Photograph by HATSUE
“You are what you eat” has special resonance for native Cincinnatians. We grew up chomping Grippo’s potato chips, stretching cheese from LaRosa’s pizzas, and battling brain freeze from Graeter’s black raspberry chip ice cream. Even long-gone culinary experiences seem encoded in our DNA. Mention Rubel’s to an elder, and they’ll wax poetic about rye bread baked by the Russian immigrant family (full disclosure: I’m related!).
From A (the Aglamesis brothers) to Z (Zip Kirschner of Zip’s Café), Cincinnati is rich in immigrant and ethnic origins of culinary delights. Our particular—some might say peculiar—taste buds are so tongue-and-groove with place that national media, when reporting on the Queen City, invariably highlight the Macedonian Kiradjieff family’s chili or goetta synonymous with the German-descended Gliers.
Two names, however, are woefully overlooked in the pantheon of exceptional local foods: Yoshio Shimizu and Takeshi “Ben” Yamaguchi. These Japanese-American entrepreneurs, along with their wives Toshi and Alyce, founded Soya Foods in 1945. From a modest factory in Price Hill, they quietly built a powerhouse business by turning the region on to the healthy joys of tofu.
As the only tofu maker for more than 100 miles, Soya Foods attracted hungry and homesick Asian and Asian American customers from near and far. The small retail store inside the factory—which sold fresh tofu, sprouts, and noodles along with cookware, crockery, and non-perishable victuals imported from Japan—became a hub for Japanese Americans who hungered as much for a sense of community as for its canned unagi and pickled vegetables.
On the surface, the story of Soya Foods sounds like the American dream: Two immigrant couples pooling resources to create a company that thrives for decades, providing for their children’s college educations. But Soya’s founding was preceded and prompted by “an American nightmare,” according to Tadashi Robert “Bob” Shimizu, Yoshio’s son.
Bob was a toddler when his father and Ben Yamaguchi met in a place that marks a dark chapter in American history. If the two Californians hadn’t been forcibly interned during the World War II, Soya Foods would never have come about. The business concept was born at the worst time in the families’ lives, but eventually made for a prosperous transition in an alien Midwestern setting. Even the company’s demise, almost a half-century later, was paradoxically a form of success.
You know tofu. It’s the mild, simple, low-calorie yet protein-rich food made from soybeans. When soaked, ground, cooked, curdled, and dried in a cheese-like process, the legumes become white or pale beige, creamy and smooth like custard or firm and crumbly like Roquefort.
Tofu is so versatile it can serve as a satisfying substitute for meat or dairy. It’s tasty naked or with a splash of soy sauce as a guilt-free snack. Readily absorbing the flavors of whatever it’s cooked with, tofu is an amiable addition to myriad recipes, adding heft and texture without overpowering. Popular restaurant dishes made with it today include Agadashi Tofu (deep-fried cubes in broth), Buta Dofu (pork and tofu stir-fry), and Mapo Tofu (a spicy Sichuan dish with meat and fermented bean paste).
Tofu originated in China two centuries ago and was quickly adopted in Japan. In the immediate post-World War II period, however, pretty much the only people with a hankering for it locally were Asian Americans (441 individuals in the city per the 1950 U.S. census) and Chinese restaurants, of which there were just a handful. So it was a gamble for Shimizu and Yamaguchi to base an entire business on it here in Cincinnati.
For the venture to work, tofu would have to reach a wider audience. Americans would have to acquire a taste for the mild foodstuff. The two couples would have to work long hours and reinvest profits back into the business.
It took years, but their bet paid off. Tofu indeed grew from an obscure specialty to a health-food wonder ingredient. It is vegan and packed with iron and fiber, so its popularity continues to expand along with health consciousness. In 1984, almost 40 years after Soya Foods was established, tofu was still exotic enough for the word to be italicized in this magazine. Today, area grocery stores carry at least a dozen different brands of it.
Neither Soya founder intended to go into food wholesaling or had considered living anywhere but California. In the early 1940s, Yamaguchi ran Ben’s Place, a diner in Dinuba, a small agricultural town near Fresno. Shimizu, an autodidact as familiar with carpentry tools as with philosophy books, was foreman of a rose nursery in San Leandro in the San Francisco Bay area. Like Yamaguchi, he had a wife and two small children.
Both men were patriotic and socially prominent. Life was good. And then in 1942 came the nighttime knock at the door. Shimizu and Yamaguchi were arrested without cause, ripped away from their families in an FBI roundup.
Photograph by HATSUE
“They didn’t tell my mother what was happening and why or where my father was going and when he would be seen next,” says Bob Shimizu, who was 3 years old at the time. The family later learned that Yoshio was in an internment camp in Bismarck, North Dakota, along with people of German and Italian descent, all suspected of helping their mother countries in World War II. “They took everything away from my dad,” says Bob. “Our whole life was taken away.”
