Sweet Legacy, New Love: Marketing Magic & Traditional Wagashi - 30 Seconds of the Video Enthusiast and Yokan

Every time I open the analytics screen on Photogram, the numbers sting. Follower count: three hundred seventeen. Several days have passed since the post. While content out there is racking up ten thousand views, Rhizuki-do's account sleeps quietly in the three-digit range. The engagement rate is... okay. But "okay" won't stop the closure. Marina shoved her phone into her pocket and walked through the Nishiki-dori shopping arcade. The morning air was cold, dim. A few fluorescent lights were dead again. The moss-covered blocks on the pavement were still wet from last night's rain. The shutters on both sides remained silent as always. Only twenty-two shops had their open signs out. Where ninety-two once lined the street, now there was only silence. (Three months.) That number spun in her head. At this pace, Rhizuki-do would be finished in three months. The ledger numbers said so. Then. She noticed the shop's sliding door was half-open. Marina stopped. Her grandmother Hatsu should be resting upstairs today. So what was that gap? She opened the door. Click. A shutter sound. A stranger stood in the kitchen. Silver, messy short hair. A single-lens reflex camera hung from his neck, its lens pointed at—a copper pot. His frame was lean, but the arm holding the camera was steady. With the wooden molds on the shelves as backdrop, morning light slanted in at an angle, creating dull streaks across the pot's surface. The young man was completely absorbed in that light. "Did you get permission?" When Marina spoke, the young man didn't turn around. "No, but seriously—isn't this light incredible? The morning angle hitting the copper pot just right—" Marina stepped forward and placed her palm over the camera lens. The shutter sound stopped. Silence. The young man finally turned. Golden eyes—irises shaped like stars—looked at her face. For a moment, he froze. "Ah... sorry, I did knock...? Probably." Marina's brow tightened. "Probably? This is a work area for the shop. You can't just—" "I'm Noto Ryo." The young man cut over her words. "Second year at Minakami University. I'm the director of the film production club. Right now I'm working on a documentary about disappearing shopping streets as a pre-graduation project. I came here after seeing Rhizuki-do's Photogram posts." Marina stopped at the last sentence. (The SNS post moved someone.) Not as a number, but as an action. One of the three hundred seventeen followers actually came here. That fact peeled away the outermost layer of her guard—just barely. But only the outermost layer. Her impression remained at its worst. "Leave." "Just watch this." Noto Ryo held out his phone. Marina didn't take it. Ryo played the video anyway. ── Eight minutes of documentary. No title. No music. No narration. What appeared was a tofu shop at four in the morning. A subtitle: "An eighty-year-old establishment in Minakami City." Then just hands, tofu, and the profiles of an elderly couple, over and over. Aged hands soaking soybeans. The husband's hand steadies the mold, the wife's hand places the weight. No words between their movements. But there was breath—shaped by decades of synchronization. For the first thirty seconds, Marina tried to analyze the composition with a professional eye. Was the camera angle right? The light balance. The depth of field. If she changed it to something more Instagram-friendly, engagement would go up— Past the two-minute mark, the analysis stopped. Aged hands pressing tofu into the mold. Watching that image, Marina found herself remembering her grandfather—Genzo. Those large hands stirring the copper pot. How his shoulders rose slightly when he lifted the azuki bean sacks. How he stayed alone in the kitchen at dusk, continuing his work. The video ended. Play count: two thousand three hundred. Not viral. But this was— (Something that couldn't be calculated by conversion rates.) Marina silently handed the phone back to Ryo. There was a pause. She rubbed her eyes. Pressed the corner of her eyelid with the pad of her finger. "Hay fever." "...It's mid-summer." "Can I ask you something?" Marina met Ryo's eyes. The golden irises met hers straight on. Eyes without deception. "Is that tofu shop still in business?" "They closed last year." A short silence fell. ── "Film us." Marina said it. Her own voice surprised her—no hesitation at all. "But there are conditions." "Conditions." "Post time, thumbnail color grading, video length, hashtag structure—all of it based on my SNS strategy data. I spent three years at Pulse Link, a digital marketing firm, increasing client followers by an average of over two hundred percent. The data has backing." Ryo's face clouded slightly. "That's... forcing the footage into a data template, right?" "It's necessary to produce results—" "You think it was good that the tofu shop video didn't go viral?" Marina stopped. "Two thousand three hundred views. But after watching that footage, I went to see that couple for three months straight. I was there until the day they closed. The video moved something—not through numbers. If you bind it with data, it stops being film." "Emotion alone won't save Rhizuki-do." Marina glanced toward the shelf holding the ledgers. "There's a real number: closure in three months. A hundred moving videos won't matter if sales don't go up. My grandmother protected this place alone. I won't hide that reality behind beautiful footage." "Then let me ask—how many followers do you have right now?" "...Three hundred seventeen." "I can't shoot soulless film for three hundred seventeen people." "Making those three hundred seventeen into thirty thousand is my job." Both of them searched for the next words. Then. Thud. A bag of azuki beans fell from the shelf to the floor. Both went silent, staring at it. A beat. "...So, where are these azuki beans from?" "Hokkaido Tokachi. Don't change the subject." Marina put her hand to her forehead. What