Gannenshoyu or First-Year Soy Sauce?
Kikkoman Soy Sauce and the Corporate Forgetting
of the Early Japanese American Consumer
Robert Ji-Song Ku
Kikkoman Soy Sauce
On September 19, 2007, the Kikkoman Corporation placed a full-page color advertisement in the New York Times commemorating the company’s fiftieth anniversary in America. The ad is essentially a letter of thanks to America from Yuzaburo Mogi, the company’s chairman and CEO. “Arigato, America,” the ad reads in large letters. A large photographic cutout of a smiling, grand- fatherly Mr. Mogi appears beneath the 160-word letter, accompanied on the left by a bottle of Kikkoman soy sauce hovering over a special gold emblem expressly designed for this occasion. The emblem, announcing “50th Anniver- sary in America,” is flanked by two dates, 1957 and 2007. To the right of Mogi is a caption identifying the chairman as a “member of the family that founded the company more than three centuries ago” and who “helped make Kikko- man one of the world’s leading food brands.”
“Thank you, America, for 50 great years,” begins Chairman Mogi’s letter:
Thank you for making Kikkoman one of America’s best-loved food brands. We are honored and humbled by the generous welcome you have extended to us since we started marketing our soy sauce in America 50 years ago.
A lot has changed since then, but one thing remains the same. Our core prod- uct, naturally brewed soy sauce, is still made just as it was more than 300 years ago—slowly fermented and aged for full flavor like a fine wine.
Over the last half century, you have embraced our soy sauce, teriyaki, and other authentic seasonings and products. You have made us a part of the Ameri- can pantry. And as we celebrate our golden anniversary with you, we thank you for welcoming us into your homes and your hearts, and we look forward to sharing a place a the table with you for many years to come.
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At the bottom of the ad, under the interlocked fingers of the genial-looking chairman, are the details of Kikkoman’s fiftieth-anniversary sweepstake, prom- ising great prizes, including a trip to Japan, no purchase necessary.
Far from being a singular event, this ad was a small snippet of a wider, all- out marketing blitz choreographed by the Kikkoman Corporation for the bet- ter part of 2007. In observance of the anniversary, the company replaced the standard labels on many of its products with newly designed commemorative ones and replaced the signature red caps on some bottles of soy sauce with fes- tive gold ones. Earlier in the year, before more than forty journalists gathered at San Francisco’s city hall, the president of the San Francisco Board of Super- visors proclaimed June 5, 2007, as the city’s “Kikkoman Day.” It was here in 1957 that Kikkoman established Kikkoman International, Inc., and Kikkoman Day marked the fiftieth anniversary of that occasion.1
The festivities in San Francisco were followed a few months later by a gala in Washington, DC, held across the street from the White House at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. With a guest list of more than two hundred business and political luminaries, the event featured congratulatory speeches by, among others, Carlos M. Gutierrez (secretary of commerce), Jim Doyle (governor of Wisconsin), and Tommy Thompson (former secretary of health and human services). During the proceedings, congressional members announced that a resolution recognizing Kikkoman’s fifty years in the United States had been submitted to both houses of Congress.2
Governor Jim Doyle’s conspicuous role in the Chamber of Commerce gala was not incidental. In May 2003, the Kikkoman Foundation pledged a million dollars to the University of Wisconsin–Madison to establish the Kikkoman Laboratory of Microbial Fermentation. This gift was connected to another Kik- koman anniversary, the thirtieth anniversary of the company’s first U.S.-based soy sauce production facility, established in Wisconsin’s Walworth County in 1973. The opening of this plant was momentous, as Kikkoman was arguably the first Japanese company to establish a production facility on U.S. soil.3
In Kikkoman Chronicles, a book commissioned by the company on the his- tory of the Kikkoman Corporation, the author, Ronald E. Yates, writes:
The Kikkoman Soy Sauce plant (in Walworth) is generally conceded to be the first full-blown Japanese manufacturing facility ever constructed in the United States. . . . While it’s true that Japan’s Sony Corp. opened a television picture tube assembly plant that it had previously purchased near San Diego in 1972, it wasn’t producing a product from scratch the way Kikkoman’s Walworth plan was. Nor was it producing a 100 percent Japanese product like brewed soy sauce.4
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Figure 10.1. Kikkoman’s Golden Anniversary advertisement published in the New York Times on September 19, 2007. Photograph by the author.
