To mark 100 years of bringing the flavors of Japan to the world, Mutual Trading Co., Inc. looks back on its storied history, from the company’s humble roots as a “co-op purchasing and import channel” in Little Tokyo serving the needs of early Japanese immigrants in Southern California, to its pivotal role in introducing Edomae Japanese sushi to the United States. In this first installment, Mutual Trading’s origins are traced alongside the rise of the Japanese American community, highlighting how the company laid the foundation for Japanese cuisine’s lasting presence in America and helped the community rebuild after internment.
An unlikely friendship
In 1965, Noritoshi Kanai, then general manager of Mutual Trading, approached sales consultant Harry Wolff Jr. with an idea: join him on a product-seeking trip across Asia.
At the time, Kanai and Wolff desperately needed a win. Mutual Trading’s breakout success selling Tohato’s Harvest Honey & Sesame Cookies to U.S. supermarket chains had just sputtered as American snack companies flooded the market with cheaper copycats made in Taiwan—a “bittersweet experience,” Kanai later recalled. The trip would be part business mission, part mental reset: a chance to scout the company’s next hit.
Kanai and Wolff had met in the early 1960s at the Housewares Show in Chicago. As they bonded, Kanai shared his struggles selling Japanese cookies and rice crackers in the American market. “If that’s the case, I’ll help you,” Wolff replied, adding another piece of advice for the new immigrant: “In the United States, find one good doctor and a good lawyer—and also a good Jewish friend.”
And so, a partnership—and an unlikely friendship between a Japanese businessman from Tokyo, and a no nonsense former security guard from Chicago—was born.
Over the next year, the two traveled the country selling Harvest cookies, eventually pushing shipments to 50 cargo containers a month before the copycats caught up. Even after the boom ended, Wolff proved indispensable as Kanai pursued a bigger goal: expanding business beyond the Japanese-American community to reach a broader American consumer base. The lesson was clear: Mutual Trading needed a quintessentially Japanese product that couldn’t be easily copied.
The trip that birthed the sushi revolution
With the company’s future at stake, the two left for Asia in search of the next “big hit.” But after days of scouting potential products across Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan, the trip was “floundering,” Kanai later told the Los Angeles Times.
Upon checking into their hotel in Ginza, Kanai dared Wolff to try sushi at Shinnosuke, a restaurant near Kanai’s old stomping grounds—the Tokyo Mutual Trading office. Kanai was curious: Would a middle-aged, no-nonsense Ashkenazi Jewish man who came of age in Depression-era Chicago like Edomae nigiri sushi?
To Kanai’s surprise, Wolff didn’t just like sushi—he loved it. The dinner was such a hit that Wolff secretly returned to Shinnosuke for the next five nights, devouring nigiri and running up a $275 bill (about $2,650 today) on the company tab. Kanai told the Los Angeles Times in 2015 that, at the end of the trip, Wolff offered a bold proposition: “Kanai, go do sushi. Sushi is good.”
Kanai was skeptical. It was, after all, 1965—the era of the Beatles, frozen TV dinners, meatloaf casseroles, haute French dining, and convenience cuisine. Sushi was largely confined to Japanese enclaves and rarely featured raw fish. When Kanai first visited Los Angeles in 1956, he observed that West Coast “sushi” meant inari, futomaki, or chirashi, reflecting the Kansai roots of early Japanese immigrants. He told Wolff, “No, Americans don’t eat raw fish!”
Wolff also reframed sushi for Kanai as more than a food product—it was a model of hospitality. Unlike most upscale dining in the United States, where chefs stayed hidden in the kitchen, sushi chefs built relationships with customers, embodying omotenashi, the Japanese art of attentive, intentional hospitality.
Then, Wolff hit him with the clincher: “If you take sushi to the United States, who’s going to copy you?”
“Two ideas were born [from that trip],” Kanai recalled in 2006. “1) Target restaurants with an American customer base, and 2) Introduce sushi. Wolff was living proof that Americans will eat raw fish, and more importantly, that delicious flavors are universally accepted by people from other cultures.”
With Kanai convinced, the real work began stateside. First, he had to persuade risk-averse Japanese restaurant owners to stake their businesses on an unknown: Edomae sushi. He honed in on a Little Tokyo institution: Kawafuku.
Creating the nation’s first sushi bar at Kawafuku
Founded in 1923 by former Imperial Palace chef Takichi Kato, Kawafuku was among the first—if not the first—upscale Japanese restaurants in the United States. With ornate interiors and a reputation for hosting VIPs ranging from members of the Japanese imperial family to Charlie Chaplin, it was both a community cornerstone and a rare Japanese dining destination for non-Japanese Angelenos. Much of that broader appeal centered on a dish that, at the time, was practically synonymous with Japanese food in America: sukiyaki. For Kanai, Kawafuku was the ideal pulpit from which to launch sushi.
When Kanai first broached the idea with then-owner Tokijiro Nakashima, he was shut down immediately. “No, no, no—sushi will run us out of business,” Nakashima protested. “Sushi is no good. American people don’t like.”
Kanai was persistent. After six months of persuasion, Nakashima finally relented: Kawafuku would open a “sushi bar”—a term Kanai himself coined—with Mutual Trading overseeing the sourcing of both ingredients and talent. Kanai recruited sushi chef Shigeo Saito from Tsukiji to helm the counter—and in 1965, Kawafuku opened what is widely regarded as the first sushi bar in the United States.
The timing couldn’t have been better. Japan’s postwar economy was booming, and a new wave of corporate executives from Japan began traveling to Southern California to establish business stateside. Kawafuku’s sushi bar catered to their tastes, while also giving them a memorable place to entertain their American counterparts. Word spread quickly. Kawafuku’s success helped spur restaurants like Eigiku Cafe and Tokyo Kaikan to open sushi bars of their own, both supplied by Mutual Trading.
