Every problem should have one moment where you have to commit to something you're not sure about.
Kenji Murakami opened Brook Crest Path in October 2019 in a converted textile warehouse on Koenji's north side. He had spent the previous six years managing the route-setting program at a larger gym in Shinjuku, and the thing that kept bothering him was the gap between the gym's ambition and its welcome. The walls were good. The atmosphere for anyone who wasn't already a climber was not. He signed the lease on the Koenji space with a co-signer, a friend from his university mountaineering club, and spent four months converting the building himself, with help from a carpenter named Fujita-san who had never set foot on a climbing wall but understood how to make a space feel honest.
The first year was difficult in the specific way that 2019 into 2020 tends to be for anyone who opened a small business. The gym closed for eleven weeks during the first state of emergency. Kenji used the time to repaint the walls, redesign the beginner section, and write the route-setting philosophy that still guides Aya and Tomoki today: every problem should have at least one moment where the climber has to commit to something they're not sure about. That's the point. When the gym reopened in June 2020, the regulars who came back brought friends. The membership grew slowly and without advertising, mostly through word of mouth in the Koenji and Nakano neighborhoods.
Kenji Murakami grew up in Matsumoto, Nagano, where he started hiking at age nine with his father and began sport climbing at a local wall in Ueda at …