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But perhaps of greater interest, especially in respect to Kikkoman’s presence in America, is a historical tidbit revealed elsewhere in Yates’s book about an event that took place a century earlier.
According to Yates, in 1868, “the same year that the Emperor Meiji wrested power from the Tokugawa Shogunate,” Saheiji Mogi (a forebear of the current chairman Mogi) shipped kegs of Kikkoman soy sauce (called shoyu in Japa- nese) to Hawai‘i and California in an effort to expand the Kikkoman brand internationally.5 “By 1868, the Mogi clan was shipping soy sauce to Hawaii and California—traveling with some of the first Japanese immigrants to both places, writes Yates.”6 This detail is reiterated in the book’s conclusion:
Someone once said that you cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. It’s a great definition of risktaking. Losing sight of Japan’s shore is something the Kikkoman Corporation has been doing for almost half of its 300-plus-years of existence. It began when members of the Mogi clan began shipping kegs of Kikkoman brand soy sauce to Hawaii and Cal- ifornia in 1868—the same year Japan opened its doors to the world after almost 300 years of self-imposed isolation. And it didn’t stop there. Kikkoman went on to set up a subsidiary in San Francisco in 1957 that has become a benchmark model of how to introduce a relatively unknown product (Japanese shoyu) to the mainstream U.S. market.
Yates’s evocation of the year 1868, when juxtaposed with 1957 and 2007, raises an obvious question: If Kikkoman soy sauce was indeed shipped to Hawai‘i and California at the onset of the Meiji era, why would that not qualify as the first instance of its marketing in America? Yates’s account obfuscates as much as it reveals. In one instance, Yates states that Kikkoman soy sauce was shipped to Japanese immigrants in Hawai‘i and the United States as early as 1868. But he also states that the soy sauce traveled with them, implying that the immi- grants purchased it before leaving Japan. If Yates’s account of Kikkoman’s start in America is true, why, then, not commemorate 1868, instead of 1957, as Kik- koman’s first year in America? Moreover, if Kikkoman soy sauce was indeed shipped to Hawai‘i and the United States as early as 1868, were there any Japa- nese immigrants in either location to receive it? That is, was the Japanese pop- ulation large enough to make it financially viable for Kikkoman to ship its soy sauce over such a long distance?
In both the New York Times ad and Kikkoman’s corporate website, as well as in the fulsome press coverage of the soy sauce maker’s anniversary cele- bration, 1957 is emphatically referred to as either the “start” of Kikkoman soy
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sauce “marketing” in America or the year in which the soy sauce first “entered” U.S. markets. Senate Resolution 323—introduced during the first session of the 110th Congress on September 20, 2007, by Senators Herbert Kohl (D-WI) and Russell Feingold (D-WI)—recognizes “Kikkoman Foods, Inc., for its 50 years of operations in the United States.” (Apparently, the resolution confused Kik- koman Foods, Inc., the subsidiary overseeing the Walworth plant, for Kikko- man International, Inc., the company’s San Francisco–based marketing arm.) The resolution also recognizes Kikkoman as “celebrating its 50th anniversary of business in the United States during the year 2007”; as having “established sales operations in San Francisco, California, in 1957”; as annually shipping “over 30,000,000 gallons of soy sauce throughout North America”; as “one of the first Japanese companies to have a major manufacturing plant in the Unites States”; as continuing “to make steadfast commitment to the economic and culinary vitality of the United States”; and as having remained for fifty years “steadfast in its devotion to promoting international cultural exchange.” The document concludes by resolving that the Senate
1. recognizes the importance of the contribution made by Kikkoman Foods, Inc., to the cultural and economic vitality of the United States; and
2. commends Kikkoman Foods on its 50 years of marketing and operations in the United States.7
As the resolution directly states and various media widely announced, the golden anniversary celebration very clearly commemorated the 1957 installa- tion of Kikkoman International, Inc., in San Francisco.
