An Unexpected Export
Danaka Kazuhaki.
He was a chef-turned-entrepreneur who ran Kara Sushi, the most famous conveyor-belt sushi franchise in Japan, and the one with the most locations of all. That a man who loved sushi this deeply had come to Korea was nothing short of pure chance.
Had the country not been ravaged by the typhoon, he might never have set foot in Korea at all. It wasn't that he bore any particular grudge against the place. He simply had no business reason to visit, and in ordinary times he spared it little thought. Managing the countless shops he ran back in Japan had already eaten up a lifetime.
And yet that same man had stopped in on a corporate relief mission, come to aid the recovery. If the typhoon had never arrived—or if it had come and done little damage—Danaka Kazuhaki would have had no reason to be here.
Still, once he had visited and seen his schedule through, dropping into a neighborhood sushi shop was no accident. He was an entrepreneur who loved sushi enough to eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
He did not, however, expect anything of the shop's quality. There was no way, he was certain, that a neighborhood place like this could serve sushi better than Japan, the birthplace of the craft.
"Just as I thought. A neighborhood sushi shop—nothing to it."
He muttered it in Japanese, eyeing the sushi the chef had brought out. To his eye, what sat before him was no different from the sushi of Japan.
"However skillfully one makes it, surely sushi prepared abroad could never surpass what we make in Japan?"
The interpreter he had brought along chimed in at once, smoothing the moment for the sake of a frictionless professional relationship. Any Japanese who failed at that particular social art had long since been shown the door and erased.
"And yet, for all that, there seem to be rather a lot of customers, don't there?"
"There do. Quite a crowd, for a neighborhood sushi shop."
Strangely enough, the place was packed to the walls. Had Danaka's party not arrived early, they would have been stuck waiting themselves. Outside, a line of people hoping for a table already stretched long.
Setting the question aside, Danaka took up his chopsticks, lifted a piece of sushi, and ate it.
!!!
In that instant, Danaka Kazuhaki's eyes flew wide. The interpreter across from him reacted in exactly the same way.
"Th-this is..."
"M-Mr. Danaka..."
Danaka Kazuhaki was stunned by the extraordinary flavor, and it wasn't the fish atop the rice. The fish tasted ordinary—so short on freshness, in fact, that it nearly made him yawn. Seoul lay far from the sea; there was no eating a catch taken moments ago and still gleaming. A portable tank could cling to some of that freshness, but it still fell a little short of slicing sashimi from a fish pulled straight out of the ocean.
What had seized his attention was the very thing between his teeth—the grains of rice that were, in a sense, the wellspring of sushi itself. The flavor of those grains was phenomenal.
"Rice like this exists in Korea?"
Dumbfounded, he could only set his chopsticks down. Rice with a flavor this fantastic, this overwhelming, to be had at some out-of-the-way neighborhood shop? Do Koreans all grow up eating rice like this? That such a blessing should exist!
It wasn't some subtle distinction only a gourmet could catch. The flavor was plain enough for anyone to taste. The proof sat right in front of him: even the interpreter, who knew nothing whatsoever about the sushi before him, had registered the difference. Danaka hurriedly finished the meal and put his questions to the chef—through the interpreter, of course.
The chef talked freely. It wasn't a trade secret, after all.
"Ah. We switched the rice we use for the sushi not long ago. The customers have taken to it. Even I could tell the difference in flavor, clear as anything."
"Then is there a way I might obtain this rice?"
"The government released it as public reserve rice... and honestly, that's the trouble. The stock I bought is running out, and they say they won't be releasing any more of it. I heard they wouldn't have released this rice at all, if it weren't for the typhoon."
The chef went on, regret thick in his voice.
"My customers' standards have already climbed. I don't know if they'd be satisfied if I bought a different rice..."
"Might I ask the brand?"
"They said it's called Starlight Rice."
The interpreter relayed the entire exchange to Danaka Kazuhaki exactly as it had unfolded, translating it so that not a hair of meaning was lost.
Danaka had been scheduled to fly back to Japan the next day, but the moment he heard the interpreter out, he changed his plans. There was somewhere very important he had to stop before he went home.
Kim Sehee had an important decision to make. The response to putting Starlight Rice out into the world had been nothing short of explosive. With this year's typhoon wiping out the rice supply, the public had gotten a taste of it—and then the Starlight Food homepage had been plastered so thickly it might as well have caught fire.
For the time being, though, at the government's mediation, Kim Sehee had not yet entered the market.
Starlight Rice was so overwhelmingly good that it could have rendered every existing harvest irrelevant by comparison. If Starlight Food went into full production and released it commercially, it would almost certainly sell out to the last grain.
Perhaps fearing exactly that, the government had thrown up all manner of regulations and laws to bar the way. Even so, the domestic rice market was tempting enough that she wanted to punch through those regulations and sell. Get one foot in the door and start moving product, and she could quietly wedge herself into a market worth ten trillion won in all.
Stick her head in first, and think about what came next afterward. Production still fell short of total domestic consumption, of course. It would take a few years, at least. But the more she shortened that span, the more money shimmered before Kim Sehee's eyes.
What held her in such fierce deliberation was the risk of making enemies of millions of farmers. For a company, image mattered more than one might think.
A firm that had seemed friendly and gentle could be recast as a criminal enterprise trampling Korea's farmers underfoot. Nor did she have the political ties to ignore that many farmers, and the government besides, and sell rice anyway.
She could already see it. Sell the rice on a whim, fall from the government's favor, and face a tax audit or some other political squeeze. The rice market was a business on which countless lives depended. It was nothing like green tea or coffee.
To a woman caught in that bind, Danaka—who had come calling on business—brought, in a sense, the very answer Kim Sehee wanted.
Danaka Kazuhaki had put off his return to Japan and come looking for Kim Sehee. The meeting had been set so suddenly that he could not see her at once. Even so, he and his party waited until they could speak with her.
"Distribute Starlight Rice in Japan?"
Kim Sehee felt every worry she had been turning over swept away in a single stroke. If not at home, then she could sell it abroad. From where she stood, though, there was no end of snags.
"Starlight Food hasn't been growing for long, so the department that handles overseas sales is still quite small..."
Until just last year, Starlight Food had been peddling products that barely moved even at home. They had been gasping to keep up with the domestic market; they hadn't the strength to spare so much as a glance overseas. And Starlight Food had nothing that could crack a foreign market. The goods weren't especially delicious, and they weren't especially special, either.
In truth, the will to sell abroad had been there. Recently she had given up on China over guanxi and the thicket of regulations, and even an attempt on Japan came freighted with obstacle after obstacle.
The firms that offered to handle the export for her tore into her for commissions so grotesque they beggared belief.
"Forty percent of the profit as a commission? What kind of nerve is that?"
Domestic export firms demanded an excessive cut in exchange for the use of their distribution networks in Japan. Furious, Kim Sehee snapped the call off.
"They might as well rip the liver out of a flea!"
But Kim Sehee's right hand—her most loyal subordinate—pushed back on her words.
"Honestly, there's nothing we can do. Do we know a single company in Japan? Do we know the first thing about the Japanese market? Before any of that—does anyone at this company even speak Japanese?"
Of course, the internet overflowed with Japanese majors, enough to fill dozens of trucks, because so many people adored Japanese culture. At Kim Sehee's company, though, people who could speak Japanese were rare. There were probably more who spoke English.
"Even to sell a single thing, the laws and regulations differ from ours in so many ways, so of course they demand a steep commission. Has our company ever exported anything? I can guarantee you that even chartering a cargo ship would be difficult."
Faced with her right hand's assault of hard facts, Kim Sehee had nothing to say. Every word of it was true.