Acts of Service shares the migrant family experience of building and shaping culture through restaurant businesses. This body of work draws from Yamazaki’s childhood memories of spending time at his family’s Japanese restaurant, offering a nostalgic view of the restaurant as a second home. It was a place where family, friends, and regular diners gathered, bringing together a mixture of cultures, conversations, and experiences within a shared workspace.
The project explores the specific rhythms of the restaurant industry, the quiet dynamics of childhood in that environment, and the layered traditions that coexist in these spaces. Yamazaki is particularly interested in how diasporic restaurant culture becomes a site of both cultural preservation and adaptation. For many families like his, restaurants are not only places of labor but also spaces where identity is negotiated daily where helping with small tasks, doing homework in the back, or simply being present in the flow of service becomes a formative part of growing up between cultures.
