#002: Back From Hiatus!

Finally! It’s been almost a year since we started this website, and you might be wondering what happened. A lot!

Since the birth of Hanabi Matsuri around June 2025, we did a ton of brainstorming, some legwork, and a bit of networking. This included a lot of forming of ideas, which was mostly about how we could start-up our ambitions for creating Volume 1 Café.

But all this came to a halt when my day job took a massive turn in leadership, which ultimately lead to my resignation from that company. But since I relied on that day job as my sole source of income, I was forced to put Hanabi Matsuri on Hiatus while I sought out another, more sustainable day job.

Anyway, things are much better now, thank you for asking!

Starting now, Hanabi Matsuri will be waking up from its long nap and return to the world! I plan to use this blog to track the progress of the business, and update any interested readers out there. Perhaps one day, we will turn this into more of a newsletter format.

And there have been a lot of changes recently. With the viral growth and public interest in anime, manga, and Japanese pop-culture in the United States, there are some competitors entering the industry, and we are concerned that our business plans and strategies may need to be altered in order to build a sustainable product and enjoyable experience for our future patrons.

Moving forward, Hanabi Matsuri will be rolling out a step-wise approach to our operations. We still have a strong desire to open a physical location in the future, but we will need to work on budgeting and building interest first before we can afford that kind of investment. So, we’ll start with a focus on our online presence through social media, building a robust website, and focusing much of our attention on R&D.

Here’s to a rough and beautifully imperfect start-up. Cheers!