[Japanese-Americans helped launch the California tuna-canning
industry—and one of America’s most beloved sandwiches.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A SECOND LOOK AT THE TUNA SANDWICH’S ALL- AMERICAN HISTORY  
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Mari Uyehara
September 11, 2022
Taste Cooking
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_ Japanese-Americans helped launch the California tuna-canning
industry—and one of America’s most beloved sandwiches. _

The humble tuna sandwich and the American working clasd spirit,
Antonis Achilleos

 

It is hard to think of a food more emblematic of America’s working-
class spirit than the humble tuna sandwich. While the Spanish make
their tuna bocadillo with piquillo peppers and sherry vinegar and the
French have their pressed pan bagnat, made with high-quality jarred
tuna and an array of vegetables in a real baguette, the American
version is an object of convenience and thrift.

Its assembly rests on three post–Industrial Revolution convenience
foods: canned tuna, presliced wheat bread, and mayonnaise. The
sandwich is portable, dependable, and eminently satisfying. If you
want to make it fancy, no extra expense is required: Just pop it under
the broiler to make a bubbling tuna melt. For many of us, the ultimate
preparation is the one made at the kitchen counter of our childhood,
whether the filling was mixed with crunchy bits of celery and red
onion, sharpened with capers, mustard, and lemon juice, or freshened
up with herbs.

That’s certainly how Steve Cook, who along with Michael Solomonov
runs a collection of well-regarded Philadelphia restaurants, including
Israeli fine- dining classic Zahav and casual deli the Rooster, sees
it. “You identify with the way your mother made it,” says Cook,
whose own mother favored a little mayonnaise and Dijon mustard, sweet
pickle relish, and maybe some fresh dill. “It’s a neutral
canvas.”

The thing about tuna, Cook says, is that you lose a lot of what makes
it special when it’s canned in water, as it’s often sold in
grocery stores. At the Rooster, they confit fresh ahi tuna to preserve
a lusher texture rather using chalky chunks of fish from the can. (The
dish is currently off the menu.) But when he’s making tuna for his
kids at home, he has a trick: He mixes in canned sardines, whose oily
richness helps revive the canned tuna, along with a touch of
mayonnaise and mustard, sweet pickle relish, red onion, celery, and
whatever herbs are on hand, and places it all on slices of wheat.
There’s an added bonus to sardines. Unlike tuna, they are among the
safest fish on the planet because they are smaller and lower on the
food chain, thus less likely to accumulate high levels of mercury.

Unwittingly, Cook, in adding sardines, was honoring earlier
canned-fish history in the U.S. As it turns out, the origin story of
the tuna fish sandwich, like much in American life, is one shaped by
natural resources, entrepreneurial brilliance, and immigrant
influence. You see, originally, the vast majority of Americans
didn’t consider the albacore tuna worth eating—it was fed to
animals, used as bait fish, or pursued in sport fishing. 

In the 1800s, the canned fish that most Americans ate was the sardine,
and what little canned tuna did come to our shores was imported by and
for Italian immigrants.

That was the case until 1903, when a combination of overfishing and
poor ocean conditions made for a terrible sardine season. So terrible,
in fact, that sardine-packing businesses almost went under. It was
then that one of those sardine executives, Albert P. Halfill of the
Southern California Fish Company in East San Pedro, Los Angeles, went
looking for alternative sources of fish, experimenting with halibut,
rock fish, and, most successfully, albacore tuna, which was then
abundant off California’s coast. At that time, the company’s
product was extremely local: tuna caught off the coast and packed with
California olive oil, which in later years was replaced with cheaper
cottonseed oil.

There was still the roadblock of selling a product with no market for
it. Through a combination of free tastings of the product at county
fairs and in stores, tins given away for free with purchases of
coffee, and marketing campaigns comparing tuna to the white meat of
chicken, tuna started to catch on. The albacore’s selling point of
being like the chicken breast, a similarly dry and mild meat, also
came to define its preparations, which required adding in moisture and
flavor. Bluefin tuna, then cheap and more abundant, was too oily and
strong for early 20th century America’s palate.

Tuna—sometimes called “tunny”—was easily swapped into chicken
and fish salad recipes. In the 19th century, scraps of chicken or
salmon, white fish or trout from dinner were mixed with mayonnaise and
homemade pickle relishes, also leftover from dinner, and served on
lettuce for lunch. As women started spending more time in public life,
at department stores and later offices, lunch counters started
offering these salads between two pieces of bread to encourage
customers to take it to go. When canned tuna became available in the
early 20th century, home cooks and lunch counters could just open a
can instead of cooking chicken or fish first.

The tuna salads of yore bear a lot of resemblance to those today, made
with assorted elements of crunch, piquancy, and moisture: celery,
various herbs, pickle relish, grated onion, mustard, and mayonnaise,
as well as some ingredients, like beet juice and whipping cream, that
have since fallen to the wayside.

