Tatsuo Kan (KOJO, Kizuna): Every Crisis, a New Business
Tatsuo Kan was feeding 8,000 people at a single event in Tokyo when he realized the catering business he'd spent eight years building was going to kill him. Not metaphorically. The Japanese have a word for it: karoshi, death from overwork. He had celebrity clients, government contracts, five large parties a day. He also had a wife, Kanako, and two small children he barely saw.
So he walked away from all of it.
The long way to Penticton
The Kans wanted North America. They'd met in Arizona and the pull westward never left. First stop: Sun Valley, Idaho, where Tatsuo planned to open a restaurant. But the American immigration math didn't add up. Thousands of dollars in work visa fees, no guarantee of permanent residency. He and Kanako sat on the couch and talked themselves out of it.
Then Saskatoon. A friend had mentioned Canada's provincial nominee programs. Tatsuo flew out, explored the options, and stopped in Vancouver on the way home. At a high-end sushi restaurant on Robson Street, a chef told him to forget the prairies and move to the coast. The chef gave him an immigration lawyer's number.
When Tatsuo called, the lawyer laughed. "Kan, you wouldn't believe it, but I was just chatting with your wife." Kanako had found the same lawyer independently. They'd arrived at the same conclusion without telling each other.
The family landed in Vancouver in June 2014. Tatsuo spent two years managing a string of Japanese restaurants on Robson Street, training staff across three locations. It was good work, steady immigration points. But Vancouver wasn't the plan. On a flight over the South Okanagan, the couple looked at each other and smiled. "That's it. This will be our home."
They settled in Summerland and put every dollar of savings into a house.
Better guest experience. Bigger nights. $299. Once.
Sold out on day one
Penticton had eight sushi restaurants when Kan assessed the market. He figured he could do it differently. He found a rental space on Skaha Lake Road with equipment included, signed the lease in late fall when foot traffic was thin, and opened Sushi KOJO on Valentine's Day 2017.
They ran out of food on opening day.
What followed was 70-hour weeks, a team that eventually grew to 28 employees (many recruited directly from Japan, because local applicants weren't showing up), and a concept Kan describes with disarming simplicity: "We're not high-end, we're not junk food, not fast food, we're in the middle. We're homey. We're simple and we're fast. We don't even have a dessert."
The name carries weight he doesn't broadcast. Kojo, in Kan's words, means "walking on water, faith in God and trusting that nature and people will support you." Every daily staff meeting circles three words: energize, impress, connection. "We want to hear 'wow.' We want that connection."
When the staff said no
The expansion story is the one that tells you the most about how Kan runs things.
During a slow winter season, he offered his team an out. Fewer covers, tight margins, the honest question: does anyone want to leave? Nobody did. Instead, his staff told him to open a second location and offered to help manage it. KOJO Westside opened in West Kelowna in late 2019. A third concept, KOYA, followed in 2021, a fast-casual sister spot a block from Okanagan Lake Beach.
Then the contraction. Kan sold KOYA in March 2023. In January 2025, he closed KOJO Westside permanently, citing the same problem that shapes every independent restaurant conversation in Canada right now: ongoing staff shortages. The chef who built his Penticton team by recruiting directly from Japan couldn't find enough people to keep a second location running.
The original KOJO on Skaha Lake Road is still open, still busy, still the anchor. But Kan had already started building something else.
The sake maker who doesn't drink sake
This is where Tatsuo Kan's story stops being a restaurant profile and becomes something stranger.
His koji supplier, a fermentation expert named Yoshi Kasugai from Nagano, had been making fermented rice for KOJO since day one from a small operation in Richmond, BC. Kasugai used a four-centuries-old technique: rice wrapped in shiki-nuno cloth, left to ferment slowly and naturally. He didn't own a car. He delivered sake by bus.
When Kasugai lost his building lease around 2021, Kan called him. Two weeks later, Kasugai showed up in Penticton with a condition: the two of them would make sake together.
There's a problem with this origin story, and Kan tells it every time anyone asks. "I don't even drink sake. I didn't really even like sake. But I had no choice. I had to make sake. His fermented rice was too good to say no."
They built a brewery adjacent to KOJO Penticton. Licensing took over a year. Five varieties launched in 2023 under the Kizuna name, including a sparkling sake designed specifically for people who think they don't like sake. The Junmai won silver at the 2023 Sélections Mondiales Des Vins Canada and bronze at the Los Angeles International Competitions. The Nigori took a gold for package design.
"I'm so happy," Kan told Castanet. "We are able to deliver our culture, real culture, to the Okanagan, to Canada."
Every crisis is the next business
While waiting that year for the liquor licence, Kasugai had time on his hands. He'd brought Kan a gift on arrival: soy sauce and miso he'd made using the same fermentation method as the koji, but with soybeans. Kan, despite being Japanese, said he was shocked to learn that major commercial producers press the fat out of soybeans and sell it separately. Not pressing it out produces better flavour.
They made 2,000 litres of soy sauce. Customers started asking about the sauces they were already using at the restaurant. Six Kizuna sauce varieties followed: BBQ, poke, sesame, teriyaki, spicy mayo, and chili. All gluten-free. All except the mayo, plant-based. Kan's framing: "All our sauces are designed for people who are too tired to cook."
His own assessment of the pivot was blunt: "I knew then that this would be a great business. I felt it had more potential than sake."
That sentence captures something worth sitting with. A restaurateur who built a sushi empire, then an award-winning sake brand, now thinks bottled sauces are the bigger play. Not because sushi and sake failed. Because restaurants are labour-intensive, exposed to staffing crises, and fundamentally hard to scale. Packaged products travel further with fewer people.
What other independents can take from this
Kan's story isn't about having a plan. It's about responding to what shows up. A koji supplier loses his lease and you become a sake maker. Your staff refuses to quit and you open a second location. The second location can't find staff and you close it without drama. Every ending funds the next beginning.
The throughline is a willingness to contract. Selling KOYA, closing West Kelowna, focusing the restaurant energy on one location while building product lines that don't depend on hiring sushi chefs from Japan. It's not failure. It's an independent operator reading the conditions and adjusting.
Nine years after selling out on opening day in Penticton, Kan runs a restaurant, a sake brewery, and a sauce company from the same stretch of Skaha Lake Road. He still doesn't drink sake.
Sources: City of Penticton, Castanet, KelownaNow, iNwine, PentictonNow.
