Fortune Cookies Are Not From China. They Took Shape in California, From a Japanese Cracker
Travel across China and no fortune cookie arrives at the end of dinner. The cookie began with Japanese bakers in California, spread through Chinese restaurants after World War II, and was later sold to Hong Kong as a genuine American cookie.
Key points
- Order dinner in Beijing and no fortune cookie arrives at the end.
- The ancestor sits in bakeries near the Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto, Japan.
- In San Francisco, Japanese immigrant Makoto Hagiwara, who ran the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, is reported to have served the modern cookie some time between 1910 and 1914.
Order dinner in Beijing and no fortune cookie arrives at the end. The cookie that closes a Chinese meal across the United States is not a Chinese food. The Japanese American National Museum puts the settled part of the story in one line: the invention is disputed, but everyone agrees it is not Chinese.
The cracker from Kyoto
The ancestor sits in bakeries near the Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto, Japan. Families there still bake tsujiura senbei, fortune crackers tied to the paper fortunes handed out at temples and shrines. The Japanese cracker is larger and browner than the American cookie, flavored with sesame and miso instead of vanilla and butter, and it carries its paper fortune tucked into its bend, not sealed inside. Researcher Yasuko Nakamachi of Kanagawa University spent six years tracing the link. Her strongest evidence is a book illustration dated 1878 that shows an apprentice grilling these crackers on hand irons of the same kind Kyoto bakers still use. That picture predates every California claim by decades.
Two California claims
In San Francisco, Japanese immigrant Makoto Hagiwara, who ran the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, is reported to have served the modern cookie some time between 1910 and 1914. His first versions held thank you notes, which later became fortunes. The Benkyodo company, founded in 1906 by Suyeichi Okamura, baked the cookies for the garden, and Okamura's family credits him with the vanilla and butter flavor that made the cookie American. Los Angeles tells a rival story. David Jung, a Chinese immigrant who founded the Hong Kong Noodle Company in 1913, claimed he invented the cookie in 1918, with hopeful messages for unemployed men. No documentation backs his account. A third claimant, Seiichi Kito of the Fugetsu-Do bakery in Little Tokyo, founded in 1903, said the idea was his and that Jung copied it.
In 1983 the argument got a courtroom. San Francisco's Court of Historical Review, a mock court with no legal or academic authority, heard the evidence and ruled for Hagiwara. Los Angeles rejected the verdict. The real turning point was grimmer. In 1942, Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps under Executive Order 9066, and the Japanese bakeries that made fortune cookies closed. Chinese restaurant owners and bakers stepped into the gap. By the end of World War II the cookie had spread nationwide, attached to Chinese restaurants in the American mind.
The cookie never crossed back. When Brooklyn based Wonton Food moved to sell fortune cookies in China in 1992, shops in Hong Kong marketed them as genuine American fortune cookies. Writer Jennifer 8. Lee, who traced the history for the New York Times, offers the cleanest summary of the whole path: Japanese bakers invented the cookie, Chinese restaurants popularized it, and Americans consume it.