But how significant is Yates’s revelation that Kikkoman shipped its soy sauce to Japanese in Hawai‘i and California as early as 1868? Surely, if this were the case, these earliest Japanese immigrants could not have received the product as a gift; that is, they must have bought it. Therefore, can we consider 2007 as Kik- koman’s 139th anniversary in America? In fact, there is irrefutable evidence that on numerous occasions not long after 1868 and long before 1957, Kikkoman soy sauce was marketed to, exported to, and consumed by a sizable group of Ameri- cans. Thus, if not the first instance of Kikkoman soy sauce being marketed in the United States, what does 1957 really commemorate? And what is Yates implying when he describes the San Francisco subsidiary as first introducing Japanese soy sauce to the “mainstream U.S. market”? Of course, what Yates is really saying here is that the soy sauce was indeed marketed to some Americans before 1957. Who exactly, then, is part of this so-called mainstream, and who is outside it? What do these three dates—1868, 1957, and 2007—really signify?
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The answer, it turns out, is obliquely hinted at in the Kikkoman newspa- per ad, when Mogi describes Kikkoman soy sauce as a “naturally brewed soy sauce . . . still made just as it was more than 300 years ago—slowly fermented and aged for full flavor like a fine wine.” With this self-characterization, Kik- koman reveals a marketing strategy that attempts to establish the legitimacy of its own soy sauce while alluding to what it sees as the dubiousness of some of its competitors’ soy sauces that do not undergo a similar process of slow fer- mentation. Referred to by some as “non-brewed,” “hydrolyzed,” or “chemical” soy sauce, and often American made, alternative types of soy sauce are widely consumed the world over, and, owing to its lower cost compared with that of the traditionally long-brewed type, will most likely increase in popularity. By repeatedly stressing that its soy sauce is “naturally brewed,” “slowly fermented,” and “aged,” Kikkoman is strongly insinuating that non-brewed soy sauces are “unnatural” and therefore inauthentic. They are, in a word, fake.
To drive home this point, Kikkoman even went as far as to ask an inter- national food arbitrator—the United Nation’s Codex Alimentarius Commis- sion—to bar U.S. soy sauce makers from using the term “soy sauce” when marketing their non-brewed products. Undeterred, the U.S. makers parried by essentially accusing Kikkoman of unfair essentialism: “All we want is for the standard for soy sauces to be all-inclusive,” argued a U.S. delegate to the com- mission. “We have people who make naturally brewed and the hydrolyzed. We just have to make sure the product is safe and compatible, that’s all.”8
But in hitching the “authentic soy sauce” advertising strategy to the San Francisco office’s fiftieth anniversary, Kikkoman not only is deliberately questioning the legitimacy of its competitors’ soy sauces but also is con- sciously characterizing another thing as an ersatz version of what that thing purports to be. By essentially erasing the history of Kikkoman’s marketing presence in Hawai‘i and the United States between 1868 and 1957, the com- pany is asking whether those who consumed its soy sauce during this period are, in fact, authentically American. In other words, Japanese Americans, who constituted a major overseas market for Kikkoman soy sauce for many decades before 1957, are simultaneously likened to fake soy sauce and defined as ersatz Americans.
Read against the interwoven backdrops of early Japanese history in Hawai‘i and California, and the current debate taking place among soy sauce manufac- turers over the very definition of soy sauce, it is apparent that Kikkoman’s New York Times ad and the associated golden anniversary celebration reveal a series of assertions, conjectures, and implications that radiate far beyond Mogi’s sim- ple desire to say, “Arigato, America.”
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First-Year Soy Sauce?
