Why do Japanese who grew up in Hawaii like their foods “sweeter” than the Japanese from Japan?
Much of our taste preference for slightly sweet foods stems from the fact that most of the early Japanese Immigrants to Hawaii worked on the Sugar Plantations where pay was low and life was tough. Salt and shoyu had to be imported, and came to Hawaii in ships. You had to buy salt and shoyu. But if you lived on the Sugar Plantation, sugar was “free”. All you had to do was to walk down to the sugar mill, and the raw (brown) sugar was piled on the floor in huge mountains inside the warehouses (before being shipped to California for refining into white sugar under the C&H brand (C= California & H= Hawaii). ?You brought your container (usually a metal pot) and scooped up as much sugar as you wanted from that huge pile, and took it home to use in your cooking. So a lot of early cooking on the Plantations was “sato-shoyu” with lots of sugar. The thick sato-shoyu also “preserved” the food, and retarded spoilage, since there were no refrigerators at the time (and no ice boxes, either). So even
