Lady Joker, Volume 1 by Kaoru Takamura (lightest ebook reader .txt) 📕

in himself. Yet the reason he could afford to lose himself in such leisurely concerns was precisely because, throughout the late seventies and early eighties, the strong economy and improving quality of civic life had sustained increasing beer sales.

It had been at that particular moment that Shiroyama had decided to reflect upon his personal misgivings, which were worthless to the company. When their share of the market had begun to slip as a result of their failure to adapt to shifts in consumer behavior and their late start in both the race for new products and the company’s need for a structural shakeup, what had he done, as head of the beer division? Despite being aware of all the issues that needed to be handled, had he failed to summon the appropriate sense of crisis, being pressured by near-term sales figures and lacking the ability to propel the company forward? When this same man was then promoted to president in a personnel shuffle meant to shore up the beer division, he had sworn to himself that he would ensure shareholders’ profit and employees’ livelihood, now and in the future—such was his straightforward and clear sense of duty and responsibility as manager of the company. Had he not compensated for the creativity and volition he lacked with this notion of duty, he could never have taken on the role of president.

And when he considered what was necessary in order to fulfill his duty of securing the company’s current and future profits, the answer had come to him easily. One solution was the radical reform of their production and distribution lines, as well as of the rigid structure endemic to a large company like Hinode; another solution was to cultivate their key products in order to strengthen their foundation. The future of the beer industry itself had plateaued, and if he hoped to bequeath Hinode’s assets to the next century in which the ongoing contraction of domestic manufacturers was all but guaranteed, there was no choice but to diversify. In order to generate the capital needed to make such diversification a reality, he needed to create one more stable, lucrative product—a keystone as basic as miso or soy sauce. To bring a second Hinode lager out into the world—this had been Shiroyama’s aspiration when he had taken over as president.

Those who believe there are limits to what beer can taste like should not participate in the development of the test product.

Shiroyama had spewed such histrionics three years ago January in his opening remarks at the meeting of the New Product Development Committee, which had assembled all the engineers and researchers from the beer division, as well as the executives from Product Planning. With the launch of a second Hinode lager as their goal, they quickly began narrowing down concepts based on analysis from a vast accumulation of market research. At the time, all of their competitors were focused on alleviating the bitterness of the hops; they had removed the astringency from the grain husk and improved the consistency of the carbonation, bringing out products known for their clarity and cool, crisp flavor. The results of their market research plainly showed that such light and clean “dry” beers would continue to be on trend, but the whole point of developing a second Hinode lager was to create a timeless product to be enjoyed for all time, impervious to the whims of the latest fad.

Ultimately, by taking into account Hinode’s century-old penchant for the real thing—“the beer of all beers”—along with the shifting preferences of the era, they had narrowed it down to three concepts: “Joy,” for the blissful delight of drinking; “Levity,” for the uplifting experience; and finally, “Serenity,” for a drink that went down easy without being too heavy, too sharp, or too uncomplicated.

Next came the process of correlating these three concepts—joy, levity, and serenity—to specific flavors and aromas such as “light” and “bitter” on a chart, then conducting a series of sensory and taste tests to further substantiate the chart, and in the end a half a year was spent harnessing the vague idea of the flavor they hoped to achieve into a workable technology. At which point the trials began, but Shiroyama had ordered that the selection of the barley, the processing of the grains, the creation of the wort, the selection of the yeast, and the fermentation conditions all be reassessed from zero. The trial process—selecting the best yeast from among hundreds of varieties and fine-tuning myriad possible conditions during fermentation while checking the results of each—was akin to searching for an undiscovered one-horned beast on the immense African continent, or like reaching out and grabbing a cloud. Over the course of a year and a half, Shiroyama had visited the plant where the trials were taking place once a week, listened to each and every member of the development team, and whenever a prototype was ready he tested it with the executives from product planning and Sales, asking for their feedback.

Shiroyama’s duty, as it was, had been to watch over, believe in, and entrust this difficult challenge to the thirty full-time engineers and fifteen full-time members of the product planning division, and to wait. This product eschewed the mainstream; its point was to pursue a lasting strategy in the beer business, whose long-range outlook remained uncertain, and to survive the structural shifts of Japanese society that awaited them in the future. As such, Shiroyama had concerns about how it would be received by the market. Moreover, the pursuit of a new product launch had not necessarily been the consensus of the board members. And yet, he held fast to his singular and indomitable ambition: to secure the future of Hinode—that the beer that had been consumed for the past half century would still be the beer of the next century.

Last February, when the development team came back with a sample product, saying they might have finally created a beer that came close to a unicorn, Shiroyama had