The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘The Untold Story of Sushi in America’

Episode Date: November 14, 2021

In 1980, when few Americans knew the meaning of toro and omakase, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, spoke to dozens of his followers in the Grand Ballroom of the New Yorker Hotel.It was said Moon could see the future, visit you in dreams and speak with the spirit world, where Jesus and Buddha, Moses and Washington, caliphs and emperors and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and even God himself would all proclaim his greatness.“You,” Moon later recalled telling his followers in the ballroom, “are the pioneers of the fishing business — the seafood business. Go forward, pioneer the way and bring back prosperity.” They did. Today a business they grew and shaped is arguably America’s only nationwide fresh-seafood company of any kind. It specializes in sushi, and its name is True World Foods.One of Moon’s daughters, In Jin Moon, once asked in a sermon whether their movement really made a difference. “In an incredible way, we did,” she said: Her father created True World Foods. “When he initiated that project,” she went on, “nobody knew what sushi was or what eating raw fish was about.” Her father, she concluded, “got the world to love sushi.”This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Hi, my name is Daniel Frommsen, and I'm an editor for the New York Times Magazine, and I'm going to share an article I wrote for us recently. Several years ago, when I was early in the reporting of this story that I'm about to read, I found myself visiting this turn-of-the-century mansion that's located in the coastal fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. located in the coastal fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. You have to imagine this kind of imposing, Tudor-style, grand home on a cliff overlooking Gloucester Harbor, literally built by a diamond-mining tycoon in the year 1900.

Something like the Great Gatsby. Except it was a lot quieter and virtually empty and ended up feeling a little bit like an abandoned museum. So we walked in and, I mean, the foyer is absolutely covered with photos. And the photos feature one man in particular. This middle-aged Korean man who is usually fishing or posing with fish or in various maritime settings. So for instance, in one photo, he is with a giant halibut the size of a huge human being. And in another, there are salmon, and he's in Alaska.

And then he's in Hawaii posing with a blue marlin, or maybe it was Florida. And there was even a picture of a couple of his children who were riding a giant bluefin tuna as if it was a horse. Probably my favorite photo was of him in a seafood warehouse with his wife, and they're each holding a truly enormous lobster, like a 10-pound lobster. And his eyebrows are just arched, and his mouth is kind of open, like in a look of sheer delight. So all of this fish stuff, or let's call them fish artifacts, originated with the man in the photographs. And that man is the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who died in 2012. So you might have heard of Moon before. He was the founder of the Unification Church.

Many people would know it as the Moonies, although this is a word that his followers now consider pejorative and which isn't used anymore. So Moon was maybe best known for his mass weddings of followers where he would marry hundreds, sometimes thousands of couples all at once. But maybe more important, Sun Myung Moon, to his own followers, was considered to be the so-called true father of humankind, which is another way more or less of saying that they considered him to be the messiah.

It wasn't just that Moon was obsessed with fishing personally. It was that his spiritual vision would ultimately become interwoven with a little-known business named True World Foods. True World Foods is a dominant wholesale seafood distributor, arguably the only truly nationwide distributor of fresh seafood in the United States. There's no other nationwide company quite like it. So if you've ordered takeout sushi anywhere in the United States during the pandemic, for instance, there's a good chance that it originated with True World Foods. And the thing is, True World Foods is more than just a business. It's actually the modern descendant of what Moon envisioned as a vertically integrated theological seafood empire,

which would be built by his young true believers. This is the unlikely story of how Reverend Moon's spiritual vision and his followers' little-known efforts transformed America's sushi industry. So here's my article, The Untold Story of Sushi in America. In the beginning, God did not create a sushi company. The sushi came later. So did the unraveling of a controversial religion and the lawsuit for control of its mysterious assets. In the beginning, it was a simpler time, 1980, when few Americans knew the meanings of toro and omakase,

and there was only the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, speaking to dozens of his followers in the grand ballroom of the New Yorker Hotel. You can imagine the energy of that era and their anticipation of that day. The followers had been called from all across the country to New York City, to Moon's very own skyscraper, the vacant hotel whose 2,000 rooms he blessed with holy salt, transforming it into his missionary headquarters. Most people perceived Moon only from a distance,

the round-faced messiah who would marry thousands of identically-dressed Moonies at Madison Square Garden, be convicted of federal tax fraud, and eventually soften from a feared, detested brainwasher into a hazy, zany memory, fit for a Don DeLillo novel or a Seinfeld joke. But to the young followers in the Grand Ballroom, he was considered humanity's true father.

