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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Archival References
The Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), June 24, 1908 — “Palatial Liner Tenyo Maru, A Triumph of Beauty and Speed.”
The San Francisco Call, August 8, 1908 — “Toyo Kisen Kaisha’s New Liner Tenyo Maru.”
The Japan Times (Tokyo, English Edition), September 1908 — “New Ocean Liner Expresses Japan’s Modern Craftsmanship.”
Toyo Kisen Kaisha Promotional Brochure, Fleet Descriptions, 1908–1911, on the Chiyo Maru and Shinyo Maru, Mitsubishi Dockyard Archives.
Every object holds a history.
Discover more heirloom stories and restored pieces at Acanthus Home.
