Yoshino Town
Yoshinori Tsujimura

Taking over the family business with liquor shop as the main business, Yoshinori focused on the business category of the sale of confectionery using kudzu (arrowroot) and managing a cafe, from his generation. With the “Only One Strategy”, which is the reverse of the popular one, it creates a new wind on Mt. Yoshino.

I hope this shop to keep being a place where everyone come with the aim of here.

Born here in Mt. Yoshino, he grew up as the second son of a merchant house. “This is a store that has been continued since my grandmother's generation, and it was like convenience store in the present day. At that time, it was a time when the shopping streets were lively, with independent shops, such as butchers, fish shops, rice shops, and others.”
It is the seventh year after changing from the liquor shop to the present business style. He would like to further develop the pastry making of kudzu that my mother has continued since long ago. He also thought that “Even if we earn the same 1,000 yen, for example, I want to get the remuneration for something was created with all our own sincerity. I had a desire to show that to my children as well.”
Before launching a new shop, he learned the basics of the new shop development, including participating in branding study session sponsored by the prefecture's government. The concept of the goods for sale is “gifts for important person.” In a simple, waste-free gallery-like shop, confectioneries using kudzu with poetic naming such as “The Secret Time” and “Stars and Dances” are displayed sophisticatedly. The message written on the shop's home page was expanded in a story-like style by his wife who worked for a PR company in Tokyo, listening to the story of her husband.
Yoshinori's strategy for the shop development is “subtraction” in a nutshell. “Normally, we tend to do ‘addition’ too much, but we venture to value “an option of stopping”.
Since the confectionery using kudzu is hand-made, it can’t be mass-produced. Now it's a time when scarce value for consumers also appears as a special added value. “I want to meet the expectations of the customers who really liked the shop, I think so and make the confectionery”.

Interviewed in April, 2019
Writer : Hideko Takahashi / Photographer : Hiroyuki Tamura