03/09/2026
She was 15 years old, working her first part-time shift at a CoCo Ichibanya curry restaurant in Yokohama.
Seven years later she was running the company.
Rino Morosawa started there in 2017, during her first year of high school.
She took to the customer service side so hard that she reached the national finals of the chain's service contest while still a student.
At 19, she was certified as one of only 15 customer-service specialists in the entire national CoCo Ichibanya chain.
That's when the founder of the franchise operator, Daisuke Nishimaki, asked her a question: did she want to be the next president?
She was 20.
Two years of management training later, on May 1, 2024, Morosawa took over as president of Skyscraper, the Gunma-based company behind 25 CoCo Ichibanya locations, roughly 400 employees and about 2 billion yen in annual sales.
She was 22.
The day after she took the job, she was back in uniform working the floor.
She still does it — one shift at every single store, once a month, through the lunch rush.
Today she is 24, the company runs 32 restaurants with 488 employees, and sales reached 2.55 billion yen, around 17 million dollars, for the year ending April 2026.
Her target for the next ten years is 10 billion yen, roughly 67 million dollars.
