User talk:Suomi Finland 2010/sandbox

PURPOSE: An administrator said I was not spending enough time on article and cited that only 30% of edits were on articles. However, a sandbox counts as non-article work. This is not fair.

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Taichiro Morinaga (1865-1937) was a Japanese philanthropist and was began candy manufacture in Japan.

Early life

Morinaga (1865-1937) was born on Japan's southern island of Kyushu. He had no formal education. His father died when he was 7. Later he became potter's apprentice and went to Tokyo in his teens to sell pottery. He became a branch manager for a wholesaler in nearby Yokohama but his branch lost money after extending too much credit to customers because of leniency. Since employees were personally responsible for such losses, Morinaga searched for a way to repay his boss.

With no local prospects found to repay the loss, Morinaga, at age 23, emigrated to the United States where he opened a hardware store in San Francisco. However, the venture was unsuccessful due to local boycotting due to his race. During the visit, he converted to Christianity.

Candy pioneer in Japan

A nameless American gave him a piece of candy which was a new appetizing treat for Morinaga. Having led an impoverished life in Japan, Morinaga had never tasted such a delicious treat. At the time, candy in Japan was expensive and consisted of either boiled beans or bee honey, which was based on sweets originally brought by Chinese and Portuguese traders centuries earlier or even more expensive candy imported from Europe. Morinaga visited the United States for a second visit This second visit to study candy manufacture lasted ten years.

In 1899, he left the United States and initially sold candy from a push cart. Later than year, he opened a candy shop in Tokyo (Minato City), the Morinaga Western Confectionery Shop (later Morinago Confectionary), with with Hanzaburo Matsuzaki, a business partner and fellow Christian.

Morinaga later founded Morinaga & Com, the first modern candy company in Japan and the first to produce chocolates in the country when it started in 1918, one year after opening a company dairy. Morinaga is considered one of Japan's greatest industrialist which was not a zaibatsu. Early difficulties of the company included that Japan had little commercial milk production resulting in his company opening a dairy. Another difficulty was that Japan had little arable land for crops and no locally produced corn or sugar cane to make corn syrup. The company is currently one of Japan's biggest candy makers, with 2008 sales of $1.5 billion and over 5,000 employees. The company also operates restaurants, coffee shops, cafeterias and golf courses in Japan. The affiliated company, Morinaga Milk Industry, sells powdered milk and other dairy products worldwide, as well as health food snacks. In 2008, Morinaga America, Inc. was opened in the United States.

One of his early products were marshmallows, which he called angel food because of their color and association with Christianity, his own religion. He developed a type of caramel, called Hi-Chew, became one of his flagship products and resistant to turning into goo in hot Japanese weather, unlike carmel formulations that he had seen in the United States. His formulation was less buttery and appealled better to the Japanese taste.

Legacy

After the Great Kanto Earthquake, Morinage led the rescue effort and also distributed sweets to displaced persons.

In 1944, Morinaga's company, with the Army Medical School of Japan, was the first to produce penicillin, an antibiotic drug, in Japan.