Published August 3, 2007
For the uninformed, Sawtelle Boulevard is a nondescript street off of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles. Nondescript - until you hit the three-block stretch nestled between Olympic Boulevard and Missouri Avenue - that can be best described as Downtown Little Tokyo tightly condensed into a single neighborhood. What was once home to botanical nurseries owned by second-generation Japanese immigrants a decade ago is now a flourishing mini-ethnic enclave for Japanese immigrants, college students and Westside hipsters in need of an authentic curry fix.
Because gas was expensive and we could always depend on Sawtelle for a night of drunken karaoke, overpriced Japanese fashion, delicious Japanese dessert crepes and cheap ramen, Sawtelle was my college posse's default destination for quick entertainment and good dining. We all knew the geography of this tiny oasis of shabu-shabu houses, boba cafes and video rental stores as well as the backs of our hands.
Considering how much time and money I spent there over the last four years, maybe it shouldn't have been all too surprising that I would end up working there as a sushi waitress as my very first job right out of college.
No longer a passive, sporadic consumer of the Sawtelle experience, I now depended on Sawtelle as the source of my living wages. Not only that, Sawtelle was where I found all my natto, Korean seaweed, green tea and esoteric Pocky flavors when I was done eating my free meal of fried fish, seafood curry and iced Oolong tea after an uneventful lunch shift.
Most importantly, Sawtelle was where I was inducted into the underground network of the restless and effortlessly hip Japanese college students who moved from Japan to Los Angeles to study at Santa Monica College, and when they were not studying English, they worked as servers in the string of Japanese-owned restaurants.
It was through their association that I suddenly had the hook-ups - to discounts to good sushi, to free ramen meals and to the occasional unofficial discount when I happened to go grocery shopping in my waitress gear.
And then that was that. I have truly become a Sawtelle junkie.
During particularly slow shifts at the sushi restaurant, I learned a lot about my fellow Japanese co-workers. I learned about their motivations that brought them to Los Angeles, to find and experience something that couldn't be found back home. I admired their guts for uprooting themselves from their family, friends and culture to study in a language that they only had a shaky command of.
They taught me useful Japanese phrases; I helped them with English pronunciations. We bonded effortlessly over restaurant gossip, our mutual love for Pinkberry and the fact that we were all ridiculously young and naïve people excited and slightly terrified of the undefined future that lay ahead of us.
And in the end, this was how I came to see Sawtelle Boulevard in that brief, uncertain limbo that followed my college graduation: a close-knit, ever-changing community embodying the Japanese culture that resonated deeply in my bones. Not only that, it was a physical manifestation of a life's transitions, of the chance encounters that occurred when ordinary people's big dreams and life-changing decisions took them to opposite ends of the globe.
All good things eventually come to an end. Two weeks ago, I accepted a job offer to teach English abroad in Japan for a year. I will be quitting my sushi waitress gig at the end of August. I will be leaving for Tokyo in mid-September.
I never expected this indulgent life to last forever. After all, nothing is ever permanent in Sawtelle Boulevard, and maybe that's what makes it so good.
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