Picture a small tofu shop in Tacoma — the seed that grew into this 65,000-square-foot Asian supermarket serving Seattle since 1928. Fujimatsu Moriguchi founded the business as a small tofu shop in Tacoma, selling Japanese foods to the Nikkei community. His son Tomio moved the business to Seattle in 1970 and built it into a regional institution.
The store sells everything from fresh fish and prepared bento to Korean skincare products and Japanese ceramics; the food court inside serves ramen, Hong Kong-style milk tea, and Filipino halo-halo. But Uwajimaya is more than a grocery store — it is a pillar of the Japanese American community in Seattle, a community that was devastated by one of the greatest injustices in American history. In February 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast.
The Moriguchi family, like 120,000 other Japanese Americans, was sent to internment camps. The business survived because trusted non-Japanese neighbors agreed to manage it while the family was gone. When the Moriguchis returned after the war, they rebuilt.
That act of survival and renewal is woven into every product on these shelves.