LIGHT UP COFFEE opened in Kichijoji in July 2014. Its founder, Yuma Kawano, won Japan’s national latte art championship in 2012 while still at university. He had never liked coffee until a light-roasted single origin changed his mind, and a year before the shop opened he was roasting at his family home on a 1 kg roaster. After a year of selling beans online and to cafés, he opened the Kichijoji shop with Tamihito Aihara, and they built the walls, tables and counter largely by hand over a month. Coffee came in the light blue cups he first saw in London and conical beakers found in Stockholm. The name stands for brightening every day with good coffee.

LIGHT UP buys coffees from individual producers through green coffee traders and from farms in Asia it helps run. It roasts for clarity, clear differences between coffees and a sweetness that lasts as the cup cools, balanced enough to want again the next day. Roasting moved in 2023 to a former car factory in Mitaka, on a 22 kg Probat UG22; the team cups every roast weekly and aligns taste across the shops each month. On Bali, where it built a processing station, and in Da Lat in Vietnam, it works with local producers on growing and processing, and runs farm tours.

The Kichijoji shop, renewed in 2022, has seats by the sunny entrance, more at the back where coffee seminars are held some weekends, and a flight of three single origins found only there. Shimokitazawa opened in April 2017 as a roastery and coffee stand serving through a window. It has counter seats facing the baristas, an upstairs room added in a renewal at the end of 2024, an espresso flight and a monthly public cupping. The Mitaka roastery opened as a coffee shop in September 2023, with about twenty seats at large tables, by the roaster and on benches, and brewing seminars at weekends.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: LIGHT UP COFFEE