Pick up a pair. Build your walk.
Kenji Muraoka opened Cedar Cove Path in the spring of 2019 in a narrow shopfront on Fuyacho-dori, a few minutes' walk from Nishiki Market. He had spent the previous six years working the floor at a large sporting goods chain in Osaka, where the stock room held thousands of pairs and the sales target was always the same: move volume, move fast. He got good at it. He also got tired of it. The thing that kept nagging at him was how rarely anyone actually tried on more than one pair, how rarely anyone talked about the shape of their foot or the way they walked. He wanted a shop where that conversation was the whole point.
The first year was a learning curve with a steep drop-off at the end. Kenji stocked too many models, ordered too many colourways, and ended up with a back room full of sizes nobody wanted. He sold them off at cost, cleared the shelves, and started again with about 40 models chosen by one rule: he had to have worn each one himself for at least a week. That rule stuck. It slowed down the buying process considerably, which turned out to be exactly right. By late 2020 the shop had a small but loyal group of regulars, mostly people who had come in for a fitting and left with something they had not expected to buy.
Kenji Muraoka grew up in Kobe and spent six years on the floor of a large sporting goods chain in Osaka before opening Cedar Cove Path in Kyoto in 2019. He trained under a senior fitter at the Osaka store who taught him that a shoe fitting is really a conversation about how someone moves through the world. Outside the shop, Kenji walks a lot. He logs his routes in a battered notebook and has strong opinions about which Kyoto neighbourhoods have the best pavement for testing a new midsole. He is currently obsessed with the geometry of toe boxes and will talk about it at length if you let him.