Panda and the Candy Shop – Part One
ep.216 Panda and the Candy Shop – Part One
Published: August 23, 2025, 18:06
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Preface
No preface is written.
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Main Text
Dagashiya Wonderland (First Half)
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1. The Entrance Always Carried Dust and Sweet Smell
•In front of the candy shop, there was always a thin veil of dust floating in the air.
•When you slid the glass door open, a little bell would ring.
•At the back, an old lady sat at a low table watching TV.
•Before even saying “welcome,” she would first check my feet for some reason.
•(Hey, I’m not shoplifting today. I brought actual coins this time.)
•On the shelves were colorful little bags: 10 yen, 20 yen, 30 yen.
•It was the miraculous age of “zero consumption tax.”
•A 100-yen coin was like a king—so dignified and powerful.
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2. Bottle Soda and “Unfair Early Lunch Punishment”
•Next to the shop stood a vending machine with bottled sodas, sealed with crown caps.
•At its base, there were always shards of broken glass scattered.
•“Ah, so this is where they smash them,” sharp-eyed Panda observed.
•Out of curiosity, I tried to imitate it.
•…But with no arm strength, I couldn’t even make a crack.
•At that exact moment, the old woman burst out from the back:
•“So it was you doing this all the time! I knew it—because you’re a foreigner, you must be doing bad things!”
•And just like that, I was given an unfair punishment.
•The real culprit was probably someone else. I only “observed.”
•In fact, I didn’t even make it to the “attempted” stage.
•But brown hair and pale skin worked like a magnet that attracted such accusations.
•(……Still, if I cried here, I would lose. Candy and gacha machines were waiting for me.)
•In the end, even if they scolded me, the bottle-breaking incidents obviously continued.
•So I think the old lady eventually realized the culprit wasn’t the “foreigner.”
•But she never apologized.
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3. The Shrine of Gacha Opens
•In front of the store was the gacha capsule corner, the children’s little casino.
•20 yen, 100 yen. Each turn of the handle made a capsule drop, koron.
•“Biting Granny Eraser”: a joke eraser shaped like a grandma clamping her teeth on a pencil. 100 yen.
•Boys copied me and kept turning, and soon, in the classroom, “Biting Granny Battles” began.
•Erasers chomping on pencils across desks.
•When the teacher walked in, everyone calmly tucked them away into their pencil cases.
•(Granny may have a foul mouth, but she knew how to read the room.)
•Girls loved the celebrity clear-file sheets (rare prizes).
•They wanted those, so the “ordinary erasers” that came out instead were tossed aside.
•Humanity is, in truth, very honest about discarding what it doesn’t want.
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4. Umbrella Tip as a Treasure Hunter’s Pickaxe
•Once a week was “excavation day.”
•With the tip of my umbrella, I probed under the gacha machines. Katsu, katsu, katsu.
•See? There it was—forgotten capsules and fallen erasers.
•If you gathered them up, you could fill a bag.
•While the old woman was watching TV, I struck a golden vein on the ground.
•At home, I poured them into an empty cookie tin.
•“It grew again,” my mother remarked.
•She never knew how I got them.
•Boys’ eyes widened: “Whoa… two Space Battleship Yamato erasers? An Ultraman monster too? Trade with me!”
•I would quietly reply: “No…”
•(Even back then, my collector’s spirit was strong.)
•But Kinnikuman erasers were in a class of their own.
•Boys would never throw them away. Girls hardly ever spun for them.
•So even with umbrella-tip excavation, you would never find “Kinkeshi.”
•The world contains things that will never be discarded: honor, friendship, and Kinnikuman erasers.
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5. The Joys and Sorrows of Shared Property
•One day, several friends and I bought dozens of Saint Seiya magnet packs.
•I was lazy, so I put everyone’s magnets into one bag.
•Naturally, no one could tell whose was whose.
•“Panda, that’s mine!”
•“No, I think that’s actually mine?”
•A national border dispute over magnets erupted—just like a territorial conflict between nations.
•To make things worse, during an exchange someone pointed at a magnet with pencil-lead stains:
•“You gave me a dirty one.”
•My chest went zukun—pierced.
•I hadn’t done it on purpose. Really, I hadn’t.
•The other child didn’t seem to care much, but I sank into self-blame for days.
•If the phrase “gentle regret” exists, it was coined for that very moment.
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6. The 100-Yen Kingdom and the Princess of Savings
•Panda was poor.
•Instead of spending pocket money right away, I saved to buy “big things”:
•Bicycles, VCRs, radios.
•I was the CFO—Chief Family Optimizer—of the child bank’s cash flow.
•That’s why I often couldn’t buy manga, and why I scavenged under gacha machines.
•“If it doesn’t exist, make it. If you don’t have it, find it. If you can’t buy it, think it into being.”
•The blueprint of my creative brain was drawn on the dusty floor of a candy shop.
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7. Snack Time: Squid in a Pot and Grilled Cod
•My family’s regular treats were savory “chinmi” snacks.
•Squid in little jars, grilled cod, cod with mayo. 10 yen apiece.
•My mother would buy ten at a time.
•In those days of no sales tax, she could hand over 100 yen and get, “Here you go.”
•They were both adult snacks and children’s treats.
•In the mouth, the squid’s umami spread with stubborn insistence.
•Even when it stuck to your teeth, happiness stuck along with it.
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8. “No Snacking Allowed” and the “Legal Goods”
•At middle school, outside snacking was forbidden.
•But anime goods from the stationery shop were allowed.
•Saint Seiya magnets cost 20 yen a bag.
•From those tiny bags, a whole universe, destiny, and cosmos would emerge.
•Friends even asked me: “Can you buy 500 yen worth for me?”
•But I mistakenly assumed they didn’t care much about the designs.
•So I gave them my duplicates—my way of running a market strategy.
•Looking back, it was a legitimate supply chain.
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9. Loose Hygiene, Loose Time
•The candy shop sometimes sold expired bread.
•Sometimes a bottle soda would come out from the fridge in the back.
•Half the store was really just the family’s house—tatami mats, curtains, daily life spilling out.
•Looking back, things were very “loose.” But that looseness was its protection.
•Even the smell of the rag used to wipe up spilled ramune soda is preserved in memory.
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10. The Treasure Hunt Continues—and the Present Day
•The child who once poked under gacha machines with an umbrella tip
•Is now an adult who peers into the gas station’s receipt box.
•“Any 3-yen discount coupons?”
•Small gains, when accumulated, become large gains.
•The sense for sniffing out little wins, trained in candy shops, still serves me in the Reiwa era.
•And above all, the lesson I learned in that place:
•Things that are never discarded cannot be picked up.
•Like Kinnikuman erasers.
•Like friendship and pride.
•Like the little stories I’ve been collecting all along.
—To be continued.
