Junki's comatose baby daughter lay nearly buried beneath the tangle of tubes and monitors. The doctors would not look him in the eye. He sat vigil through the night. In the silent watches, to the pulse of the heart monitor, during breaks from his divine plea-bargaining -- God, take me, not her -- shards of his past came hurtling at him.
He remembered his bleak boyhood in Kyoto, in the section of the city below the central train station, far removed from the world-famous temples and cherry trees. His father was an accomplished but dreamy photographer and his mother a driven, embittered woman who launched a series of struggling enterprises to feed her seven children. Junki, the youngest child, turned to the gang-controlled streets for companionship.
Junki proved himself a consummate brawler, slashing and battling with a ferocity notable even by lower Kyoto's brutal standards. First he ran with a gang, then he ran his own. He picked up both a collection of knife scars and a nickname derived from the American tough-guy films he loved: One-Eyed-Jack Junki.
He had lost his right eye in an accident when he was three years old. A Buddhist priest had told him, "Junki-san, God has taken your eye and replaced it with his own. You will have a special insight into people."
But the only thing special about Yoshida's life seemed to be its difficulty. At 18 he failed the exam for entrance into the university system, the kiss of death for a young person in Japan. A life on the streets awaited Yoshida, a violent and likely brief career shaking down construction workers for the Yakuza, the Japanese version of Cosa Nostra. He decided instead to borrow money from his mother for a plane ticket to America, the land of second chances. He touched down in Seattle on a January day in 1968. The first thing he did was cash in his return ticket. He had resolved not to return home until he had achieved success.
For a long time it seemed he would never see Japan again. He spoke no English and possessed no work permit. That first rain-swept winter he lived in a junker car and used a public restroom in west Seattle as his bathroom. As an illegal alien, he worked gut-busting, low-paying jobs in restaurant kitchens and on landscaping crews.
But things started to improve. He acquired some rudimentary English and a student visa. He enrolled at Highline Community College, where he discovered that American students were as hungry for things Japanese -- from tempura to films to Zen -- as he'd once been for things American. Junki began to teach karate at Highline. His fire and charisma -- along with his fourth-degree black-belt mastery of the Ryobukai school of the martial art -- drew students in swarms. He met a fellow Highline student named Linda McPherren at a party and immediately announced that he was going to marry her. Two weeks later, the couple was engaged. Junki and Linda married in 1973, and the next year became parents. Lucky Junki.
Dear God, take me instead.
Grace and good medicine prevailed. Kristina was out of danger, breathing normally, her liver again filtering her blood. As life flooded back into their daughter, Linda and Junki went limp with relief. A day or two passed before Junki considered the fact that the family had no health insurance.
After five days in the hospital, Kristina was well enough to go home. The nurses and doctors were all grins, Junki and Linda were glowing. But a worm of despair was already turning in Junki's brain: My God, how do I begin to pay for all this?
One of the hospital staff handed him an envelope. Junki hesitated before opening it. The bill would certainly be astronomical. Then he gave a gallows laugh -- what did it matter how many zeros there were when he was virtually penniless? But as he read the bill his laughter died. The amount payable was $250.
"If that's too much," the hospital staffer said, "we can work something out."
Junki was too overwhelmed to speak. But he silently vowed, with all the resolve that had brought him off the streets of Kyoto to the New Jerusalem of America, that one day, in some way, he would repay this kindness.
The Yoshidas returned to their lives. Junki continued to teach karate. The family moved to Oregon, where Junki opened a dojo in suburban Portland that soon became a center for martial artists throughout the Pacific Northwest. When practicing karate, Junki was formal, dignified, and imposing -- all Japanese. In other aspects of his life, however, he was exuberant, fun loving, able to make friends with anybody -- the representative American. The dojo thrived, but another daughter had come along (the Yoshidas would eventually have three daughters), and the family still lived on a shoestring.
In fact, at Christmas, Yoshida didn't have enough money to buy gifts for his karate students. So he and Linda brewed batches of a cooking sauce, adapting one of his mother's recipes to American tastes. They doubled the sugar and added more mirin, the rice wine that lent the sauce, or teri, its distinctive flavor and glazing properties. Outside of a few specialty stores, such sauces were then unknown in the U.S. The Yoshidas gave eight-ounce bottles as gifts in December. By February, students were asking for more. Junki admonished them that Christmas came only once a year.
"No, no," the students replied. "We don't expect another gift. We'll pay you."
Today, Mr. Yoshida's Original Gourmet Sauce and Marinade is bottled and packed in an industrial park just under the flight path of arriving jets at Portland International Airport. You walk down a hallway from Junki Yoshida's office, put on a hygienic haircover, open a door, and step directly onto the plant floor. The effect is rather startling. It's as if you've stumbled into a James Bond movie, where a vast SMERSH laboratory secretly hums on the other side of a seemingly ordinary living-room wall. Serpentine belts snake from floor to ceiling of the football-field-size factory, emitting a moderate din as they bear the distinctive, half-gallon plastic jugs of ink-colored sauce in various states of preparedness.
