We Don’t Discover Japan From Abroad

Wakaba was not created because Japanese food, sake, or wine became fashionable. We did not discover Japan from abroad. We grew up with it.

Wakaba was founded between two places we call home: Tokyo and Oakland. Our roots are Japanese, our relationships are Japanese, and the language we use with our producers is the same language they use with their families, their neighbors, and the people who have supported their businesses for generations.

For us, Japan is not an aesthetic. It is not a marketing category. And it is not a distant market to be researched from across the Pacific.

It is home. Our home. That changes the way we source.

We can call a small winery that has never written an English press release. We can sit across the table from a winemaker in Nagano and hear their story in their own words. We can visit the places where these wines are made, understand why they are made that way, and build relationships that begin long before a bottle reaches California.

Some of the producers we believe in may never appear on an English-language list of “Japanese wineries to watch.” That is exactly the point.

We want to find the winemaker doing something remarkable on just a few hectares of land. The producer whose wines are deeply appreciated within their community but remain largely unknown outside Japan. The person who has never seriously considered America because exporting feels complicated, distant, and unfamiliar.

And when we bring their wines here, our responsibility is not simply to move cases. It is to represent them.

To explain their work without flattening it into a trend. To introduce their wines to restaurants, wine bars, bottle shops, and people who will understand what makes them special. And to make sure that when something travels thousands of miles from Japan to California, its identity does not get lost somewhere along the way.

Wakaba exists in the space between Japan and California because we belong to both. Oakland is our home. Japan is our home.

We understand what it means to bring something from one to the other because we have spent our own lives crossing that same ocean.

And our vision goes both ways.

We want people in California to discover the extraordinary small producers of Japan whose wines rarely make it outside the country. And we want people in Japan to discover the independent winemakers of Northern California whom we know through our life here.

Two places. Two communities. One bridge. There will always be people that see Japan as an opportunity. We see Japan as home.

That is the difference behind Wakaba.