By Masaharu Nanami
     Francisco Xavier, 33, who studied cooking in Japan for 10 years, opened a Japanese-style restaurant on Easter Island in the South Pacific, best known for its Moai statues, in February 2007 to offer sushi to local residents and tourists.
     Xavier, who is married to a second-generation Japanese-Chilean woman, named the restaurant Izakaya Kotaro after his son. It has a red lantern and a bamboo lattice door. There is also a Japanese-style guest room toward the back of the restaurant.
     ''I am producing a real Japanese taste,'' Xavier said in fluent Japanese. The restaurant is also popular among American and other foreign tourists and crowded with customers until late at night every day.
     He makes nine kinds of sushi using local tuna and white fish. He also produces bean curd and wheat noodles as well as ramen noodles from flour. ''While studying cooking in Italy, I learned how to make pasta and applied that to noodle making,'' he said.
     Bean paste and rice are sent from Japan via Tahiti, about 4,000 kilometers away.
     Xavier studied singing at a university in the Chilean capital of Santiago but went to Japan in 1993 to study its language and culture at a university in the city of Osaka. He also worked part-time at a fish store and cultivated his skill as a cook at a foreign-affiliated hotel on the weekends.
     ''In Japan, I learned industriousness and a sense of responsibility for working,'' he said in an interview.
     After graduation, he worked at hotels in the United States and Italy, returning home in 2003 when an offer was made by a Japanese-style restaurant at a hotel in Santiago to become a chef.
     By word of mouth, he found the job of cook at a hotel on Easter Island, and at the end of 2006, he built his own restaurant by recycling waste wood.
     Last year, about 39,000 tourists visited the island, and the number of Japanese was some 2,800, the third largest number after Americans and French. Eighty percent of visitors to his restaurant were Japanese. For backpackers, he prepares dishes at rock-bottom prices.
     ''There were distressing moments with no money while I was in Japan. Now, I have leeway in living here,'' he said. ''There are a wide range of Japanese dishes from tea-ceremony dishes and a la carte dishes at the izakaya (Japanese-style pub). I want to do a good job based on that tradition.''
==Kyodo