 

Tuna’s reputation rapidly changed from “nuisance” fish to
lunch-counter staple and, for some time, enjoyed a spot on the menus
of upscale Los Angeles restaurants. In 1913, there were nine plants in
operation along the California coast, producing 115,000 cases
annually, and that grew to 36 canneries in the span of five years.
That growth happened in part because of the inventive and industrious
fishing methods of immigrants from Japan based in Los Angeles and San
Diego.

In 1901, 12 Japanese men, former railroad workers in Los Angeles who
immigrated from Wakayama prefecture, started diving for abalone off
San Pedro in Los Angeles and soon noticed albacore tuna there. In
1912, Masaharu Kondo, a former professor at the Imperial Fisheries
Institute in Tokyo, founded M.K. Fisheries Company in San Diego and
introduced two major innovations to the California tuna industry,
earning him the moniker the Fish Magnate of California. First, the
Japanese fishermen he recruited used bamboo poles with a short line
and barbless hook.

Some canners were skeptical of the method’s efficiency, but when
they attempted to employ other technology, like nets, they were unable
to meet the productivity of the pole fishermen—it remained the main
method until the 1980s, when albacore populations declined and the
industry turned to trolling jigs. Kondo also brought the first
refrigeration ships to San Diego from Japan—a revolutionary
move—so that fishermen could travel long distances and transfer the
fish without them spoiling. It became an industry standard. And it was
vital as Kondo and his Mexican-born partner Aurelio Sandoval chased
tuna to Mexican waters. In something of a Japanese- Mexican-American
partnership, the pair also used a Japanese chemist, Tatsunosuke
Takasaki, who had experience in Japan’s sardine canneries, to
oversee their canneries, where both Japanese and Mexican workers were
employed.

By 1914, more than 150 Japanese fishermen operated 50 of the 140
albacore vessels in San Pedro. Los Angeles’s Terminal Island was
dubbed Little Nippon, with its own “tuna street” and a vibrant
immigrant community, with Buddhist temples, a judo hall, and kendo
schools. According to a 1917 article in industry journal Pacific
Fisherman, “the Japanese taught the Americans and all the others how
to catch tuna in commercial quantities, and they are the best
fishermen in the game. As a result, the packers vie with each other in
providing them with attractive quarters close to their respective
plants.” The others being Portuguese, Italian, and Mexican
immigrants who also worked as fishermen in California.

It’s a story, an American story, that has familiar reverberations
today: The Japanese immigrants, who were a vital part of the American
food industry, were vilified. As food historian Andrew F. Smith
thoroughly and thoughtfully chronicles in the “Enemy Aliens”
chapter of his book American Tuna,

 Japanese men were forbidden by law from marrying white women,
excluded from owning land, and labeled as “undesirables.” William
Randolph Hearst’s media company, with local newspapers like the San
Francisco Examiner, was the Fox News and Breitbart of the day, then
running anti-Japanese editorials laced with conspiracy theories and
racist paranoia, including false accusations that Japanese-American
tuna ships were engaged in spying and reports targeting Kondo and
Takasaki.

Nativists tried to ban the Japanese from fishing, which failed at
first, and politicians catered to them by stirring anti-Japanese
sentiment. But with the attack on Pearl Harbor, they had the pretext
they needed. In 1942, after decades of racist slander, the FBI raided
Terminal Island, arresting boat owners and other Japanese-Americans,
3,000 in total. They were the first Japanese-Americans sent to
internment camps—one of the worst violations of civil liberties in
American history. Their boats were seized, and a total of $130 million
in property was stolen or destroyed. After the camps let out when the
war ended in 1945, most of the Japanese-American fishermen never
returned to the trade.

 It took decades for American attitudes towards its citizens of
Japanese ancestry to soften and normalize (while others,
unfortunately, have flared up as new xenophobic paranoias have taken
hold). Eventually, after the wounds of war scarred over, tuna salad
made it over to Japan, where it became a common filling in the
Japanese rice ball onigiri and a staple sandwich in the country’s
famously good convenience stores, like 7-11, and at home.

There it is sandwiched between slices of shokupan, the fluffy white
milk bread, and often moistened with Kewpie, the rich, tangy
mayonnaise made with rice vinegar, twice the egg yolk of American
brands, and MSG. Tochihiro Nakashima, the creator of Kewpie, first
encountered mayonnaise in the U.S., launching the now iconic brand in
1925. When I tried it recently along with my old favorite,
Hellman’s, in two batches of tuna fish salad, I found that it
simultaneously rounded out the salad’s overtly fishy notes, while
somehow making it taste more clearly like itself. In some ways, it
seemed almost poetic to bring together the U.S.-inspired,
Japanese-made condiment with the canned fish sustained in its American
infancy by Japanese immigrants. But that aside, it was also just more
delicious.

What We Talk About When We Talk About American Food. In this column,
Mari Uyehara covers American food at unique cultural moments and
historical turns, great and small.

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