Though Moon was from Korea, most of the 70 or so followers whose lives he changed that day were Japanese. They were people like Takeshi Yashiro, the youngest son of the Anglican Bishop of Kobe, an underachieving student who was nearly struck down as a teenager by a progressive disease. When he miraculously survived, he set out to see the world. After he joined Moon's church in New York, his mother told relatives not to visit him. Now here he was,

a 30-year-old immigrant in an Art Deco ziggurat taller than the Statue of Liberty, ready to receive a new mission. And here he was. It was said Moon could see the future, visit you in dreams, and speak with the spirit world, where Jesus and Buddha, Moses and Washington, caliphs and emperors, and the Reverend Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr., and even God himself would all proclaim his greatness. The date, according to a document a follower saved, was April 16th, the day after a church holiday when they would have recited the liturgy known as Pledge, vowing to use their sweat, tears, and blood as weapons to defeat Satan. They promised to attend their father forever and restore God's ideal world. The true world, they sometimes called it. Their oath ended with the following words, I will fight with my life.

I will be responsible for accomplishing my duty and mission. This I pledge and swear. This I pledge and swear. This I pledge and swear. Now Yashiro and the others listened intently. You, Moon later recalled telling them, are the pioneers of the fishing business, the seafood business. Go forward, pioneer the way, and bring back prosperity. They did. Today, a business they grew and shaped is arguably America's only nationwide fresh seafood company of any kind. It specializes in sushi, and its name is True World Foods. Yoshiro spent many years as True World's president, overseeing an

operation that now includes branches in 17 states, and Britain, Canada, Japan, Korea, and Spain. It distributes not only fish and shellfish, more than 40 salmon and salmon roe products, five species of Japanese sea bream, but also eel sauce, knives, exotic citrus, mochi ice cream bonbons, and virtually every other input a sushi chef might need. According to Robert Blue, the president of its parent conglomerate, the True World Group, in its current fiscal year, True World Foods has sold to more than 8,300 clients in the United States and Canada, overwhelmingly sushi restaurants. Its Japanese subsidiary is on track to export more than a million kilograms of fresh fish to

the United States in 2021. In many cities, Blue says, True World sells to between 70 and 80 percent of mid-range and high-end sushi restaurants. The group's annual revenues typically exceed $500 million. The pandemic, of course, wasn't typical. But sushi was a big winner in COVID, because sushi is a great takeout food if done right, Blue told me recently. We're actually doing our strongest sales in history. One of Moon's daughters, Injin Moon, once asked in a sermon whether their movement really made a difference. In an incredible way, we did, she said. Her father created True World Foods. When he initiated that project she went on, nobody knew what sushi was or what eating raw fish was about. Moon, she concluded, got the world to love sushi. Or as she put it on a different occasion, my father's work is already

in their body. Faith, we all know, is complicated. It can start wars or artistic movements, define our most public acts or most private thoughts. It can also live in the marrow of a world-altering corporation, bringing Japanese delicacies to Nebraska or influencing the sushi you ate yesterday, which may itself be edible proof that people and values at the edges of our culture have moved closer to the center, but not in the way we expect. For True World Foods, this deep entanglement of business and religion would confer both hidden advantages and a singular vulnerability. It would make possible the sushi thing, as Yashiro once called it, even as it laid the foundation for a bitter Moon family feud

and a lawsuit whose consequences for tuna and salmon are still unfolding. At times comically, at times tragically, Moon's followers have expanded our understandings of what faith can and cannot do. Their greatest achievement would always be linked to their greatest limitations. After all, they set out to build God's kingdom, and somehow ended up selling America's raw fish. Sushi, as the University of Kansas historian Eric C. Rath has written, Sushi, as the University of Kansas historian Eric C. Rath has written, is an anonymous cuisine, a shapeshifter that, responding to forces more powerful than human genius, keeps evolving silently in new ways that few can predict. It originally wasn't Japanese.

