Our guest today is baker Osawa Shuichi. In 2019, he became the first Japanese person to win the Mondial du Pain, or World of Bread, one of the world's most prestigious breadmaking competitions. The trophy now sits in his bustling bakery. We spoke with him to find out how this baker of world-class bread approaches his craft.

I would say that, for Japanese people, I should make Japanese-style bread that suits our taste buds. Being a baker is the path I've chosen in life, so I want to make some really good bread that can only be found here!

August 2020. Osawa has just opened a new bakery in Tokyo. Inside, we find rows of freshly baked breads. Everything from classic croissants and baguettes... to sweet, cream-filled pastries. Osawa does the kneading and baking himself.

The types of bread you see in my bakery aren't meant to be cool, or fashionable or stylish. We have all the typical Japanese styles of bread, but in addition, really simple French country bread. We make these classic breads as well as we possibly can, and every day, as we bake, we're having this intense dialog with the bread.

Some of the recipes here are the same ones that won the World of Bread. A fluffy loaf of bread. It was made with some surprising ingredients... cherry blossom leaves and sake!

At the World of Bread, there's a category where you make a bread that expresses your country. The first thing that came to mind for me was Japan's four seasons. And spring is really the season where life is starting to sprout. You get through some harsh seasons, and then life just bursts forth. That's spring. And spring in Japan means cherry blossoms. So we did a cherry blossom flavor, and the sake adds an even stronger Japanese feeling. Combined, it all represents Japan.

Fresh baguettes, made just how they were at the competition. Osawa says they don't use any machines to make the dough, just the traditional methods.

The dough really is alive. I listen to its voice, its feelings, to decide when it's the right time In terms of timing, because the dough is alive, it has things it likes and things it doesn't like. You really have to constantly try to feel what it wants. We work with the dough.

Osawa's journey to becoming a baker began here, two hours from Tokyo in the city of Takasaki. The eldest son of a family that owned a bakery, he grew up around bread.

My mom went back to work just two weeks after I was born. She would lay me down to sleep in a bread-proofing box the whole day! Even way back in preschool, I would always say, "I want to be a baker when I grow up." It started there. My parents were bakers. I felt like I had to become one too. It was just how it was.

At age 20, after finishing high school and apprenticing at another bakery, Osawa joined the family business. But he found himself constantly butting heads with his father, Takehide.

We worked together for about five years. The first two years, we would fight but the work went well, but in the third year we stopped speaking! Throwing baking sheets at each other. It was war. Both me and my dad are so serious. Our minds work the same way, but we didn't quite agree. We had different visions.

At 25, Osawa quit the family bakery and opened up his own shop in the area. But it shut down after just a year. Despite a lot of effort, he couldn't find another good space.

All the places I looked, the rent was just too high. I tried for almost a year, but in the end, nothing. I didn't have money, I didn't have a shop. No machines. Just motivation. There was this big gulf between what I wanted to be doing and reality. It was really depressing.

Osawa looked for a new line of work to support himself and gave up on baking. He ended up working construction on building sites.

I just couldn't imagine myself putting on a suit and going to an office. So I found construction work. It was right when solar power was getting much bigger. So I would go to these wide-open areas in the mountains and install solar panels. Or I'd go to construction sites where they were making reinforced concrete, climb to the very top, apply anti-rust material, cut bolts, lots of things like that.

Two years passed this way. Then came another turning point. The owner of the bakery where Osawa had apprenticed invited him to the World of Bread -- an epic breadmaking contest.

He said, "Come with me to the World of Bread competition in France." And so I worked my construction job up until the day before, went home, packed my suitcase and went to France. I hadn't even known there were breadmaking competitions like this. It was the first time I had ever seen a bread contest. The people competing, the bakers, were from all these different countries, and they were so cool. I felt jealous. I went to cheer them on, but the truth is, I felt bitter the whole time I was sitting there in the spectator seats. I thought to myself, "I'm going to be a baker again." Did I decide in that moment? I don't know, but looking back, I think my whole world changed then.

Osawa resumed baking. He wanted to compete in the World of Bread, and he chose this place to train, a tiny shed in a parking lot.

