Meidi-ya was founded in Yokohama in 1885 as a ship chandler and grew into Japan's premier importer of luxury foods, still trading from a landmark 1933 building in Tokyo's Kyobashi. Its Oishii Kanzume tins, smoked salmon belly and smoked Hiroshima oysters among them, are Meidi-ya's own label, packed to its order rather than in its own plant. The house sells the polish of a long-established grocer more than the work of a cannery.