Like rice cultivation and ironworking, Chinese characters and Zen Buddhism, sushi came from across the sea, invented in China or Southeast Asia before appearing in Japanese records as a form of tribute or currency more than a millennium ago. It also wasn't raw. For most of its history, sushi was fermented, a patchwork of often esoteric regional dishes consisting of seafood preserved with salt and usually rice, though some mountain dwellers favored deer or boar. A 12th century tale tells of a drunken peddler who vomits into her sushi barrel, a crime that no one was likely to notice because the contents were so pungent. The rectangles on today's plates and emoji keyboards, in contrast, known as nigiri sushi,

resulted from a steady reduction in the level of preservation and were popularized as a street food in modernizing Edo, and then Tokyo, as the city was renamed in 1868. Japanese papermaking technology, meanwhile, was adapted to manufacture sheets of seaweed, a prerequisite for present-day sushi rolls. Still, as recently as the 1940s, Rath writes, a survey of rural Japan found places where no one had heard of sushi. To really catch on in America, it had to really catch on throughout Japan. The reasons for this mutual transformation have been scrutinized by an entire academic and popular canon. Refrigeration, globalization, industrialization,

long-haul air travel, a wave of U.S.-Japanophilia that crested in the 1980s amid broader culinary awakenings. Other reasons are slightly less obvious. World War II, for instance, not only ushered in Japan's roaring post-war economy, but also redefined and homogenized its cuisine by privileging urban

staples like rice and soy sauce, alongside prestigious marine specialties. Science, too, played a role. One writer on global sushi culture has theorized that America's sushi boom would have been impossible without the development in the early 1960s of new domestic medium-grain rice, the development in the early 1960s of new domestic medium-grain rice capable of appropriate clumping into vinegared pillows for fish. If soldiers and scientists could alter the course of sushi, surely a messiah could as well. Sun Myung Moon, born in 1920 amid the aftershocks of Pyongyang's Protestant revival, would tell of how Jesus appeared to him on Easter Sunday when he was 15 and spoke about the work he would have to do. Moon wove tales of persecution and survival, notably his imprisonment by the communists in a labor camp, into a mythology that helped

attract tens of thousands of followers, mainly in Asia, America, and Europe. His beliefs, which fused Christianity with elements of Buddhism, Confucianism, shamanism, and Europe. His beliefs, which fused Christianity with elements of Buddhism, Confucianism, shamanism, and sex magic, weren't so different from other Korean new religions. What ultimately set the Unification Church apart was its staggering success in Japan. In particular, a conglomerate called Happy World, which defectors have said was closely intertwined with the Japanese church's financial bureau, cultivated a nationwide network of religious sales representatives. Coached to deny their ties to the church, they often approached potential clients by identifying supposed ailments and curses, which of course could be healed only by buying, say, a wildly expensive ginseng tea,

or a miniature stone pagoda imported from Moon affiliates in Korea. The tactics were questionable, but they worked. The fundraisers were so successful that Japan became, in the words of the church historian Michael Michler, the economic juggernaut that powered his global movement. In 1972, after Moon moved to America, a vanguard of Japanese members followed. His Japanese treasurer's trusted assistant, according to an affidavit by the former treasurer, arrived with a briefcase stuffed with about $1.8 million. From 1976 through 2010, the Unification Church of Japan would send more than $3.6 billion to the United States. Initially, these twin flows of people and funding shaped the future of sushi in two main ways. The first was by binding its fate to that of a new corporation in Washington,

which would receive and manage those billions of dollars. Despite being legally distinct from Moon's church, it was named Unification Church International. Today, it owns the True World Group. Unification Church International would turn out to be much more than a sushi holding company. Sometimes directly and sometimes via a shell company, it would finance Moon's media properties, his anti-communist activism, his ballet company, his tax fraud appeal by Lawrence Tribe, even a chinchilla ranch in Northern California, which received nearly $3 million. But it would also be a vehicle through which the religion guided the seafood business.

