Prior to this week, I’d been to Little Tokyo once: on a date at a vegan sushi restaurant with a man who had no female friends. I decided to remedy this disservice (to myself, to Little Tokyo, to women everywhere) and make a return visit.
The intended purpose was to go get fresh mochi—gooey flavored rice balls. Unfortunately, my love of the stuff was thanks to that international man of mystery, Trader Joe, who colonizes ethnic grocery stores, raids them of their treasures, and repackages them for white people (like myself!). My sister suggested I seek out the real thing, and what do you know, there is a 120-year-old mochi shop, Fugetso-Do, ten minutes from my house.
Little Tokyo sits on the Eastern edge of Downtown Los Angeles, and I decided I’d park a few blocks from Fugetso-Do and hopefully find some little shops to poke around in along the way. The bright side? There were plenty. The downside? I had my enormous babytoddler in tow, which meant equal measure of carrying and corralling her wherever we went. I steered into an outdoor mall, hoping it was enclosed enough to not make us both completely insane.
We went into a beauty supply store, where I wished I had the leisure to hold my phone and google “best Japanese face masks.” Unfortunately, my hands were occupied replacing the things my daughter pulled off the shelves (hair dyes, ceramic mugs, condom boxes). We tired of this after three minutes and headed to a bookstore.
The thing about Japanese bookstores is I want to buy every single thing inside. Tiny monkey notecards! Flowered washi tape! Tiny bonsai kits! Beautiful books I’m under no obligation to read because I do not know the language! Luckily, I was too busy following my daughter around like a harried personal assistant to do too much damage, and we emerged almost empty-handed (stationary, flamingo cross stitch kit, aforementioned washi tape, two children’s books).
It was snack time, so we headed a flight down to the grocery store, which overflowed with endless, undiscovered delights. But the clock was ticking via the squirming toddlerbaby so I grabbed some biscuits and made a beeline for the register.
They were delicious—crisp, flavorless, light—and we ate them at a table in the courtyard, entertained by passing dogs and pop music piping through outdoor speakers. It was time to head to Fugetsu-Do.
It’s a freestanding shop front that doesn’t seem to have changed much since its inception—wood shelves line the walls and the clerk stands behind a glass counter filled with the day’s confections. The only nods to modernity were a wire rack holding bags of chips and the Apple Pay machine I took a “one of everything approach.”
Our task complete, we marched triumphantly home through the main alleyway of Little Tokyo, lined with ramen shops and yogurt stands housed in a modern mall meant to look old via decorative pagodas. We got back to our car with plenty of time to spare and I unloaded the baby from my aching shoulders, giving her a leftover biscuit to chomp as I settled her into her car seat.
That night we ate the mochi, sampling each flavor, and I thought, despite its failings, its nice to live somewhere you can travel halfway around the world 10 minutes from your house.
Yum!!!
When Carol’s daughter was two she adored sushi. When she had her birthday that’s what she wanted but could not understand why her guests (other two year olds) might not feel the same.