It Runs East- West

The pack of young women stationed outside FuRaiBo, a Japanese-style pub or izaka-ya on West Los Angeles’ Sawtelle Boulevard, is a subtle but sure sign that there’s more going on in this short block of Japanese mini-malls than just an exotic lunch at Sawtelle Kitchen or Hurry Curry.

Surrounded by unremarkable office buildings, nurseries and neon storefronts, the young scenesters casually dressed in jeans and belted knit sweater-jackets shudder in the Friday evening chill and steel themselves for what they’ve been told will be a one-hour wait to get in the new pan-Asian youth hotspot.

Inside, the crowd is a blend of Japanese hipsters, college students of many Asian ethnicities and even the odd couple with a baby mobbing the tables under the dramatic glow of Japanese lamps. The latest J-pop hits (the sugary-sweet Japanese equivalent of Top 40 songs) thump from the speakers, underlying the clatter of dishes and rowdy laughter as pitchers of beer pass overhead.

An orderly array of shoes lined up outside a private room with walls of tatami, rice straw matting, where customers sit on fabric floor cushions around four tiny tables, is a reminder that this is, after all, a Japanese club. But the youthful presence, along with the area’s scattering of authentic Japanese pop culture shops, makes it clear that this isn’t anything like downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo or Gardena’s Japanese neighborhoods. Sawtelle Boulevard, from Olympic to Santa Monica boulevards, is for the young.

Think of it as a dollhouse version of Japan Town, U.S.A., where a cluster of restaurants and stores nudge one another along a street that looks sedate during the day but where boba tea houses and karaoke studios with private rooms buzz well into the wee hours. It’s also a hub for alternative pop media, with shops trading in used manga--novel-length Japanese comics--and the locally famous Video Addict rental store, which specializes in Asian films.

Little Tokyo, the oldest and largest of Japanese communities in Los Angeles, is museum-like by comparison, swathed in multiple layers of Japanese American history. To young, homesick natives of Japan, it’s just not happening. Clusters of Japanese businesses are also found in Gardena and Torrance, where eateries have sprung up to feed hungry salarymen from nearby Japanese corporations.

Sawtelle, however, thrives on Japanese food and pop culture, a lure for explorers from East and West.

FuRaiBo customer Mansan Luc has just finished a dish of asparagus and eggplant with miso. A vegetarian, she likes the place, she says, “for its really good vegetarian selection.” Her tablemates--and almost everyone else in the joint, it turned out--are there for tebasaki: chicken wings fried in peanut oil. But delectations are only one part of the area’s allure.

As dusk crawls along the short but historic strip referred to simply as Sawtelle, Carmina Ocampo, 20, and Bill Poon, 41, man the front counter at Giant Robot, a retail store created by Japanese American Eric Nakamura, owner and editor of a magazine with the same name. Giant Robot magazine, which is available internationally at art and music stores, celebrates Japanese pop culture from a distinctly American perspective, tracking such trends as surf culture and hip-hop music as they move into Japan and take on bizarre, often hilarious, forms. Ocampo and Poon, who identify themselves as minions of the Giant Robot, greet a stream of customers strolling in, bellies full of dinner from one of the many nearby restaurants.

“The after-meal crowd,” Poon notes.

“Every time I come here, I want to buy everything in the store,” says Elaine Chin, 28, pawing longingly at framed art prints ranging from computer anime stills to new Japanese graphic design. It’s indeed tough to decide on any one thing: that “Lost and Found Pet Posters From Around the World” tome? Pocket-sized zines cobbled together by local artists? Stuffed pillows shaped like scooters and turntables? Sock monkeys?

Poon walks a visitor around the store, patiently describing curios from the culturally significant to the just plain weird, from DVDs of films by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai and books of Japanese graffiti to a collection identified in English as “Ugly Dolls.” Japanese dolls, in general, go beyond the cute or action varieties. A kogepan doll, a popular toy in Japan, seems particularly mysterious. “It’s a piece of burnt toast with strawberries on its head,” he explains. “There is a story about how it got those strawberries there,” he adds enigmatically, but he won’t elaborate.

With his nerdy glasses and funky tie, Poon looks like a young Elvis--Costello, that is--and seems an appropriate emcee for a street that hides some quirky surprises.

Close to UCLA and Santa Monica College, both institutions assiduously frequented by Japanese students, Sawtelle provides a sort of urban comfort zone.

