What is “Yashoku”?
It means going out into the wild to harvest and eat the plants, animals, fungi, and other life forms that dwell there.
Once an essential survival skill for humankind, it is now an act largely forgotten by modern society.
Yet there is someone who unearths this lost sensibility—lightly, and yet with profound depth.
A YouTuber known as the “Yashoku Hunter,” Akira Takemoto redefines the ancient practice of foraging—transforming it into intellectual entertainment for an age of information and overabundance.

For MAWSIM, whose guiding theme is rediscovery, it was a long-standing dream: to venture deep into an uncharted jungle and encounter a primal, fragrant nostalgia—a return to the wild. It was a perfect pairing.

Akira Takemoto
YouTuber/essayist/manga storywriter/media personality

A graduate of Waseda University’s School of Education, he makes a living through yashoku—gathering and cooking wild plants, animals, and fungi—and shares these experiences through various media. His YouTube channel, “Yashoku Hunter Akira Takemoto,” currently has over 480,000 subscribers. He has published multiple books and appeared widely in TV and print.
X：@tetsuto_w
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSbe4o0yCVbo9cUxAPT9t_g

Takemoto’s foraging often targets invasive species.
In fact, it might be more accurate to say he goes after them deliberately.
His approach carries a wry sort of enlightenment: rather than denouncing the distortions humans have wrought upon nature, why not eat the problem—and enjoy it?

One such target was water hyacinth, an invasive aquatic plant now spreading across Japan.
Naturally, it led him to MAWSIM, which uses it as one of its ingredients.
Takemoto resonated deeply with our philosophy—an attempt to turn ecological challenges into something of value through the act of distillation.
We’ve since collaborated on several video projects—including one featuring MAWSIM’s Nishiyori—shifting gradually from dialogue to co-creation.

Akira Takemoto Digs for Roots

It all began with an invitation.
A message arrived from Shinta Mani Wild, a luxury resort in Cambodia: “Come experience the jungle for yourself.”

Nestled deep in the Cardamom Mountains, the resort’s 350-hectare grounds are cloaked in tropical rainforest—still largely untouched by human hands.
Wild spices and herbs grow here in rare abundance.
In this mythical jungle, MAWSIM sensed the shadow of something long pursued: a fragrance where surprise and nostalgia intersect.

Akira Takemoto immediately came to mind.
To search for scent, side by side in the jungle.
To distill a gin that could bottle the forest whole—through the botanicals he chose by eye, nose, and tongue.

We reached out. The answer came back without hesitation.
It would be his first shoot abroad, but Takemoto had long been drawn to Cambodia—sometimes dubbed the holy ground of wild food.
We met on the ground, and the collaboration began: part filming, part fieldwork, part joint creation.

With Shinta Mani Wild as our basecamp, we entered the jungle.
The humidity. The soil. The plants. The drifting scents carried on every breeze.
Takemoto took it all in with his body, guided by an instinct sharpened by long experience, as he discerned which botanicals were worth harvesting.

Among them, two stood out for MAWSIM: wild turmeric and wild galangal—both rhizomes of the ginger family, native to tropical Asia.

They had an aroma only wild plants possess—untamed and unruly.
Turmeric offered a deep warmth, a faint sweetness, and the bitter breath of wet earth.
Galangal struck with bracing clarity, like a gust of tropical wind, and pierced the senses with its sharp, spicy sting.

When blended with MAWSIM’s signature Spices & Herbs base, these roots awakened something buried deep: a raw wildness, alive beneath the layered strata of spice history.

A Drop of Jungle Turned into Memory

Both yashoku and distillation are expressions of intellectual inquiry.
In the age of hunter-gatherers, much of human knowledge was devoted to discerning what was edible; distillation, which traces its origins to Mesopotamia, would later become one of the wellsprings of science itself.
Seen this way, the two can be understood as practices that stand in the in‑between—at the threshold where wildness and culture meet.

Yashoku lies closer to the wild: more primal, more elemental, a succession of one‑time encounters.
Distillation, by contrast, may be an attempt to gently connect and seal such ephemeral fragments of wild food—reconstructing them within the language of scent, and giving fleeting moments both structure and aftertaste.
And so, under the cork, a memory that once traveled between wildness and culture continues to drift quietly, even now.

MAWSIM GIN JUNGLE