It's National Fortune Cookie Day. The Cookie Isn't Chinese — It's Japanese.
It's National Fortune Cookie Day. The Cookie Isn't Chinese — It's Japanese.
Today, July 20, is National Fortune Cookie Day in the United States. Tonight, millions of Americans will finish a Chinese takeout order the same way they always do — by snapping a thin, folded wafer in half and fishing out the curl of paper inside. After the fried rice and the General Tso's, almost everyone assumes the cookie is Chinese.
It isn't. Fortune cookies are rarely served in mainland China at all. When Wonton Food, the largest fortune cookie maker in the world, opened a factory in China in 1994, it closed almost at once. An executive, Derrick Wong, summed up why in four words: "Fortune cookies are too American." In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, two Chinese immigrant mothers take jobs at a fortune cookie factory and can't make sense of the strange little slips or the cookies that carry them. The object that looks like the very emblem of the Chinese restaurant is not, in fact, Chinese.
A cracker folded outside a Kyoto shrine
The fortune cookie's ancestor is Japanese. It is called tsujiura senbei — a "fortune cracker" — and confectioners near Kyoto and Kanazawa were already folding it, exactly as we fold it now, in the 1870s, tucking a written fortune into the crease.
The scholar who spent more than two decades chasing this history is Yasuko Nakamachi of Kanagawa University. She found the crackers still being made at a generations-old bakery beside a Kyoto shrine, and she turned up an 1878 illustrated book showing an apprentice grilling them by hand. The person who carried Nakamachi's findings to an American audience was a New York Times reporter, Jennifer 8. Lee, who told the story in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (2008).
The Japanese original and the American cookie diverge on sight. The senbei is bigger and darker, grilled with sesame and miso, so it tastes nutty and savory rather than sweet — nothing like the pale, buttery, vanilla cookie in an American Chinese restaurant. Even the fortune sits in a different place: the Japanese cracker holds its slip in the outer fold, the American one in the hollow center. The whole thing grows out of omikuji, the Japanese shrine tradition of drawing a random written fortune.
A garden in San Francisco, 1914
So how did a Japanese cracker end up clipped to the check at a Chinese restaurant? According to Lee, Japanese immigrants who arrived around the turn of the twentieth century found they couldn't open Japanese restaurants, because Americans then wouldn't eat raw fish. So they opened Chinese ones instead, riding the wave of a chop suey and chow mein craze — and, to satisfy the American habit of ending a meal with something sweet, they began sending diners off with the little fortune cracker.
Most experts, Nakamachi among them, trace the American cookie to the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Its caretaker, a Japanese immigrant named Makoto Hagiwara, was serving the cookies to visitors by around 1914; they were baked nearby by the Benkyodo confectionery in Japantown, and the fortunes he tucked inside were written in both Japanese and English. Los Angeles has its own claimant — David Jung of the Hong Kong Noodle Company — and in 1983 a body called the Court of Historical Review took up the dispute. It was a mock court with no legal or academic authority, and, sitting as it did in San Francisco, it ruled for San Francisco.
1942: who was left in the room
All of that is an argument about who was first. The event that actually changed the cookie's nationality was something else.
In December 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. That February, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, and the government forced roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast into inland camps — citizens and non-citizens alike. The people who baked fortune cookies were among them. Japanese confectioneries shut their doors one after another: Benkyodo, Shungetsu-do, Shinanoya and Takeda in San Francisco; Fugetsudo and Umeya in Los Angeles.
The vacancy filled immediately. Chinese American entrepreneurs, who were not subject to internment, took over production and scaled it up. Soldiers passing through wartime California tasted the cookies in Chinese restaurants and carried the memory home, and the fortune cookie spread across the country. By the time Japanese Americans left the camps, the cookie had already changed its label to "Chinese." The Ono family, who ran Benkyodo, recovered their business and property after the war; many other confectioners never went back to fortune cookies at all, returning instead to manju and mochi, the Japanese sweets they had made before.
The cookie's identity did not shift because the flavor shifted. It shifted because the hands did. Three of Benkyodo's iron molds now sit in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History — the tools of the people who first made the cookie, kept as artifacts, while the cookie's name passed to someone else.
This kind of change in nationality isn't unique to the fortune cookie. General Tso's chicken, one of the signature dishes of the American Chinese menu, carries the name of an old general from Hunan. Yet the dish was invented by Peng Chang-kuei, a chef who fled to Taiwan after the Chinese civil war — and it doesn't exist in Hunan.
The night 110 people played the same numbers
Just how deeply the cookie had lodged itself in American life became clear, by accident, in the spring of 2005.
That night's Powerball drawing produced a flood of second-prize winners — 110 of them, where the game usually yields four or five. Every one had played the same five numbers: 22, 28, 32, 33, 39. Lottery officials suspected fraud and spent the night checking whether the numbers had appeared on a television show or formed some pattern on the ticket. The explanation was simpler. The winners had copied the "lucky numbers" printed inside their fortune cookies, and every one of those slips had come from a single Wonton Food factory in Queens, New York. Those numbers had been drawn one at a time, out of a bowl, by a worker at the plant — even the "luck" in the cookie was pulled at random on a factory floor. Because the slip's sixth number missed the real Powerball by one, the players took second prize instead of the jackpot, and the lottery paid out roughly $19 million it had never expected to.
The New York Times reporter assigned to that story was Jennifer 8. Lee. Following the cookies is what led her, in the end, to the fact that they had never been Chinese to begin with. The very moment America discovered how far the fortune cookie had reached into its own life was the moment that unearthed where it hadn't come from.
The fortune cookie didn't turn Chinese because it got sweeter. One government pulled the people who made it out of the room, and others were left holding the tray. For an object, nationality tends to go to whoever wasn't taken away.
- Source ↗ HISTORY, "The Surprising Origins of the Fortune Cookie"
- Source ↗ CNN Travel, "From Japan to America, the changing fortunes of fortune cookies"
- Source ↗ KQED, "Unwrapping the California Origins of the Fortune Cookie"
- Source ↗ Smithsonian Magazine, "Cracking Open the History of Fortune Cookies"
- Source ↗ Discover Nikkei, Gary T. Ono, "Japanese American Fortune Cookie"
- Source ↗ Snopes, "Did Winning Lottery Numbers Come from a Fortune Cookie?"
- Source ↗ Nexstar / New York Times reporting, "How 110 people won big Powerball prizes in a 2005 drawing"
- Source ↗ Salon, "Outrageous fortune" (Wonton Food's China factory)
- Source ↗ Saveur, "The Inventor of General Tso's Chicken Dies at 98"
- Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (Twelve, 2008)
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