Sawtelle Boulevard

"It’s not quite that simple," explains the always-illuminating Nishijima. "The flavorings were often from the Southern regions of the early immigrants. A Hawaiian influence factored in too, as the Pacific Islands sugar-cane fields were the first stop for many of them. But today you’re seeing more Tokyo flavors."

The food at O-Sho, opened in 1966 and the oldest restaurant on Sawtelle, distills these many influences the way a plate of nachos distills the elements of Mexican food. "O-Sho’s food was designed for American diners," says Bob Kubo, the son of O-Sho’s founder. His father, who came to the San Joaquin Valley as a farm laborer, spent a few years working in a Little Tokyo restaurant. He patterned O-Sho’s tempura- and teriyaki-dominated menu after the restaurant’s Americanized foods, garnishing his plates with iceberg-lettuce salads and orange slices.

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Asahi Ramen

2027 Sawtelle Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90025

Category: Restaurant > Asian

Region: West L.A.

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More About

• Asahi Ramen
• Sachiko Ota
• Gardena
• Eating Out
• Japanese Food and Cooking

"This was not how we ate in Japan," O-Sho’s present owner, 69-year-old Toshiko Kubo tells me over tea and cookies at the restaurant. "We ate only smaller fish, no tuna or yellowtail. It was mostly vegetables and rice, rarely chicken or meat." And what does she cook for her family now? "She does a delicious spaghetti and meat sauce," says her granddaughter, Kristin Kubo, who’s translating.

Formal restaurants on Sawtelle were scarce before 1955, the year Futuba opened. Few Sawtelle Japanese spent their money eating out. Most of the existing Japanese-owned restaurants were coffee shops and luncheonettes serving turkey dinner with pie and coffee, and bacon with eggs. Many Sawtelle Nisei developed a taste for American food in school cafeterias. Despite the Depression and overt discrimination in the job market, Sawtelle thrived, although, according to Sakai, it was considered "Baja Bel Air — the other side of the tracks."

That world came to a standstill on December 7, 1941. That the day would "live in infamy" was doubly true for West Coast people of Japanese heritage, two-thirds of whom were American-born citizens. Ota, Sakai, Morikawa and the Yamaguchis remember in salient detail the weeks that followed Pearl Harbor. Their lives came to a grinding halt with the signing of Executive Order 9066, which ordered them to internment camps. With little time to settle affairs, and only two small suitcases allowed for the journey, many families were victimized by non-Japanese. "My father sold his new tractor and our refrigerator at a huge loss," Morikawa recounts.

And what became of Japanese food while the internees were lining up for their meals in the camps’ Army-style mess halls? "A guy in Manzanar made tofu," Sakai remembers. The Yamaguchi brothers from the variety store on the corner of Mississippi and Sawtelle, who were 8 and 10 years old at the time, describe how their mother took the mess-hall food to the family’s tiny tar-paper-covered barracks and warmed it on a potbelly stove. "She would do things to it," Jack Yamaguchi says. Some enterprising internees made tsukemono pickles from watermelon rind. A few coaxed vegetables from the harsh badlands. Some made bootleg sake.

It would be at least a decade before returning Sawtelle families, who’d lost everything, could participate in America’s rapid postwar growth. Housing was scarce. At first, some stayed in the main hall of the Japanese Lutheran Church and the Sawtelle Institute. Bed sheets or blankets, used as dividers, afforded privacy. "Even those with college degrees were persona non grata in the business world," says Don Sakai. Many worked as day laborers or gardeners.

Slowly, the community re-established itself. Bob Iwamoto opened Safe & Save market, and Betsy Takeuchi ran Granada Market. Mutual Trading, which had stored inventory in a Catholic church in Little Tokyo, was among the markets’ suppliers. "Of course, there were no imports during and immediately after the war," Kanai explains. But as soon as stores opened, they had some supplies.

Restaurants too began to open, and at first, it was non-Japanese who patronized them. This was the era of ’50s places such as Tokyo Dragon, famous for its "Ecstasy Boat Dinner," and teppanyaki steak houses called Shogun. The Kubo family opened another restaurant nearby on Pico in 1969. It had a sushi bar, one of the first ever in the neighborhood.

By the mid-’70s, with the elimination of restrictive immigration laws, many young Japanese nationals were once again lured by a future in the U.S. Among these Shin Issei (new-generation immigrants) was Takuo Kitano, proprietor of Hide Sushi. A sushi chef by trade, Kitano quickly grasped American food sensibilities working his first job, at Holiday Bowl, a sushi bar in Gardena. Hide, the 12-stool place he opened in 1979, developed a reputation for giant sushi at modest prices, appealing to the American idea that more is more.

On the brink of the ’80s raw-fish-roll craze, Hide introduced many boomers to sushi: It was on the Westside, the food was affordable, and it didn’t seem too foreign. Eight years ago, Kitano bought the property beside Safe and Save market, where the new and much larger restaurant he built stands today.

The escalating land values on the Westside in the ’80s had developers circling like vultures. The first chink in the armor was the disappearance of Hankawa’s S&M Nursery, a landmark since 1947. The new multistory Sawtelle Place mall, built on the lot, left no trace of the nursery, and many felt the days were numbered for Sawtelle’s older mom-and-pop businesses.The mall attracted a different clientele, the Chuzai-in. These Gucci-obsessed, platinum-card-carrying, temporarily visa’d employees of Japanese multinationals were a breed apart from the unpretentious, practical Issei and Nisei who had first settled here.