How Fugetsu-Do Survived the Evolution of Little Tokyo
Since 1903, a Japanese confectionery called Fugetsu-Do has been making mochi in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles.
The shop’s interior, little changed since the 1950s, is lined with wooden shelves and glass showcases. Workers wrap packages of sweets in pink paper on a battered linoleum countertop. Through a doorway half-covered by a fabric divider is the store’s small factory, which produces a rainbow of mochi and manju every week.
Brian Kito, the store’s third-generation owner, no longer marks his manju with the intricate, handmade metal brands that his grandfather Seiichi used when he opened the business. But Brian still keeps them in a rice-flour-dusted plastic container under the factory’s wooden prep table.
The Kitos have stewarded Fugetsu-Do through many eras of upheaval that have threatened Little Tokyo: Japanese internment, urban renewal, the L.A. riots. Today, the store is thriving.
Now 68, Brian Kito is preparing to pass Fugetsu-Do onto his son, Korey. For Brian, keeping the store alive has meant more than even the gargantuan task of sustaining an established family business. It has also meant striving to preserve the Little Tokyo he grew up with, building on cultural traditions that span not only generations, but oceans.
“I went fishing last year, and the last fish I hooked was a nice big trout that took me for a ride for more than 20 minutes,” Brian said. “When I got it in the boat I thought, ‘You know what, you deserve to live.’ So I cut him off.”
“The store is kinda like that, too. When the chips are down, the store seems to survive on its own.”
The Birth and Dispersal of Little Tokyo
At the beginning of the 20th century, Los Angeles was booming, and many Japanese immigrants, having come as seasonal laborers, opted to stay. Seiichi Kito founded Fugetsu-Do in 1903, a few blocks away from its current location, naming it after the shop where he’d trained in mochi-making in Tokyo.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake brought more Japanese Americans south, growing the population of Little Tokyo to nearly 10,000, up from 3,000. Many residents maintained strong ties to Japan. It was common for children born in America to be sent back to be educated or live with family. When Seiichi’s wife, Tei, died in 1921, he sent four of his eight children, including the youngest, Roy, to be raised by relatives and family friends in Japan. Roy returned to the United States at age 16, his first language Japanese.
After President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in 1941, authorizing internment, the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans for four years devastated Little Tokyo. Many residents were forced to sell their homes and businesses.
The Kito family was detained at Heart Mountain in Wyoming, where Roy met his future wife, Kazuko. Using donated sugar rations, Seiichi made manju, a Japanese cake, for the residents of the camp.
After World War II, many Japanese Americans were dispersed to the West Coast without housing, or had to live in government trailer parks. The Kitos returned to Little Tokyo. The owner of the property that had housed Fugetsu-Do demanded four years’ back rent for storing their equipment. Roy and Kazuko slept at a local temple while struggling to make enough money to pay. With the help of another Little Tokyo family, the Tanahashis, Roy Kito reopened Fugetsu-Do in May 1946.
Building and Losing a Family Business
Brian Kito was born in 1956, a decade after his family’s return to Little Tokyo. The next year, Fugetsu-Do opened in the storefront it occupies today, built on the same First Street site it had been on since the ’30s.
By the ’60s, Little Tokyo had come back from the ravages of internment as a prosperous hub of small businesses. The busiest week of the year fell — and still falls — after Christmas, when the Kito family prepares the komochi and okasane mochi traditionally enjoyed in celebration of the new year. Brian’s first memory of the store is of this holiday rush, the mochi-pounding machines thumping ceaselessly as he slept on the mezzanine.
Brian’s debut as an entrepreneur was through a summer business selling soda and shaved ice out of Fugetsu-Do. He worked in the shop six days a week during college, but when his older brother bowed out of the business, he was still not sure if he would take over the store.
Then another family business ran into trouble. In 1971, the Kito family opened a bakery on Second Street, run by Brian’s mother, Kazuko, selling wedding cakes and pastries. But they received a notice in 1981 that the building containing the bakery would be demolished.
In the end, they lost the bakery. But the fight to save it — translating official documents and serving as the neighborhood’s face to the city — drew Brian into a larger effort to preserve Little Tokyo.
“That’s how I became connected to the community, and that’s why I stayed,” he said.
