Little Tokyo is Open by Mariko Lochridge

30/04/2026

🌿 April 2026 🇦🇷

I left my job and then broke my leg 🤦🏻‍♀️

After 8 years, I finally gave myself permission to pursue something for me.

A few days in the desert…
Then I flew to Argentina to begin documenting Nikkei diaspora stories across South America. ✍️

Four days later, I broke my leg. 😅🦴

Not metaphorically. I actually broke my leg.
At jiu jitsu training.
And required emergency surgery in a hospital in Buenos Aires.

Now I have a titanium rod and four screws holding it all together.

Literally and figuratively 🥲

Not exactly how I imagined this chapter starting.

How it started… how it’s going…
20 photos to capture the month of April

1–2 Last days at .cdc 💻💛
Cleaning out my office and writing a lot of thank-you letters.

3–4 A few more small biz milestones — the .ramen.dtla Ramen doc was accepted into LAAPFF, and signed a lease for the LTSC GFB FSN project. Both felt like full-circle moments, professionally and personally.

5–8 Palm Springs reset 🌵
Coachella offsite with
Sunrise in a hammock 🌅

9–11 Buenos Aires 🇦🇷
This saucer from — for my café con leche ☕ — is made by the

Founded by Saijiro Tsuji, who immigrated from Gifu in 1922. The family began producing porcelain in Argentina in 1951.

This book documents early Japanese immigrants — seeing the Tsuji family listed there… SO COOL! 📖✨

Their work still lives in some of the city’s most iconic cafes like

12–14 Tibia/Fibula Surgery 🥋➡️🏥

15–16 Recovery
10 days post-op. I can’t walk yet.
It’ll be months before I’m moving independently.

A lot of ceilings.
A lot of stillness.
A lot of staring at my feet.

17–19 Writing ✍️
Helping me process. Keeping me sane.

20 Finally escaping the hospital for some Argentinian asado 🥩🔥

I came here to document stories.

Now I’m being forced to slow down and notice the spaces in between.

Life keeps life-ing, and I’m still here.

I’ll be sharing the Nikkei stories I’m beginning to uncover — just at a different pace than I expected.

Subscribe for updates — link in bio 💫

06/04/2026

🌸 Closing a Chapter — 8 Years at LTSC 🌸

It’s hard to sum up what this work has meant — but at its core, it’s been about people, stories, and the belief that small businesses are the heartbeat of our neighborhoods. 💛

Some moments I’ll carry with me:

✨ Launching the incubator (2018–2019)

🎅 Carrying Sh**un Santa around Little Tokyo — because I refused to let the pandemic cancel the holidays

🚶🏻‍♀️ Walking tours with Mike Murase

🎒 Exploring the neighborhood with Little Tokyo Explorers +

📚 Teaching small business basics at

🎉 Celebrating milestone birthdays of our legacy businesses and more

🍜 Screening the Mr Ramen documentary inside .ramen.dtla

🌸 Walking through the flower district with Yuka from

🍥 Discovering that is America’s oldest ramen shop

🥊 Talking boxing with Nori of (and receiving his corner jacket!)

🌆 Connecting neighborhoods — Boyle Heights, Leimert Park, Altadena — with Little Tokyo

Next up:
A month of rest… 😌

And then I’ll be back with something new — focused on increasing online visibility and archiving the histories of small businesses. 📲📖

Stay tuned. 💫

01/04/2026

🌸 March was such a vibe. ✨

1–3 I spent a lot of time at .la 🐟🍟

For a long time, I’ve felt a quiet discomfort about the distance between Little Tokyo and Skid Row — even though they’ve always been neighbors. Sitting in one of the few DTLA spots that accepts hot food EBT made that distance harder to ignore.

Kenny and Leo run Catch 21 differently. They know their customers not as transactions — and definitely not as problems — but as people. As neighbors.

It brought me back to 2020, when I first met Sho, who challenged me to rethink the language I use — to move away from “homeless” or “unhoused,” and instead recognize everyone as part of a shared community.

At Catch 21, that idea isn’t theoretical. It’s daily practice.

