Quarter-life crises descend upon the best of us, and barista Kohsuke Yamaoka was no exception.
Watching Yamaoka make sandwiches at Chipper’s Coffee & Sangas, his weekend-evening pop-up operating out of Kamiyama coffee favorite Camelback Coffee, it’s hard to imagine that he was once a cog in the corporate machine. For five years after graduating from university, the Hyogo Prefecture Awajishima native commuted between Osaka and Himeji to sell copy machines for Fuji Xerox. But in 2014, at age 28, he saw a future of neckties and briefcases unspooling before him into the distance, and resolved to change his life.
“This just wasn’t the kind of adult I wanted to be,” he says.