On May 17, 1868, a little less than a century before Kikkoman established its San Francisco office, the first large group of Japanese to sail for Hawai‘i boarded the Scioto, a ship ferrying 149 contract laborers—141 men, six women, and two children—from Yokohama to Honolulu.9 The only Japanese to disembark on the islands earlier—long before James Cook “discovered” them in 1778—were most likely shipwrecked Japanese sailors who drifted ashore.10 None of them left any trace. According to Yamato Ichihashi in his landmark 1932 study, Jap- anese in the United States, the earliest Japanese document noting the arrival of Japanese in Hawai‘i is 1803, whereas the earliest Hawaiian document dates this to 1832, “when a small number of Japanese castaways were brought to Hono- lulu on board an American sailing vessel.”11 “Thus it seems evident that a num- ber of Japanese by accident reached both Hawai‘i and California in those early years but neither were induced nor cared to remain,” writes Ichihashi. “They returned to their native land as soon as they found opportunity to do so.”12
In contrast, the passengers aboard the Scioto were not compelled to go ashore because of some unfortunate nautical mishap. Indeed, Hawai‘i was their intended destination, even if most “had no accurate idea of where they were going”; they simply “expected to become wealthy.”13 Specifically, they came to work in Hawai‘i’s burgeoning sugar plantations under a three-year contract brokered by an enterprising—albeit unscrupulous, by most accounts—Amer- ican businessman named Eugene M. Van Reed. Known as the gannenmono, or “first-year people,” to indicate that they migrated during the first year of the Meiji Restoration, this pioneering group consisted of “a few samurai, a hairdresser, cooks, potters, printers, saké brewers, tailors, and woodwork- ers.”14 Also among them was a stowaway, who kept a diary of the passage. In his entries was an inventory of the ship’s provisions, which included items indispensable to the Japanese diet: more than five hundred bags of rice (mostly brown, which some of the passengers passed the time by polishing during the long journey), miso (a paste made of fermented soybeans, barley, and rice in varying combinations), and soy sauce.15
W. Mark Fruin, author of Kikkoman: Company, Clan, and Community, one of the volumes in the Harvard Studies in Business History series, writes that in 1838, Saheiji Mogi “petitioned for and received central government registration of the brand name Kikkoman and unknowingly began what would become a century-long crusade for brand recognition of his family’s flagship shoyu, Kik- koman.” This sort of assertive business maneuver was “a rather unusual move for the time,” observes Fruin. While the Mogi family sold soy sauces under
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a variety of brand names, “Kikkoman was the pride of the family, its private label.”16 Even the name, Kikkoman, is special. The word is composed of three characters, the first two (kikkō) meaning “tortoise shell” and the third (man) meaning “ten thousand.” Because kikkō also can mean hexagon, the brand’s logo is a hexagon with the character man in the middle.17 In what turned out to be one of many shrewd moves in expanding his prized brand overseas, in 1879, Mogi registered Kikkoman in California “as a legally recognized brand name, a move that predated the same legal protection in Japan by six years.”18 By 1906, the brand had been registered in every U.S. state.19
As Ronald Yates asserts in his Kikkoman-commissioned book, if Saheiji Mogi shipped kegs of soy sauce to Hawai‘i 1868 with Japanese immigrants, it must have been aboard the Scioto, and the soy sauce inventoried in the stowaway’s diary must have borne the Kikkoman label. But if the kegs were shipped to Japa- nese immigrants aboard a different vessel that same year, the gannenmono, who constituted the entirety of the Japanese population on the islands during those early years, had to have been the intended buyers. (Almost twenty years passed before another of shipload of Japanese went to Hawai‘i.) As contract laborers subject to precise, if not coercive, contractual conditions, this first group of Jap- anese, once on the islands, had to buy everything they would need, including grocery items such as rice and soy sauce. Considering Saheiji Mogi’s bold tactics to internationalize the Kikkoman brand as early as the first half of the nineteenth century—a business gambit not attempted by his more hidebound Japanese competitors—the gannenmono’s soy sauce in all probability was Kikkoman.
