Andersen Hiroshima

This guide to Andersen Hiroshima traces Shunsuke Takagi, a bread-factory owner from Hiroshima, tasting Danish pastry in a Copenhagen hotel dining room in 1959 and turning that one bite into an obsession that outgrew pastry entirely. Within three years his company was selling Denmark's pastries across Japan, but the harder puzzle he spent the next decade chasing was about time, not flavor: how to get fresh-tasting bread from one factory to shops it could never reach fast enough. His bakers spent roughly ten years experimenting with frozen dough, working toward this flagship store, which opened in 1967.