Masanori Arai was 19 years old when he picked up the magazine that would inspire him to move to the other side of the world and then spend the rest of his life in Ottawa.
It was 1979. Arai was in a book store in Sendai, his hometown in northern Japan. Flipping through a magazine, he read an article that mentioned the restaurant Suisha Gardens in Ottawa. The article so captivated Arai that he was moved to write the owner of Suisha Gardens and propose that he work for him as a dishwasher. The 10,000 km separating Sendai and Ottawa were no impediment.Sign up to receive daily headline news from the Ottawa SUN, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.
Rejection letters that C’est Japon a Suisha owner Mike Arai received from previous owner Frank Tashima. Arai was eventually hired and started working at the restaurant in 1981, when he was in his early 20s.Arai got his landed immigrant status, as Teshima suggested. Then Arai moved to Ottawa in September 1981 and started as a bartender, doing the same job he had done at Narita International Airport, east of Tokyo. In the mid-1990s, Arai bought the restaurant from Teshima.
Teshima said he grew up a poor farm boy in the south of Japan and came to Vancouver in 1968 with $712 to his name. Not long after Teshima arrived, while he was working at the Kobe Steak House in Vancouver, he was recruited to work at Japanese Village in Ottawa. The Slater Street restaurant still has its huge water wheel outside its entrance. As part of the restaurant’s decor, water trickling down crevices and around raised rocks in the downstairs dining area, which is filled with tatami rooms and private spaces.
Teshima said that when his restaurant introduced sushi to Ottawa food-lovers, it took time for raw fish to catch on. He took out newspaper and radio ads and even staged sushi demonstrations in high schools. By 1991, Arai had returned to Ottawa and was managing the Suisha Gardens here. Four years later, he bought the location from Teshima, who eventually sold his other locations, except for the restaurant in Niagara Falls. Teshima, 86, still owns that location, which Lisa, 50, manages.
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