🎙️VOICES #2 Naoko Nagisa — Feeding the “Will to Live” Through Food and Connection

Cooking is more than a skill — it’s a quiet form of strength.

In Aomori - JAPAN, Naoko Nagisa has spent nearly 20 years nurturing that strength through “food” and “connection,” building warm, resilient spaces where people feel they belong.

Next year marks 20 years since she started her entrepreneurial journey.

A food-education specialist, a disaster-prevention advisor, and a creator of places where people feel they belong — her work has always circled around the same axis: food as life force, community as support system.

All while raising a 23-year-old daughter and a 9-year-old son, and navigating earthquakes, pandemics, and the slow shifts of society, Naoko has remained rooted in the same question:

How do we protect the simple act of living well?

The moment everything changed

Her turning point arrived during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.

“People had rice and water… but didn’t know how to cook it.”Watching this, Naoko felt a sharp realization: Cooking isn’t just a hobby — it’s survival.

Since then, she has taught everything from clay-pot rice to rolling-stock cooking with dried foods and canned goods. Preparedness not as fear, but as part of daily life.

And yet, she laughs when she admits:

“I was never good at cooking. Being clumsy helps me understand people who struggle.”

In her classes, she teaches from the same eye-level, the same starting point. She knows exactly where people trip — and how to guide them past the moment they want to give up.

Food, heart, and the invisible threads between people

In her early twenties, she worked in an elderly care home — an experience that shifted how she saw “eating.”

Very few people can eat what they want, with their own strength, she learned.

Some residents had family visiting often. Others waited for no one.

Through this, she realized:

Food is not just nutrition. It’s dignity. It’s connection. It’s a form of love that doesn’t need words.

Her own upbringing shaped her too. As a teenager, her father fell ill; her mother, with no license and no work experience, struggled. She grew up without a model of “a working adult.”

It wasn’t until her late twenties that she felt a quiet voice inside:

“This can’t be my whole world.”And she stepped out and decided to start her own path.

A community kitchen, a children’s dining room, a home for everyone

Naoko once let go of her shop during the pandemic, but eventually opened a new café, a kitchen studio, and a guesthouse.

She’s now building what she calls “the town’s dining table” ; a space that is both a community diner and a children’s cafeteria.

Her time volunteering in Noto deepened one wish:

A place that is a community hub on ordinary days,and an emergency refuge when life shakes unexpectedly.

Aomori deserves that, she believes and she intends to build it.

The future? She doesn’t force it.

Naoko’s philosophy is simple:

Do what you genuinely want. Even losing a little sleep doesn’t matter.

Don’t do what you don’t want to do.

But sleep and time in the onsen are non-negotiable.

“I don’t plan my future by deadlines,” she says.

“I just want to create what feels right for the moment , things that look fun.”

Naoko loves Aomori, but she could be herself anywhere. That softness, that flexibility, is what makes her “second chapter” feel airy, open, unbound.

Her story reminds us:

When the feeling of “I want to do this” appears, quietly and honestly — the future begins to move.

From Naoko, you sense that kind of courage.A still, steady determination that comes not from ambition, but from choosing life , one meal, one conversation, one connection at a time.