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.
In 1899, a 20-year-old named Sadagoro Hoshizaki boarded a Norwegian cargo ship to set sail for a new life in the United States. A born and raised Odawara native, Hoshizaki had saved up $60 to pay for the voyage from Japan to California. Like thousands of other Japanese immigrants, he set out with a simple plan: to eke out his own piece of the American dream as an agricultural laborer in California. What he couldn’t have known then was that this leap would eventually lead him to found a company that would endure for more than a century.
The late 1800s were boom times for Japanese immigration to the United States. In 1869, the first Japanese immigrants arrived in the mainland United States, landing at the port of San Francisco carrying nothing but tea plant seeds, silkworms, rice, bamboo shoots and cookware. Fleeing the brutality of the Boshin Civil War in Japan, this group – 22 strong, according to the Daily Alta California – broke ground on the first Japanese settlement in North America, the short-lived Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony.
While the settlement collapsed after two years, this group of 22 became the first documented wave of Japanese immigrants to the United States. Over the next three decades, thousands more joined them as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 created labor shortages in mining, agriculture and manufacturing that were soon filled by Japanese workers. By 1900, 22 became 24,326, and among the thousands setting sail to the United States, was Hoshizaki himself, who arrived in San Francisco and quickly found work on an orchard in Vacaville.
Hoshizaki arrived in 1899 at a pivotal time for Japanese Americans: Excluded from mainstream markets amid nascent anti-Japanese racism, early Issei (first-generation) immigrants built self-sufficient economies in so-called “Japantowns” across the country, establishing “their own schools, temples and churches, markets and restaurants,” according to the Los Angeles Times. In Los Angeles, one such community emerged downtown in the 1880s: “Sho-Tokyo” or Little Tokyo, which soon became the largest Japantown on the mainland.
While the city had “fewer than 50” Japanese residents in the early 1880s, those who came to Los Angeles set their roots in downtown along East First Street. Among the first to settle and establish themself wasa cook named Hamanosuke “Charlie Hama” Shigeta who opened his restaurant “Kame” on 340 East First Street in 1884, making him the first Japanese person to own a business in Little Tokyo. Shigeta’s restaurant marked the birth of Little Tokyo, opening the floodgates for Japanese-owned boarding houses, bookstores, tempura restaurants, hotels, and confectioneries in the years that followed.
As early Issei immigrants married and began building families and communities, Japanese home cooking took root on the mainland, further shaping the local economies of Japantowns. A typical Japanese meal in those days consisted of a bowl of white rice served with miso soup, green tea and a variety of okazu or side dishes: takuan (pickled daikon radish), broiled fish, canned kamaboko (fish cake) and whatever facsimile of a Japanese dish could be fashioned out of substitute American ingredients. Issei cooks had to innovate out of necessity, but as they began craving staples like miso, soy sauce, and rice from Japan, they built a patchwork of traders and grocery stores to supply local communities with the ingredients their kitchens needed.
Colloquially known as the takuan boeki, or takuan commerce, after the iconic pickled yellow daikon radish that was the most common craving for early Issei immigrants, this network took root across the country. In 1905, after years of back-breaking work on farms across California and a stint at a Japanese-owned grocery store in Riverside, Hoshizaki opened his own general store in Little Tokyo using Russo-Japanese War rations he brought back from Japan, including canned goods and dried staples such as kanpyo (dried gourd strips), shiitake mushrooms, koya-dofu, as well as miso and soy sauce. The shop, Tokai Shokai, was located at 124 San Pedro Street. By 1910, the takuan boeki had flourished into a nationwide ecosystem, with 242 grocery stores, 21 trading firms, and 42 tofu shops owned by Japanese Americans on the mainland.
By the turn of the 1920s, the national mood shifted against Japanese Americans. As Japantowns grew across the country, so did anti-Japanese campaigns by anti-immigration groups, culminating in legislation like the California Alien Land Law, which banned Japanese immigrants from possessing agricultural land in the state, and the Immigration Act of 1924, which effectively banned Japanese immigration into the United States.
The Immigration Act of 1924 devastated Japanese communities on the mainland; it not only froze the inflow of Japanese immigrants, but also constrained the flow of food and capital carried into the country. Amid the growing hardships facing Japanese Americans, and disruptions to imports from Japan, Hoshizaki saw a need to unify importers in Little Tokyo as “a co-op purchasing and import channel.” The idea was that by unifying grocers and pooling their orders in one bulk, importers could consolidate their bargaining power and negotiate better prices, ensuring a secure, steady flow of goods into Southern California.
