Ogata: a success story

The name Ogata sounded so lovely to her mother’s ears when she named her little girl.

Little did she know then what significance that name would come to hold in the world.

One day, amongst the many pairs of shoes in the classroom hallway, little Ogata spotted her teacher’s new dark brown boots. And when the teacher then went on to read the fairy tale of Puss in Boots, Ogata was completely smitten! From that moment on, she wanted nothing more than to wear boots for as long as possible.

Every morning, the little girl would tell her mother how she’d worn the most beautiful boots in her dreams, and evening after evening she grew sadder as she took off her ordinary little shoes. So her mother began scouring every shoe shop until she finally found some delightful little cowboy boots for her daughter. Ogata was over the moon when, on her sixth birthday, she was able to go to school wearing her new little boots.

From that day on, she wore nothing but boots. She asked all her relatives for boots for Christmas and her birthday, and by the age of fourteen she had already amassed a considerable collection in all colours and shapes. She kept her boots even when they had become too small for her or were worn out.

At the age of seven, she had also started drawing boots, and just one year later she was designing new models. At fourteen, she launched her online boot shop, and at sixteen she won an inventors’ competition with her ingenious design for transparent swimming boots with fin extensions. On her Facebook account ‘Ogata’s Boots’, at the age of eighteen, she received a friend request from a certain Benno Stiefel, whom she naturally wanted to meet in person as soon as possible and, just as naturally, married a month after that meeting.

There are many more ‘boot-related’ chapters of her life to recount: at the age of twenty-five, she was entered into the Guinness Book of Records for the most extensive collection of boots; at thirty-five, she founded the university faculty of ‘Bootology’; at forty-one, she launched the charitable aid project ‘Boots for All’ and, at forty-five, the founding of the Boot Party, which had set itself the task of completely banning normal footwear from 2035 onwards.

At fifty-two, however, she was so worn out from all the boots that she passed away shortly after drawing up her will. This extremely successful life devoted to boots left her boot-husband Benno two billion in boots and the commission for a five-storey boot museum. She was laid to rest in the presence of the world’s highest-ranking boot dignitaries in a boot-shaped wooden coffin, an event observed at the edge of the cemetery by an admittedly peaceful demonstration of ordinary shoe-wearers. And when one pressed the sole of the grave boot’s heel, a wistful voice recited the fairy tale of Ogata in her boots.