16232 Pacific Coast Highway. Blue tile roof, the street number over the door, and the sign he drew at the kerb.
In memory of Kikuo Imamura · 16 November 1952-11 September 2023
Entrepreneur, restaurateur, creator. A devoted husband and a wonderful father. He crossed the Pacific, drove west to choose a town, and built a life in the one he picked. A life, a restaurant, and a family. Told by the people who were there, alongside what the newspapers of the time wrote down.
Where this family begins. Two people from the same corner of southern Japan, who married young, crossed an ocean, worked and saved, and then drove west to choose a town.
Born in Ebino, which sits at the far south-western corner of Miyazaki prefecture, pressed up against the Kagoshima border. He called himself a Kagoshima man. His mother, Shigeko Imamura, and his father, Yoshinori Imamura, ran the family supermarket there. He went to Fukuoka University and read law, and graduated in it.
Born on Amami Ōshima, the largest island of the Amami group, subtropical and ringed by open water, and part of Kagoshima prefecture. Known to everyone as Tomoe.
He grew up in a shop. His mother Shigeko and his father Yoshinori ran the family supermarket in Ebino, which means he was raised inside a business: stock, suppliers, margins, regulars, the daily arithmetic of a place that has to open tomorrow. That is where the family says his commercial instinct came from, and it shows up everywhere afterwards: a restaurant, a second restaurant, and then an import and export company. He did not learn trade in Orange County. He learned it in Miyazaki, behind a counter, as a boy.
They met while she was still in high school and he was at university, and married as soon as she turned eighteen. After he graduated they decided to go to America.
Atlanta, Georgia, on a friend’s referral, and work in a Japanese restaurant. Three hundred dollars each, six hundred between them. Kikuo took handyman work on top of it. They put their heads down until they had enough for a car, bought one, and drove roughly two thousand miles to Southern California.
They were not fleeing anywhere. They were shopping. Three places were under consideration: San Diego, Hawaii, and Huntington Beach. The trip was a survey. They went to look at Huntington Beach and stopped looking.
Two wages, a second job, one car, and a town chosen on sight.
It is worth pausing on what he had trained for. A law degree from a Kyushu university is a settled professional life in Japan, and he chose a different one. Whatever Daimon became, it was not the career he had prepared for. It was the one he chose instead, and then built from nothing twice, once crossing the Pacific, and again behind a sushi counter on Pacific Coast Highway that Americans had not yet learned to sit at.
And there is a symmetry in it that nobody arranged. She was born on an island in the middle of that ocean. He grew up a few hours north of it on Kyushu. They ended their working lives on the far shore of the same water, serving its fish.
Sunset Beach · Huntington Beach · 日本
In 1982 Kikuo and Midori Imamura opened a Japanese restaurant on a highway they had chosen on purpose. Stand in that parking lot and you are looking at the same water that touches Japan. He had crossed it. For twenty-three years the restaurant was, in a way, both shores at once, and the wave pattern behind these words is seigaiha, an old Japanese design meaning blue sea waves, drawn as good fortune arriving over and over without end.
It worked from opening night, and the teppan room was booming. The hard part was the sushi counter. Marketing the place took work, and persuading people who had never eaten raw fish to try it took more. So what he set out to do was not to be authentic. It was to be welcoming, how to make sushi feel approachable, beautiful, fun and creative to someone who had no reason to trust it.
Look at what came out of that. A roll named for its colours, arriving at the table in bands like something you would want to photograph before eating. Not only a recipe, an invitation, a thing a nervous first-timer can point at and grin.
And then the part worth remembering him for. He did not keep it. He turned to his own team of chefs and handed them the same idea. Now let’s get more creative. Go and make yours. And they did: Masahiro Ikuta and the team came back with the crunchy roll, doing the same thing a completely different way. In a trade where a good idea is usually held close, he handed the whole idea over and watched what came back. The people who knew him describe him as happy, funny and kind-hearted, and that instinct, giving it away to see what they do with it, is what that kind of man does with a good idea.
