A potent brew of coffee and athletics

Café owner and triathlete Yoshiharu Suzuki’s affair with the island of Saipan was no love at first sight, but it has been going on for seven years and running.

He came to the island with a strong desire to be anywhere but Japan and even stronger memories of the three years he spent in New York City. It was little wonder why he was not smitten at once by Saipan’s simple, natural beauty.

“I was so bored my first year here. There was nothing to do,” he recalls one Saturday afternoon. Then managing a massage business at Summer Holiday Hotel, Suzuki went to Guam four times in 1998 to look for a job. He succeeded in his endeavor and was all set to bid Saipan sayonara by yearend.

But he ended up staying somehow. Apparently, his several months on island were long enough for the place to work its charms on him and make him unable to go.

“The more I saw of Guam, the more I appreciated Saipan. Life here is very simple. You feel closer to nature. Anywhere you go in Guam, there are so many lights you can’t see the stars,” he says.

Now one of the most active athletes on Saipan and the owner of the colorful, relaxed Latte Café in Garapan, 38-year-old Suzuki swears his old friends would be very surprised by how much his island life has transformed him.

Born and raised in southeastern Tokyo, Suzuki says he was the happy-go-lucky type from his teens until his 20s. His career path since he graduated from Nihon University has been all but straight.

After two-year stint with an Italian clothing company in Tokyo, he went to New York City in 1993 and spent his first year there studying English and the next two and a half years working as a waiter in a Japanese restaurant.

Tired of having no money in his pocket, he eventually decided to return home, where he made use of his newly acquired grip on the English language by serving as a coordinator in an English conversation school.

The itch to travel, however, did not go away. For him, the school job was but a means to support his lifestyle while he waited for that company—in Thailand, Singapore, Jamaica, or any of the many countries he had sent his resume to—to call and say he’s hired.

His wait finally ended one day, when he read a job vacancy announcement for a massage parlor manager on Saipan while flipping through the classified ads. He faxed his resume to the number given and after two minutes, the phone rang.

“The [employer] told me he was blind and that he didn’t need to personally interview me. Then he started asking me questions. After we talked on the phone for two hours, he said, ‘maybe you’re the one,’” Suzuki relates.

He arrived on Saipan for the first time in April 1998. Despite his initial boredom with the place, the island soon grew on him.

The sport of triathlon played no small part in keeping him on island.

Ever the clubbing type, Suzuki did not used to care for anything athletic. He admits, though, that growing up in hilly Shinagawa district gave him a pretty good introduction to running, which he has been doing competitively for more than five years now.

“I never imagined myself doing triathlons, although I believe I did my first long-distance run when I was 9 years old,” Suzuki smiles. “I did something wrong and my father hit me. It was about 7 in the evening and it was a little dark. But I wanted so much to get away from the house I just started running and running—while crying and crying—toward my uncle’s house. I probably ran six to seven kilometers that night.”

Save for some baseball in high school, Suzuki did not engage in any real sports activity until January 1999, when he met triathletes Stewart Smith and Nicky Nichols.

“I was swimming at Kan Pacific. They came up to me and asked if I would be interested in doing triathlons. I wanted to reject the idea right there and then, so I said I didn’t have a bike. But Nicky said he would let me borrow his bike. They just didn’t give an excuse not to do it,” he says.

Suzuki has since participated in various competitions, including the annual Tagaman and Xterra races. He has bagged his share of marathon championships, although he has yet to win a triathlon (“my biking and swimming are not that good”).

While he continues to train regularly, winning is not the end-all, be-all of his involvement in sports.

Having suffered a nearly fatal illness at age 29, Suzuki says his current healthy lifestyle has done a lot to improve his overall well-being. So enthusiastic is he about sharing sports with other people that he would like to help coach younger athletes in the future, he says.

Besides triathlon, Suzuki’s passion lies with his breezy little café, which he put up in October 2002 and proudly describes as his ideal coffee shop.

Latte Café, after all, embodies Suzuki’s taste, with its great food and huge servings, strong coffee, reggae background music, and natural surroundings. “This is a place where you can relax and be yourself. It’s just the kind of place I would go to all the time,” he says.

Judging by the rate that customers return to the place, it is evident that Suzuki is not alone in his inclination.

Asked what he plans to do next, Suzuki says, “I try not to plan too ahead. I believe that if you just try to do the right things everyday, everything will fall into place in the future.”

But clearly, with his coaching plans and all the effort he’s putting into his café, Suzuki will not be running away sometime in the near future. No resume will be sent through his fax machine for a while because on Saipan, he has found a home.