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, a new wave of “Yellow Peril” unleashed the same kind of xenophobic hysteria seen in Germany toward Jews, gays, and Roma. The U.S. government built and ran internment camps for Japanese and Japanese Americans in the western U.S. Women and children were not spared. A mere 1/16th of Japanese lineage could get people locked up;
in photographs, some of the kids look as Anglo as Dennis the Menace.
The large majority of those interned were American citizens; many had never been to Japan or spoke Japanese. Guard towers and barbed wire kept prisoners in place. Overcrowding was common. Health care was nominal. One camp was at a racetrack, with prisoners living in horse stalls.
Shimizu and Yamaguchi met for the first time at Poston, the largest of this country’s 10 Japanese internment camps, with close to 18,000 prisoners, in Yuma, Arizona. Prisoners built irrigation systems and farmed the land in extreme weather, with daytime temperatures reaching up to 115 degrees. A poem left behind by one Poston prisoner carries the lines We’re trapped like rats in a wired cage/ To fret and fume with impotent rage.
Photograph courtesy Celine Parreñas Shimizu
Bob Shimizu, now retired, recalls little about those early years. “I remember sneaking and catching someone’s koi out of their koi pond,” he says. “Not much more than that. My dad was bitter about how he was treated, but it was the era when no one talked about things.”
What is known is captured in the 2022 documentary film 80 Years Later by Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Bob’s daughter-in-law. (Some quotes in this story come from that film.) Families were informed that, when released, they shouldn’t return home. They’d have to disperse somewhere eastward to break up any concentration of Japanese Americans on the West Coast.
Despite the harsh treatment, the two families, among many released in 1943, continued to live in and love the United States—though not its racist policies.
For immigrants with few resources, a food enterprise offers a low bar for entry into owning a business. Yamaguchi had restaurant experience, and Shimizu could build just about anything: furniture, machines, electronics. At Poston, prisoners grew and cooked their own food, and the two men learned to make tofu.
Dan Shimizu, Yoshio’s grandson, says the children were never told exactly why tofu was the choice for the business. But, he conjectures, “it was something ready-made that they could slot into and work on together.”
With help from a local Quaker nonprofit, the Yamaguchis arrived in Ohio first, buying a modest duplex at 1275 Rutledge Avenue in Price Hill. When the Shimizu family arrived, they joined their friends, moving into the other half of the building. “They liked the German population in the neighborhood,” says Steve Yamaguchi, Ben’s grandson. “They felt they might have had some empathy with the Germans.”
Photograph courtesy Celine Parreñas Shimizu
The Soya founders enrolled their children in Carson Public School and got down to business. “They rented a dilapidated old place on Queen City Avenue,” says Bob Shimizu. “It was pretty run-down.”
Mung bean sprouts were the company’s first offering. Bean sprout salads were a popular menu item in the late 1940s at the luxurious Beverly Hills Supper Club and countless Northern Kentucky gambling dens. When Soya signed a contract as the primary supplier of sprouts to the Castellini Company, the food wholesaling giant, “they were thrilled,” says Steve Yamaguchi. “Castellini distributed to Kroger!”
In 1949, the families set their sights on another comestible: tofu. They purpose-built a single-story white-brick factory at 2356 Wyoming Avenue, just off Queen City Avenue. Yoshio Shimizu handcrafted much of the tofu-making equipment, shelving, and furnishings.
Word about Soya spread quickly in the Asian community. Before long, families were driving to it from all over the tri-state—and even further afield—to stock up on hard-to-find foods. The place became a de facto clubhouse for the Japanese community. Gossip was shared in the aisles.
In the 1970s and ’80s, the Furiya family of Versailles, Indiana, was one of many to make an hour-plus drive to Soya, keeping their purchases fresh in an iced-down cooler. “The bell above the metal door heralded our arrival,” recalls Linda Furiya in her evocative 2006 memoir Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Childhood in Whitebread America (Seal Press). She recalls the smells and sounds of the shop that the family trekked to twice a month:
“A warm muskiness of boiling soybeans rising from the vats permeated the store. […] The proprietress, Mrs. Yamaguchi, peeked from behind the wall of paperwork on her desk. Pushing back her salt-and-pepper frizz of hair, she quickly shuffled from behind her heavy, cherrywood desk, muttering repeatedly in a husky voice, “Irrashimasen!” (Welcome!), and then busied herself pouring green tea into thick earthenware mugs. Her husband, Mr. Yamaguchi, was punching numbers into a calculator.”
Furiya’s brother Keven says the visits were as social as they were transactional. Their parents lingered as long as possible at Soya in order to chat in Japanese, something they didn’t have an opportunity to do at home. “My dad was an avid gardener,” he recalls. “He grew Japanese vegetables like napa, daikon, and Japanese eggplants. He would wrap some in newspaper and present them to the Soya owners. They were really appreciative, and it made him feel very important.”
Barbara Neumann, née Futamachi, remembers tagging along with her parents for weekly trips to Soya as a child. “Each week, we would get two or three blocks of tofu and one bag of bean sprouts,” she says. “My mother would buy cans of things like pickles. If I got lucky, I’d get a box of Botan candy with a toy in it. My friends were amazed that you could eat its rice-paper wrappers.”
