Mitsuwa Marketplace

Mitsuwa's Irvine location opened in 2011.

Inside the former Torrance location. The grocery store is to the left, the main food court upper right, and specialty stores selling books and videos lower right. It was closed in 2019, with the new location at the Del Amo Fashion Center opening in February 2020.

Mitsuwa has seven stores in four metropolitan areas in California:

• San Francisco Bay Area
  • San Jose
• Los Angeles area
  • Torrance
  • San Gabriel
  • West Los Angeles
• Orange County area
  • Costa Mesa
  • Irvine
• San Diego area
  • San Diego

The Los Angeles location of Mitsuwa Marketplace in the Little Tokyo neighborhood closed in 2009.[3] In 2019, Torrance closed the location in Old Town Torrance and reopened within the Del Amo Fashion Center in February 2020.[4] The former building was then demolished in 2023.

• Honolulu area
  • Honolulu

The second-floor Honolulu store is located in the International Market Place in Waikiki, Honolulu.[5][6]

• Dallas/Fort Worth area
  • Plano

Mitsuwa entered the Dallas/Fort Worth area with a store in Plano, an upper-middle-class northern suburb of Dallas. The store, which opened in the spring of 2017, is near North Central Expressway and Legacy Drive.[7][8]

Okonomiyaki sauce for sale in Arlington Heights, Illinois

The Chicago area store is at 100 E. Algonquin Road in Arlington Heights, Illinois — part of a number of Japanese businesses in Arlington Heights — and opened in 1991. The store is open 365 days a year[9] from 9 am to 9 pm. Mitsuwa is the largest Japanese marketplace in the Midwestern US. The Chicago store is one of three that are east of the Rockies. This Mitsuwa location, like those in other states, was formerly known as Yaohan.

The food court has many traditional foods, such as sushi, tempura, noodles, etc. It is made of the Otafuku-tei (now replaced by Gabutto Burger), Kayaba, Santouka Ramen, Releaf Matcha, Jockey Express, Daikichi Sushi, Pastry House Hippo, and Mama House restaurants. Mitsuwa hosts the JTB travel agency. There are two entertainment shops in Mitsuwa Chicago, JBC Video, a Japanese video rental store, and Kinokuniya, a Japanese book shop that sells stationery, novels, manga, and other imported media. A cell phone store, Galaxy Wireless, is at the Chicago Mitsuwa.

Mitsuwa Chicago had a china store called 'Utsuwa no Yakata'. This store closed on April 1, 2006. Kinokuniya bookstore, which had expanded into the area previously owned by a China store, has been replaced by SanSeiDo.

The location has two personal care shops, Shiseido, a Japanese cosmetics store, and Super Health, a vitamin and other health supplement store.

Mitsuwa New Jersey Store

The Edgewater, New Jersey store is located on 595 River Road. It has a food court, a bookstore owned by Kinokuniya, a gift shop selling Bape clothing and golf clubs, a video store that carries DVDs and Laserdiscs of movies and a store selling Japanese ceramics and denki-gama, making Mitsuwa more of a mini-mall than a traditional supermarket. It is a small taste of what current Japanese multi-story malls, or subway stations, are like.

The supermarket section sells fresh produce and certified Angus beef, as well as Japanese drinks and snacks such as Yakult, Calpis, Ramune, Ikechi Shrimp Chips, Pocari Sweat, Pocky, Pretz, and Japanese liquor such as Sake and Shōchū.

The Books Kinokuniya bookstore section sells Japanese music CDs, novels, job applications, children's books, manga, and imported magazines (including dozens of Japanese fashion magazines) such as Weekly Shonen Jump and Disney Fan.

There is also a kiosk that sells Ito En tea and Minamoto Kitchoan that sells Japanese sweets such as manju, mochi, and Inja.

A Daiso "100-yen shop" location opened at the marketplace in August 2019.[10]

The New Jersey location used to run an exclusive shuttle bus between the store and the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. The bus transported Mitsuwa customers for a nominal fee and it did not make any stops along its route. The service was terminated on December 31, 2014.[11]