“Most young Japanese people coming to Los Angeles grew up in a city and can’t identify with the feel of Little Tokyo,” says Izumi Hasegawa, 35, a journalist who lives near Sawtelle Boulevard and writes for the U.S.-based Japanese publication U.S. FrontLine News. “The South Bay is closer to what they experienced at home, but not very hip.”

On the street, the telltale signs of a spicy youth culture are few: a faux torii gate here, a glowing neon sign with Japanese characters there. The area may be the stomping ground of the young, but it is hardly rowdy or rebellious. Exotic in appearance maybe, but also subdued and well-behaved.

Young women like Izumi Hasegawa are about par for the area. Her business card identifies her as a reporter, DJ, MC, photographer, cinema navigator and Shinto priestess. You’ll see them shopping for toasted nori and Kewpie mayonnaise--a made-in-Japan brand to die for, Japanese natives swear--at the local supermarket. This season, the shoppers are mostly shibuya-gyaru: young women in a pricey uniform of Frankie B. jean skirts, architectural heels and Christian Dior aviator lenses. Still roaming in small packs are last season’s ganguro--literally “black faces”--ultra-tanned style mavens with bleached tresses, pale lips and white raccoon circles penciled around their eyes, and the ko-gyaru, precocious juveniles known to dart about in towering platform boots and hankie-sized minis.

You will most certainly note the street’s young pan-Asian demographic, which includes people of Korean and Chinese descent.

Giant Robot’s Poon sums up the cachet of the neighborhood: “Mostly, it’s food and boba.” With four boba shops within two blocks, it seems that the drink--blue marbles of tapioca served soaked in sugary tea or strawberry-flavored milk--is among Sawtelle Boulevard’s chief attractions. Every other person hanging about seems to carry a clear cup filled with “black pearls,” with a cannon-size straw jutting out of it.

Anyone looking for more traditional food or bars might try somewhere else. “If you’re not into Asian things,” says Poon with typical understatement, “this is just a regular street.”

The Sawtelle Boulevard of Asian fusion cafes and eclectic stores has been grafted onto an area with a Japanese American tradition that goes back to the early 1900s.

Plant nurseries owned by issei and nisei--Japanese immigrants to the U.S. and their offspring--used to line the street. Most of them are gone, replaced by office buildings sheathed in red brick or drab granite.

Kikuyo Yamaguchi, 81, and her late husband weathered the internment camps during World War II and came to Sawtelle Boulevard--then known as a nursery row--to make a fresh start in the late 1940s. They leased a plot of land at the corner of Sawtelle and Olympic boulevards and opened Yamaguchi Bonsai Nursery, which in 1964 moved a few blocks north to its current location.

Daughter Marianne Yamaguchi, 48, grew up in the area and has seen the street’s nurseries dry up: “Everybody gets older, and the kids don’t want to carry on,” she says, standing in front of pots filled with miniature pines, geraniums and tea roses at the back of the store, still owned and operated by her family.

Few other establishments from the old days survive--two tiny markets, a handful of mom-and-pop gift emporiums. Don Sakai’s Satsuma Imports, where you can buy everything from Japanese sake sets to geta wooden sandals, has been at its current location since 1946. The Safe and Save market, where locals get tuna and salmon cuts for sushi parties, still occupies its decades-old spot. But for the most part, mini-malls and trendy restaurants have elbowed out the shops of yesteryear.

As early as the mid-’80s, the Sawtelle corridor began shedding its low-key appeal to accommodate a rash of development projects. “There was a big push 12 to 15 years ago to knock everything down and develop the area,” Marianne Yamaguchi recalls. Real estate developers “flashed tremendous amounts of money to issei owners,” she says, trying to buy their land. Some resisted, but a cluster of mini-malls--Sawtelle Centre, Sawtelle Place and Olympic Collection--mushroomed at the south end of the Sawtelle corridor, across the street from one another.

Poon worked at a video store on Sawtelle a decade ago. He was surprised at how quickly the area morphed. “I came back a few years ago and thought, ‘Whoa, there’s a lot of stuff that wasn’t there before,’ ” he says. And this patch of West L.A., once dormant in the shadow of the 405 Freeway, has grown the livelier for it.

