Tokuyama Hiroaki was born in 1960 into a fisherman's family on Lake Yogo, the small, still lake in the snow country north of Biwa. He trained at the Kyoto ryōtei Kawashige, came home as head chef of the lakeside kokuminshukusha, and there met Koizumi Takeo, the fermentation scholar who directed an institute at Yogo. Out of that meeting — and with his wife Junko — he opened Tokuyamazushi on the shore in 2004: five rooms above the water, and a kitchen that treats fermentation as the local grammar rather than a technique.
What you eat
The house funazushi is the center of the table: roe-bearing nigoro-buna, salted for six months and then fermented in rice for a full year, served with honey and sansho — the acidity rounded, not disguised. Around it, the seasons of deep Kohoku: saba narezushi with cheese and tomato sauce; a winter hotpot of white-fatted bear brought in by local hunters; wild boar, deer and duck; wild eel from the lake itself, grilled over charcoal; mountain vegetables; and to finish, a rice ice cream of the master's own patent.
The lake and the guides
The house stands on the shore below Shizugatake, twenty minutes on foot from Yogo station, and a stay is how it is best understood — dinner, the open-air bath, breakfast, the lake at first light. The Tabelog Award held it in Silver from 2019 through 2025, Bronze in 2026; Gault & Millau gives three toques. Michelin publishes no Shiga edition, so the guide came to the master by way of Ginza: 百薬 by 徳山鮓, the Tokyo restaurant he supervises, took a star in the 2026 edition.
Save it for
The traveler willing to wait months and ride to the end of the line for a cuisine that exists nowhere else — one lake, one family, and time itself doing the cooking.