The second sushi-shaping factor was more straightforward. By 1980, hundreds of Japanese missionaries had traveled halfway around the planet to America. In the New Yorker Hotel's ballroom, Takeshi Yashiro felt proud, he remembered, as he and his brothers and sisters were conscripted into a plan to end world hunger. It was a little more complicated, actually. Unknown to most of the world, Yashiro's true father was a fervent fisherman who spent much of the 1970s and 80s chasing giant tuna and preaching about the spiritual potential of the oceans,

which he saw as the origin of an entire ocean providence, a vision capacious enough to include both arcane theological projects and a vertically integrated business empire. Moon memorably described the business aspect in a speech titled The Way of Tuna. I have the entire system worked out, starting with boat building, he declared. After we build the boats,

we catch the fish and process them for market and then have a distribution network. It was about more than making money. He was the future food messiah who would solve the food problems of the world. In a way, he said, I view a tuna as an offering. And it was more than just an idea. By the time Yashiro and the other fish pioneers listened in the ballroom, Unification Church International had already poured more than 1010 million into shipyards and seafood operations on every coast of the continental United States,

including a processing plant in Alaska. It would go on to spend tens of millions more. But someone needed to sell the catch. Moon's idea, the pioneers say, was for them to pedal it door to door from refrigerated vans, and to proselytize at the same time. Moon gave each person some seed money, a single $100 bill. They were assigned to all 50 states. I think we had a lottery, a pioneer named Tom Akuzawa recalls. I happened to pick Oklahoma. I didn't know where Oklahoma was at the time. North Dakota, Yashiro told me with a laugh. He was assigned to Massachusetts.

Mike Surisaki, who set out for Louisiana, remembers a stern warning from Moon himself. He was very clear, Surisaki says. Father is coming any time to visit you, so you have to prepare. Always you have soy sauce and wasabi. Yashiro traveled to Boston, where he was joined by other pioneers, including a friend named Max Nagai. He raised money by selling balloons outside Faneuil Hall. They saved up to buy a van, insulating it themselves with fiberglass and plywood. We had a lot of fun selling fish, Yashira said. But frozen pollock from Moon's Plant in Alaska? It was a little hard to sell. Going door to door gave way to retail and wholesale. Church superiors, meanwhile,

reassigned Yashira to Chicago, he said, where he put in 20-hour days and helped found a wholesaler named Rainbow Fish House. He and his spiritual brothers packed a bare apartment, sometimes sleeping on the floor. But you know, he told me, this is no different from, I believe, all the pioneer people or immigrants who came to the United States. It was, he said, their American dream, a dream that now took a sudden turn towards sushi. Powerful cultural currents, healthful eating, the TV miniseries Shogun, status-conscious yuppified living, were conspiring to help an increasingly Toyota-driving,

Casio-wearing public embrace the challenging raw cuisine of Japan's business elite. According to Mutual Trading Company, a leading wholesaler of Japanese dry goods, from 1977 to 1980, the number of sushi bars in Southern California shot up to 116 from just 39. A sushi chef profiled by the Washington Post in 1989 recalled the before times when diners asked for a knife and fork. Now he made at least 1,000 pieces a day and suffered from sushi elbow.

As critics glorified beguiling fish served by skillful sushi masters, a few words from the New York Times' four-star review of Hatsuhana in 1983, the sushi phenomenon clearly depended on a feeling of social distinction, of entering a gastronomic sphere with its own rituals and rules. A U.S. News & World Report survey of local style-setters in Atlanta in 1981 proclaimed that sushi was in, along with racquetball and peach as a decorating color. The Breakfast Club famously deployed a sushi lunch to symbolize Molly Ringwald's character's prim sophistication. But slowly, inevitably, sushi's social meanings

multiplied. It became a ballpark snack, served at major league stadiums in California starting in the late 1980s, and a rap lyric, Big Daddy Kane, I'm genuine like Gucci, raw like sushi. It was cultural diplomacy, Bill Clinton, I like it a lot. like sushi. It was cultural diplomacy. Bill Clinton. I like it a lot. Mmm, fanfugutastic, Homer declares in a 1991 Simpsons episode while eating blowfish sliced by a sushi novice, downing a supposedly lethal dose of venom because the master abandoned the bar to make out in a car with Edna Crabapple. Sushi's embrace in Springfield, and by Mr. Simpson-san, presaged its broader diffusion through middle America. By 1995, the Kansas City Star would be reporting on the arrival of supermarket sushi. In a way, it was simple. The nation's new sushi

chefs needed suppliers, and in every corner of this newly sushi-crazed America, a group of potential suppliers was waiting. They are Japanese, we are Japanese, Nagai remembered. They came to us. Sushi, he acknowledged, wasn't what Moon planned. How can you save the world with sushi? But it wasn't a total accident either. The idea and the reality, he said,

