I didn't see anything that marked this historical culinary invention until we went to the gift shop. Mounted to the top of a display case are two small black iron presses with long, thin handles.

They're called kata, and are used to make senbei or Japanese crackers. Inside they're engraved with an H and an M — inverted they would appear on the cookies as MH for Makoto Hagiwara.

"If you came to the garden while he was managing it, everything had his name on it. Napkins would say M. Hagiwara. There would be pots in the garden with M. Hagiwara ... tea pots, tea cups. His name was everywhere, and the fortune cookie is one of those things that helped to spread his popularity," Pitsenbarger says.

And make the cookies popular, too. But since each fortune cookie was being made by hand, demand became too much for the Hagiwara family. Makoto asked a local confectionary shop, Benkyodo, to take over making the cookies.

Suyeichi Okamura opened Benkyodo in 1906 and after a few moves, it's located today at Sutter and Buchanan in San Francisco's Japantown. His grandson, Gary T. Ono, is the family's historian and has written articles about his family's connection to the fortune cookie.

I went to visit Ono in Los Angeles, in his apartment in Little Tokyo. A giant foam fortune cookie hangs in the living room, and the fortune poking out of it reads: “Made In Japan.”

Ono drags out a heavy suitcase from a closet and pulls out several kata wrapped in newspaper. They sport the familiar initials: MH.

"My grandfather was a service person to Makoto Hagiwara," Ono says. "And advised Hagiwara in converting the taste (of the fortune cookie) to something more palatable to American tastes. So they came up with a vanilla extract flavor that we know today."

He says Benkyodo helped develop a machine to mass produce the cookies for the garden, sometime around 1911.

But Ono isn’t the only one to make family claims to the origins of the fortune cookie: A few Chinese companies have also claimed the invention, as has another Japanese sweet-maker in Los Angeles called Fugetsu-Do.

Brian Kito owns Fugetsu-Do, just down the street from Gary Ono in Los Angeles. Brian’s grandfather opened Fugetsu-Do in 1903, three years before Benkyodo opened in San Francisco. And Gary says Brian heard similar stories about his grandfather creating the fortune cookie.

"We were never confrontational about it or argumentative. We didn't know precisely that our grandparents did this or did that," Ono says. "[Brian] even said, 'Well, if it wasn't my grandfather, I hope it's your grandfather.'"

Author Jennifer 8. Lee says you can probably trace the history of fortune cookies in America back to L.A. and San Francisco. But as a concept, they go back to Japan.

"And in Japan they're called tsujiura senbei or bell crackers," says Lee, who traced the history of the American fortune cookie in her book, “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures In the World of Chinese Food.”

Lee writes about Yasuko Nakamachi, a Japanese researcher whom she met through Gary Ono. Nakamachi was investigating the connection between the fortune cookies she saw in New York with a cracker made in Kyoto. She unearthed a copy of a woodblock print from 1878 of a Japanese man grilling fortune cookies.

"Around the shrine in downtown Kyoto, there are actually a bunch of families that still make 'fortune cookies' in the Japanese tradition," says Lee.

"But they're actually bigger and browner. They're made with miso paste and sesame, so much nuttier than the American versions, which tend to be yellow and buttery, reflecting the American palate," she adds.

Those cookies also have fortunes, but not inside. Instead they’re pinched in the fold. They look almost exactly the same.

But how did this American adaptation of a Japanese cracker become so associated with Chinese restaurants?

"When the Japanese first came to the U.S., a lot of them actually ran Chinese restaurants, because back in the 1910s and 1920s Americans were not eating sushi," says Lee. "You had Japanese opening Chinese restaurants because that was familiar, with chop suey and chow mein and egg fu yung."