Soy sauce fish
small bottle of soysauce
Shoyu-tai, also known as soy sauce fishes, are small fish-shaped containers for liquid condiments such as soy sauce. They were first produced in Japan in the 1950s, originally in the shape of snappers. Although their use decreased by the 21st century, they continue to be used in bento and sushi containers and airline meals.
Soy sauce fishes have spread in use as Japanese cuisine has grown popular outside of Japan. In 2025, as part of an effort to address plastics pollution, the Australian state of South Australia became the first place in the world to ban their use.
History
Soy sauce fishes were invented in the 1950s by the founder of Osaka Prefecture-based manufacturer Asahi Sogyo, Teruo Watanabe. This type of container is also referred to as shoyu-tai (醤油鯛, shōyu-dai), literally "soy sauce snapper", owing to the shape of the polyethylene containers were originally produced in during the 1950s. Their use decreased by the 21st century, though they continue to be used in bento boxed meals, sushi roll containers, and airline meals.
As Japanese cuisine has grown in popularity in other countries, use of soy sauce fishes has spread alongside it. Soy sauce fishes produced by Little Soya, based in Texas, US, were set to be taken on a NASA space launch to the International Space Station in 2014.
“Soy sauce fish” enters the record as small bottle of soysauce. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what sauce, fish and small can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18337290. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Soy sauce fish” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.