sometimes there's a gap. Sometimes you have to compromise. Nearly four decades after the day of the $100 bills, a manager welcomed me to True World Foods New York, which does business, the company estimates, with 60% of the sushi restaurants in the New York metro area. The largest of 22 True World Foods branches around the country, it is actually in New Jersey, strategically perched near Newark Airport. The time was about 6 a.m., roughly late

afternoon in Sushi World, and the hour that True World's delivery trucks try to arrive in Manhattan. With a few exceptions like the walk-in super freezer, which is approximately as cold as the South Pole in winter, the heart of the facility is chilled to a constant 36 degrees. Beyond racks of surf clams, Pacific oysters, and California sea urchins, a worker wielded what looked like a curling wand retrofitted for Mad Max, defoliating a headless Chilean sea bass. In the tuna room, a man peeled fine bones off a chunk of Boston bluefin. In the dispatch room, drivers ate breakfast beside walls covered in maps and keys. In the live fish room, hot tub-sized tanks were stacked three high. The vast dry goods zone contained buckets of pickled ginger arranged in half-ton pallets.

The warehouse is slightly smaller than one-and-a-half football fields. It was purchased in the late 1980s by several senior Japanese followers, most of whom Moon married in the same mass wedding. It is tempting to perceive True World Foods as a profit-minded conglomerate with a colorful yet ultimately peripheral religious backstory. The sushi equivalent of Marriott, which has been guided for decades by public shareholders and has sometimes made business decisions at odds with the Mormon beliefs of its founding family,

by serving alcohol, for example. Instead, it's more accurate to imagine a fish company guided for most of its history by the equivalent of Joseph Smith and his immediate disciples. Throughout True World's existence, foundational aspects of its identity— who will lead, where and how and when to expand,

messaging at annual meetings, what purpose the business should serve, what sacrifices employees should accept and why— have defied the business world's usual gravity and been shaped, directly or indirectly, by the pull of Moon. Moon's religion, for instance, was responsible for True World's industry-defining status as a single brand and operation. Originally, the Fish Pioneers wholesalers weren't officially united.

As Yoshiro led efforts in Chicago and Nagai took charge in Boston, other pioneers helped create, or sometimes inherited, independent businesses that would form a constellation stretching south to Miami and west to California. Their church, meanwhile, guided both the rise of their eventual parent company and how everything coalesced under it. rise of their eventual parent company, and how everything coalesced under it.

As a legal entity, the True World Group, founded in 1976 as International Oceanic Enterprises, would go on to become the largest revenue-generating, for-profit subsidiary of Unification Church International. IOE's early directors included not only two presidents of the Unification Church International. IOE's early directors included not only two presidents of the Unification Church of America, but also Moon himself. Its high-profile acquisitions, like Moon's beloved Alaskan seafood venture, reflected his personal preoccupations,

while the wholesalers, where True Father's presence was minimal, remained outside the fold. But by 1994, when IOE's president presented Moon with a golden trophy during a celebration of Moon's ocean providence at a church estate in the Hudson Valley, the direction of what Moon put in motion was increasingly clear. The grounds were blanketed with booths and displays from Boston's Rocky Neck Seafood, Chicago's Rainbow Fish House, and their

counterparts from around the country. The merger was already underway. Still, it was never preordained that the leaders of these independent firms would donate their ownership shares to Unification Church International and unite as True World Foods. That's your own little kingdom, so to speak, and that's pretty comfortable, says Jennifer Yashiro, Takeshi Yashiro's wife, who worked with him at Rainbow Fish and later became a True World group administrator. Surrendering that freedom, she recalls, was part of a top-down spiritual vision. Takeshi Yashiro helped coordinate the new subsidiary's formal name changes in 1999 while serving as president of True World Foods.

Moon, he said, personally of True World Foods. Moon, he said, personally approved True World's logo, a humanoid T and W surrounded by two hemispherical arrows symbolizing the give-and-take action of the universe, which are borrowed from the emblem of Moon's church. In hindsight, it can feel sudden, a nationwide sushi distributor emerging as a seeming act of God. In reality, True World resulted from a slow accretion of advantages. The church's arranged marriages, for instance, frequently between spouses of different nationalities, enabled Japanese fish pioneers to remain in America legally. Especially in the early years, they lived communally and worked for little or no pay. When it was time to expand, Japanese members from the movement financing Happy World conglomerate

