Kenji Murakami kept his first two hives on the roof of his apartment building in Matsumoto in the spring of 2014. He had been working as a food buyer for a supermarket chain for eight years, spending most of that time reading ingredient labels and being quietly disappointed. The honey on the shelves was almost always blended, heated, and stripped of anything interesting. He figured he could do better with a rooftop and a beginner's beekeeping kit from a shop in Nagano city.
By 2016 he had moved the hives to a small plot of land outside Azumino, borrowed from a retired apple farmer named Takahashi-san who asked only for two jars of honey per season in return. The apple blossom honey from that first Azumino harvest was the one that made people start asking to buy it. A friend brought a jar to a coffee shop in Matsumoto, the owner asked where it came from, and that was the beginning of the wholesale side. Kenji quit the supermarket job in the autumn of 2017 and has not looked back, though he admits the first winter without a salary was genuinely frightening.
Today Swift Blend Gate runs forty hives across three sites in Nagano Prefecture: the original Azumino apple orchard, a soba-flower field near Hotaka, and a mixed forest site above Shiojiri that produces a darker, more resinous honey in late summer. Kenji's partner Yuki handles the packing and the website, and a part-time helper named Daisuke comes in during harvest weeks. The name came from a beekeeping term for the small gate on a hive entrance that controls traffic. It stuck.
Kenji Murakami spent eight years as a food buyer for a regional supermarket chain before keeping his first two hives on a Matsumoto rooftop in 2014. He trained under Takahashi Noboru, a retired beekeeper in Azumino who had been working hives since the 1970s and had strong opinions about not rushing the extraction. Kenji left his buying job in autumn 2017 to run Swift Blend Gate full time. He plays old Ryuichi Sakamoto records in the packing room on Friday afternoons and is working, slowly, on a small guide to Nagano's flowering calendar for home beekeepers.