Taste of Japan's Newest Collaboration

There's a particular kind of experience that comes with eating Japanese food inside a space actually built for it, not a folding table under a festival tent, but a room designed around the idea that a shared meal is its own form of culture. That's the experience Tanoshii Project is bringing to Little Tokyo this August with Sushi Pop, a three-hour dining experience in collaboration with JACCC.

The setting is the Toshizo Watanabe Culinary Cultural Center, tucked inside JACCC’s campus, a space built specifically to hold food as cultural expression. Expect the kind of spread that leans into abundance and craft at once: nigiri built around prized cuts like bluefin tuna, delicate rolls, sashimi sliced to order, tempura fried light and crisp, skewered yakitori, and the smaller, easily missed dishes like onsen tamago that round out a proper Japanese meal rather than just filling a plate.

Alongside the food, expect an emphasis on drink as its own kind of craft, a rotating selection of Japanese sake and beer meant to be tasted and compared. And running underneath all of it is sound: a live DJ built around city pop, the breezy, nostalgic sound of 1980s Japan, turning the room into something closer to a listening bar than a standard buffet hall.

What ties it together is Little Tokyo itself. This is one of the last remaining Japantowns in the country, a neighborhood where food has always carried more weight than simple sustenance, it's memory, identity, and continuity, passed down through generations of restaurants and markets that never stopped operating even through the neighborhood's hardest years. Sitting down to eat inside JACCC means sitting down inside that history, whether or not it's the first thing on your mind while reaching for another piece of nigiri.

For the Tanoshii Project, known for building large Japanese food and culture festivals across Southern California since 2019, this collaboration marks a shift in scale but not in spirit. The mission is the same one that's brought them to Anaheim, Long Beach, and Phoenix, using food as a way to connect people with Japanese culture, just now inside a room built with exactly that purpose in mind, in a neighborhood that understands better than most what it means to keep a culture alive through what gets served at the table.

It's less about a single meal and more about what that meal represents: a living tradition, still finding new rooms to fill.

Want to experience it for yourself? Learn more and buy tickets to Sushi Pop, happening on August 22, 2026 from 4:00 pm - 7:00 pm.