mobilized their superior assets and credit to help purchase new properties like the one in New Jersey, supercharging True World's scale and geographic reach. The cultural influence of this reach is difficult to quantify, but it's clear that the fish pioneer's push into the sushi frontier, from Boston and Chicago to Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, and beyond, resulted in a powerful shift. It changed the market, says Yasu Kizaki, vice president of the Denver restaurant Sushi Den. Without True World, Denver would have been very behind in sushi. Moon's followers didn't start the boom. They amplified it, as if building the sushi equivalent of America's first and only nationwide cellular network, whose ever-improving strength and reach

meant virtually everyone, everywhere, was within driving distance of a good sushi chef, because every sushi chef was within delivery distance of a good sushi chef, because every sushi chef was within delivery distance of a True World Foods. And where there were no chefs, the followers became chefs. You already know how that went. Japanese members, 1980s, every state. They reportedly opened around 100 restaurants, including some of the earliest sushi bars in places like Omaha, Boise, and Little Rock. My church asked, are you okay to go to the United States and start a sushi restaurant? Sekichi Muto, a missionary who became a sushi chef in Connecticut, told the New Haven Independent last year. At first, he said, he mainly served more classical sushi, but then the pendulum swung toward special roles.

As sushi's silent evolution continued in the 1990s and 2000s, Moon wielded tremendous authority but was rarely involved in day-to-day operations, though his approval would have been sought for momentous decisions. He underpinned a corporate culture of reverence and deference. The True World Group reportedly helped finance projects ranging from Moon's seminary to his right-wing newspaper, The Washington Times. For many years, the group's headquarters was in the New Yorker Hotel. Moon once visited a True World property and posed for a photograph, eyebrows arched and mouth agape, while holding a giant lobster. In at least one well-documented instance, a follower's choice to set aside lifestyle and comfort for largely devotional reasons resulted in the founding of

a new branch of True World Foods. It was 2009, and Sejiro Tanaka, a manager at True World Foods Los Angeles, was instructed to open a location in Las Vegas. In a written testimony published online, Tanaka says that his wife was taken aback. She was recovering from a near-fatal cancer, and he would have to leave her behind, along with their sons. But Las Vegas wasn't just any city. Moon and his wife spent much of their time there.

To support True Parents, True World Foods also must stand and make an effort, Tanaka recalls that the True World Group's chief executive told him. We are not just doing business, we are doing heaven and earth restoration. Tanaka moved to Las Vegas. He learned that his competitors there were good at high-volume species like tuna and salmon, but weak in Japanese imports. So twice a week, when Japanese seafood arrived by air in Los Angeles, he and a partner drove through the desert round-trip to make same-day deliveries in Nevada. His strategy was a success. Bit by bit, the city's sushi grew better and more

diverse, largely because of Moon's presence. Soon, however, his true father's guidance of True World would be called into question. In 2011, according to Tanaka, lawyers told True World's managers that they should no longer follow Moon's commands. Lawyers for Unification Church International deny this. An unsettling realignment of faith and business was taking place. What exactly this meant for the company's leadership, for America's sushi industry, was not yet clear, but it clearly meant something to Tanaka. I have come to feel that it is no longer worthwhile to sacrifice my family, he wrote in a letter of resignation. He added, government without virtue creates broken organizations. The unification movement has

survived more than half a century of conflict and controversy. Tell-all memoirs, federal investigations, disclosures of sacramental sex rituals, and, for instance, the fact that the former Korean military officer who served as publisher of the Washington Times also raised Moon's illegitimate son. But True World Foods has now been drawn into a different kind of ordeal, one that is existential, more akin to civil war. On one side is Moon's church, which, since shortly after his death in 2012 at age 92, has been led by his widow, Hak-Ja-Han Moon, who is considered humanity's true mother. On the other side is their eldest living son, Hyun-Jin Moon, who maintains that he is his father's only true

successor and who has taken full control of Unification Church International and its estimated billion-dollar assets, the True World Group included. What did the terrorists do when they realized they were going to fight against the largest military infrastructure of the world? Hyunjin, who is also known as Preston, once told a small group of associates, according to court documents, They did asymmetrical warfare. We do asymmetrical warfare. One reason for the conflict was succession. Moon's wife gave birth to seven sons and seven daughters. Substance abuse and behavioral problems effectively disqualified the eldest son,

while the second son died as a teenager from a car accident. So for many years, Moon elevated the third son, Preston, making him vice president of his newly restructured church and eventually president and chairman of Unification Church International. But in a supplicating yet self-righteous report to his parents in 2008, Preston denounced what he saw as the religion's misguided copying of the failing methods and structures of the mainline Christian churches, arguing that it needed to become more of a global interfaith movement. He added, shall we lead the world back to God, or shall we forever remain a cult or new religion? Moon not only rejected the pitch. A few weeks later, he inaugurated Preston's youngest brother as the international president of the church.

