WHAT'S MITSUWA AND WHY DO I LOVE IT?
The funny thing about my childhood and adolescence is how cut off I was from it, for so many years. I grew up in Tokyo and after I came back to the states for my sophomore year of college — and even more so after my parents moved to Honolulu a few years later — the world I grew up in gradually seemed to drift farther and farther away.
Part of it was that the ex-patriot Americans and other Westerners that I had known had scattered to colleges across the world and no one I knew, from then on, shared any vision of that world or my memories of it. As the years passed, I sometimes wondered if I had imagined Japan. When I finally got my first opportunity to return, some 16 years after my last college vacation trip "home," I truly felt I had walked into a dream.
I've been back several times — twice for a year sabbatical that I lucked into by virtue of being married to a professor — but even so, whenever I hear the strains of a J-Pop tune, catch a whiff of simmering soy broth coming out of the doorway of a New York restaurant, or hear a fragment of Japanese conversation in a Honolulu shopping mall — I'm suddenly back there, dropping in on my past and wanting to linger.
I've found a way to get a fix when I need it — not too far away. Just a bit more than an hour south, in Chicago's northern suburbs, there is Mitsuwa, a tiny corner of Japan in the American Midwest. Part of a chain that has eight stores in the U.S., the Chicago Mitsuwa is one of just two outside California.
Mitsuwa Marketplace, as it is officially named, is really a small enclosed mall featuring shops specializing in Japanese books and magazines, liquor , health products, table ware, video rentals and a travel agency.
But the real reason homesick ex-patriot Japanese and other Asians, nostalgic Americans who once lived in Japan and curious ordinary Chicagoans, flock to Mitsuwa is clearly the food. Between the large supermarket that occupies most of Mitsuwa's floorspace, and the cases of bento (boxed lunches) and little restaurants ringing the food court, the Mitsuwa experience is all about the food — and the emotional associations that go with it.
Part of it was that the ex-patriot Americans and other Westerners that I had known had scattered to colleges across the world and no one I knew, from then on, shared any vision of that world or my memories of it. As the years passed, I sometimes wondered if I had imagined Japan. When I finally got my first opportunity to return, some 16 years after my last college vacation trip "home," I truly felt I had walked into a dream.
I've been back several times — twice for a year sabbatical that I lucked into by virtue of being married to a professor — but even so, whenever I hear the strains of a J-Pop tune, catch a whiff of simmering soy broth coming out of the doorway of a New York restaurant, or hear a fragment of Japanese conversation in a Honolulu shopping mall — I'm suddenly back there, dropping in on my past and wanting to linger.
I've found a way to get a fix when I need it — not too far away. Just a bit more than an hour south, in Chicago's northern suburbs, there is Mitsuwa, a tiny corner of Japan in the American Midwest. Part of a chain that has eight stores in the U.S., the Chicago Mitsuwa is one of just two outside California.
Mitsuwa Marketplace, as it is officially named, is really a small enclosed mall featuring shops specializing in Japanese books and magazines, liquor , health products, table ware, video rentals and a travel agency.
But the real reason homesick ex-patriot Japanese and other Asians, nostalgic Americans who once lived in Japan and curious ordinary Chicagoans, flock to Mitsuwa is clearly the food. Between the large supermarket that occupies most of Mitsuwa's floorspace, and the cases of bento (boxed lunches) and little restaurants ringing the food court, the Mitsuwa experience is all about the food — and the emotional associations that go with it.