Kenny is now part of a mural (by Sho) at LTSC’s UMEYA (Crocker & 5th) 🏢🎨
Taking them to see it for the first time felt like closing a loop. 💛

4-6 Ran back the “1956 Tour” with so owner Jeffrey could finally join 😂
Boyle Heights → Little Tokyo, with a group mostly new to both neighborhoods. Every time, something new surfaces. 🚶🏻‍♀️📍

A theme emerged: take the business owners on field trips. 🌿

7-9 Took Yuka from out to Altadena / El Sereno / NELA —
community gardens, local grocers, quiet knowledge-sharing. 🌱🍊TY for hosting

10 Visited the Monuments exhibit at with a childhood friend who’s spent over à decade documenting the removal of racist monuments 🏛️📸
A reminder that public space reflects what — and who — we choose to honor.

11-14 More field trips with Little Tokyo Explorers 🎒

“I Spy” — find a drummer, find green + yellow. 🎶 So muchfun digging in the crates

15-16 Ended with a booth-building workshop with 🎨🛍️
Learning here always feels collaborative.

6 years since lockdown.
8 years since leaving breaking news.
A lifetime dedicated to small biz.

And March felt like everything connecting.

Spring. New light. New possibilities. 🌸✨

02/03/2026

02/03/2026

✨ January 2026 ✨

We keep starting the new year hoping it will be better… but the news cycle (and its ripple effects) continues to hit the small business community hard. 💔📰 And yet — there are bright spots in the everyday. 🌤️

Our business owners continue to amaze me with their creativity, resilience, and stubborn hope for the future. 💡🔥 Maybe they’re a little insane… but better to be insane with hope than defeated by hopelessness. 💫

1–2 So happy to hear from the first — and soon second — generation ownership of .la 🐟🍟 A charming and humble AAPI-owned fish fry spot at the edge of Little Tokyo. More about their inspiring story coming soon! ✨

3 Joined the Little Tokyo Breakfast Club at for an incredible history of the fight for reparations, shared by member Miya. ☕📚✊🏽

4–7 Spent MLK Day with .blooms 🌸 and ☕ for annual community day — so many amazing orgs to learn from and build with! 🤝💛

8 Hosted a group of creatives to unpack the very complicated world of RFP applications. 📑😵‍💫 An amazing peer-to-peer roundtable led by and .art — community knowledge-sharing at its best. 🧠✨

9–14 A beautiful community mural unveiled at 🎨🌈 Stunning work by Maya and Luis, filled with so many Easter eggs that tell the story of how this project came to life. 🐣💬

15–17 Our second annual visit to 📚🏙️ Watching the afterschool students work in teams to complete their scavenger hunt brought me so much joy. Teaching them how to find the publication date awakened the wannabe librarian in me. 🤓💖

18–20 Closed out the month with an upcycling workshop at ♻️✨ Hosted by + the Small Biz Hype Squad and sponsored by . We turned scrap materials into TEN TEN–shaped keychains — tiny symbols of creativity and possibility. 🔟🔑

Meow! 🐱 January is done — and despite it all, we found joy.

Choosing joy is my greatest form of resistance. 💛🔥

01/01/2026

Showing gratitude and appreciation for 2025 as we close out one last time 🙏

Ready for 2026 🫶

01/01/2026

🎄 December 2025 ✨

1–2 Supported Japanese ⇄ English translation to discuss the future of Little Tokyo’s public spaces. 🗣️🌆 A skateboard park was a very popular idea! 🛹

3–4 Following Yuka from around taught me just how much of floristry is physical labor. 💐💪🏽 It’s had me thinking about vehicle customizations specifically designed for florists. 🚐

5–6 Visited legacy business Akimoto Chiropractic as they shuttered their doors for the final time. 🕊️ We worked hard to find good homes for their well-loved furniture. 🪑🤍

7–9 breakfast is still going strong — highly recommend! 🍳☕

10–11 Went to to stalk… ahem, visit 😆 Happy to report she’s thriving with an amazing organization! 🌱

12–17 Celebrated my birthday at 🎉 Thanks to the support of ‘s Yuka and ‘s Philip ♥️ This also gave me the chance to test out Little Tokyo Bingo and Little Tokyo Trivia — games I’ve been working on! 🎲📍

18–19 Shoutout to the Kouraku Hype Squad for creating this back-page ad in the to announce ’s 50th anniversary. 📰🎨

20 Closed out the year with toshikoshi soba. 🍜✨

Grateful for a full December and a meaningful year in community. 💫

25/12/2025

Small Business Secret 🧑‍🎄 Santa… sort of… 🎄

when I first started doing this work in 2018, I had the unrealistic dream of organizing a holiday party and having the small business owners all participate in a secret Santa gift giving

This obviously didn’t happen, but I never gave up my dream. And this year I had a creative idea of being the one that carries the gifts from business to business.