Restaurateur Kenji Minamida opened Sawtelle Kitchen in 1990. Back then, he says, “there were no parking meters on the street.” Now they line the main drag, and good luck finding a free one on weekend nights.

“This year the city planted a bunch of cherry trees up and down the street, trying to give it some identity,” Yamaguchi says. Unnecessary: The Sawtelle corridor is already wearing its new personality on its sleeve.

“Sawtelle used to be a very boring street. You just passed by; you didn’t stop,” says Minamida, who landed there by chance when he took over a failing restaurant run by a friend. He had no intention, he says, of launching his first venture there: “I personally wanted to open my restaurant in a funkier area, like Venice, or Melrose.”

These days Sawtelle has its own kind of funky vibe--mellower than Venice’s, not as aggressively hip as Melrose Avenue’s. It is a place of small interior charms, easy to miss at a first glance. Exploring Sawtelle is like hanging out with a new friend who is a little reserved at first but eventually turns out to be lots of fun.

There is a word in the Osaka dialect, kuidaore, that means “eat till you drop.” And Sawtelle is full of establishments at which to perfect this rather fine art. The area appears to exist primarily to satisfy the cravings of young Japanese living in Los Angeles who miss the dishes they grew up with: deep-fried breaded pork cutlets, curry rice a la Japonaise, Jell-O coffee desserts. These are staples of an amalgam cuisine called yooshoku in Japan: basically, Japanese dishes that substitute Western ingredients for traditional ones and borrow liberally from continental recipes.

Under its exotic flourishes, yooshoku is recognizably comfort food, which may help explain its multiethnic appeal. There are spaghetti dishes, meatballs, endless upscale variations on fast-food favorites. The meatloaf with the demi-glace sauce served at Sawtelle Kitchen is a tricked-up hamburger without the bun and with tastier fixings. The wedges of deep-fried yam served with plum mayonnaise dip are an exotic take on French fries.

Even someone who never dared a sushi counter can dig this kind of cuisine. “I call it Japanese American,” says Minamida, who sports white chef regalia and a bowl haircut as he steps out of the smoky kitchen to talk about his restaurant.

Sawtelle Kitchen was one of the first establishments to herald the changes in the area and remains a nexus of sorts. It is always packed, mostly by non-Asian Angelenos eager to experience the thrill of something different--but not that different.

Minamida, who cooked at Chinois and Rebecca’s before opening Sawtelle Kitchen, says he designed his menu with American tastes in mind. “I know the Japanese already like this kind of food,” he says.

His customers are 70% American and 30% Japanese, he says. Most customers are regulars, and they show up en masse on Friday and Saturday nights, when the line spills to two little wooden benches outside the entrance.

Even the decor, reminiscent of a Provencal bistro--antique cabi- nets filled with china, porcelain bibelots, tiny tables with precious little elbow room--seems intended to appeal to cross-over crowds. The walls used to be all white; now they are smoky and look as if they have been that way since Prohibition. Customers sip Coke out of vintage-style glass bottles on an outdoor patio fenced by pink bougainvillea bushes.

If you try to make your way to the bathroom (outside, in the back of the building), you might stumble by mistake into Get Wicked, the clothing store stocking skateboarder and hip-hop threads next door, and give its two ancient video game machines a spin.

Trendy food served fast in a bustling ambience just fit for college student types is what keeps the eateries in the area packed.

Among the most popular are Japan Bistro Blue Marlin and Hurry Curry of Tokyo, where there was hardly room to breathe on a recent Friday evening, despite a C rating posted in the window. A new outpost of Curry House, a Japanese-style curry and spaghetti franchise, opened this month on the second floor of the Sawtelle Place mini-mall and already has customers queuing up patiently on weekend nights.

There are, of course, traditional restaurants as well: At Manpuku Tokyo BBQ, a yakiniku restaurant, customers toss plump, bite-sized bits of chicken and beef over tabletop grills and wash them down with wakame seaweed soup. At Asahi Ramen, a perpetually jammed noodle house, just about every dish consists of large ceramic bowls full with miso soup in which various kinds of wheat noodles, or ramen, float alongside pork medallions, crispy chopped green onion, sprouts, bamboo shoots and half a boiled egg.

In the 1970s, the restaurants on Sawtelle Boulevard were mostly traditional teriyaki and tempura houses owned by Japanese Americans. The newer establishments are owned by recent emigres from Japan armed with a flair for experimentation and a willingness to absorb pan-Asian influences.

