①Watch first, touch secondBefore anything else, a film — narrated in English. What koji actually is, what fermentation does, how it meets your gut microbiome, and how the seasonings you're about to make are made.

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②Meet four molds, not one
Yellow, black, white and red koji, side by side. One family, four different organisms, four completely different flavours. Most people in Japan have only ever met the yellow one.

③Sow the spores yourself
You'll inoculate steamed rice with tane-koji — the seed spores — with your own hands. This is the step that turns rice into koji, and almost nobody outside a brewery has ever done it.

④Koji-no-hana, under the microscope
The moment
Koji-no-hana — "the flower of koji" — is the white bloom that opens as the mold matures. You'll see it alive, magnified, with your own eyes. Not a diagram. The organism itself. This is the part everyone reaches for their phone.

⑤Four seasonings, demonstrated
Shio-koji, ama-koji, shoyu-koji — and shoyu itself. Each one made in front of you, start to finish. You don't rush through them here: you go home with sealed koji and a soy sauce kit, and make all four in your own kitchen, at your own pace.

⑥The tasting
Amazake, black-koji amazake, shio-koji and shoyu-koji, tasted side by side. The two amazake begin as the same rice. They taste nothing alike — and neither contains a grain of sugar. This is the one that surprises everybody.

⑦Cook lunch, and learn to cook it again
We make lunch together using the seasonings you've just met — taught slowly enough that you can repeat it at home, not just eat it here.

⑧Miso is not one thing
Climate, water and local culture have produced dozens of misos across Japan, and they barely resemble one another. You'll taste the difference rather than read about it.

⑨The rare shelf
Chie's own cacao koji — made nowhere else in the world — alongside a run of ferments most people in Japan have never encountered.