The fish-shaped soy sauce bottles that come free with every sushi order are the latest casualties in South Australia’s war on single-use plastics. The state was the first Australian jurisdiction to ban single-use plastic grocery bags and, in September 2025, turned its sights to these ubiquitous plastic fish. A significant environmental hazard, their small size means they’re not easily sorted by recycling facilities, and that’s supposing they even make it into the recycling. The oceans abound with these not-fish, where their shape and small size mean they’re easily mistaken for prey by larger creatures and swallowed, leading to starvation, choking or serious injury.
They’ve been around for a long time. Called “lunch charms” or shoyu-tai by the Japanese, they were invented in 1954 by Teruo Watanabe, the founder of the Osaka-based manufacturer Asahi Sogyo. The fish-shaped soy sauce bottles were a convenient alternative to carrying around glass or ceramic containers. And, since they were cheap and disposable, they began to make their way into landfills, waterways and the sea.
As the popularity of take-away sushi increased across the world, the plastic fish tagged along. Except, it seems, in the USA. As recently as 2025, someone wrote on Instagram, “I keep hearing about these, but the funny thing is we don’t have these in the U.S. I’ve never seen one except on Instagram!” That’s not strictly true. At least some Americans believe the fish-shaped soy sauce bottles were actually invented there. On the website Take3fortheSea they wrote:
Soy sauce only started being packaged in these fish-shaped containers in 2008 when a restaurant in Las Vegas wanted to offer a ‘premium’ soy sauce container with their sushi buffet. The American company Little Soya developed the instantly-recognisable plastic fish-shaped container, and the rest is history.
The real inventors, the Japanese, were not content with just one fish shape. There are many fishy variants, along with a pig-shaped bottle containing sauce for pork. However, the original fish has become a cultural icon, appearing on a wide range of merchandise. There are fish-shaped soy sauce bottle pens and even a giant version containing hand cream. It may take a long time for the South Australian ban, the first in the world, to have an impact beyond Australian borders.