Any given week I provide 15 to 30 hours of TA, technical assistance, also known as one on one small business support to expiring and veterans small business owners. About half of those meetings are IRL and the other half are virtual.

So in the first week of December, I dedicated the first few minutes of every meeting to inviting the owners to be a part of an impromptu secret Santa game.

They didn’t have much of a heads up so they got a but creative with putting together a gift on the fly.

It was also fun to connect them to one another in this way, which really is the majority of my work, Connecting likeminded small business owners 🫶

Thank you for kicking us off and for .ramen.dtla .yoga for participating! I hope you all enjoyed your gifts! 🎁

14/12/2025

🎃 October 2025 🍜

October was so busy that I hardly remembered to take any photos of my food, but FINALLY I got to try a few spots on my wishlist like , (Las Vegas), and — and there was also a lot of community stuff too 🫶

1–2 Community Crafting series presented by x kicked off at — we got to make pencil cases from rice bags! Definitely want to run this back next year!

3–5 Hosted my first-ever food walking tour with , with yummy stops at .la + small business education at . It was also the test pilot for our new one-page walking tour pamphlets, thoughtfully designed by from the Small Biz Hype Squad.

6–7 I had the honor of presenting my friend and client Yuka Mizusawa of with an award at the annual event — we were very hype 🎉

8–10 Visited the .sogetsu.la exhibit at , and besides Kitajima Sensei’s amazing pieces, I also found a work by small biz client 👘

11 I was quoted in an article in the Japanese Economist KeizaiKan — my mom is still reeling from the shock 😆

12–14 Traveled to Vegas for the weekend to be a “booth girl” for my friends .usa and 👓 and also got to hang out with old and new friends — is always a super popular booth!

15–17 Wrapped up our “Fashion & Identity” month with x Little Tokyo Explorers. After a month of intentional programming on what inspires design, the kids got to make their own original fashion pieces at .

18–20 Dressed up in matching Halloween outfits with Naoko-san from , then got photobombed by in front of his Ohtani mural 🎨🥰

What a fun month! Next year I’ll plan ahead better and level up my Halloween costume game 👻

13/10/2025

Reintroducing myself 👋

Noticed a lot of new faces here recently, so a quick hello — I’m Mariko Lochridge, the person behind this account.

🗞️ Before moving into small business support, I worked in international journalism for over a decade, reporting and producing breaking news stories for Reuters and later Nippon Television. Most of my time was spent in the field covering breaking news and community recovery across Japan — experiences that shaped how I think about storytelling, resilience, and place. I’ve also interviewed a lot of Japanese professors and doctorates about robots 🤖 and machine learning technology.

🏮 Since 2018, I’ve been working with the Little Tokyo Service Center, supporting Nikkei-owned and legacy businesses in Los Angeles through bilingual (Japanese/English) technical assistance, storytelling, and preservation work.

💡 This account documents the impact of collective resources — how community partnerships, shared infrastructure, and cultural stewardship help small businesses survive and adapt.

🙏 Thanks for following along and for caring about the future of Little Tokyo and other historic neighborhoods like it.

24/12/2024

What a find!

I visited the yesterday and came across this interesting vendor 👩🏻‍🍳

I didn’t expect to find any places as I knew, as expected most were from famous Las Vegas resorts and iconic Hollywood hangouts but imagine my surprise to find the menu for Kawafuku!

The owner said that him and his wife (they’re both from Western Europe) came across this menu in France. It had been folded up, as though someone had hidden it into a jacket to take home as a souvenir.

Moments like this feel full circle considering that recently did a tribute to the Kawafuku menu earlier this year 🍲

I especially enjoyed the short description of the menu and restaurant on the back of each print.