It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region,

and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

Hey, I'm Catherine Nagasawa.

When Irene Brown was a kid in the 90s, her family used to take trips to Chicago's Japan town.

At least, that's what her mom used to call it.

It was a cluster of Japanese restaurants and businesses on the north side

in the Lakeview neighborhood near Belmont and Clark Streets.

Now, Irene's family isn't Japanese.

But her family like to drive in from the suburbs to shop for ingredients

for the Japanese recipes they like to try

out. If you wanted to buy rice noodles, you couldn't just go into any store or order it on Amazon.

You had to actually go to the Japanese neighborhood. The shops and restaurants Irene remembers

were actually the remnants of a small but thriving Japanese-American neighborhood. At its peak in the 70s, there were around 150 Japanese-American-owned establishments in the area.

And right in the middle was the Nise Lounge Bar near Clark and Sheffield.

It was named after the Nise, or second-generation Japanese Americans, who lived in the neighborhood.

My dad would be sitting there watching the Cubs games,

and it'd be all Japanese Americans, Nisei, is here at the time.

That's Paul Yamauchi, who as a kid would work in his dad's restaurant, the hamburger king.

It was next door to the Nisei lounge.

My pay was a bowl of chili and fries, and there was a door here that connected the Nisei Lounge.

The Nisei Lounge is still there, but Irene says nearly all of the other Japanese shops and restaurant she remembers are gone.

To Guri Mercantile, where she went shop for pottery and chopsticks, is now an improv comedy theater.

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