History

Kichijoji, Tokyo, 1956. In the years just after the war, Kazue Takeishi, the founder, who had made her way from Wakayama with her daughters, stood on Nakamichi Street while it was still an unpaved road. On the same spot, a relative of the family had already been running a soba shop. Taking over that shop, she renamed it "Nakamichi" and hung up the noren of a small Chinese-style eatery. Everything began here. Steam and the scent of soy sauce on a dirt road, neighbors slipping under the noren. One of her daughters, Mitsuko — later the second generation — stood behind the counter after school while still in her teens. It was nothing grand, but it was a place where anyone could fill their stomach without ceremony. Then came the postwar boom: students multiplied, large companies built offices nearby, and the town grew livelier. The eatery came to bustle with set meals, and in time became an izakaya where regulars gathered over drinks. Changing with the times, the shop never stopped serving its bowls. The third generation first slipped under this noren as a customer in the early 2000s. By then the founder had already stepped back from the shop, but she would eat at the end of the counter as she always had, and sometimes share a few words. She was a deeply kind person. That warmth crossed the ocean to Montreal — and now returns to Kichijoji. Seventy years on from the founding, it is still being passed down.