Foodies (before that was a term) discovered Soya, too. “Japanese food was virtually nonexistent when Soya opened,” says Marilyn Harris, the prolific food writer and teacher. “People didn’t know what it was except that you ate it with chopsticks. I bought their silken tofu, which was really good.”
Soya expanded its restaurant clients regionally. “Grandfather traveled and sold tofu to any Chinese restaurant he could find,” says Steve Yamaguchi. Bob Shimizu says bumps in business followed influxes of Asian immigrants to the area. “After the Korean war ended in 1953 there were a lot of Korean war brides who became customers. And after Vietnam ended in 1975, the same thing happened.”
All four kids helped out at the factory and store, from lugging 50-pound bags of rice up the staircases of customers’ homes to driving a refrigerated truck to commercial accounts. “When I was in grade school, maybe 10 or so, they’d make chow mein and sell to local groceries,” says Bob Shimizu. “Evelyn Yamaguchi [daughter of Ben and Alyce] and I would put it in quart-size containers. We would put the labels on the containers. We would have contests. She always won because she was a couple years older and a lot faster.”
Photograph by HATSUE
As teenagers, the four kids sometimes had to interrupt their busy social schedules to go water the thirsty bean sprouts, even at night. Yoshio Shimizu eventually alleviated that bothersome need by personally constructing an automated watering system.
Though the kids assisted here and there, they were never groomed to take over the business. Instead, they were urged to set their sights on careers that would take them beyond the limits of their own community.
They were intentionally not taught the Japanese language. The families celebrated American holidays, albeit with a big pot of rice on hand alongside the Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys. All four kids excelled at Western Hills High School, where they were the only Asians, and then at the University of Cincinnati.
Their assimilation was successful, but at a cost the children would only later understand. “We met with virtually no prejudice or teasing or bullying,” says Bob Shimizu, who was a West High football star, class president his junior and senior year, and, along with the Yamaguchis, heavily involved in extracurriculars. Compared to the blatant racism their parents suffered in California after Pearl Harbor, “being in Cincinnati was amazing at how kind people were. They took you at face value.”
Were the Shimizu and Yamaguchi kids’ super-achiever personalities a response to the hardships of their youth? Were they inspired by the diligence and sacrifices of their parents? Or was their shining, in part, because they had something to prove?
“There’s always been a part of me hiding my Japanese-ness and culture,” says Bob Shimizu. “That was the brutality of my early childhood, being made to feel ashamed of who I was. I later lived a bit of a charmed life and got things in life many other people didn’t have, but on the other hand I gave up things I probably shouldn’t have had to.”
Steve Yamaguchi laments a similar distance from his origins. “I missed out on the heritage component,” he says. “I’m diluted out.”
Photograph by HATSUE
Celine Parrenas Shimizu says the families’ ambitions for their children were a strategy for survival. “They grew up with the narrative of Never get in trouble. Never even give a sense you’re doing anything wrong, because you represent your entire community and family.”
Yamaguchi père wanted his kids to go into law or medicine, “the bigger dream of higher education,” says Steve Yamaguchi. “So he pushed my dad [Ben Jr.] into the medical field.” Bob Shimizu, who also became a doctor, adds, “My father didn’t want my brother or me to have anything to do with working as hard and in such a difficult situation as he did.”
As such, the demise of Soya Foods ironically was the fruition of the parents’ American Dream: The kids became too successful to run a mom-and-pop shop. They had surpassed the success of their parents, at least in the parents’ eyes.
When Ben Jr. and his wife Nita bought out the Shimizus, who retired in the 1970s, it was Nita who took the helm of Soya. Never mind that she was a Kentucky-raised woman of German and English descent with forebears in the Daughters of the American Revolution. “It became her baby,” says Steve Yamaguchi. “She dove into our Japanese-American heritage more than my dad!”
To share Japanese culture with elementary school kids, Nita visited classrooms to show off kimonos, chopsticks, and samples of Japanese foods. In the factory, she added alfalfa sprouts to Soya’s offerings, further increasing their appeal to a new category of retail clients: health food stores.
Photograph courtesy Celine Parreñas Shimizu
In the 1980s, two of Ben Jr. and Nita’s four kids appeared on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. “They sent a crew from New York to videotape the making of tofu,” says Steve Yamaguchi. “My older brother Rob did the process while I did some of the packing.”
Appearing on the national TV show was a sort of swan song for Soya. Nita and Ben Jr. divorced in the early 1990s, and the factory soon closed. Ben Jr. then invested in a completely different kind of food operation, buying the Cheviot steakhouse Maury’s Tiny Cove. His sons Paul and Ben III ran it from 1994 to 2009.
In 2000, the duplex on Rutledge Avenue finally left the hands of the Yamaguchi family, more than a half century after its purchase. The family members have dispersed, many of them making it back to California. The dream cooked up in Soya Foods was realized, but at personal costs that are often glossed over now with humor.
“How is tofu made?” I ask Bob Shimizu, who laughs and says, “I have no idea!”