On April 19, 1926 – nearly 57 years after the first Issei immigrants landed in San Francisco – Hoshizaki established Mutual Trading Co., Inc., a California corporation to import shelf stable Japanese foods: soy sauce, green tea, nori, wakame, and an array of canned goods including bamboo shoots, takuan, tofu, konnyaku, kamaboko, and seasoned inari age.
“Considering the current situations around us, we, Japanese American business owners, made a decision to establish the Mutual Trading Company in order to respond to the current development of Los Angeles and the change in society,” declared the company’s charter in 1926.
Mutual Trading’s prospectus further elaborated: “When considering the future of Los Angeles city, it will not take long for the city population to reach 2 million and become a metropolis. [...] With our stable foundation, loyalty, and hard work as our business policy, we believe as we grow with Los Angeles city and plan for 100 years in the future, establishing a large market in the western hemisphere will not be impossible.”
15 years after its founding, Mutual Trading faced its first existential threat: the outbreak of the Pacific War, which froze all trade with Japan. In 1942, a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, forcing 110,000 Japanese people on the West Coast to sell their homes, belongings and businesses to report to one of ten internment camps. Among the thousands forced to evacuate was Hoshizaki and several Mutual Trading employees, who now faced the closure of their business, as well as indefinite incarceration.
As Mutual Trading employees prepared to report to internment camps, they scrambled to safeguard what remained of their business. Their unlikely lifeline came from Maryknoll Church—a Catholic parish and school in Little Tokyo—whose staff agreed to hide the company’s merchandise in the church basement.
Maryknoll Church, whose priests and nuns continued supporting Japanese American
communities displaced to internment sites such as Manzanar, where Catholic churches
like the one pictured served as places of worship. (Photograph by Ansel Adams. Courtesy Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Item #2001695654)
“The administrators said, ‘Just bring in all of your belongings and we’ll keep them in the basement,’” recalled former Mutual Trading President Noritoshi Kanai in an interview with Tokyo Journal. “The people at Mutual Trading were very lucky.”
With their merchandise safely stowed away, Mutual Trading temporarily closed their doors and Hoshizaki spent the duration of the war in the Manzanar Camp in Central California along with 11,000 other interned Japanese Americans.
Not every Japanese American business was lucky: only three out of California's 40 Japantowns survived the war, and thousands of business owners returned from camp having lost everything – their homes vandalized or sold, their belongings stolen and their livelihoods erased. Before the war, Japanese Americans operated around 1000 retail produce stores in Los Angeles; By December 1946, only 30 of these stores reopened. A 1980 congressional commission appointed to study the effects of internment estimated that Japanese Americans lost between “$149 million and $370 million in 1945 dollars” due to internment. Adjusted for today’s value, that amounts up to $70 billion to $150 billion.
Despite warnings from the War Relocation Authority to avoid returning to enclaves, Hoshizaki and several managers returned to Little Tokyo in 1945 determined to reopen Mutual Trading. Upon arriving at Maryknoll, they found their inventory safely stored away in the basement, untouched and ready to distribute to Japanese Americans returning from camp.
In 1946, Mutual Trading reopened its doors, ready to supply food staples, cooking utensils, and imported goods to families rebuilding their lives after internment. For those who had been incarcerated, food was more than a necessity. After years of being deprived of Japanese cooking in the camps—forced to eat unfamiliar meals made from government surplus foods in mess halls—food, and Japanese food in particular, became a sacred source of comfort, safety, and identity. A meal as simple as a bowl of white rice, miso soup, takuan, and broiled fish suddenly had immense meaning.
largely dried and canned foods from Japan—along with essential kitchen and tableware
Mutual Trading helped restore a sense of normalcy throughout the community, supplying households and restaurants alike as they rebuilt their kitchens with Japanese ingredients and essential tableware, such as rice bowls, miso soup bowls, chopsticks, and teacups. Through resilience and grit, Little Tokyo came back to life as businesses reopened, temples resumed services, and community traditions like Nisei Week returned.
Though much has changed in the 100 years since Mutual Trading’s founding – and 80 years after reopening – what hasn’t changed is Mutual Trading’s continued commitment to bring the flavors of Japan to the world, connecting people and communities through the universal language of food. It’s a mission not just informed by Mutual Trading’s history, but the whole of Japanese-American history – a story that began 127 years ago, when a 20-year-old Odawara native boarded a ship to set sail for America.
