Olympic Swimming Pool

A few weeks ago, when I did my interview, Seiko Fujimoto took me to Japantown’s merchant meeting. In that meeting, merchants expressed their concerns. Two experts in marketing also attended the meeting. These experts taught the merchants about how to brand and market their products.

The merchants discussed about the need to bring younger crowd and other customers to spend more time in Japantown. To achieve the goal, the merchants wanted more parks and playgrounds for the family. The owner of Japantown also started to decorate Japantown. For example, the talk of the month was the new “Olympic swimming pool” in front of Murata’s Café Hana. The merchants said the swimming-pool-like fountain was weird. Fujimoto said she did not know what that thing was. It seemed the business owner was quite desperate to save their businesses.




Before this semester, I did not pay that much attention to Japantown. I did not even realize if Japantown was actually trying so hard to stay afloat. It was like a sinking ship. At the merchant’s meeting, many of the merchants said they had a decline in sales. One merchant even said last month was a month of no sales and it never happened before. This was definitely an alarming thing. My question: as many ethnic-based neighborhood decreasing in sizes, will Japantown be gone too (especially if the “rejuvenating” plan called Japantown Better Neighborhood takes place)?