Mochi ice cream was invented in Los Angeles: the Mikawaya story

If you have ever bitten through a cool, faintly chewy skin into a frozen core of green tea or strawberry ice cream, you have eaten a dessert that was conceived in Little Tokyo, a few blocks from Los Angeles City Hall. Mochi ice cream — the bite-sized orb of ice cream wrapped in a thin sheet of sweet pounded rice — is not a centuries-old import. It was invented in the early 1990s by a Los Angeles confectionery family, and the company that made it, Mikawaya, spent more than a century as one of the anchors of Japanese American Los Angeles before its Little Tokyo flagship finally closed in 2021 ^[1][2][3].

A wagashi shop, founded 1910

Mikawaya began in 1910 as a maker of wagashi — the delicate traditional Japanese confections served with tea: mochi, manju, daifuku, dango, yokan ^[1]. For Japanese immigrants building a community in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles, a wagashi shop was not a novelty boutique; it was infrastructure. Wagashi marked New Year, weddings, funerals, temple festivals, and the changing seasons. Mikawaya, set up in the dense few square blocks of Little Tokyo, became the place where that calendar of sweets was kept.

The shop’s twentieth century was shaped by the same catastrophe that shaped every Japanese American institution: Executive Order 9066 and the wartime incarceration. The Hashimoto family, who would come to own and run Mikawaya, were among the roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry forced from the West Coast; they were sent to the Poston camp in the Arizona desert ^[2]. Little Tokyo emptied. When the war ended, Japanese Americans returning to Los Angeles found a neighborhood that had been occupied and remade in their absence, and they rebuilt their businesses out of that loss. Mikawaya was one of the institutions that came back.

Frances Hashimoto takes over

Frances Hashimoto was born at Poston ^[2]. She grew up in and around the family business and, in 1970, became Mikawaya’s president — a young Japanese American woman running a legacy confectionery in a Little Tokyo that was once again under pressure, this time from redevelopment and the slow attrition of small ethnic shops ^[2]. She is remembered in Los Angeles as much for her civic work — she was a force behind Little Tokyo’s Nisei Week festival and its preservation campaigns — as for what happened next inside the Mikawaya kitchen ^[2].

The invention, early 1990s

The leap came from Frances Hashimoto’s husband, Joel Friedman. The idea was disarmingly simple: take daifuku — the classic wagashi of a soft mochi shell wrapped around a sweet filling, traditionally red bean paste — and swap the filling for a frozen scoop of ice cream ^[2]. The execution was not simple at all. Ice cream and mochi want opposite things: ice cream needs to stay frozen hard, while mochi turns brittle and cracks at freezer temperatures. Getting a mochi skin thin enough to bite cleanly, pliable enough to survive the freezer, and stable enough to ship took real food engineering. Frances Hashimoto led the work that turned the concept into a manufacturable product, and built it out into a line of about seven flavors — green tea, vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, mango, and others ^[2][3].

By the 1990s and 2000s, Mikawaya’s mochi ice cream had escaped Little Tokyo. It went into Japanese and Asian grocery stores, then into mainstream American supermarkets, then onto the dessert menus of countless restaurants that bought it wholesale. For a long stretch, if you ate mochi ice cream anywhere in the United States, there was a good chance it came out of Mikawaya’s plant ^[3].

My/Mo and the mass market

Frances Hashimoto died in 2012 ^[2]. A few years later the mochi-ice-cream business was relaunched and aggressively scaled under the brand My/Mo Mochi Ice Cream, which pushed the format into freezer aisles nationwide and made “mochi ice cream” a category that other companies — including large ice cream makers — rushed to copy ^[3]. The dessert that had started as one Little Tokyo shop’s clever riff on daifuku became a supermarket staple with its own grab-and-pop merchandising.

The Little Tokyo flagship closes — 111 years

On June 29, 2021, the original Mikawaya store in Little Tokyo closed after 111 years, another loss in a years-long thinning of the neighborhood’s old businesses, accelerated by the pandemic ^[3]. The brand and the My/Mo line continued — mochi ice cream was, by then, far bigger than any single storefront — but the closure ended the physical thread that ran from a 1910 immigrant wagashi shop, through Poston, through Frances Hashimoto’s office, to the invention of the dessert.

Why this is an LA story

Mochi ice cream is sometimes assumed to be an ancient Japanese sweet because its two ingredients — mochi and a cold filling — are both old. But the specific thing in the freezer case was designed in Los Angeles, by a Japanese American family whose own history runs straight through the West Coast incarceration, and it was Frances Hashimoto, born in a desert camp, who turned her husband’s idea into a product the rest of the country would eventually take for granted. The Little Tokyo store is gone; the dessert is everywhere; and the line from one to the other is a Los Angeles line ^[1][2][3].