The Bonito Flake Museum in Hualien County’s Cising Township (七星) reopened last week and announced the development of a new soy sauce with bonito flakes.
The museum is creating the soy sauce to sustain the traditional local industry and pass it on to future generations, it said.
Once an abandoned bonito flake factory, the original wooden building was at least 50 years old. It was repurposed into a museum in 2003 and was a popular tourist destination in the Cisingtan (七星潭) area before it burned down in July 2017.
The owner of the building, Jota Food Co, decided to rebuild the museum on its original location.
Parts of the new structure are preserved from the former building, burn marks included, museum manager Yu Kuo-feng (余國豐) said.
Cising was a thriving center for bonito flake processing, an industry that began in the Japanese colonial era, Yu said, adding that at its peak, there were more than 20 factories in Cising alone.
However, with factories moving to Southeast Asia in the 1980s, the industry has been declining, and the original museum building was one of the last factories to close down, Yu said.
Yu’s father, former Jota Food president Yu Tsung-po (余宗柏), had bought the factory, saying that someone had to preserve the memory of Hualien’s local industry.
It is unfortunate that much of the antique fishing equipment on display in the museum was destroyed along with the original building, Yu Kuo-feng said.
Some antiques were saved, including a mailbox that has had more than 30,000 letters deposited in it and a first-generation bonito flake shaver, he said.
Yu Kuo-feng also announced the museum’s collaboration with local soy sauce factory Hsin Wei to develop a bonito-flavored soy sauce.
Hsin Wei was founded in 1927 and has been a staple of local taste, said Hsu Heng-hsun (許恒巽), the third-generation owner of the soy sauce factory, which has transitioned to become mostly a tourist facility.
The collaboration aims to not only renew the memory of the local bonito flake and soy sauce industries in the minds of residents and tourists, but also to pass down the memory, Hsu said.
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