Menus at Sea: Passage on the Tenyo Maru, 1918
An heirloom story of passage, preservation, and the quiet luxury of memory.
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.
A contemporary report published in 1915 described Japan’s new turbine vessels, Tenyo Maru among them, as “ingenious mechanical contrivances” combining electrical and steam propulsion. Power moved through the ship at nearly 350 revolutions per minute, allowing smooth maneuvering and exceptional efficiency at sea. Modernity, in this instance, was not theoretical. It was operational.
Accounts praised her teak-paneled salons, velvet-upholstered lounges, and luminous dining rooms. Polished brass and curved balustrades framed interiors that belonged as much to a grand hotel as to the sea. Even a decade after launch, the ship retained the optimism of early modern travel, confidence expressed through proportion, surface, and order.
By September 1918, the Tenyo Maru was undertaking Voyage No. 50 Homeward, traveling from Hong Kong through Nagasaki, Kobe, Shimizu, Yokohama, and Honolulu, bound for San Francisco. Printed passenger lists issued by Toyo Kisen Kaisha recorded saloon and second-class travelers returning to the United States after the Great War.
Printed in Yokohama, the souvenir list carried a traditional woodblock on its cover, a bridge crossing calm water beneath a fading sky. The saloon register reads as a ledger of a changing world, merchants, missionaries, engineers, diplomats, temporary companions bound by shared dinners and shared horizons. These lists were bureaucratic in purpose yet quietly poetic, documenting a society afloat for seventeen days.
The arrival manifest dated October 7, 1918, confirms the voyage’s end. Under Commander K. Hashimoto, passengers were processed into the quiet formality of homecoming, the ocean translated into ink.
The Tenyo Maru carried more than people. She functioned as a floating artery of exchange between continents. On her maiden voyage in 1908, The San Francisco Examiner reported a shipment of raw silk valued at $1,450,300, among the largest ever brought to port. Manifests listed chests of tea, crates of pineapples, rolls of matting, and packages of curios. Years later, The San Francisco Bulletin described another sailing with millions in treasure consigned to Oriental banks, alongside tobacco, canned goods, and California fruit bound for Yokohama and Kobe.
Each manifest mirrored its moment. Silk, citrus, and steel crossed the Pacific as evidence of progress, their movement as deliberate as the service of dinner in the ship’s salon. To sail aboard the Tenyo Maru was to witness trade and taste choreographed together.
Across seventeen days at sea, the ship maintained an elegance that bordered on ritual. Dinner menus were printed daily aboard and delivered to each cabin, recording a culinary diplomacy where East met West on porcelain. Oyster Cocktail and Consommé Victoria appeared beside Curry and Rice, Chinese Preserves, and Pineapple Ice Cream with Wafers. The voyage was measured in small ceremonies, the rhythm of courses, the hush of linen, the steady movement of waiters as the ship crossed the Pacific night.
Each menu bears restrained typography and thick paper with a subtle deckle edge. Together they form a timeline of civility, September 24 through October 6, 1918, among the final days of the crossing. In these preserved cards, the voyage survives not as motion but as atmosphere, salt in the air, polished brass catching lamplight, conversation moving between languages.
Each menu was enclosed within a printed cover produced in Yokohama before departure, adorned with ukiyo-e imagery of bridges, rivers, and figures in transit. Inside, the daily bill of fare was printed at sea in English. Western dining ritual unfolded within Japanese visual poetry, not as ornament but as structure. These were not souvenirs but designed artifacts, pairing Japanese graphic tradition with the cadence of European service. The result was cultural exchange rendered material.
Gallery: Menus printed aboard the S.S. Tenyo Maru during Voyage No. 50, September–October 1918.
Beyond engineering, the Tenyo Maru functioned as a microcosm of early twentieth-century cosmopolitan life. Diplomats dined beside engineers. Japanese officers observed a formality rooted in Meiji refinement. Knives and chopsticks rested side by side. Porcelain carried both Western garlands and Japanese crests. Each evening’s service followed a choreography of respect, linen folded precisely, silverware polished until it caught the last lantern light, menus printed freshly but bound within art prepared before departure. Elegance here was global, aspirational, and aware of its own performance.
The menus, passenger lists, and accompanying papers were preserved by a saloon passenger aboard the Tenyo Maru in 1918 and retained within one family archive for more than a century.
Gallery: Menu covers printed in Yokohama for the S.S. Tenyo Maru, 1918.
The menus, passenger lists, and accompanying papers were preserved by a saloon passenger aboard the Tenyo Maru in 1918 and retained within one family archive for more than a century.
At Acanthus Home, restoration follows the same principle. Whether furniture, paper, or photograph, each object is approached as an heirloom of presence. Restoration is not reinvention but renewal, allowing craftsmanship to breathe again.
The Tenyo Maru was dismantled long ago, her turbine silent. Yet in these papers, she still sails, not in steel or steam, but in memory, ink, and intention.
Archival References
Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), June 24, 1908
The San Francisco Examiner, June 30, 1908
The Daily Commercial News (Sydney), March 30, 1915
The San Francisco Bulletin, December 4, 1920
Toyo Kisen Kaisha Promotional Brochures, Mitsubishi Dockyard Archives
