There is a moment, right after you crack the cookie, where the fortune flutters to the table and you reach for it like it holds real information. You know it doesn’t. The message will say something about a journey or a friend or a number that might or might not be your lottery pick. You eat the cookie anyway. Everyone eats the cookie anyway.
But here is the thing about fortune cookies that almost nobody in America knows: they are not Chinese. They have never been Chinese. They are Japanese, and the reason you think they are Chinese is one of the stranger stories in American food history — a story that involves a Kyoto bakery, a Japanese gardener in San Francisco, a bitter dispute between two rival inventors, and a wartime upheaval that handed the entire industry from one community to another.
Start in Kyoto. The fortune cookie’s ancestor is called tsujiura senbei — 辻占煎餅 — which translates roughly to “fortune-telling cracker.” These are not the dainty vanilla wafers you get at Panda Express. They are a little larger, made with a darker dough that includes sesame and miso, and they taste like something a temple would serve you, which is exactly what they were for. In Kyoto, tsujiura senbei were sold near Shinto shrines as part of the omikuji tradition — the practice of drawing random fortunes from a wooden box. The cookie version wedged a slip of paper into the fold rather than stuffing it inside a hollow center, but the principle was the same: divine guidance, one snack at a time.
How old is this tradition? An 1878 woodblock-print book from the Edo period shows a bakery making tsujiura senbei — a row of women working around a table, folding hot wafers over paper slips with chopsticks. The image is the earliest known visual evidence of fortune cookies, and it predates any American claim by decades (Wikipedia, Fortune cookie). You can still buy tsujiura senbei today in Kanazawa and near the Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine in Kyoto. They remain stubbornly, deliciously Japanese.
So how did they end up in every Chinese restaurant in America?
The answer starts with Makoto Hagiwara, the man who managed the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. In the early 1900s, Hagiwara began serving fortune cookies to visitors at the tea garden. The cookies were made by Benkyodo, a Japanese confectionery shop in San Francisco that still operates today (Wikipedia, Fortune cookie). The cookies were called “fortune tea cakes” — a name that reflected their origins in Japanese tea culture — and they were a novelty, a conversation piece, a charming bit of Japanese hospitality transplanted to a California park.
Almost immediately, other people claimed to have invented them.
David Jung, the founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles, said he created the fortune cookie in 1918. Seiichi Kito, the founder of Fugetsu-do, a confectionery in Little Tokyo, also claimed the invention, saying he got the idea of putting messages in cookies from the omikuji fortune slips sold at Japanese temples (Wikipedia, Fortune cookie). The dispute was never resolved by ordinary means, so in 1983, San Francisco’s Court of Historical Review — a novelty court, but one that takes its rulings seriously enough to issue them — staged a mock trial. A fortune cookie was introduced as evidence. It read: “S.F. Judge who rules for L.A. Not Very Smart Cookie.” The court ruled in favor of San Francisco and Hagiwara. Los Angeles officially condemned the decision (Wikipedia, Fortune cookie).
This is the part of the story where you might expect fortune cookies to take over Chinese restaurants the way spaghetti took over Italian restaurants in America — a gradual cultural drift, immigrant communities adapting, customers adopting. But that is not what happened. What happened was World War II.
Before the war, fortune cookies were known as “fortune tea cakes” and they were made by Japanese-Americans. The industry was small, local, centered in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Then, in 1942, the U.S. government forcibly relocated over 100,000 Japanese-Americans into internment camps. Among them were the people who had been making fortune cookies for decades. The factories sat empty. The bakers were behind barbed wire.
Chinese-American manufacturers stepped in. With the Japanese-American producers gone, Chinese bakers began making fortune cookies on a larger scale, and when the war ended and the internment camps closed, the fortune cookie industry had shifted permanently. It was no longer a Japanese-American confection sold at tea gardens. It was a Chinese-American dessert served at restaurants. The name changed too — “fortune tea cakes” became “fortune cookies” — and the association with Chinese food became so complete that most Americans today would be genuinely surprised to learn the cookies were ever anything else (Wikipedia, Fortune cookie).
The scale of the modern fortune cookie industry is staggering for something that most people treat as a throwaway. About 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year worldwide, and the vast majority of them are consumed in the United States. Wonton Food Inc., headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, makes over 4.5 million fortune cookies per day. That is more than 1.6 billion cookies a year from a single company — roughly one fortune cookie for every two Americans, every single day (Wikipedia, Fortune cookie).
The cookies themselves are made from a simple batter: flour, sugar, vanilla, and sesame seed oil. The batter is squirted onto hot trays, compressed into thin circles, and baked for about a minute. While the cookie is still hot and flexible, a fortune is inserted and the cookie is folded — traditionally with chopsticks, now by machine. As the cookie cools, the sugar crystallizes and it hardens into the familiar crisp shape (Library of Congress, How do fortunes get inside of fortune cookies?).
The mechanization happened in the late 1960s, when Edward Louie invented the fortune cookie machine. Before that, every cookie was folded by hand. Louie’s machine made mass production possible and dropped the price low enough for the cookies to become the free courtesy dessert that American diners expect after their meals. The fortune cookie went from a Japanese tea garden novelty to a machine-made American institution in roughly sixty years.
But perhaps the most remarkable chapter in the fortune cookie’s journey came in 1989, when fortune cookies were imported into Hong Kong and sold as “genuine American fortune cookies” (Wikipedia, Fortune cookie). Think about that for a second. A Japanese invention, carried to America by Japanese immigrants, taken over by Chinese-American manufacturers during wartime, and then shipped back to Asia — where it was marketed as authentically American. The cookie came full circle, except it arrived in a language its original creators would not have recognized.
Three years later, in 1992, Wonton Food Inc. tried to expand its fortune cookie business into China. The effort was abandoned. Fortune cookies were considered “too American” (Wikipedia, Fortune cookie). The country the cookie was supposedly from did not want it.
This is the part of the story I find most interesting. Not the invention dispute or the internment camps or the 3 billion cookies a year, but the simple fact that cultural identity is not something you can track by following the food. The fortune cookie is Japanese in origin, American in identity, and Chinese in association. It belongs to all three countries and none of them. A Kyoto baker folding paper into hot wafers in 1878 could not have imagined that her creation would end up as a punchline in a Brooklyn factory, a lottery strategy for 110 Powerball winners, or a novelty souvenir in Hong Kong.
If you want to make your own fortune cookies — the old-fashioned way, with a chopstick and a little patience — there are fortune cookie making kits that come with the molds and templates. You will not get the machine-perfect shape, but you will get the experience of folding a hot wafer over a slip of paper before it hardens, which is closer to what the original Kyoto bakers were doing than anything a factory produces. And if you want to read the full story of how fortune cookies ended up in every Chinese restaurant in America, Jennifer Lee’s The Fortune Cookie Chronicles traces the history from the tea gardens to the Powerball scandal.
The next time you crack one open and unfold the paper, you might consider that you are holding a piece of Japanese temple culture, filtered through San Francisco, mechanized in Brooklyn, and served to you by a tradition that has been borrowing from other traditions since before anyone thought to put a fortune inside a cookie. The cookie does not care what you call it. It was made to be eaten.