Preston's allies have argued that Hak-Chah Han, corrupted by Rasputin-like clerics and enabled by a medium who channeled the spirit of her dead mother, plotted with rival heirs to remove Preston from power, and has since deviated from Moon's original teachings, notably by calling herself God's only begotten daughter. In addition, they have argued that Moon, late in life, was heavily impressionable or even senile. late in life, was heavily impressionable or even senile. The youngest brother, Hung Jin Moon, also claims he was forced out. His own schismatic congregation has achieved infamy for the AR-15 style rifles and golden crowns of bullets made from inert ammunition featured prominently during ceremonies. In 2009, Preston filled the board of Unification Church International with loyal associates

and began directing its assets toward his own interfaith peace movement. His action spilled into True World Foods in 2011, when Yashiro visited his true father in Las Vegas with a delegation of around 60 senior True World employees, in defiance of Preston's wishes. Yashiro was fired before they even left. Others later resigned or were demoted. According to lawyers for Preston and Unification Church International,

Yashiro was told in advance by True World's board that the visit to Moon was staged as part of an attempted hostile takeover of True World. Yashiro, in contrast, told me that Preston was the biggest thief in the history of Moon's church. True world, he said, was the blood, sweat, and tears of my brothers and sisters. Not long after, Moon's church filed suit against Preston and his fellow board members in District of Columbia Superior Court, claiming that they had effectively stolen Unification Church

International by violating a fiduciary obligation to manage it in the church's interests. Moon died the following year. The True World Group's current president, Robert Blue, says that True World Foods never stopped serving Moon's vision. It's just that the keeper of Moon's vision is now Preston. If reason would prevail, I think that we would be fine, he said of the court case. Blue called Preston a man of deep conscience whose fantastic work, like peace-building efforts between North and South Korea, was being impeded by a tragic, heart-wrenching situation. Paradoxically, by setting off an exodus of True World managers, Preston freed Yashiro and the others to extend Moon's sushi legacy even further.

When Yashiro and I last met, at a diner in the New Yorker Hotel, he explained how he had hired various defectors and started a new distributor, Ocean Providence, whose annual sales had already reached $50 million. He was pushing sushi even farther into the southwest and upper midwest, and he seemed unburdened, even buoyant. Some of the things that they started doing, I kind of like it, Yashiro added, referring to True World's new management. Still, he supported the ongoing lawsuit. Someday, he hoped, True World and Ocean Providence would become allies or even merge. Whatever the ultimate outcome of the conflict, Yashiro won't be here to see it.

In 2018, he received a diagnosis of advanced cancer. He would not be blessed with a second miraculous recovery. At his funeral, he lay in white holy robes in an open coffin, draped in a white and red Unification Church flag, the one with the twin arrows that are part of the True World logo, the arrows of give and take. Enormous floral arrangements exploded with color, sent by former True World managers, the Unification Church of Japan, color, sent by former True World managers, the Unification Church of Japan, Happy World, Japanese restaurants in Indiana and Arizona. Other offerings were discreet. One was from Rainbow Fish, Chicago. With deepest sympathy, another note read, Sisters from Fish Company.

When Yashiro was buried a few days later, the flowers were heaped on his grave, covering the freshly turned earth like a quilt. Then it was time for lunch. As is done in many East Asian traditions,

his family arranged an altar where they offered a meal to their loved one in the spirit world. In front of Takeshi Yashiro's portrait, they placed slices of raw tuna. After Yashiro's death, the District of Columbia Superior Court vindicated Moon's church and his widow, and all the others who stood with them. A judge, deciding whether Preston Moon and his fellow board members breached their fiduciary duties while taking control of Unification Church International, found that they did.

