a store to remember

I walk down the aisles of my youth.

Ducking beneath inverted painted paper umbrellas and translucent ribbed lanterns I wander the cluttered labyrinth of Japanese serving dishes and dolls, recalling a lost Hawaii. Reflecting briefly on the memory-only existence of Ieda’s, Toyo’s, and Arakawa’s, family owned stores of a similar nature, I press on.

I hear the clacking of Mahjong tiles coming from Chinatown’s second story backrooms (and our own house).  I peruse the open markets with my mother, reward for having my haircut. She knowingly stops at the best spots, a little look funn here, some char-siu there, a pound of fish cake around the corner, and not to be forgotten rakkyo (an often pickled mini-onion that I used to nibble layer by layer).

From the kitchen I smell the Portuguese sausage, eggs, and rice breakfast my dad has sizzling on the stove. Turning to the next aisle, I’m learning to use Mizkan rice vinegar to flavor sushi rice and the sauce of our family favorite Pork Meatballs ( fried orbs of ground pork, chopped shrimp, grated carrots, egg, rice flour, and shitake mushrooms with a shoyu, sugar, vinegar, green onion sauce). 

Suddenly a preschooler I’m sitting with my Grandfather watching the stock ticker tape for him (how I learned fractions), drinking watered down Hawaiian Sun Passion Orange juice and slurping on these tubular stickless popsicle things.

Then a memory within a memory, as I’m 5000 miles from Hawaii in an Ithaca apartment putting Ikari tonkatsu sauce on my katsu (makes sense right?) thinking about how it reminds me of our family dinners at Hifumi, a Japenese anomoly along the canal side of Honolulu’s Chinese cultural plaza.

Still at Cornell, but now a freshman, a 2am line of coffee mug holding hungry over worked floormates extends out of our dorm room as I dish out servings of Japanese style Vermont Curry (made using vegetables tupperware kleptoed from the dining hall salad bar) and rice (from my contraband cooker).  This is followed with games of Shogi against nihonjin Tetsuo and physics major Jacob, a secretly Asian Portland native egg (in Hawaii I’d be considered a banana).

Pausing for a pound of Hamachi, I reflect on the first fifteen years of my life that I wasted not eating sushi. Glancing across the case I find myself sitting in my parent’s living room eating poke and kalua pig, while osmosising colloquial Japanese via KIKU’s prime time programming.

In the last aisle I wash down a drop of Sake with a cup of water and bowls of Ozoni (traditional New Year’s day mochi soup), only in elementary school I’d yet to develop an appreciation for just how good that rice wine really was.

And back at the counter checking out, I’m in a tiny ramen shop eating tofu drizzled with shoyu and ginger, across from me my future wife, it’s the moment we first remember meeting (we actually met at a coffeehouse concert a few months earlier).

A Portland fixture for over a hundred years (broken up briefly by what Anzen, the jovial owner, jokingly refers to as a “Japanese vacation” during the 1940’s), this store is comfort itself for a Hawaii raised Japanese American. There aren’t many places I can go here to get a block of Okuhara’s Kamaboko, Purity Portuguese sausage, or S&S saimin. And the non-genetically mortified fresh Ota tofu sold here is easily some of the best I’ve ever had outside Japan.

Sure Uwajimaya’s got a better selection of fresh produce and local meats, and H-mart and Fubonn are asian food super stores, but Anzen is way more personable and has some of the best sushi grade fish in the whole city (they supply many of the areas top spots).

I stood wondering how I’d gone a year and a half in P-town without even hearing about this place. I used to live only five minutes away (and driven by maybe fifty times without even noticing….next time you pass the convention center look at the left instead of right). “Hawaii and Japanese peeps where were you on this one?” I wondered out loud.  “Maybe they assumed you already knew,” laughed Anzen (recent conversations confirmed as much).

Leaving this store full of memories I found it funny that a place I’ve visited exactly once could be so entirely familiar. I’ll be back. In fact I told Anzen “Dude, you’re going to be sick of seeing us.”

Anzen Hiroshi
736 NE MLK Blvd
Portland, OR 97232
(503) 233-5111            
Hours:
Mon-Sat 9 a.m. - 6:30 p.m.
Sun 12 p.m. - 5 p.m