The room agreed with him. Steaks going up in flame at your table, a full bar, a place built for a night out rather than a shrine to tradition. A party, with very good fish.
They ran it for twenty-three years and sold it in 2005. What came after belongs to other people. This record is about the twenty-three.
He wrote the name 大紋, the large crest, and drew one. He said it out loud as 大門, the great gate, thrown open to welcome everyone. He was doing both the whole time.
The crest that hung over the parking lot, enlarged from the menu cover. The family holds that this is the Imamura family kamon, and that Kikuo Imamura drew it himself.
The mark is a five-petal blossom inside a double ring, with a radiating burst at its centre, a straight spear rising through the top, and a fan of lines closing it at the bottom. In colour, the petals are rose-pink; on the sign, black on a lit panel. The petals are drawn with notched, angular outer edges rather than smooth rounded ones.
This is the family’s own crest, and that changes how the irregularity reads. A kamon in a reference book is ruled: fixed proportions, standardised petals, the same mark every time. A kamon drawn from memory by the man whose family it belongs to is not. He was not designing a logo out of nothing and he was not copying a plate out of a book, he was drawing something he already knew, at sign scale, by hand. The ruffled petals and the slightly free geometry are exactly what that produces.
So the name and the mark say the same thing twice. 大紋 means large crest. He put his family's crest on the building, at the size of a road sign, and called the place after the act of doing it.
Two words, one sound. The family holds that Kikuo Imamura explained the name as a great gate, thrown open to welcome everyone. That is a real and exact meaning, but of different characters. 大門 is daimon, the main gate of a temple or a castle. 大紋 is also daimon, the large crest. They sound identical and are written differently.
The sign and the menu cover both carry 大紋, the crest characters. Enlargements of both confirm the same character, with the thread radical on the left. The written name is the crest. The spoken meaning he handed down is the gate.
In Japanese these are two separate words that happen to sound alike. In English they are not even that, romanised, they collapse into a single spelling. DAIMON on the sign is both words at once, and on a highway in California that is the only spelling most people would ever read. He kept the crest in the writing and the gate in the saying, and the English lettering held both without having to choose.
One name doing two jobs: this is who we are, and come in.
Kikuo Imamura loved beauty. The ocean he lived beside, the nature around it, and the way a rainbow takes separate colours and makes something better out of all of them together. That is where his roll came from.
The teppan room was busy from opening night. The sushi counter asked more of people: raw fish was unfamiliar to most American diners in 1982, and hesitating was reasonable.
He did not read that as rejection. He read it as a chance to make somebody curious. And the place he went looking was the same place he always went. Beauty. He lived on the coast and loved it. He loved a rainbow, and the way separate colours sitting alongside each other add up to something none of them manages alone.
So he laid different fresh fish in overlapping slices across the top of a roll, each one a different colour, and sent it out looking like exactly that. Kikuo Imamura’s rainbow roll.
It was never only about the fish. It was about making something beautiful enough that a stranger would stop, look, and want it. People eat with their eyes first. He was not asking anybody to understand sushi before they were allowed to enjoy it. He changed the invitation.
And then the creativity spread. Kikuo loved watching it happen. When the chefs and the team got an idea of their own he was delighted, and ideas came from everywhere: the coast, memories of Japan, something somebody’s family made at home, or simply a good night behind the counter.
The crunchy roll came out of a kitchen at home. Chef Masa, Masahiro Ikuta, had a wife who often made a favourite family food built on tenmusu, the Japanese pairing of tempura and rice, remembered as a kind of tempura musubi. That tradition is what the families remember feeding into the idea that became Daimon’s crunchy roll.
One roll came from the colours of the natural world. The other came from a family recipe carried across the Pacific. The caterpillar roll belongs to the same stretch of experimenting. Different memories met at one sushi bar, and Kikuo was happy to see it.
Other chefs have told their own stories about the rainbow roll, and we are not disputing any of them. Nobody wrote it down at the time, which is exactly why several honest accounts can sit alongside each other.
We are proud of every Japanese American chef, and every other cook, who made this food travel, including the ones telling a different version. This is our story and our father’s. It is not a claim against anybody else’s. We are asking history to make room for his.
