By KAYOKO GEJI/ Correspondent
August 19, 2025 at 07:00 JST
Four years after swapping her pompoms for a chef’s knife, Masako Morishita earned one of the most prestigious accolades in American dining: a James Beard Foundation Award.
In 2024 she was honored in the Emerging Chef category, winning what amounts to an Academy Award of cooking.
Born and raised in Kobe, Morishita’s journey was anything but conventional.
As a teenager studying abroad in the United States, she discovered cheerleading for the first time. Enthralled by the energy and athleticism it requires, she returned to Japan determined to master the sport.
She spent more than a decade in grueling training. After multiple auditions, Morishita achieved her dream when in 2013 she earned a spot on the cheerleading squad for Washington’s NFL team–now known as the Commanders.
By her fifth season she had made history as the team’s first overseas-born captain.
When she eventually hung up her uniform, Morishita poured that same relentless energy into a new passion: food.
She brought Japanese comfort cuisine to Washington, D.C., by hosting pop-ups in vacant storefronts and serving dishes like fragrant curry and pork shabu-shabu, a popular hot pot featuring paper-thin slices of premium pork.
As her reputation grew, a local wine bar invited her to put her talents on a larger stage.
About three years ago Morishita took a job at a Japanese restaurant, but she found the work creatively stifling. The kitchen operated on a rigid menu and relied on frozen "shumai" dumplings.
She persuaded the owner to let her introduce down-home Japanese dishes with an imaginative twist.
Diners loved them. Morishita’s breakout creation, miso butter clams, drew inspiration from a childhood memory of her father topping a bowl of rice with miso soup and a small pat of butter, letting the flavors melt together in comforting simplicity.
Remarkably, Morishita never went to culinary school. Her secret weapon, she says, is her finely honed palate that developed when she grew up in Kobe. Her family ran a sake shop with a lively standing bar.
Morishita’s unusual journey, blending elite athletics, entrepreneurial grit and culinary creativity, has put her in the U.S. media. The State Department tasked her with preparing a luncheon during an official visit by former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to Washington.
Moreover, Morishita is still a rarity among American restaurateurs: female and an immigrant in a field dominated by men.
She sees that uniqueness as a strength, using her visibility to challenge stereotypes about Japanese cuisine and to champion what she calls “cultural diplomacy through food.”
From the grassroots up, she is carving out her own path, one inventive dish at a time.
A peek through the music industry’s curtain at the producers who harnessed social media to help their idols go global.
A series based on diplomatic documents declassified by Japan’s Foreign Ministry
Here is a collection of first-hand accounts by “hibakusha” atomic bomb survivors.
Cooking experts, chefs and others involved in the field of food introduce their special recipes intertwined with their paths in life.
A series about Japanese-Americans and their memories of World War II
Masako Morishita (Provided by Masako Morishita)