even was this guy? Ryo picked up the bean bag and examined the label. He really seemed interested. Whether it was genuine or an attempt to shift the mood was impossible to tell. Probably genuine. "...Can I just shoot for now? Just the workspace. We can talk conditions after." Marina sighed. "Reluctantly." "Got it." ── Reluctantly was the truth. Marina reviewed the ledger from the corner of the kitchen while watching Ryo photograph the copper pot and wooden molds. He barely spoke. Peering through the camera's viewfinder, adjusting angles by millimeters, he simply searched for light—quietly, as if the argument from before had never happened. While organizing the shelves, a notebook fell to the floor. Old. The cover was sun-faded, corners rounded. The moment she picked it up, she recognized the handwriting. Her grandfather Genzo's. "Rhizuki-do Confection Records" was written on the cover. Inside, recipes were arranged meticulously. Nerikiri ratios. Yokan cooking times. Seasonal azuki adjustments. Decades of trial and error filled in small, dense characters. She turned a page. The page for Tsukikage. Hokkaido Tokachi azuki—Okinawa black sugar—three hours in copper pot—written carefully beside the recipe, in the margin, was a completely different handwriting. A rushed scrawl. The ink was slightly smudged. Written in haste. Marina read it aloud. "This taste, to a hundred years ahead." Her voice wavered slightly. She didn't notice it herself. But it did. The camera's motor sound stopped. When Marina looked up, Ryo had pulled away from the viewfinder. Camera lowered, he was looking at her face directly. With his raw eyes. Golden irises quietly reflecting her. "Can you make that expression again?" "...It's not an act." "That's why it's good." His face was serious. Not joking. Marina looked at Ryo. The person she'd been arguing with moments ago was now quietly looking at her face. Not through a viewfinder. Directly. (What even is this guy?) An unfamiliar feeling grazed somewhere in her chest. Before she could name it, Marina's gaze returned to the notebook. "Try filming. Let's put the conditions on hold for now." Ryo nodded slightly. ── The next morning. A notification came on Photogram. A tag from an unfamiliar account. She opened it. A video was posted. The account name was "noto_ryo_film." The profile read "Minakami University Film Production Club Director." Marina played it. Thirty seconds. The first shot was Marina's hands opening the recipe notebook. The copper pot and wooden molds melted into the background. Morning slant light scattered softly across the page. Then, slowly, a zoom. The rushed handwriting in the margin—"This taste, to a hundred years ahead"—expanded to fill the screen. And finally. Marina looking up. A still image of that moment. No BGM. No text. Non-standard length. No prior approval. Marina called. He picked up on the second ring. "Why didn't you show me first?" "You would've stopped me." "I'm stopping you now—" She opened the analytics screen. Words caught in her throat. Eighteen hours since posting. Views had broken ten thousand. She opened the comments. "Does Rhizuki-do actually exist?" "I want to go." "I cried." "Who wrote that handwriting?" "Minakami City, huh? I should visit sometime."—Comments kept coming. "Come to Rhizuki-do." She hung up. ── Thirty minutes later, Ryo arrived. Camera still hanging from his neck, he opened the sliding door with a grin showing his fangs. If there was a word for that expression, it was exactly that: smug. "How is it?" "Look at the data. Ten thousand views." She thrust the phone at him. It was frustrating. But numbers were numbers. "See? It's all about sensibility—" "Next time we edit according to my strategy." She cut him off preemptively. Ryo stopped talking. Both of them laughed at the same time. They just... laughed. Neither first, the ten thousand views invalidating the argument for just a moment. "...Thank you." She said it shortly. It was all she could manage. She held out a fist to Ryo. He bumped it lightly. In that moment, something jumped once in her chest. Not love—something simpler. Like resonance. That's what Marina told herself. She didn't have the energy to verify, so she quickly turned her attention back to the ledger. "I'll send the next post structure by end of week. I'll run hashtag optimization and post time A/B testing simultaneously." "Got it. Just keep some sensibility in there, yeah?" "I'll think about it." Ryo laughed and opened the sliding door to leave. ── Marina started sweeping the storefront. As she pressed the bamboo broom against the arcade's pavement, in the twilight-like afternoon light, she felt her emotions gradually settle. Ten thousand views. That meant ten thousand people had watched this thirty-second film. If the three hundred seventeen had stayed three hundred seventeen, today's numbers wouldn't exist. Her eyes drifted toward the back of the arcade. A white van was parked there. In an unfamiliar spot. One of the vacant storefronts. Workers were carrying white interior panels inside one after another. The shutter was up, protective tape covering the inside. No sign yet. Marina stopped sweeping. She took a photo with her phone. Zoomed in on the image. Along the edge of the panel, a faded neon pink line ran through it. White and neon pink. Zooming further, she could see a small logo next to the panel manufacturer's name. "F-FOODS" Marina stared at that logo. She didn't recognize it. But something caught. A sensory, baseless catch. She searched when she got home. Frontier Foods—a company operating multiple food service brands, headquarters in Chuo Ward, Tokyo—came up. Details were sparse. The list of managed brands was minimal. The website had little information. Marina stared at the search results. The satisfaction from ten thousa

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Episode 2

Name: Sweet Legacy, New Love: Marketing Magic & Traditional Wagashi
Author: Novelia

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