Casting a bit of doubt on this conjecture, however, is the fact that nowhere in Fruin’s meticulous account of the company’s history is there any mention of any soy sauce, let alone the Kikkoman brand, being shipped to Hawai‘i — or anywhere else outside Japan, for that matter—in 1868. Indeed, the earliest mention of Kikkoman’s international exposure is 1872, when Saheiji Mogi entered the soy sauce in the Amsterdam World’s Fair, followed a year later at the Austria World’s Fair, where it received a letter of commendation for excellence. A gold medal awarded at the 1883 Amsterdam World’s Fair further exposed Kikkoman to an international audience and stimulated consumer demand both in and beyond Japan. Mogi promptly capitalized on the growing exposure by raising the price of Kikkoman soy sauce at home higher than that of his domestic competitors. According to Fruin, Mogi also raised imports, most notably to Hawai‘i and California, “where the kegs of Kikkoman were particularly prized by the increasing number of Japanese immigrants.”20
But this did not happen until the late 1880s, or perhaps even later, when the Japanese population in Hawai‘i had begun to rise significantly. For nearly two
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decades after the Scioto landed there, the Japanese government stopped send- ing laborers to Hawai‘i. Rumors of maltreatment of the gannenmono by the plantation hierarchy, as well as news of abuse of fellow Asians, the Chinese in particular, had reached Japanese authorities and been reported in the press.21 Moreover, as Hilary Conroy notes, “The Japanese were determined that West- ern nations should not have reason to regard Japan as an Oriental storehouse of coolie labor like China. And to them the case of the Gannen Mono savored not only of coolie trade but even of kidnapping.”22 The harsh conditions of plantation life eventually compelled forty gannenmono to return to Japan before fulfilling their three-year contracts, with thirty-nine formally accusing Hawai‘i’s plantations of cruelty and breach of contract.23 For several years, the plantations, eager for laborers, implored Japan to reconsider its policy, and Japan finally assented in 1884. Representing the restart of Japanese labor to Hawai‘i were the passengers aboard the City of Tokyo, which arrived in Hono- lulu on February 8, 1885, with nearly 950 men, women, and children aboard.24
It is a safe guess that the City of Tokyo, like the Scioto before it, stocked large quantities of soy sauce as part of the provisions for the long voyage. How could it have not, given the indispensability of soy sauce to the Japanese diet? It is equally safe to guess that the Japanese immigrants brought along a large reserve, knowing that soy sauce and other Japanese food items would be difficult to find in Hawai‘i, where then the Japanese made up only a negligible fraction of the overall popu- lation. The demographic outlook, however, changed considerably as more Japa- nese laborers followed in subsequent years. By 1890, more than 12,000 Japanese were living in Hawai‘i, making up roughly 14 percent of the overall population, and by 1896, the number had doubled, as had the percentage. By 1920, more than 109,000 Japanese resided there, representing nearly 43 percent of its population.25 By 1924, more than 200,000 Japanese (including those who decided to return to Japan) had made the passage to Hawai‘i.26 This translated into not only a substan- tive labor force carrying out the backbreaking work of plantation life under the relentless heat of the tropics, but also innumerable kegs of soy sauce consumed by a newly emerging community of Japanese, who, although thousands of miles from home, still hankered for a familiar taste of Japan.
What label did the soy sauce ferried by the City of Tokyo display? The odds are overwhelmingly in Kikkoman’s favor. According to Fruin, by 1939, Kik- koman exported one-tenth of its entire production to locations outside Japan, with half going to “countries in the yen currency block (largely Manchuria and North China, excluding Korea and Taiwan), and most of the remainder went to Hawai‘i and America’s West Coast with their considerable Japanese and Jap- anese-American population.”27 No other Japanese brand came anywhere close
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to having such a large overseas market. All indications point to Kikkoman soy sauce’s being in Hawai‘i with the Japanese laborers when it mattered most during those early and, no doubt, arduous days. Whether it was 1868, when the Scioto transported the first group of Japanese workers to Hawai‘i, or 1885, when the City of Tokyo resumed the practice, or the early decades of the twentieth century, when Kikkoman soy sauce became a multinational export item and most likely the first soy sauce to cross the Pacific, Kikkoman truly deserves the title of gannenshoyu, or “first-year soy sauce.”
