as valuable as the recipe itself.

When possible, tell us the name of the dish, where in Japan it comes from, who taught it to you, how it was traditionally made, and any story or memory associated with it.

SatoYori is ultimately about more than food. It is about preserving a small part of the knowledge held by Japan’s rural communities—and making sure that the tastes, stories, and traditions of those places have somewhere to live on.