Chapter 166: The Rice That Will Blanket Japan
We reached downtown, and the streets were seething with people. It was a weekday afternoon, and still this crowded? The world seemed to be made up entirely of people with nothing to do. Did nobody have a job?
"Let's go over there, Hana!"
"Okay!"
Haru pointed at a theater whose design I already knew by heart. I nodded and let myself be towed along. There was, unfortunately, a bit of a gap in strength between us.
I could feel the stares from the people around us, so I tugged my hat down lower. My hair color had to be the reason. Out on the street I was the only one with green hair. Everyone else was black-haired, or dyed some shade of blonde.
Maru seemed to notice what I was doing. She looked at me and said,
"Hana, your hair is so pretty. Why are you hiding it?"
She had a point. My hair had better be impressive. It was the most expensive hair in the world. I couldn't even begin to imagine how much money it would take to make a wig out of it. Surely enough to buy a decent building.
Emboldened, I squared my shoulders and started striding down the street like I owned it. If I took the stares the way a celebrity would, as something to enjoy, that was enough. And I wasn't actually famous the way a celebrity was, with a face that had been sold to the public. This was only a passing encounter. No matter how unusual someone looked walking down the street, give it a few dozen minutes and they vanished from people's heads. Surely I would be the same.
Anyway, once we reached the theater I watched Haru buy the tickets. The machine sat a little too high, and it took standing on tiptoe to barely reach it. Thank goodness Maru was with us, or we never could have used the ticket machine at all. If I had come alone, I might not have gotten to see a movie.
No matter how convenient they said kiosks were, I couldn't understand why anyone would build one without a thought for short people like me. Going up to a part-timer to ask for help was out of the question, too, given the loner streak I'd been born with. I was the sort who couldn't even properly say what I wanted when I got my hair cut. It was the classic case of things not being that easy.
Tickets in hand, Haru led me over to where they sold popcorn. My eyes sparkled at the sight of it. A movie theater called for popcorn and cola. Those two were specialties that belonged to the theater alone, and I could never give them up. The world had gotten convenient enough lately that some places let you bring in outside food, but no matter how good that food was, nothing could replace the popcorn they sold at the movies.
"Haru! I want popcorn!"
"Which kind do you want, Hana?"
Haru scooped me up so I could see the menu. I studied it with grave care. Choosing the popcorn you were going to eat for two whole hours deserved that kind of seriousness. Pick a bad one, and your mouth would be bored for the entire film.
"I want caramel popcorn! And roasted squid, too!"
"Caramel popcorn and roasted squid? Got it."
"You're not getting any, Haru?"
"I'll just have water. I'm on a diet these days!"
She didn't look that heavy to me, and yet she was dieting. Seeing an adult still work so hard at taking care of herself made her seem impressive all over again. I was a glutton who ate whatever landed in front of me. Snacks, drinks—if it reached my hands, I couldn't rest until I'd eaten it. Maybe that was why I'd been feeling a little rounder lately.
"Hnn..."
I felt oddly guilty that Haru wasn't having popcorn and cola. It seemed like I was the only one eating something delicious. Perhaps because of that, she soothed me as if it were nothing at all.
"You should eat whatever you want, Hana! I'm really fine!"
When she put it like that, I was supposed to listen. I nodded, making my agreement perfectly clear.
"Whoa!"
Before long I had warm popcorn in my hands, and a cola that looked cold and refreshing just to look at. We were short a hand for the roasted squid, so Haru carried it, pulling off the feat of holding both me and the squid at once. She seemed pretty strong.
Popcorn and cola in hand, we sat down. There was still a little time before the movie started, so we had to wait.
Back in Japan, Danaka set about persuading the executives.
"Companies that do not adopt Starlight Rice will soon be left behind."
"However superb the fish may be, the grains of rice matter just as much in sushi. For a company running a franchise, the quality of the fish is, if anything, much of a muchness. The real decision will be made by the rice."
"This is not something to regard through colored glasses merely because it is Korean. Starlight Rice is, truly, truly, a revolutionary cultivar that will overturn the rice market from here on out."
Thanks to the fervent sincerity of Danaka's persuasion, the executives agreed to try Starlight Rice at the Kara Sushi franchises operating in the cities. It remained a secret, of course, that even the executives who had opposed Starlight Rice to the bitter end did a complete about-face after tasting it themselves.
The result was a massive success. Sales at the stores using Starlight Rice nearly doubled. Stores out in the countryside, and in places where few people lived, saw their sales fall instead.
Lists of the locations using Starlight Rice spread across the internet and social media, so people avoided the stores that didn't use it and drove to the nearest one that did, just to eat sushi there.
Watching the numbers climb, Danaka allowed himself a smile of triumph. The gamble on which he had staked his position had paid off, and paid off spectacularly. Right now the Japanese archipelago was littered with consumers held captive by the taste of Kara Sushi.
He decided to sell the surplus rice himself. It wasn't enough for every person in Japan to eat, but it was far too much to consume through the stores alone. Not every location had switched over yet, so the surplus was overflowing. And with the advance Kara Sushi had already paid Starlight Foods, the farms had already been expanded several dozen times over.
The Korean government, terrified that the country's rice self-sufficiency rate would be shattered, was dead set against releasing Starlight Rice onto the domestic market. Danaka rather hoped that situation would drag on. The longer it did, the more rice would flow into Japan.
Of course, if production exploded in a few years, the Japanese government might move to block Kara Sushi from selling the rice. He had to capture consumers' palates quickly, before that day came. Only then would those consumers become Kara Sushi's shield.
On a community for people who loved Japanese sushi, the reaction to Kara Sushi was on fire.
Riding that consumer response, Danaka put the leftover rice into distribution. A network built up over decades did the heavy lifting. Kara Sushi was an old franchise, so that network had been in place for a long time, and there was nothing in the way of selling a new product. They could move it at once.
They began selling Starlight Rice packed into sacks. Kara Sushi could set the sack specifications themselves, so they poured Japanese sensibility into every inch of the design. Had they used the format of the rice sacks sold in Korean stores, they would have been in for a rough time.
They printed, in huge letters, the line declaring that this was the rice used at Kara Sushi stores. The country-of-origin mark they tucked into a corner consumers were unlikely to look at, written as small as it could be.
No matter how popular K-pop had become in Japan, and no matter how feelings toward Korea had improved, most Japanese people still didn't feel particularly warm about Korean rice. So the origin label was crammed into a corner where it would be as hard to see as possible.
Even if someone ate it once and only later realized it was Korean rice, they would keep eating it. Starlight Rice was that good.
Anticipating that consumers might not so much as touch it if they knew it was Korean, Danaka stuffed the packaging with nothing but Japanese phrasing, over and over. You couldn't find a single word of Korean on the face of the sack. All it emphasized was that this was the rice Kara Sushi used.