#CreativeAward2026 #EntertainmentOriginalWorkCategory The Road to Natto Champion Chapter 1 | How To Make Natto-Champion | The Natto Development Committee Begins

[Synopsis]
Are you familiar with the famous TV Tokyo program "TV Champion"?
It was a long-running program that aired 797 times over 14 years and 6 months, from April 1992 to September 2006.

It was one of my favorite programs, and"Tomorrow, you will be the champion!"was its initial catchphrase.

However, I never thought of"you"as referring to myself, and I watched the program as just another viewer, but on November 16, 2000, I, an ordinary salaryman, suddenly found myself sitting on the throne of TV Champion.

"National Natto King Championship"I will trace the behind-the-scenes story that you couldn't know just by watching the TV screen, and the path I took until I became the champion.

1995, Akino Town, Ibaraki Prefecture (now Chikusei City)
Three years after the start of TV Champion, I was working in the General Affairs Department of a factory that made residential insulation materials, having obtained the national qualification of Type 1 Health Officer, and was responsible for promoting safety and health activities for the people working at the factory and for payroll calculation.

At home, our third child, our eldest son Kotaro, had just been born, and our family of five was living in company housing.

And with the arrival of the PC OS Win95, the internet spread all at once.Since I was struggling with raising three children, while collecting information about child-rearing on the net, I ended up on a site called "Child-rearing Chat."

I became obsessed with chat, where I could converse with multiple people in real-time via logs rather than by phone, and I made maximum use of the then-popular Tele-hodai flat-rate service, connecting to the internet via dial-up late at night to enjoy conversations with men and women of the child-rearing generation from all over the country.

One day, while I was discussing child-rearing worries in the chat as usual, a person from Hiroshima asked me this.

"Ganmo, you're from Ibaraki, right?
Tell me a delicious way to eat natto."

"Ganmo" was my registered name at the time.

"A delicious way? How about putting raw egg on natto rice?"

"No way! Raw egg is impossible! Isn't there anything else?"

Then someone from Tokyo

"If you put kimchi on it, not only does it mask the smell of the natto, but the synergistic effect of the double fermentation of the kimchi and natto makes it delicious."

they interrupted and answered.

"Huh! I'll try that sometime.
Even though Ganmo is from Ibaraki, you don't know much about natto, do you?"

At the time, I didn't know any way to eat natto other than using the included sauce or adding a raw egg.
That casual remark from the person in Hiroshima on the other side of the screen pierced through the quiet room late at night, and my face suddenly flushed hot in front of the computer.

"I live in Ibaraki and eat natto every day, I can't lose when it comes to natto...!"

At 3:00 AM, with the end time of Tele-hodai approaching, a small fire was lit in my heart.

In that case,I decided I would collect a lot of information about natto, eat natto from all over the country, and show them all! I thought.

In 1997, the first thing I started doing was taking pictures of the labels of the natto I bought, and then attaching and entering the product name, company name, and my impressions of eating it into spreadsheet software to organize it.

However, since this would just be self-satisfaction for a personal collection, I decided to create a website and publish it on the internet.
In the midst of the dawn of the internet, I studied HTML tags from scratch, created tables, decorated text, and taught myself how to create a simple website.
In an era where you couldn't easily create good-looking websites for free like you can today, I found a service where a domain rented out part of its server for free, and I published the information on the 20 types of natto I had collected so far there.
Furthermore, I added a bulletin board function to the website so that I could exchange information with visitors.
And, inspired by the Safety and Health Committee I was planning and operating at my workplace, I named the website the Natto Development Committee. I put my heart into the idea of "not just conveying information about natto, but creating new ways to eat it together."

When I published the website in 1998, visitors began posting photos of natto sold across the country and arrangement recipes using natto on the bulletin board one after another.

I couldn't hide my excitement every night at the passionate posts gathering from all over the country, more than I had expected. A few friends from a "parenting chat" also joined this "Natto Development Committee," and within less than a month of its launch, the number of "committee members" reached 20, and information on over 50 types of natto products came in all at once.
Then one day, one of the committee members introduced me to a website, saying, "There is a website like this about natto."
At that time, I had no idea that that website would have such a huge influence on me.

Chapter 2

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