Hagiwara?EUR??,,????'??+Landscape Designer, Fortune Cookie Inventor

 

Makoto Hagiwara with his daughter in 1924. Hagiwara died the following year.

The Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco?EUR??,,????'???s Golden Gate Park began as a one-acre exhibit within the Japanese Village of the1894 California Midwinter International Exposition. In 1895, Makoto Hagiwara, a prosperous local Japanese landscape designer, was placed in charge of the garden, where he stayed for 30 years, expanding the garden to encompass five acres and maintaining this popular, quintessential San Francisco site.

Hagiwara is also known for inventing the fortune cookie in the early 1900s (dates vary), but he never copyrighted the confection. Accounts say Hagiwara introduced the treat to visitors to the Tea Garden in 1914.

The Buddhist pagoda in the Japanese Tea Garden, San Francisco, Golden Gate Park.

The curious cookie wasn?EUR??,,????'???t mass producing until Edward Louie of San Francisco opened the Lotus Fortune Cookie Company in 1964. In the 1970s, Louie invented a machine that inserted the fortunes and folded the cookies. China, reportedly, didn?EUR??,,????'???t get a fortune cookie factory until 1993, advertised as ?EUR??,,????'??Genuine American Fortune Cookies,?EUR??,,????'?? but were not a hit.