Yoshio Suzuki

Yoshio Suzuki (鈴木誉志男) is the founder of Saza Coffee and its representative director and chairman.¹ He started the business in 1969 as a seven-tsubo, fifteen-seat coffee shop tucked inside his family’s cinema in Katsuta, Ibaraki, and spent the next four decades turning it into a roastery that travels to origin, farms its own land in Colombia, and — under his son Taro Suzuki — outbids the world for Geisha.²

He is the middle generation of the family: his father ran the theatre, he built the coffee company, and his son runs it now.³

Story

Born into a cinema, not a café

He was born on 23 March 1942 in Katsuta Town, Ibaraki Prefecture — the seaside town that is now Hitachinaka — where his father, Suzuki Tomiji, managed the Katsuta Takarazuka Theatre.² That is the same business, incorporated in the same year, that Saza Coffee is legally descended from.

He read law rather than business, graduating from Toyo University’s Faculty of Law in 1964,¹⁴ and went into show business: he joined Tokyo Rakuten-chi in 1966 and worked as a producer at an entertainment venue.² Toyo University’s own alumni interview puts it simply — “after working as a movie producer, Mr. Suzuki opened the first Saza coffee shop in 1969.”¹

The shop inside the theatre

He came home in 1969 and opened a coffee shop called Saza inside the theatre — seven tsubo (about 23 square metres) and fifteen seats.² A tsubo is the traditional Japanese floor-area unit, roughly the size of two tatami mats; seven of them is a room, not a restaurant.

There was nobody to teach him, so he taught himself: he learned roasting out of trade magazines and started going to see coffee where it grows.² He became the company’s representative director in 1972, and the business was renamed Saza Coffee Corporation in 1991.²⁵

”You cannot be a real coffee seller without knowing where it grows”

The line he keeps returning to, in his own words to his university’s alumni magazine, is 世界の産地を知らずして、真のコーヒー屋にはなれない — “I couldn’t be a true coffee seller without knowing the coffee growing areas in the world.”¹⁴

He acted on it literally. He spent roughly forty years visiting producing countries before the company bought land of its own,⁴ and he frames the payoff as cultural as much as commercial: “building ties founded on trust with local people has been the most important element,” and “by blending historical and cultural elements into coffee, you can offer customers not only flavors to enjoy but also something to ponder.”¹

That instinct — go to the farm, make the relationship, then buy — is the same one his son later industrialised as the “Geisha Hunter” buying trips described on Taro Suzuki. It is also, in effect, an early Japanese version of what the trade now calls direct trade.

Buying a farm in Colombia

Under his leadership Saza did the thing very few roasters anywhere do: it bought its own coffee farm in Cauca, Colombia — the estate this wiki covers as Finca Saza.¹⁶ Toyo University’s interview dates the purchase to 1996;¹⁴ the company’s own farm page dates the opening to 1997;⁶ the Japanese Wikipedia biography says 1998.² See the callout below.

His son later took the farm over, expanding it from 2008 with the former Colombian federation quality director Edgar Moreno and adding a second parcel — the part of the story told on Finca Saza and Federación Nacional de Cafeteros.⁶

Chairman, and the civic half of the job

He handed over day-to-day command and became chairman (会長) in 2005;² Taro Suzuki became president in June 2020.³ Outside the company he has been president of the Hitachinaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry (from 2010), a director of the Japan Coffee Culture Society, a lecturer at Kanazawa University and at a local culinary school, and formerly head of the Katsuta credit union.²

That is a fair description of what Saza actually is: not a start-up roastery, but a long-standing local business in a prefectural town, whose owner sits on the chamber of commerce and whose most famous product happens to be the most expensive coffee on earth. See Japan coffee market for the wider setting.

To verify

When Saza bought the Colombian farm. Three company-linked sources give three years: 1996 (Toyo University’s alumni interview, quoting Suzuki),¹⁴ 1997 (Saza’s own farm-history page),⁶ and 1998 (the Japanese Wikipedia biography of Suzuki).² The Saza Coffee and Finca Saza notes already flag the same disagreement — this note adds the 1996 figure from the university interview, which is the earliest of the three and comes closest to being a first-person statement. None has been checked against a corporate filing or land record. Do not state a single year as fact.

To verify

Which company he is chairman of. Toyo University lists his title as representative director and chairman of “Saza Coffee Holdings Co., Ltd.”,¹⁴ while the entity this wiki documents at Saza Coffee — via Ibaraki Prefecture’s export register — is SAZA COFFEE ROASTER INC. A holding company sitting above an operating company is an ordinary structure and the two are almost certainly related, but no source consulted here sets out the group’s actual shape, so the relationship is an inference.

Not to be confused with

To verify

Two other people and one other company share the name. Research on this topic keeps surfacing (a) a well-known Japanese jazz bassist named Yoshio Suzuki, unrelated to coffee,⁷ and (b) Suzuki Coffee, a separate roastery with a head office in Niigata and a Singapore arm, whose lineage runs back to a Kiyoshi Suzuki who opened a coffee shop with its own roastery in Kojimachi, Tokyo, in 1944.⁸ Nothing consulted here connects either to Yoshio Suzuki or Saza Coffee. Suzuki is one of the most common surnames in Japan; the same caution appears on Taro Suzuki. A secondary coffee wiki also credits “Yoshio Suzuki” with founding Saza in 1969 — the year is right, but that page is a low-authority source and is not what this note rests on.

Related

• Saza Coffee — the company he founded and chairs
• Taro Suzuki — his son, who runs it now
• Finca Saza — the Colombian estate bought under his leadership · Federación Nacional de Cafeteros
• Japan coffee market — the market he built the business in · Specialty Coffee Association of Japan
• Geisha · Best of Panama · Elida Estate — what the company he founded is now known for buying
• Direct trade — the go-to-origin habit he started at Saza
• Kentaro Maruyama — the other Japanese roastery founder who built a business on going to origin himself
• Price Peterson · Peterson family — the equivalent founding generation on the producing side

Official links

• Official site — Saza Coffee (サザコーヒー), the company he founded
• Official — Saza Coffee online shop and farm history pages (saza.coffee)
• (no personal website found)

Footnotes

1. Toyo University — My Philosophy: Yoshio Suzuki × Etsuko Yaguchi, alumni interview (English) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

2. Wikipedia (Japanese) — 鈴木誉志男 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

3. Wikipedia (Japanese) — 鈴木太郎（コーヒー研究家） ↩ ↩²

4. Toyo University — My Philosophy alumni interview (Japanese) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

5. Wikipedia (Japanese) — サザコーヒー ↩

6. Saza Coffee — official farm page, サザ農園について / FINCA SAZA COFFEE ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. Jazz in Japan — Yoshio Suzuki interview (the jazz bassist, a different person) ↩

8. SUZUKI COFFEE — corporate site (a separate company) ↩