Lucky Junki

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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.

He shows no trace now of the samurai cowboy screaming into the TV camera. Yoshida is every inch the businessman -- solemn, crisp, and formidable.

Yoshida moves through the plant with a capo's strut, pausing here to greet a longtime employee, there to question a manager about water spilling over the lip of a monstrous vat. He shows no trace of the samurai cowboy screaming into the TV camera. Yoshida is every inch the businessman -- solemn, crisp, and formidable in an expensive gray suit, his face an impassive mask.

He climbs a set of stairs to a catwalk overlooking the floor, surveying this slice of his kingdom with a satisfaction tinged by wistfulness: He has only a sketchy understanding of the factory's engineering and operations, he acknowledges. And the sauce itself, while bearing Yoshida's name and likeness, is no longer entirely his; five years ago, he sold North American trademark, distribution, and marketing rights to the H.J. Heinz Co., for which he essentially serves as a contract manufacturer. This arrangement falls under the aegis of Yoshida Foods International, another one of the companies that make up the privately held Yoshida Group, which last year took in more than $180 million in sales.

"Economy of scale," he says, with a stoical toss of his hand. "Pretty soon, there only be four grocery outlets left in this country -- Wal-Mart, Safeway, Kroger, Costco. To play with those big boys, you better be big yourself."

The capital-intensive roar and high-corporate filigree seem a world apart from a 20-gallon pot of sauce simmering on the stove in the basement of a karate dojo. And the austere and sober businessman touring his factory seems a different person from the berserker wearing a pasta mustache at Sur la Table. And yet the distance between the mom-and-pop project and Heinz, or even between the two sides of Yoshida's personality, isn't nearly as great as the one yawning between food manufacturing and the spectral, virtual 21st-century enterprise -- global logistics and supply chain management -- that now constitutes Yoshida's core business.

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