On January 7th, 2026, the social media account for Uwajimaya announced an exciting new chapter for Asian Americans in the South Sound with four magic words: “Tacoma, we’re coming home.”
The story—that Uwajimaya was opening a store in Tacoma as well as in Issaquah—had actually broken on January 6th in the Puget Sound Business Journal.
The news caught fire on social media thanks to a post by Michael LaFreniere, former director of the Tacoma Historical Society. The new Tacoma store is planned at the former Hobby Lobby location on South Union Avenue, with a “village-style” $8 million buildout echoing the flagship Seattle store. It will include a 30,000-40,000 square foot grocery store and several tenant businesses.
What made Uwajimaya decide to return?
“There were two factors really,” said Denise Moriguchi, Uwajimaya CEO and third-generation owner, in a phone interview. “First, it’s a nice story of resilience, honoring our grandparents, our ancestors—but also, it’s the business case that we can survive there. We’ve been looking for several years.”
Denise Moriguchi’s grandparents, Fujimatsu and his wife Sadako Moriguchi, opened the first Uwajimaya in Tacoma in 1928, before World War II. Fujimatsu Moriguchi sold fish cakes from the back of the family truck, as well as tofu and soy sauce, to Issei working in regional logging camps. Eventually the couple opened a storefront in the city’s downtown core. They named it for their home city of Uwajima, Japan. Kazuo Ito’s hand-drawn map of Tacoma’s historic Japantown, originally published in his 1978 community anthology Issei, shows the store name “Uwajima-ya” between Broadway and Market Streets. On the Uwajimaya company website, a photograph of the Moriguchi family at the original storefront places it at 1502 Broadway, just steps from the present-day location of the Tacoma Convention Center. The original storefront was surrounded by dozens of Japanese-operated hotels, barber shops, dry cleaners, photography studios, restaurants, and import/export stores. Other maps appear in Becoming Nisei (a book by UW Tacoma professors Lisa Hoffman and Mary Hanneman) and on the digital exhibit Tacoma Japantown, which show even more locations and names of Japanese-operated businesses around the city before World War II.
Denise Moriguchi said that it is now “bittersweet” to look at Ito’s hand-drawn map with its many Japanese surnames. “I’ve stayed at that Marriott at the Convention Center multiple times,” she said, “and didn’t realize I was staying above the place where the family store was.”
Though Tacoma’s mayor Harry P. Cain was one of the very few mayors of a major American city on the West Coast who spoke out against the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans, his efforts to stop the incarceration were unsuccessful. During World War II, the Moriguchi family along with close to 700 other Japanese Americans from Tacoma, were forcibly evicted on May 17 and 18, 1942. They boarded trains at Union Station and landed at the Pinedale detention center near Fresno, California and then the concentration camp at Tule Lake in Northern California.
After the war, many Tacoma Nikkei resettled elsewhere. Close to 1 in 7 Nikkei eventually returned to Tacoma, comprising about 6 families. The Remember Pearl Harbor League was active, and potentially responsible for an act of arson at the Columbus Hotel, a downtown Japanese-operated location, according to Tacoma History Live, historian Michael Sullivan’s blog. According to HistoryLink, when Fujimatsu Moriguchi passed, he divided his estate into four portions with his sons, who in turn divided it with their three sisters and their mother Sadako. The Moriguchi family decided to relocate to Seattle, and opened the first Seattle store on South Main Street in 1945 before relocating to 6th Avenue South and South King Street in 1972 and then their current location on South Jackson Street in 2000. Several other stores have opened in Beaverton Oregon, Bellevue, and Renton.
Tacoma’s downtown core still lacks a grocery store to this day, making the area a marked contrast to its vibrant past of local greengrocers, produce stalls, butchers and seafood markets. And while there are other Asian grocery stores in Tacoma, as well as an HMart in Lakewood, having an Uwajimaya store means something else: a large pan-Asian grocery store located in central Tacoma.
Another Uwajimaya store is also planned to open in Issaquah “Whenever we open a new store it’s exciting to think about the future,” Denise Moriguchi said . “But the Tacoma store is special. It’s a lot more than just a new store. It’s a chance to pause and think about our history. I think about my grandparents, what they went through, what was on their minds, things that are happening today that are not unlike what happened then. It’s a chance to reflect on that history that I didn’t expect, almost like a history lesson.”
Descendants of Tacoma’s Japanese Americans are also excited by the news of Uwajimaya’s return. Ellen Sato Faust, current executive director of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Association, who grew up in Tacoma, shared over email that her family and the Moriguchi family emigrated from the same city, Uwajima, Japan. “My dad Masahiro Sato knew the Moriguchis, and that Uwajimaya used to be in Tacoma,” Faust shared. “[That] information was so novel to me, because when I was little, we literally did make a single trip to Uwajimaya in Seattle, at least in a lucky year—it was like our pilgrimage to Mecca. It’s like Uwajimaya is rising like the Phoenix out of the rubble of Japanese history in Tacoma. It’s something to look forward to.”
Denise Moriguchi now says she’s been “moved” by the many positive reactions to the news. “They say ‘don’t read the comments’ online but it’s been so nice to hear people’s stories, people’s connections. It means that we can continue the work that my grandparents, my dad, our family started. We want to be supportive, integrated into the community. We can be more than a grocery store: a place where you can gather.”
You can learn more about Tacoma’s historic Japantown at this digital exhibit curated by author Tamiko Nimura here.
