True World Group history

A United States News and World Report survey of “local style setters” in Atlanta in 1981 proclaimed that sushi was “in” (along with racquetball and “peach as a decorating color”). “The Breakfast Club” famously deployed a sushi lunch to symbolize Molly Ringwald’s character’s prim sophistication.

On July 1, 1982, Moon blessed Yashiro and his bride along with more than 2,000 other couples in one of his mass wedding ceremonies, in New York City's Madison Square Garden.

As critics glorified “beguiling” fish served by “skillful sushi masters” — a few words from The New York Times’s four-star review of Hatsuhana in 1983 — the sushi phenomenon clearly depended on a feeling of social distinction, of entering a gastronomic sphere with its own rituals and rules.

Sushi's popularity had flowered enough by 1986 for Moon to gloat that Americans who once thought Japanese were "just like animals, eating raw fish," were now "paying a great deal of money, eating at expensive sushi restaurants." He recommended that his flock open "1,000 restaurants" in America.

But by 1994, when I.O.E.’s president presented Moon with a golden trophy during a celebration of Moon’s ocean providence at a church estate in the Hudson Valley, the direction of what Moon put in motion was increasingly clear.

By 1995, The Kansas City Star would be reporting on the arrival of supermarket sushi.

Takeshi Yashiro helped coordinate the new subsidiaries’ formal name changes in 1999, while serving as president of True World Foods.

In June 2001, True World Foods' Kodiak, Alaska, fish processing company pleaded guilty to a federal felony for accepting a load of pollock that exceeded the boat's 300,000-pound trip limit.

But in a supplicating yet self-righteous report to his parents in 2008, Preston denounced what he saw as the religion’s misguided copying of “the failing methods and structures of the mainline Christian churches,” arguing that it needed to become more of a global interfaith movement.