Restaurateur Daibutsu Ikemizu, who operates Sawtelle Centre’s Blue Marlin Bistro, is getting ready to open another restaurant up the street next month. The cuisine at the new place, Buddha’s Dream, will be “Asian fusion: Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese,” says the Japanese-born and -raised Ikemizu.Ikemizu talks about the perfect customers he envisioned for his new enterprise: a young couple who sit at a table covered with five or six dishes, each representative of a different Asian cuisine, and sample them all.

Where throngs of young pedestrians are found, hip shopping is surely not far away. Besides the Giant Robot store, Far East Connections and the vintage clothing mecca Black Market are recent additions that point toward a trend.

The 9-month-old Far East Connections stocks between 10,000 and 15,000 used manga comics, read voraciously in Japan, and fresh issues of Japan’s hottest fashion bibles--CanCam, ViVi and JJ. For those in the know about music, art and graphic design, the shop also boasts a handful of used design magazines with cult-like appeal, including collectible copies of Cut, Brutus, Studio Voice and Relax that sell for as little as $5 here but are seen for $30 or more elsewhere. On display is even a vintage copy of Bar-F-Out, a defunct but legendary magazine printed in a mix of English and Japanese that used to cover the Tokyo underground culture.

Owner Kotaro Mori lives in nearby Venice and estimates that 40% of his clientele are young American adults, a lot of whom can speak and read Japanese. “I was surprised by that,” Mori says.

The collision of Japan’s youth culture and L.A.’s home-grown subcultures has sparked exciting possibilities on Sawtelle. “This area is becoming fashionable,” Mori says and pauses, looking for the right word--”and creative.”

Giant Robot’s Nakamura agrees; he opened his shop because of the vibe of the place. “We just felt we could survive on this street; I’m still trying to figure out where the neighborhood will go from here,” he says.

Mori dreams of organizing a street festival. “I don’t want to be like Little Tokyo or Torrance,” both of which have Japanese festivals, he says. Except in one respect: Those neighborhoods have a tradition of community events that Mori would like to see infiltrate Sawtelle. “Personally,” he says, “I want to make this area really cool.”

At Black Market, a store co-owned by Korean entrepreneur Jisook Lee, the counter is fashioned out of the front of an old silver Pontiac. On sale are pricey, well-worn gypsy skirts and a selection of vintage Levi cords and jackets. Steve Mok, who works there, points to a series of drawings artfully choreographed into a window display. Since it opened last December, Black Market has hosted monthly mini-shindigs, during which local artists work on new window displays in store, while customers watch and groove to a DJ set.

Video Addict owner Eiren Chong sits at a tiny sidewalk table and chats with customers as they duck inside for armfuls of video tapes. Video Addict is a serious resource that draws customers from throughout L.A. Besides Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Hong Kong films, its racks are filled with just about every TV drama, soap, documentary and variety show broadcast on Japanese television going back to 1998.

Plastered on the wall next to the cash register are relationship charts that help the faithful keep up with their TV soaps--”He likes her, she likes this other guy.” Real insider stuff. Two shy Japanese students from Santa Monica College, who give only their first names--Kyoko and Kayo--slide behind a fluttering yellow curtain to get their dose of the latest episodes of a Japanese variety program called “Hey! Hey! Hey!”

“We did have a lot of the film industry people come in before the [American] launch of the ‘Iron Chef’ TV show to look up things for research purposes,” Chong says.

His customers are mostly Japanese speakers, because the TV shows have no subtitles--although the Hong Kong films do. Among the non-Japanese, says Chong, “we do get some maniacs who come in to get a movie even though it’s not subtitled.”

On a recent weekend night, Lina Washington, a former veterinary assistant who grew up in Japan but has lived in the U.S. for 16 years, walks out of Video Addict with a plastic shopping bag filled with tapes. “That’s the only place they have the Japanese TV shows I want,” she says in Queen’s English, which, she adds, she learned in Japan. She particularly likes to get the Japanese analogues of American TV shows: “The Japanese ones are funnier.”

And so it is with Sawtelle--a West L.A. neighborhood where you can peruse Japanese teen fashion mags with names like Cutie, Muffin and Potato; get acquainted with Asian pop culture icons; and hang out with stylish Japanese youth--all analogues to their U.S. counterparts, only sometimes funkier and funnier.