Have Paper, Will Travel: April 2019

Monday, April 29, 2019

Some sights and sounds from the Monterey Park Cherry Blossom Festival

My exhibit display:

I've seen Brian Kito do his mochi & manju stage demonstration for over a decade, each year at the Monterey Park Cherry Blossom Festival; but usually I'm too busy at my own tables to pay close attention.  

This year I was happy to be able to take a break and watch and film his demo.  I was shocked to learn about the murky origins of the Chinese fortune cookie; and how that in all likelihood, it's a Japanese-American invention.  

Sorry about the audio quality, but listen to Brian explain how the origin has been traced back to his grandfather.

http://www.fugetsu-do.com/history.htm

From Wikipedia:

Seiichi Kito, the founder of Fugetsu-do of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, also claims to have invented the cookie.[8] Kito claims to have gotten the idea of putting a message in a cookie from Omikuji (fortune slip) which are sold at temples and shrines in Japan. According to his story, he sold his cookies to Chinese restaurants where they were greeted with much enthusiasm in both the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas. Thus Kito's main claim is that he is responsible for the cookie being so strongly associated with Chinese restaurants.[citation needed]
Up to around World War II, fortune cookies were known as "fortune tea cakes"—likely reflecting their origins in Japanese tea cakes.[2]
Fortune cookies moved from being a confection dominated by Japanese-Americans to one dominated by Chinese-Americans sometime around World War II. One theory for why this occurred is because of the Japanese American internment during World War II, which forcibly put over 100,000 Japanese-Americans in internment camps, including those who had produced fortune cookies. This gave an opportunity for Chinese manufacturers.