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January 17, 2000
SHOPPING JAPANESE-STYLE
I love to shop. Whether it's a crowded suburban mall, a downtown district such as Fifth Avenue in New York City or a distant Web site where I simply click to purchase anything that tickles my fancy, I enjoy spending money for... stuff. Lots of stuff. Clothes, gifts, electronics, books, CDs, videos and food -- much of it these days comes delivered to my office.
| I was plenty impressed by Little Tokyo, and felt quite at home amongst so many people who look like me with the sound of Japanese conversations floating in and out of earshot. |
Even with the Internet, though, there's some stuff I like to shop for that's hard to find: Japanese things.
The Denver area is blessed with a great Japanese supermarket, Pacific Mercantile, which sells a wide variety of produce and groceries and also features a back section of gift items, pottery and lacquerware and even some clothes. Also in Sakura Square, where Pacific Mercantile is located, I regularly shop at Kobun-sha, a Japanese bookstore with some arts and crafts and other gift items. But I spent some time in Los Angeles his week, and visited both Little Tokyo and the predominantly Asian suburb of Gardena, and my eyes were opened to the joy and glory of shopping Japanese-style in a place with a very large Japanese American population.
Like Sakura Square, Little Tokyo is the heart of Los Angeles' Japanese community. It features a thriving Japanese American Cultural Community Center and Little Tokyo Service Center offering services from cultural classes and a gallery at the JACCC to low-income housing and a host of community health and social services. Little Tokyo is also home to the Japanese American National Museum, a wonderful resource for JAs everywhere; a powerful permanent exhibit covers the history of Japanese immigration to the U.S. and the tragedy of internment. And, Little Tokyo covers a number of blocks with shops and restaurants that made me feel as if I were wandering around an Americanized district of Tokyo, because the shop employees as well as the customers are more likely to be speaking Japanese rather than English.
In fact, some of the stores clearly aim to serve Japanese customers, not Japanese Americans. A number of video stores and a huge and impressive bookstore, Kinokuniya, primarily sell Japanese titles and since I can't read or write Japanese, I was an outsider and as lost as any curious American tourist. Kinokuniya dedicates one section of the store to English titles, though, and the videos it sells are in Japanese but subtitled in English. I bought a Japanese children's book and a couple of Japanese alphabet learning puzzles for my nieces from Kinokuniya's extensive children's section.
Some stores specialize in traditional Japanese goods but serve both Japanese and Japanese Americans. One example is Fugetsu-do, a family-owned pastry shop which is renowned for its homemade omochi and manju snacks -- various rice cakes and pastries filled with sweet bean paste. Fugetsu-do, one of the oldest continuously-running operations in Little Tokyo, has been making its confections since 1903, and legend has it that the tiny store is where the fortune cookie was invented. The shop's original sign is part of the JANM's permanent exhibit. Another crowded shop, Bun-ka Do, stocks a variety of gifts including some very fine ceramics and lacquerware... because I didn't want to have to pack fragile items for my flight back to Colorado, I settled for easy-to-pack chopsticks as a souvenir.
Little Tokyo's plazas and alleyways also include fancy stores including ones you might see in Japan, as well as brand name shops such as Sisheido, the cosmetics company, and a specialty clothier for "men under 5'9" -- perfect for vertically challenged guys like me.
I was plenty impressed by Little Tokyo, and felt quite at home amongst so many people who look like me with the sound of Japanese converstaions floating in and out of earshot. But even more impressive was Marukai, a gigantic warehouse-style store in the LA suburb of Gardena about 20 minutes southwest of Little Tokyo.
I didn't get to explore the area much, but Gardena appears to be a city where many Japanese and JAs have settled, but without a concentrated downtown area such as Little Tokyo to serve as a community focus. But a store like Marukai can feel like a bustling community center all on its own.
Marukai is set up like American chain stores such as Costco, Sam's Club or Pace Warehouse -- customers pay an annual fee to enjoy the bulk buying power of Marukai's crowded shelves and surprisingly low prices.
I wandered the aisles in awe and ogled items from appliances including a combination rice cake-and-bread maker ("with pounding control!") to another fine selection of ceramics and lacquerware, and a huge variety of authentic produce groceries that must include anything available in Japan (and a display of pastries from Fugetsu-do), and even furniture and antiques upstairs.
Shopping at Marukai was a thrill and made me feel more connected to my Japanese side than even dining at a great Japanese restaurant or walking the streets of Little Tokyo. I guess that's a reflection of my love of shopping -- it makes me happy to see shelf after shelf and aisle after aisle of cool stuff to spend my money on!
Visiting Little Tokyo and shopping at Marukai has made me appreciate the smaller-scale shops I'll spend more time at Pacific Mercantile and Kobun-sha and really get to know the products they sell. I want to support them and make sure they thrive -- with my shopping habits, I can probably single-handedly help Denver's Japanese shops become as huge as Marukai.
NOTE: Here are Web site address you can check for more information: The JA*Net Web site features information and a calendar of events for Little Tokyo at http://www.janet.org; the Japanese American National Museum is at http://www.lausd.k12.ca.us.janm