California Dreamin’
Of course, even if a ship transporting Kikkoman soy sauce berthed at a Hawai- ian dock in 1868, it would be a mistake to qualify the year as the start of Kik- koman’s presence in America, since Hawai‘i was not yet a part of the United States. Neither was it in 1885, even if, as Arthur Power Dudden argues,
The unbroken continuity between modern Hawaii’s epochs constitutes a remarkably singular chapter of American history in the Pacific. Nineteenth-cen- tury Hawaii before the United States annexation of 1898 was replete with Ameri- cans and American influences. Twentieth-century Hawaii after annexation is the history of the Territory and the State of Hawaii.28
Before 1893, when annexationists, composed mainly of acquisitive Ameri- can businessmen, dethroned Queen Lili‘uokalani, the last monarch, behind the cover of armed U.S. sailors, Hawai‘i had been a sovereign kingdom, first established in 1810 when Kamehameha the Great unified the islands, by brute force, under his exclusive reign. For a brief period after the queen’s deposition (1894–1898), as the U.S. Congress and presidency debated the merits of annex- ation, Hawai‘i operated as a republic, with Sanford B. Dole as its first and only president. The surprisingly effortless American victory over a once formida- ble European power in the Spanish-American War of 1898 convinced many in Washington, DC, of Hawai‘i’s strategic importance, and President William McKinley signed the Newland Resolution on July 7, approving the annexation of Hawai‘i to the United States. Statehood followed nearly half a century later, with President Dwight Eisenhower signing on August 21, 1959, the presidential proclamation admitting Hawai‘i into the Union “with equal footing with other states.”29 Thereafter, Hawai‘i would be known interchangeably as the Fiftieth State, the Aloha State, and, as the poet Eric Chock sardonically characterized the island’s overdevelopment, “real estate.”30
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Consequently, while it is entirely possible that a shipment of Kikkoman soy sauce was sent to Hawai‘i in 1868, that obviously does not equate it with being sent to the United States. But as Yates also claims, if kegs of Kikkoman soy sauce were sent to Japanese immigrants in the Golden State the same year, that is altogether another matter. California, following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War, became the thirty-first state to join the Union in 1850. Thus, anything that Japan shipped to California in 1868 meant that it was sent to the United States. It also means that 2007 marks the 139th year of Kikkoman soy sauce in America and not merely the fiftieth year, as the New York Times ad states. But before attempting to make sense of Kikkoman’s strategy of possibly moving up the starting point in order to posit a particular meaning—whatever that might be—to the finish line, there is another, more urgent, question to address regarding the year 1868. Although as Ernest Hemingway might put it, “it’s pretty to think” that Kikkoman soy sauce was sent to California in the same year the Scioto transported the gan- nenmono to Hawai‘i, if indeed it was sent, was there anyone—least of all, the Japanese immigrants—there to receive it?
As was the case with Hawai‘i, castaway sailors and fisherman were likely the first Japanese to come ashore on North America. It has been estimated that some sixty Japanese vessels vanished in the Pacific Ocean between 1617 and 1875, so one can only guess at how many survivors—if any—providentially found dry ground on North America.31 According to Yamato Ichihashi,
As early as 1803 eleven such castaways returned (to Japan) from America; in 1830 a Spanish vessel rescued twelve shipwrecked Japanese and brought them to Cal- ifornia; in 1841 Manjiro (Nakahama), a fisherman, was blown to sea with two of his companions, and was picked up and brought to America, where he remained for about ten years, returning to Japan shortly after the arrival of Perry in that Country. The romantic story of Joseph Heco, a castaway Japanese boy, picked up and brought to San Francisco in 1850, has been already told at some length; also mention has been made of numerous cases of castaways, whose problems Heco assisting in solving.32
Accidental arrivals notwithstanding, the consensus among historians of early Japanese immigration to the United States is that the first contingent of Japa- nese to traverse the Pacific with the manifest intention of settling in the United States traveled on the Pacific Mail Company’s PMSS China, which docked at San Francisco Bay on May 27, 1869. Leading the exploratory expedition was a German arms dealer, John Henry Schnell, who had made a small fortune in
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the feudal domain of Aizu in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture. According to John E. Van Sant, with the support of Matsudaira Katamori, an influential daimyo (a feudal lord and vassal of the shogun) of Aizu, Schnell “devised a plan to establish a colony of Aizu settlers in California that would produce tea and silk,” believing that the “venture would be profitable for Aizu, which had lost most of its land to the central government as a result of the civil war.”33
Aboard the China were Schnell and a mere seven Japanese men and women, including his samurai-class wife, Jou. Later that year, sixteen additional Aizu denizens arrived, followed by several others months later. Together, the enter- prising group, which numbered thirty-five at the most, established the Waka- matsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony on six hundred acres of land purchased by Schnell in the Gold Hill district of Coloma, the reputed site where a sawmill operator, James Marshall, first discovered specks of gold dust in 1848, pre- cipitating the start of the California Gold Rush. Thus it came to pass that the Wakamatsu colonists—whose dreams of riches were dashed in less than two years owing to a lack of resources, mainly water—became “the largest group of Japanese in the United States to that time.”34 No less than the state of California and the Japanese American Citizens League, the oldest and largest Japanese American civil rights organization in the country, recognize the Wakamatsu colony as the first Japanese immigrants to the United States.35
