I didn’t really know what the snack I bought at Nijiya Market on Sawtelle Boulevard was going to taste like.
It was called “pudding mochi,” but I wasn’t really sure what that meant. “Mochi,” a sweet, chewy Japanese rice cake, is a dessert I had tried before and enjoyed, but “pudding mochi,” a yellow-colored squishy creation with a dark red center, looked different enough from the mochi I had previously tried that it remained a mystery. I poked it. It shook like Jell-O. Not a terrible sign. I like Jell-O.
With one glorious bite, however, the mystery was solved: “pudding mochi” tasted like a chewy, gooey custard pie, filled with a rich, almost chocolate-y filling. Can you say “new favorite Japanese snack?”
For me, Sawtelle mostly means an opportunity to find new food (the plague of the foodie, I’m afraid), but for everyone else, Sawtelle Boulevard is not just a place to eat. It’s also full of boutique clothing shops, karaoke bars, nurseries, and ““ well ““ more places to eat like sushi bars, ramen houses, and boba tea shops. Known as West Los Angeles’s “Little Osaka,” Sawtelle Boulevard has been considered a hub of Japanese American cultural life since the 1950s, even though it only stretches a few blocks long between Santa Monica and Pico boulevards.
Although Sawtelle’s reputation has not entirely changed over the last 50 years, older shop owners along the strip recognize that a youth revitalization of the strip has occurred. In fact, parts of Sawtelle look like hipster heaven with stores like Giant Robot and Black Market selling designer jeans, purses and vintage tees. Not to mention, of course, the stores’ racks of books detailing how to create beautiful typeset stationery and anime-style comic books.
Do not expect traditional tea ceremony houses or stores stocked with precious china.
The beauty of Sawtelle, however, is that some of old-fashioned charm remains. Take Satsuma Imports, a shop that sells everything from kimonos to ceramic chopsticks to cookbooks to toys, for example. When I walked in, only a small, gray-haired Japanese man sat by the door, slumped over and snoring. I tiptoed past him and tried to rustle through the store’s goods quietly so I wouldn’t awaken him. Inside, it smelled like soft sandalwood and mothballs. With my head poked into a rack of kimonos, Sleeping Man finally asserted a: “Can I help you find something?”
I jumped. Somehow, I felt like I was intruding on a sacred Zen store space. After all, the walls’ light wood paneling, creaky floors, and proliferation of bamboo plants made it certainly seem like a completely separate world from the rest of the urban strip.
“Oh, uh, well …” Now I felt like I had to ask for something or, better, buy something. “I was hoping to find a … good luck charm?” I told a long story about how my sister was swamped with exams and could use a ““ I don’t know ““ good luck something? He nodded and pointed me over to a rack of small ceramic cats and carps. Yes, carps. In Japanese culture, carps and koi are notorious symbols of good luck.
Hence, one $5 carp purchase later, we actually got to talk about Sawtelle and I discovered that his father owned the shop in 1952 and, when his father retired, he took over the business.
“Do you have any kids who will take over once you’ve retired?” I asked.
He shook his head, but smiled.
“Oh, I have two girls, but they won’t take over the business. They’re too ambitious.” He laughed again. “One of them is a nurse ““ she went to UCLA! ““ and the other is an aerospace engineer,” he pointed proudly over to a rack of photographs near the windowsill and showed me framed pictures of beautiful girls in school uniforms, then graduation robes, then wedding gowns. He pointed to a photo at the end of the row with a little girl seated clutching a teddy bear.
“That’s my granddaughter. She’s sleeping in the back of the store. Maybe she’ll be the one to take over the business,” he said.
The family business is, of course, a rarity even for Sawtelle Boulevard, but upon leaving the store, I felt heartened all the same by the fact that store owners can still fall asleep waiting for customers to lazily traipse through and explore a small piece of another culture.
Visiting Sawtelle may just be a novelty experience for me to buy a pack of wasabi-coated peas and find dessert, but for many, living on Sawtelle is a way of life. Browsing through Nijiya Market, Japanese couples fight over what brand of soap to buy and children cajole their mothers to buy them packs of Pocky.
Los Angeles may be a changing city, but places like Sawtelle may, in some ways, never change.
If you like Jell-O more than mochi, e-mail Cohn at jcohn@media.ucla.edu.