Lady Joker, Volume 1 Kaoru Takamura (ereader ebook .TXT) 📖

assembled not only the executives but also the entire planning and sales divisions and had them participate in the tasting. At the time, everyone agreed that the beer “wasn’t too heavy or too light, with a mellow body and a refreshing aftertaste,” but they decided that its aroma had room for further improvement, especially if it were to live up to the concept of “levity.” This time, Shiroyama lit a fire under the development team by setting a strict deadline and telling them to have a completed product by September; he also instructed Seigo Kurata, general manager of the beer division, to outline a strategy to sell fifty million cases in the first year, and set out to draft a product name as well as sales and marketing plans.

On schedule, as soon as September came around, the finished product was delivered to the executive conference room in an unlabeled brown glass bottle. After everyone had sampled the beer together, Shiroyama turned to the board members and asked, “What do you think?” A few of them nodded at first, and as soon as Sei’ichi Shirai sparked the initial comment, “It’s delicious,” the others followed one by one with “Such a fragrant, mild taste,” and “The aroma is superb.” After carefully ascertaining everyone’s expression and tone of voice, Shiroyama made a call on the spot to the plant at the Kanagawa factory where the trials were taking place and consecutively thanked each and every engineer on the development team.

The entire staff of the beer division had spent the next six months immersed in preparations for the product launch. The product name had been finalized in November, but since the announcement of their new product was, after all, their biggest trade secret, they withheld the name and instead their salesmen ran around to each of their six hundred distributors across the country with a large bottle of the product sample in hand. Their reaction wasn’t bad. At the annual New Year’s gatherings of distributors held around the country, they had conducted tastings and laid the groundwork, publicizing the scale of their sales promotion that was planned ahead of the national launch on April 1st. Ordinarily, they would give a presentation of their new product at a distributors’ conference and dive right into selling the product, but this time their strategy had been to arouse curiosity from both within and outside the company by taking such clandestine steps. As they built up the anticipation for April 1st, Shiroyama waited with bated breath for the numbers that were soon to arrive.

The beer division revised their order projections on a daily basis, and at the end of January when the orders started coming in at once, the numbers far exceeded their expectations, quickly climbing to 20 percent of their April target of six million cases. At the time, Shiroyama, alone in his office, had raised his hands in the air again and again in a solitary “Banzai!”

In preparation for the high-demand summer season, they had also decided to increase the production line for the new product in every factory by mid-February. At the same time they planned to rearrange their production lines, they also took initiatives toward their mid-term plans to both streamline and differentiate their products by discontinuing their regional products that competed with microbreweries, instead advancing their consignment production. Such steps were meant to pave the way for abandoning their multiproduct strategy, which Shiroyama had decided upon even before he took over as president. For the future, Hinode would have to transform itself into the trunk of a strong tree, trimmed of all unnecessary branches and leaves, with the Lager, Supreme, and their new product as its three main pillars. These last few days, Shiroyama had just begun to savor the feeling of taking the very first step toward the realization of his vision.

As he thought about Hinode Meister, the second lager he had dreamed about since he became president, Shiroyama’s anguish briefly lessened, and a warmth filled his heart.

A Japanese beer for the 21st century. Introducing the Hinode Meister.

This was the copy that was to run across their full-page ad in the national newspapers tomorrow, Sunday the twenty-sixth. Their trademark seal of a phoenix, until now always golden, had this time been tinted azure blue to express a subtle vivacity, while the words “Hinode Meister” were rendered in a rounded, handwritten brush font that was majestic yet gentle, and colored indigo. The letters were set against an ecru background, slightly uneven, like the texture of handmade Japanese paper. The same design also adorned the canned beer.

Perhaps he would never see the product again, but the advertising campaign that had cost the sum total of five billion yen would go on, even without him. The disappearance of the president was an unforeseen internal crisis for the company, but there was nothing to stop the release of the product now. I have done all that I could, Shiroyama told himself over and over. I have done all that I could for the future of the company. But then he’d think, And yet—

Shiroyama could not imagine what effects an unexpected situation such as the abduction of its president would have on the operations of the company. Once the matter became known to the public, what was the extent of the damage—both tangible and intangible—that the company would suffer? What impact would it have on sales of the recently launched Hinode Meister?

Ah, and the shareholder meeting is around the corner—Just as this occurred to him, Shiroyama was thrown into a brief panic. No, at this very moment, the executives would surely be discussing which of the two vice presidents would take over in his place. Whether it would be Sei’ichi Shirai, manager of business development, or Seigo Kurata, manager of the beer division, who stood at the front was a significant issue within the company, but seen from a broader vantage point of the company’s future, it did not seem to matter to Shiroyama. Part of