Menus at Sea: Passage on the Tenyo Maru, 1918
An heirloom story of passage, preservation, and the quiet luxury of memory.
A Vessel of Modernity
Launched from Mitsubishi’s Nagasaki shipyards in 1908, the S.S. Tenyo Maru was Japan’s first turbine-driven steamship, a triumph of early twentieth-century engineering and design. Her debut was heralded in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser of Honolulu as a “palatial liner,” built to bridge East and West with unprecedented speed and refinement.
In a contemporary report from 1915, the Daily Commercial News described Japan’s new turbine vessels—Tenyo Maru among them—as “ingenious mechanical contrivances” that combined electrical and steam propulsion, allowing smooth maneuvering and exceptional efficiency at sea. The article explained that the new system carried “the full speed of about 350 revolutions per minute” through electrical drive, promising both power and economy. This was modernity rendered mechanical: the convergence of Japanese innovation and Western industrial ambition, expressed through maritime grace.
Contemporary accounts praised her teak-paneled salons, velvet-upholstered lounges, and luminous dining rooms, describing the Tenyo Maru as a ship where comfort and modernity converged. Ten years later, her interiors still reflected that optimism: polished brass, curved balustrades, and an order of service that belonged as much to a grand hotel as to the sea.
A Voyage in Lists and Letters
By September 1918, the Tenyo Maru was undertaking Voyage No. 50 Homeward, a journey from Hong Kong through Nagasaki, Kobe, Shimidzu, Yokohama, and Honolulu, bound for San Francisco.
Passenger List Souvenir, Toyo Kisen Kaisha, September 1918
Printed in Yokohama, with a traditional Japanese woodblock on its cover—a bridge crossing calm water beneath a sunset sky, a symbol of passage between cultures.
Among her passengers, the saloon list reads like a cosmopolitan ledger of a changing world: merchants, missionaries, engineers, and diplomats returning home after the Great War.
The printed passenger list, issued by Toyo Kisen Kaisha in Yokohama, featured a traditional woodblock on its cover—a bridge crossing calm water beneath a sunset sky, a symbol of passage between cultures. These lists, composed in fine serif type, are at once bureaucratic and poetic. They recorded a temporary society afloat, those who dined under the same chandeliers, walked the same teak decks, and gazed at the same dissolving horizon.
The return manifest, dated October 7, 1918, confirms the voyage’s end, the Tenyo Maru arriving in San Francisco under Commander K. Hashimoto, her passengers processed one by one into the quiet formality of homecoming.
List of United States Citizens, Port of San Francisco, October 7, 1918—A record of return, the ocean translated into ink.
Cargoes of Civilization
The Tenyo Maru was more than a passenger liner; she was a floating artery of exchange between continents. Her crossings carried not only travelers but also the tangible evidence of global commerce. On her maiden voyage in June 1908, The San Francisco Examiner reported a shipment of raw silk worth $1,450,300—one of the largest ever to reach the port. The manifest listed 33,447 chests of tea, 1,000 crates of pineapples, 4,811 rolls of matting, and 1,925 packages of curios.
Years later, the San Francisco Bulletin described another departure with similar reverence: “Tenyo Maru Sails with Big Cargo,” the headline read, noting $10,600,000 in treasure consigned to Oriental banks, alongside 240 tons of canned goods, 190 tons of cigarettes and tobacco, and 90 tons of California fruit bound for Yokohama and Kobe.
Each manifest was a mirror of its time, a record of civilization in motion. To sail aboard her was to witness the choreography of trade and taste, where the exchange of goods reflected the exchange of cultures. Silk, citrus, and steel crossed the Pacific as symbols of progress, their movement as deliberate as the service of dinner in the ship’s salon.
“A shipment of raw silk worth $1,450,300 … one of the largest brought to port from the Far East for several years.”
— The San Francisco Examiner, 1908
Menus as Memory
Across seventeen days at sea, the Tenyo Maru maintained an elegance that bordered on ritual. Printed daily aboard the ship and delivered to each cabin, the dinner menus chronicled the voyage’s culinary diplomacy—a choreography of refinement where East met West on porcelain. Oyster Cocktail and Consommé Victoria shared the table with Curry and Rice, Chinese Preserves, and Pineapple Ice Cream with Wafers. It was a journey measured in small ceremonies: the rhythm of courses, the hush of linen, the silhouette of waiters moving as the ship swayed gently through the Pacific night.
