Do you want to gush about Hironobu + staff? Because this is totally permission to gush about Hironobu + staff.
Oh boy would I, anon!
Hironobu.
Hironobu’s bakery was in the most recent chapter of Early Is On Time, and he shows up most often in Shadow Under Water – the one where Shisui and Shikako are teammates – but here’s some general background!
For those of you playing along at home, Hironobu is a civilian-born pastry chef, wedding cake master, and all around Baking Genius™ that married into the Akimichi because the Akimichi needed to have him and his recipes and his bakery in the clan.
Hironobu is Chouji’s first cousin once removed by marriage. I’m sure that doesn’t mean much to most people, so here’s a helpful diagram!
(Notes about who’s canon and where these characters came from at the end!)
Hironobu was born 25 years after Konoha’s founding. This makes him the same age as Inuzuka Tsume, although it is of course doubtful that they know each other because Hironobu is from civilian stock. His father was the younger son of a successful baker in the Land of Fire’s capital. Konoha was really taking off, you know, and when the first Shinobi war ended about a decade after Konoha started, it was prime time for civilians to move in! Hironobu’s dad showed up some time after that with a lovely wife, set up a small bakery, and started doing business. Hironobu inherited it when he was between 18 and 20 (so, around y44) and his father retired back to the capital.
Chouichi is Chouji’s cousin, older by 12 years. His father was Chouza’s older brother and died when he was a kid. Chouichi graduated to genin at 10 (y46) but was kept out of the war, as clan heir, especially given his father’s death. He officially abdicated when Chouji hit a year old, knowing that he wanted to go into the business and hospitality half of the clan rather than continue on as a ninja, and it’s Akimichi clan law that the clan head be an active shinobi.
Chouichi’s first act of Official Profitable And Important Clan Business happens before he’s even a chuunin. At age 11, after a D-rank cleaning up a wedding venue for a minor civilian council member, he and his team are given some left over cake. It’s the best cake he’s ever had. Ever. Better than his mother’s cake. Better than his grandfather’s cake. Chouichi is clan heir still at this time and has had every cake anyone in his clan has made and this is not one of those. It’s perfect.
The Akimichi must have it. Not just buying a cake once in awhile, no. The recipe, the shop it came from, and the baker in question. They NEED it. The clan, Chouichi knows, is not complete.
So he shows up at Hironobu’s bakery at the end of the day, dirty from team training, and charms the hell out of Hironobu, and talks business. Flour shortages and sugar prices and the difficulty of the small bakery Hironobu’s father set up. It’s out of the way, and it really doesn’t have enough room for the elaborate wedding cakes Hironobu would like to make or the staff he’d need to make them.
Chouichi arranges Hironobu’s marriage into the clan. It’s easy:
Hironobu makes a cake. A small cake. A perfect cake. He makes it when Ageha gets back from her next mission.
Chouichi brings the cake around to Ageha’s apartment. She’s two years older than Hironobu, a jounin.
She looks so tired – the Third War, you know? – and Chouichi doesn’t want to sell her on this too hard. He just hands the cake box to her, says, “You could marry the man who made this,” and leaves.
“I fell in love instantly,” Ageha has said, often, mostly about the cake but sometimes, eventually, about Hironobu.
Hironobu gets a bigger, better shop, on Tea Street. He gets much better prices on all of his ingredients. He gets lots of catering contacts. He gets a lovely wife!
In Shadow Under Water, Hironobu’s newest staff member is Akimichi Chinatsu. Dona wrote about her in a piece I’ll link below, although I’m weak and can’t deal with her being dead and therefore she just had a career ending injury. Her teammates were Yamanaka Santa and Nara Kyougi and they stop in a lot still.
When Chouichi retires from active service sometime after making chuunin (probably after Konoha gets back on track from the Kyuubi attack) he flings himself into all kinds of event planning, including weddings, and orders lots and lots of cakes from Hironobu.
