Howard says she's never pushy when she sees people struggling to read ingredients or looking puzzled at all the soy sauce offerings. Thirteen years ago, Takashi Nagashima sought to tap into what he saw as a potential market created by Mazda's arrival, and he began looking around for a location for his franchise of the Chicago-based Koyama Shoten chain. He liked the northwest corner of Metro Detroit, seeing it as a growing area and one in which many Japanese would choose to settle. His hunch about the area paid off as the Livonia location eventually became known as Little Japan. Nagashima says he's always happy to help customers who can't understand any of the Japanese packages, and his assistant, Akiko, who speaks English quite well, is also very familiar with all the stock in the store.
Some soy is sweet, others very strong, another one has more salt.
And for those who can't have sodium, there's a totally sodium-free sauce. Even though Koyama Shoten doesn't have a full-service sushi bar like Noble Fish and One World Market, Nagashima is happy to make sushi for some of his lunchtime customers. Open 7 days. Sushi bar open daily except Monday. There's a reason the apartment complex located behind the market is home to mostly Japanese.