The rent was pretty cheap for this prefab building -- really a shack. It was 15 square meters, if that. There was a sliding glass window and a door. That was it. Definitely no A/C, just one exhaust fan. It was hot in there! It would get close to 60 degrees Celsius. I'd be covered in sweat all day.

One rule of the World of Bread is that participants need an assistant, who must be 23 or younger. So Osawa hired one. By day, the two of them would make and sell bread. After that, they would prepare intensely for the contest.

You make about 20 different types for the contest. Over a hundred items total. You make a French-style baguette, you make a croissant. And the rules set out the weight down to the gram, the length down to the centimeter. If an item is off by one gram, or one millimeter of length, you lose points. At 9 p.m., we would go into our shop and start our contest training. We'd finish that around 7 or 8 in the morning, and then we'd start our regular business hours. Then when 9 p.m. rolled back around, we'd start contest training again. This continued day after day. On a good night, we'd get three hours of sleep. At most.

I'd go take naps outside. We were in this parking lot, so I'd use a parking bumper as a pillow and get a little shut-eye.

This was Osawa's life for two years. In 2019, he won the Japan qualifiers, and in October, he finally competed in the World of Bread. The entrants, representing 16 countries and territories, had to create breads across seven major categories. Each baker wanted to be the world's best.

In the "health and nutrition" category, you're trying to get as many nutrients in a slice of bread as possible. I thought of soybeans, something very Japanese. I wanted to make bread with as much soy protein as possible. So I used "koyadofu," or dried tofu. Very common in soups and stews. The type I used was freeze-dried and powdered. I also used soy butter. So soy was a major part of that bread.

The "sandwich" category was different from the year before. They asked us to make mini sandwiches, small ones. When you think of a sandwich, you think of two slices of bread together. But what I did is bake one piece of conical bread, make cuts in four places, and fill it with vegetables. A stuffed sandwich.

Osawa had one area where he really focused his attention. Good teamwork with his assistant. The time limit on the day of the contest is eight hours. Focus as a team is essential.

The judges really look at the level of communication, the connection between the assistants and the chefs. Are we doing the work precisely, and keeping things hygienic? Doing the work in an orderly, tidy way? We have to work fast to finish everything, but the quality can't suffer. Can you do that in eight hours? Every second counts!

The finale of the competition is the only part for which bakers are allowed to prepare in advance: the "artistic piece" category. The theme this year was "sports." Osawa's piece was inspired by "yabusame," mounted archery performed as part of Shinto rituals.

In yabusame, an archer rides a horse and hits targets. It's an ancient sport, basically. And I thought having an animal in my piece would make it really dynamic.

A carp is climbing up one of the legs of the horse, and wrapped around its body is a dragon. A carp that swims upstream becomes a dragon - it's a Chinese or Japanese myth that means young people who overcome obstacles achieve success. I wanted to work that into the yabusame theme. The inside of the carp and the dragon is a normal baguette like the ones we sell at our store. We heated a baguette and curved it, and, around it, we put pieces of dough to look like scales. For the pants of the man, we baked croissants, peeled off the layers one by one, and applied them to the piece.

As he put the finishing touches on the artistic piece, something surprising came in handy. The tools he used as a construction worker.

Usually when you'd make an artistic piece like this, you'd use some kind of sugary syrup as the glue. But I didn't use any at all. I created joints that fit together. So why exactly did I do that? Well, I would use a lot of different tools in my construction work. Like an impact driver, or a file. I was really taught how to use all these different tools. That's how I got the idea. And it made a lot of noise, it was something showy, and novel. I think that had a good impact on the judges.

The results were announced. Osawa took the grand prize. Japan also won in the "artistic piece," "sandwich" and "best assistant" categories.

Someone special was watching over Osawa during the contest. Another baker that he had serious differences with in the past... his father, Takehide. He came from Japan to cheer on his son.

I could see he had just been crying, but when he came up to me, he just said, "Congratulations." This was always true, even when we were fighting, not speaking, but... he's been a baker for decades, he raised me, he's the reason I made it to the contest, he came and cheered me on. I have the ultimate respect for him; he understands me better than anyone. I'm so grateful to my dad.

Do you have any words to live by?

"Do it like your life depends on it." That's how I make bread, how I offer it to my customers. You really have to do it that way. The coolest, most beautiful people are the ones who do something with every ounce of their being. I'll live like my life depends on it, to the death!