Each menu bears its own quiet artistry, the typography restrained, the paper thick with a subtle deckle edge. Together they form a timeline of civility: September 24 to October 4, 1918, among the final days of a seventeen-day crossing that carried passengers home to San Francisco on October 7, 1918. In these preserved cards, the voyage survives not as motion but as atmosphere—the faint salt of the air, the scent of polished brass, the echo of conversation in three languages.
Gallery: Menus Printed Aboard, 1918
The Dialogue of Cultures
Each menu was enclosed within a printed cover, produced in Yokohama before departure and adorned with Japanese woodblock imagery—ukiyo-e scenes of bridges, rivers, and women with parasols beneath falling snow. Inside, the daily bill of fare was printed at sea in English, a ritual of Western dining framed within the poetry of Eastern art.
These were not simple menus but small works of design, part travel keepsake and part cultural dialogue. The pairing of Japanese visual tradition with the ceremonial rhythm of Western dining captured the spirit of the Tenyo Maru itself, a vessel built to connect worlds, carrying beauty across both distance and language.
Gallery: Menu Covers Printed in Yokohama, 1918
A Floating Salon of Cultures
Beyond its engineering marvel, the Tenyo Maru was a microcosm of early twentieth-century cosmopolitan life. In the dining saloon, diplomats conversed beside American engineers, while Japanese officers observed a formality rooted in Meiji refinement. The table became a stage for etiquette as diplomacy—knives and chopsticks placed side by side, porcelain patterned in both Western garlands and Japanese crests. Here, culture was neither exported nor imported but exchanged, moment by moment, in the cadence of conversation and the ritual of dining.
Each evening’s service mirrored a choreography of respect. Linen folded with precision, silverware polished until it caught the last of the lantern light, menus printed freshly in English but bound within Japanese art. It was a voyage that distilled the early modern idea of elegance—global, aspirational, and deeply aware of its own performance.
Inheritance in Ink and Linen
A century later, these artifacts—menus, passenger lists, woodblock prints, and clippings browned by time—remain as the physical memory of that passage. They were gathered and quietly preserved by a traveler whose care allowed them to survive, passed down through generations as a record of grace and return. They carry not only one traveler’s journey from a distant shore but also a larger truth that defines Acanthus Home: that beauty endures through preservation, that craftsmanship is a language of continuity, and that every object, when saved, becomes a vessel of memory.
While our atelier is known for restoring heirloom furniture, our devotion extends to other forms of inheritance as well. We preserve paper, photographs, and written record with the same quiet reverence, each bearing its own invitation to safeguard what connects us.
At Acanthus Home, restoration is not reinvention but renewal. Each object is approached as an heirloom of presence, its craftsmanship preserved, its story quietly refined. Every chair, cabinet, or table we restore is an heirloom in motion, a cultural document rescued from time and reinterpreted for modern life.
The Tenyo Maru was dismantled long ago, her turbine silent. Yet in these papers, she still sails—a floating atelier of elegance, precision, and grace. Her legacy, like every restored heirloom at Acanthus Home, reminds us that history is not past; it is present, polished, and illuminated by care.
Preservation as Passage
Like the menus of the Tenyo Maru, every heirloom endures because someone chose to keep it—to recognize beauty as evidence of care. Restoration, at its heart, is another kind of voyage: one that moves not across oceans, but across time. Each repaired joint or polished surface reaffirms the same principle that guided those shipboard artisans more than a century ago—that elegance, however quiet, deserves preservation.
When we restore a table or chair in the atelier, we are not recreating the past but allowing its craftsmanship to breathe again. In this way, the Tenyo Maru still sails—not in steel or steam, but in memory, ink, and intention.
Archival References
The Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), June 24, 1908 — “Palatial Liner Tenyo Maru, A Triumph of Beauty and Speed.”
The San Francisco Examiner, June 30, 1908 — “$1,450,300 Worth Silk Brought Here.”
The Daily Commercial News (Sydney), March 30, 1915 — “Turbine-Driven Vessels.”
The San Francisco Bulletin, December 4, 1920 — “Tenyo Maru Sails with Big Cargo.”
Toyo Kisen Kaisha Promotional Brochure, Fleet Descriptions, 1908–1911, Mitsubishi Dockyard Archives.
Every object holds a history.
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