Patrolling the Neighborhood
When Brian took over Fugetsu-Do in the late 1980s, the old-fashioned buildings he’d spent his childhood playing in had largely been sacrificed to urban renewal, replaced by high-rises and pedestrian malls. Although some community leaders supported the changes, the new buildings pushed up rents and emptied the neighborhood of its mom-and-pop businesses.
“That’s kind of how the community got destroyed,” Brian said. “The new buildings were pretty, but the place went to hell.”
Brian said a rise in panhandling, petty crime, and the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots in 1992 scared away both Japanese Americans and the Japanese tourists that had made up his customer base. By 1993, barely making payroll and deeply in debt, Brian was considering closing the store.
As a last-ditch effort to save the business, Brian founded a community security patrol. Volunteers wearing green polo shirts and carrying flashlights walked the streets at night. The patrol, which at one point had 50 volunteers, garnered notice in the press. “In the beginning, we had confrontations all the time. The population on the street felt entitled. We felt entitled to protect the merchants and the community.”
In 1996, the group founded the Little Tokyo Koban in a storefront near Fugetsu-do. All over Japan, similar structures are embedded in neighborhoods and staffed 24/7 by police officers. Officers from the Los Angeles Police Department were on duty at the version in Little Tokyo until 2000, when it was handed over to the volunteers.
But as soon as the neighborhood appeared to stabilize, 9/11 happened, and fears of another attack emptied downtown Los Angeles again. Fugetsu-Do limped into the 21st century.
The Mochi Revival
Making mochi by hand requires strength and gentleness, speed and care. When mixing, a maker’s strength goes into the mochi. Shaping requires hands toughened to heat and nimble enough to seal wobbly, sticky dough. Move too fast, and the final product is imperfect. Move too slow, and the mochi cools and toughens. The most complex pieces are then dotted with tiny flowers and leaves.
“It takes me a year to train someone,” Brian says. “I can tell within two weeks if they have the hand skill to continue.” He doesn’t need to weigh the pieces for the funerary steamed cakes the store supplies to several funeral homes. “My hands know.”
Fugetsu-Do kept these traditions alive, but the number of people following Japanese traditions waned. When Roy Kito died in 2007, Brian made his funerary mochi himself.
Random chance kept the store afloat. In 2009, the Korean frozen yogurt trend created a market for tiny pieces of mochi. Only Fugetsu-Do could produce the delicacy domestically, allowing the shop to survive the Great Recession. Brian invested the windfall in automation, enabling the store to produce more machine-made mochi like peanut butter and chocolate, which are sold at Japanese markets across Southern California.
The late 2010s brought a boom to Little Tokyo, as well as a new generation fascinated by food and tradition. Videos showcasing Fugetsu-Do’s handcrafted mochi garnered millions of views. During the coronavirus pandemic, lines stretched out the door, and Brian purchased a new factory in Gardena, Calif., south of downtown Los Angeles. It was the first property his family ever owned connected to the business. Japanese immigrants like his grandfather had been forbidden to own property by law.
But the neighborhood’s boom resulted in rent hikes and closures of heritage businesses. The next generation of community activists rallying for Japanese American businesses also opposed clearing a homeless encampment, and criticized the Koban for bringing the police into the neighborhood. Brian maintains that without the Koban, his business, and many others, wouldn’t have survived this long.
As Korey grew up, he always told adults that he wanted to take over his dad’s store. When he was 14, he asked to work his first overnight shift during the New Year’s rush. At 15, he lasted three nights. By 16, he could make it through the entire gauntlet of forming, packing and hauling thousands of pounds of mochi.
Korey took time away from the store to work on his college degree. But in 2023, when Brian was diagnosed with and treated for cancer, Korey returned.
Working with his son sometimes makes Brian reflect on the challenges he had with his own father. “We had a tough relationship when I was Korey’s age,” he said. “He’s better than I was at his age. I don’t tell him that.” The current point of contention: Brian wants Korey to finish college before he takes over the business.
To Brian, the store’s persistence is a testament to the resilience of the neighborhood and those who shaped it. “I’ve gone through my 50 years, and when I thought things couldn’t get worse, I’d wonder, is any of this as bad as going to camps during World War II? If the store lived through that, then the store deserves to keep living.”
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