A physical Daimon menu now exists in the record. Its cover is below. What the cover cannot do is name a dish or carry a date. The inside pages can do both, and a printer's mark on the back can do the second on its own.
It started with three men behind one counter, and over twenty-three years it grew into something much larger than a payroll.
Kikuo Imamura. The owner, and one of the three working the counter.
There from the beginning in 1982.
Masahiro Ikuta. There from the beginning, and the crunchy roll came from his family’s kitchen.
That was the original trio, the first chefs there when the story began. They cooked together, laughed together and entertained the room, and between them they set the personality the restaurant kept for the next two decades.
Kikuo was not an owner watching from the side of the room. He was Chef Kiku, on the counter beside Ken and Masa, working and having fun with them.
They were only the beginning. Across twenty-three years a great many people came through those doors and became part of the team. Chefs came and went, and so did kitchen staff, waiters, waitresses and hostesses who kept the place moving night after night. Every generation of that team added something of its own.
And the Daimon family was never only the people on the payroll. It took in longtime customers, regulars and friends, some of whom came so often that the relationship stopped being about dinner. Some were there at the opening. Some arrived years later. Some stayed for a decade and some for a single chapter. Together they made the place people remember.
Chefs. Kitchen teams. Waiters. Waitresses. Hostesses. Customers. Regulars. Friends.
The faces changed over twenty-three years and the team grew, and the family atmosphere stayed exactly where it was.
Daimon was two restaurants under one roof. The sushi counter was one way of making sushi easy to say yes to. The teppanyaki room was the other, and it was cooked in front of you.
A teppan chef is a cook and, for the length of dinner, the entertainment. The shrimp toss, a tail flicked up off the grill and caught, or sent across the table to a diner willing to open their mouth and trust the aim. Knives moving faster than looks sensible. Every trick the trade has, and the chefs here could do all of them.
It matters to the rest of this record more than it might look. Teppanyaki is the most welcoming form Japanese food has ever taken in America, and it is welcoming by construction. Nobody is nervous at a teppan table. You can see everything that happens to your food. Nothing is hidden, nothing needs explaining, and at the end of it you are eating steak.
So the same diagnosis was being answered twice, on two sides of one building, in two different keys. A family in 1982 who would never have sat down at a sushi counter would happily book a teppan table for somebody’s birthday. And once they were inside, the counter was right there, twenty feet away, with a roll on it the colour of a paint box.
What it records. Twelve entrees from a vegetarian dinner up through teppan chicken, calamari steak, New York steak, sukiyaki steak, filet mignon, shrimp, scallop, two Select Cut dishes carrying the Daimon name, a lobster dinner and Kobe beef. Then nineteen combinations, ending in three house plates, the Daimon Harbor Special, the Daimon Ocean Special, and Best of Land & Sea. Then side orders, down to fried rice and noodles. Eighteen per cent added for parties of four or more.
The teppan room was the way in. The sushi bar was what you found once you were through it. He named the place after a gate, and then built one, and hung いらっしゃいませ, welcome, over the counter at the end of it.
A workaholic who was never too busy for anyone, and a businessman whose actual subject was beauty.
He worked constantly. Three businesses at once: the restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway, the ramen shop in Stanton, and an import and export company founded in 1991. A man raised behind the counter of his parents’ supermarket, who never really left the shop floor.
But the work was never what he was about, and the family are clear on this. He was a caring father and a caring husband, and he was kind to everyone, which in a restaurant means the staff and the suppliers and the stranger at the counter equally, on the good nights and the quiet ones.
And he loved the beauty of the natural world. Look at what he chose and it is there every time. A family crest made of five blossoms, drawn by his own hand and hung above a parking lot at the size of a road sign. An ocean he crossed once and then chose to live beside, out of three options that included Hawaii. A roll whose entire idea is colour. Fish he insisted on regardless of how the night looked. He was out on the water at quarter to seven on a Sunday morning because that is where he wanted to be.
