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Born in Kyushu, in the north of Japan, in 1863, founder Taichiro Morinaga went to work for his uncle, a
<br /> potter, in exchange for room and board after his father's death when Morinaga was just seven. Morinaga,
<br /> who had no formal education, became the bookkeeper of the pottery business, and then, at the age of 18,
<br /> was sent to Tokyo as the company's sales representative. Morinaga later went to work for a wholesale
<br /> company, rising to become manager of a branch office in Yokohama. Yet, after extending too much credit
<br /> to customers, the office went into debt. In order to repay his employer, Morinaga decided to try his luck in
<br /> California.
<br /> Taichiro Morinaga moved to San Francisco in 1887 and opened a hardware store, trading in high-quality,
<br /> high-priced goods--in a working class neighborhood. The business, which suffered equally from the
<br /> pervasive anti-Oriental sentiment of the era, soon failed and forced Morinaga to look elsewhere for a
<br /> livelihood.
<br /> Yet Morinaga's stay in the United States led him to an important discovery: candy. Japan had remained
<br /> closed to outside influences for more than 250 years, finally opening its borders to foreigners only in the
<br /> late 19th century. If the country's elite class had access to sweets--typically based on boiled beans--the
<br /> majority of the population had limited access to confectionery products, and sugar consumption in general
<br /> remained low. Milk and milk products were also absent from the Japanese diet. The opening of the
<br /> country's borders stimulated interest in all things foreign, and the country's growing foreign population
<br /> encouraged the import of Western-style confectionery and candy.
<br /> Taichiro Morinaga recognized that the growing foreign influence in Japan, and the country's readiness to
<br /> adopt attributes of Western culture, would inevitably extend to the country's eating habits. Morinaga
<br /> became determined to learn the art of candy making, in order to introduce new confectionery products to
<br /> the Japanese market. Despite the anti-Asian prejudice, Morinaga found a job as a janitor at a candy
<br /> factory, and there learned how to make candy.
<br /> By the end of the century, Morinaga was ready to return to Japan and start his own candy company.
<br /> Before leaving, Morinaga performed his own bit of market research, questioning members of San
<br /> Francisco's Japanese community and other Japanese visitors to the city on their candy preferences.
<br /> Morinaga discovered that the sweet most preferred by the people he questioned was marshmallows, at
<br /> the time also known as "angel food." The fluffy, egg white-and-sugar-based candy also resembled existing
<br /> Japanese confections, making it a natural first product.
<br /> Morinaga founded his business with partner Hanzaburo Matsuzaki in 1899, opening a small shop in the
<br /> Akasaka neighborhood of Tokyo. The business, called Morinaga Western Candy Confectionery,
<br /> developed quickly as the country eagerly greeted the new candy type. Morinaga himself acted as
<br /> salesman, pushing a cart from which he sold marshmallows, and other Western-styled cakes and candies.
<br /> Among these were caramels. This product represented even more of a novelty in Japan in that it
<br /> contained butter--at a time when dairy products still had not penetrated the Japanese diet. Morinaga's
<br /> caramel sales were at first limited to his foreign customers, as the Japanese shied away from the strange
<br /> product. In addition, the country's climate made it difficult to produce--and to eat--caramel, which tended to
<br /> melt and become too sticky to hold in the heat and humidity.
<br /> Morinaga set out to develop a new caramel recipe for the Japanese market, and by 1914 had perfected a
<br /> recipe that both appealed to the Japanese palate and also offered a longer shelf life. The new product
<br /> debuted in 1914, and was packaged in a pocket-sized yellow box. Known as Hi-Chew, the product
<br /> became a company flagship and one of its core products into the next century. In the meantime, the
<br /> company's strong marshmallow sales inspired the adoption of a logo, an angel, in 1905--the angel logo
<br /> also fit in with Morinaga's work as a missionary. The company adopted the name Morinaga Confectionery
<br /> Inc. in 1912.
<br /> The success of Hi-Chew led Morinaga to seek its own source of dairy products, and in 1917 the company
<br /> set up a dairy operation, which became Morinaga Dairy Industries. A year later, the company launched a
<br /> new candy line, becoming the first to introduce the chocolate bar to Japan. Meanwhile, the company
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