Fresh fish, rice, soy sauce, vinegar and seaweed
“Fresh fish, rice, soy sauce, vinegar and seaweed are necessary to make sushi,” said Kanai. “My strategy was to become the one-stop ingredients supplier for Japanese sushi restaurants.”
For Kanai—who had overseen the procurement of rice, miso, and medical supplies in Rangoon, Burma (present-day Myanmar) during World War II as an assistant quartermaster—logistics came naturally.
In sushi’s early days in America, Kanai leveraged Mutual Trading’s partnerships to equip chefs with the essentials: Yamasa soy sauce and Mitsukan rice vinegar (both under exclusive contracts), plus imported nori, powdered wasabi, and gari from Japan. Rice came from California’s Koda Farms, whose 1962 Kokuho Rose—developed by Keisaburo Koda with rice breeder Arthur Hughes Williams to mimic Japanese-style rice—became sushi’s ideal grain; Kanai secured a one-year exclusive distribution agreement for Mutual Trading.
Seafood—the neta for nigiri—was the real hurdle. Tuna, crab, salmon, and sea urchin could be sourced domestically. What Kanai needed, though, was a reliable pipeline of a variety of seafood from Japan. In the late 1960s, he devised an improvised cold chain: raw fish packed in ice at Tsukiji at 3:00 a.m., rushed to Haneda Airport at 11:00 a.m., flown to LAX, then collected by a young Mutual Trading employee, Seicho Fujikawa, and delivered straight to restaurants. The system was laborious and expensive—barely workable for three restaurants, and impossible to sustain at any larger scale.
That’s when Kanai had an idea: what if the seafood could be frozen and shipped in temperature-controlled container freight? Refrigeration and faster transport were advancing for a reliable cold-chain shipping system. For Mutual Trading, adopting those innovations was essential for the company to scale the sushi business toward success.
In 1968, buoyed by record sales of $1 million, Mutual Trading upgraded by installing freezer and refrigeration facilities to expand frozen seafood imports. Traditional sushi chefs initially balked at the idea of frozen fish for sushi, but Mutual’s sales team steadily won them over. Over time, frozen seafood became the industry standard, and the company broadened its lineup with anago, octopus, and squid from South Korea as well as Japan.
The sushi boom arrives
In the late 1960s, Kanai and Wolff’s vision began to pay off: sushi bars quietly spread to triple Mutual Trading’s business between 1965 and 1970.
In 1968, Mr. Kubo, an individual with no restaurant experience, opened Osho Sushi in Century City, widely regarded as the first sushi bar outside of Little Tokyo and an influential force proving sushi’s acceptance by Americans. Located near the 20th Century Fox lot, the 30-seat restaurant quickly became entwined with celebrity culture, drawing regulars like Yul Brynner—who, in turn, became an unlikely evangelist for sushi. Seicho Fujikawa later told author Sasha Issenberg in The Sushi Economy that Osho was a favorite date spot for Brynner: “No hair. Oooh, always bring down girlfriends, every single one.”
Hollywood celebrities soon became sushi’s most visible advocates. Stars like Richard Dreyfuss famously touted it in papers of record like the LA Times as a healthy “diet food,” helping transform what had once been a niche, ethnic dish into an icon of aspirational, health-minded Southern California living.
By the 1980s, sushi-mania in the United States reached a new peak, fueled in part by a surge of interest in Japanese culture after the release of Shōgun, the hit TV miniseries based on James Clavell’s bestselling novel. Mutual Trading tripled the number of sushi restaurants it supplied in Southern California, from 39 in 1977 to 116 in 1980.. Sushi was suddenly everywhere in pop culture—joked about on Saturday Night Live and name-checked in films like The Breakfast Club and Troop Beverly Hills. Some sushi chefs – such as Kazunori Nozawa, affectionately dubbed by the LA Times as the “sushi Nazi” of Sushi Nozawa in Studio City – even became celebrities in their own right.
For Kanai—who’d spent months persuading restaurant owners that sushi could work in America—none of this happened by chance. It was the result of years of thankless, unglamorous work by him and Mutual Trading employees laying the groundwork for sushi chefs to succeed stateside.
Long before sushi went mainstream, Mutual Trading would offer financial support to sushi chefs with credit as they opened their restaurants. “This was costly, time-consuming and risky, but I believe it was necessary,” Kanai recalled in 2006. He’d often advise many chefs in informal roles including Tokyo Kaikan chef Ichiro Mashita who famously invented the California roll in the 60s when bluefin tuna was seasonally scarce and avocado was abundant as a state cash crop and suitable as a fatty substitute for tuna.
Kanai’s business philosophy wasn’t driven solely by numbers—logistics, margins, or market analysis—but by something deeper: human connection. He’d learned as much through his partnership with Wolff and countless chefs over the years.
In those early days in the 1960s, Kanai carried that same philosophy into Little Tokyo, schlepping to the Sugar Bowl Café (the forerunner to Ajino Ichiban) on San Pedro Street—a popular restaurant for young Japanese chefs—to get to know them: their hopes, their anxieties, and what they wanted from a new life in America.
“They’d all come to share their American dream, drinking sake until midnight,” Kanai reminisced in 2006. “I’d hang out, looking after these young chefs, becoming good friends and confidants. One by one, they’d open their own restaurant. And, when they did, they’d always contact me and start business with Mutual Trading. This is the reason why Mutual Trading is said to have a strong business base today. Building this core foundation and trusting bond was no accident, in fact it's the result of deep-rooted relationships and mutual respect, built upon trust that cannot be severed nor replaced with technology."
