YAMAU coffee stand

Yamau Coffee Stand sits in what was the former Yamau Kamaboko shop. Founded in 1915 by Okamoto Udayū (岡本右佐太), the shop was a kamaboko (蒲鉾) specialty shop, and operated for more than a 100 years before the third-generation owner, Okamoto Yukio (岡本幸雄), was forced to close it in 2015 and retire due to injury.

At the time, the owner’s son, and founder of Yamau Coffee Stand, Okamoto Bunta (岡本聞太) was on a working holiday in Australia. As someone who grew up in the Kurashiki Bikan district, he decided that he wanted to give back to the town by setting up a new business. He wanted to also leverage from his lived experience in Australia, and he realized that coffee culture was a major part of life there. Even though he didn’t like coffee until he went to Australia, he realized that there were many coffee stands there and people deeply appreciated and enjoyed coffee. Eventually, he himself got captivated by coffee as well, and he decided to set up a takeout coffee stand back in Kurashiki. While there were cafes around, there weren’t any takeout coffee stands, and he wanted to encourage people to wander around the beautiful townscape while sipping on a great cup of coffee.

As someone whose parents both ran the Yamau Kamaboko store, his father made the kamaboko and his mother sold them. He wanted to inherit the shop’s name to continue on its legacy. The original shop was also partially named after his grandfather, taking a character off his first name (右) and attaching it to the kanji for mountains (山), the name Yamau (山右) was created. To modernize it, the name Yamau is only written in alphabets today, but some of the old signs, like the Kamaboko shop’s sign still remain as heritage within the store.