As with the case of Hawai‘i, some thorny questions complicate Yates’s claim that Kikkoman soy sauce either traveled with or was shipped to Japanese immi- grants in California in or around 1868. For Yates’s chronology to hold true, the Japanese in California for whom the soy sauce was intended had to have been the Wakamatsu colonists. There were no other large groups of Japanese immi- grants in California—or anywhere else in the United States, for that matter— during that time. This is not to say that there were no Japanese people there. As early as 1858, the Japanese government dispatched embassies to a number of leading Western nations, including the United States. The first mission to the United States, consisting of seventy-one people, left Japan aboard an American vessel, the Powhatan, on February 13, 1860, arriving in San Francisco on March 29.36 In addition, students were sent overseas to Europe and the United States at the behest of the Meiji government to obtain knowledge of the West, or they went on their own. Estimates are that between 1868 and 1900, some nine hun- dred students came to the United States to study.37 According to Gary Okihiro, in San Francisco alone, “student laborers were the largest group within a growing Japanese American community that numbered about 3,000 in 1890.”38
There is also the obvious incongruity of dates in the hypothesis linking Kik- koman to the Wakamatsu colony. While Yates cites 1868 as the year of the soy
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sauce shipment, the first group of Wakamatsu colonists did not arrive in San Francisco until May 27, 1869. In order for Yates’s hypothesis to be tenable, the PMSS China not only needed to have held Kikkoman soy sauce as cargo but also must have left Japan in the previous calendar year. While the date of Chi- na’s arrival is well documented (it was widely covered by the California press), the date of departure is hard to pin down. If the ship sailed during the latter days of 1868, the voyage would have lasted more than 150 days. Recall that the Scioto, which traveled only half the distance to Hawai‘i, took thirty-four days to reach its terminus. The Powhatan, which ferried the embassy mission in 1860, took a mere forty-five days to cross the entire Pacific Ocean to Califor- nia. Of course, the China may have taken a more circuitous route. As a mail carrier, the ship could very well have had to make several stops along the way. Or perhaps the ship was subject to extended layovers en route. Whatever the case, in all likelihood, Kikkoman was the first soy sauce to reach the United States, if not in 1868 or 1869, then certainly by 1879, when Kikkoman was legally registered as a recognized brand name in California. But perhaps the question of whether the steamer that transported the Wakamatsu colony also transported Kikkoman soy sauce is ultimately a trivial matter. Of far greater significance on a symbolic—if not a mythological—level is the mere sugges- tion that the year 1868, the first year of the Meiji era, was the inaugural year of Kikkoman soy sauce in America.
Willful Forgetting
In his acknowledgments, Yates lists only individuals in the Kikkoman “fam- ily”—corporate communications consultants, staff members of the president’s office, directors of divisional operations, managers of production facilities, corporate board members, and Chairman Yuzaburo Mogi himself. As a com- missioned author, did Yates play the neutral role of amanuensis and simply repeat the version of company lore as it was told to him? If so, what does Kik- koman gain by putting its soy sauce in the pantry of the first Japanese immi- grants to Hawai‘i and the United States? If the gannenmono and the Waka- matsu colony were in fact the first groups of Japanese to reach Hawai‘i and the United States, then, as the soy sauce that accompanied these immigrants, the Kikkoman brand can justifiably boast an equally compelling narrative. In other words, Kikkoman soy sauce, too, is an immigrant. What can be more “American” than to advertise oneself as an original immigrant in a country billed as a land of immigrants, where the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and Angel Island—the immigration station in San Francisco Bay that operated
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between 1910 and 1940—are revered as sacred national landmarks? Then again, what if it turns out not to be the case, that the 1868 proposition is merely company propaganda?
Hence the necessity of the 2007 golden anniversary: Given the difficulty of verifying the 1868 claim, Kikkoman does not need either to vouch for or dis- avow it but merely to allow the legend to linger. Meanwhile, with the ex post facto designation of its San Francisco subsidiary as the “official” moment of its American origin, the company is able to generate a tremendous amount of free and decidedly fawning publicity—as evidenced by the lavish media cover- age and Senate resolution—at a critical juncture in its three-hundred-years- plus history. This second tale of origin, however, is not without its own com- plications. On closer inspection, the circumstances behind the apotheosis of the San Francisco venture appear to belie the significance placed on it by the company. In fact, the establishment of Kikkoman International, Inc., in 1957 represents not the start but, rather, the restart of Kikkoman soy sauce sales in the United States, which had been interrupted by America’s entry into World War II.