First, by rewriting its Articles of Incorporation to eliminate any obligation to the Unification Church. And second, by engaging in asset transfers contrary to its original corporate mission. A more punishing analysis eventually followed. In a nearly 100-page order issued last December, the court found that when Sun Myung Moon became disenchanted with Preston, Preston and his allies on the board proceeded to pillage the company's assets and did it in a way that was secretive, out of the bounds of any kind of review process

and not in the best out of the bounds of any kind of review process, and not in the best interests of the corporation. In particular, it identified an insidious plan in which the directors, some of whom did not understand basic aspects of what was happening, agreed to irrevocably transfer $470 million in Korean properties and other assets to a Swiss foundation. The foundation supported Preston's own projects. Lawyers for Unification Church International say the transfer was a pragmatic financial decision that benefited the movement. The court determined that the directors could never be trusted to act in the corporation's interests.

So it ordered that Preston and three co-defendants be removed from Unification Church International's board and replaced with directors chosen in consultation with Moon's Church. They are also jointly liable to make the corporation whole by personally repaying more than $530 million plus interest. The order, which has been stayed while the defendants pursue an appeal, was stunning, not only because it trumpeted the righteousness of a religion long viewed with suspicion, and not only because it made Preston out to be a villain in the age-old tale of a struggle for power and money. It answered, unambiguously, the question of how Sun Myung Moon's faith was related to True World Foods and his movement's other principal American business holdings.

And the answer was, the businesses were to be owned and operated for the sake of the church because that obligation had been there from the start. The pioneers' understanding that they had always been building something for Moon, that mattered. History mattered. To contradict it was not only insidious, it was illegal. Precisely what all this means for America's sushi lovers is still unclear, partly because after oral arguments in June in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, the parties are still awaiting a ruling. But unless a First Amendment defense, which failed earlier, succeeds, it seems likely that True World's profits may once again support the Unification Church, as leadership changes trickle down. We have so many of our faith brothers and sisters still working in the business,

Jennifer Yoshiro told me. The chatter around the community was kind of excited, like, wow, so is True World going to come back? In the New Yorker Hotel's diner, Takeshi Yashiro imagined a happy ending, an earnest last chapter in which True World's profits might finally help solve the food problems of the world, just as Moon dreamed in 1980. Yet the reality may be both more ordinary and more eternal. That the changes will be small but persistent. That an unknown few will continue to influence what we eat and maybe even love. That the economic juggernaut that now feeds us sushi existed before Takeshi Yashiro and Robert Blue and will exist after them, having absorbed what they could offer. People move on. Get old. Max Nagai retired in Japan. Yashiro, of course, is dead.

If faith's power has an ultimate limit, it may be the human lifespan. Over the years, I found myself reading followers' obituaries. One woman worked in various church-affiliated Japanese restaurants in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Ohio. Another, one of 43 Japanese sisters Moon summoned to his processing plant in Alaska, later delivered packaged sushi in China, waking at 4 a.m. every morning, preparing the sushi, sending the kids to school, shopping for groceries

as well as the next day's sushi supply, then delivering the packaged sushi by 9 a.m. before she finally yielded to a nerve disease and pneumonia. If Moon created a juggernaut, he didn't stray far from the concept's origins. The Sanskrit word jaganath, which referred, according to history and legend, to a likeness of Vishnu paraded on an enormous

chariot under whose unrelenting wheels believers were willingly crushed. A follower named Ray O'Neill, who works at a marina in Gloucester, Massachusetts, offered a different metaphor. In the three and a half decades since Moon drummed to Gloucester, he had raised eels, exported dogfish bellies, and provided tech support for a tuna fleet in Tunisia. Sometimes, he said, he felt like one of those Japanese soldiers stranded in the Pacific after World War II, still principled, still fighting, left behind. There was a capriciousness to it all. A few words and off you went. You could pilot a refurbished trawler in doomed pursuit of Antarctic krill or take tuna to every corner of America. One day the Messiah was showing off your lobsters,

then he was gone, your company stolen, remade, and maybe returned, though maybe not. Your notorious faith might be forgotten, or worse, condemned to watch itself blow up. But sushi was something certain, something concrete. Taste it. My father's work is already in their body. Moon may be dead and his movement divided, but forget about all that. He gave us money in a ballroom, and we gave you these slices of bream. Was it a compromise? Of course. It was also a liberation. It was American and foreign. It was ridiculous. It was deadly serious. Moon's tuna was an offering. And it was lunch. This story was written and narrated by Daniel Frommsen.

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