Put those together and the restaurant stops looking like a business with an aesthetic bolted on. The aesthetic was the business. He was not selling fish. He was trying to hand people something beautiful and watch them enjoy it.
Which is what made him a leader rather than an owner. Plenty of people run a good restaurant. Far fewer solve something worth keeping and then turn round and hand the same idea to the people working beside them. He did not want a kitchen that executed his ideas. He wanted a kitchen full of people having their own. The crunchy roll exists because of that, and so, presumably, do dishes nobody has thought to ask about.
He made the people around him more creative than they were before they met him. That is a harder thing to do than invent a roll, and it lasts longer.
Known to everyone as Tomoe. Co-founder of the restaurant, and the reason it stayed open.
She was born on Amami Ōshima, an island in the Kagoshima chain, subtropical and ringed by open water. She met Kikuo while she was still in high school and he was at university in Fukuoka, and they married as soon as she turned eighteen. Not long after, she left Japan for Georgia, took a wage of her own and saved beside him until they could buy a car, and then crossed a continent in it with a husband who had a law degree and every intention of doing something else with his life.
In 1982 they opened Daimon together. The record of what she did there is not a story about support. She ran staff, inventory, insurance and accounting, and not for one business but across all three: the restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway, Menkichi in Stanton, and DIT USA after 1991. Rotas, ordering, suppliers, premiums, the books. The part of a restaurant that nobody photographs and without which nothing opens tomorrow.
And she drove. Every day, the children went to the International Bilingual School in the South Bay, which is not close to Huntington Beach, and she took them. All three grew up professionally fluent in Japanese because of those drives. She did that on top of everything above, in the years the businesses were being built.
She is also the reason parts of this record exist at all. She remembers Daimon sponsoring professional surfers and collecting their signed boards. She remembers the free-roll promotions advertised on KROQ and announced on KIIS FM, and the queue running down Pacific Coast Highway with people waiting as long as three hours for a teppan table. They waited because they knew what kind of night it was going to be, and the team inside was ready for them.
“I feel so lucky that I was able to have this experience with him and to have Kikuo as my husband. He was courageous, fun, caring, kind and smart, and I was always so proud of him. He was a wonderful husband and father and always cared deeply about his family. We had a great team at Daimon, and people would sometimes wait three hours for a teppan table because they knew they were going to have a fun time. Looking back at everything we built and the family we created together, I feel very lucky that I got to share that life with him.”
Midori “Tomo” Imamura, Kikuo’s wife and co-founder of DaimonA photograph with a date and a name attached is a source. A photograph without them is an illustration. Every mount is captioned before it is filled, so that whatever goes in arrives already documented.
Two newspapers wrote about Daimon while Kikuo and Tomo were running it, and both are worth reading.
In April 1991 the Los Angeles Times compared the welcome at Daimon to the television bar Cheers, and described sushi chefs in surfer T-shirts and jeans, new-wave music, sake toasts, and teppan chefs working jokes, knife tricks and food thrown through the air. In August 2002 the Daily Pilot went back, set down why the Imamuras had built the place that way, and concluded they had done what they set out to do.
Los Angeles Times, 4 April 1991: “Good Cheers Just Part of the Tradition”
Los Angeles Times / Daily Pilot, 8 August 2002: “Authentic Japanese cuisine, feel and style at Daimon”
We are looking for anyone who remembers Daimon between 1982 and 2005. Chefs, kitchen teams, waiters, waitresses, hostesses, customers, regulars, friends, surfers. If you have a photograph, an old menu, an advertisement, a newspaper clipping, a signed board or simply a good night you remember, we would like to hear it.
We are especially looking for dated menus from the early years, and for the names of everyone who worked there, so that the people who built the place are remembered alongside it.
Photographs and contributions are credited by name.
The rainbow roll, crunchy roll and caterpillar roll accounts here are Imamura and Ikuta family recollection, remembered by the people who were there rather than drawn from documents. Other chefs and restaurants have their own accounts. This page covers the years Kikuo and Midori Imamura ran Daimon, 1982 to 2005, and is not affiliated with later owners or with any business now trading at the address.