In 1957, Kikkoman filed an application with the Japanese Ministry of Finance requesting permission to export a significant amount of capital over- seas. Filed with the San Francisco subsidiary in mind, the request included a prospectus, which, among other details, indicated the scope of Kikkoman’s U.S. operations before the war:
For the past 50 years, our company has been exporting its product, Kikkoman Soy Sauce, to the United States (and Hawaii). These exports were intended mainly to meet the demands of persons of Japanese ancestry in the United States. The vol- ume of [our] exports in the years preceding the outbreak of World War II (1940) was 21,000 koku [833,769 gallons at 1 koku = 39.7 gallons], which amounted to 95 per cent of the total consumption of soy sauce in the United States.39
When trade relations between Japan and the United States resumed after the war, Kikkoman’s desire to pick up where it last left off proved unfeasible. The toll of the war on its niche base was detrimental, as the near monopoly once enjoyed by Kikkoman in the Japanese American and Japanese Hawaiian communities had all but evaporated. During its absence, opportunistic entre- preneurs established several soy sauce production facilities in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other mainland locations, as well as four in Hawai‘i alone. In fine American fashion, venturesome immigrant capitalists had filled the lacu- nae left behind by Kikkoman. At least one of these still survives as the Aloha
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Shoyu Company, established by five local Japanese families in Kalihi, a sub- urb of Honolulu, in 1946. More than surviving, the company appears to be thriving, with a growing market extending outside the islands, and celebrity endorsements from Olympic gold medal figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi and renowned restaurateur Sam Choy.40
Suddenly faced with competition from local soy sauce producers upon its return to U.S. markets, and with little chance of restoring its exports to pre- war levels, Kikkoman adopted a radical strategy: Instead of lamenting the loss of its traditional customer base—namely, the Japanese and other Asian com- munities in California and Hawai‘i—the company set its sights higher: on the Caucasian market. The prospectus filed with the Ministry of Finance spells this out by noting “an unusual postwar phenomenon”:
The feeling Caucasians in general hold toward Japan have improved remarkably in the United States, and their interest in and the reputation among them of Japanese food products has gradually improved.
Observing this clearly, our company commissioned some experts in the United States to conduct a thorough study on the possibility of getting Cauca- sians to use soy sauce in their diets. This led to our great confidence that soy sauce is a promising product [in the United States].41
The original objective of Kikkoman’s San Francisco venture was therefore two- fold: first, to regain as much as it could of the not-so-insignificant soy sauce market that it had had in the United States and Hawai‘i before the war and, sec- ond (and much more important), to begin attracting Caucasian or European Americans to its soy sauce—an exotic brew in the minds of all but a handful of Americans then—in hopes of tapping into an endless source of potential growth and future profit for the company.
Thus, what the 2007 anniversary celebrated was not the start of Kikkoman soy sauce marketing in America at some point during the second half of the nineteenth century, but the start of its dedicated marketing to white Ameri- cans five years after the end of the U.S. military occupation of Japan. The rami- fication of this is not without significance. What it means is that for the golden anniversary celebration to be tenable, Kikkoman must first disavow or excise its relationship with Japanese Americans before 1957. In effect, Japanese Amer- icans must be deliberately culled from the heterogeneous American popula- tion, and their equal standing as Americans must be placed in doubt. In other words, they must be racially quarantined in order for Kikkoman’s corporate marketing strategy to make sense.
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The most egregious instance of Japanese Americans suffering the igno- miny of racial quarantining was, of course, during World War II, when nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and livelihoods along the entire length of the West Coast, and interned in con- centration camps in some of the most desolate locations in the country. Kik- koman’s golden anniversary, therefore, was accompanied by a huge amount of irony: Just as the start of the war led to the racial quarantining of Japanese Americans, so too did the establishment of Kikkoman International, which resulted in the racialized disqualification of the same population as legitimate Americans. If the internment camps can be justified by the violent military competition between two powerful nations, the rationale for the fiftieth anni- versary of Kikkoman rests on the market competition among powerful soy sauce producers. Complicit in this act of racial erasure, then, are no less than the city of San Francisco, with its Kikkoman Day proclamation, and the U.S. Senate, which passed a resolution bestowing a congressional stamp of approval on Kikkoman’s truncated version of its history in the United States.