I learned a couple of months ago that Ittoku was closing its Brighton location and relocating to a new space in Porter Square. I'm still unsure of the exact date but sometime soon Ittoku will live among a number of other Japanese restaurants at Porter Exchange. The news was a little surprising because I’d always lazily assumed Ittoku would remain in Brighton, possibly forever, serving its delightful plates of Japanese bar food to anyone who had the great fortune to discover the izakaya. Nothing is forever, I guess, but although I’ve learned that permanence is at best a salesperson’s buzzword, I still can't quite get used to change, like the way even spending an entire summer swimming every day never lessened the shock of that first moment when I jumped into the cold water.
Once I thought through the logic, I found the decision completely understandable. Ittoku is currently in a terrible location. This isn’t just another classic TOA cheap shot at Brighton. Getting to Ittoku is basically impossible. There is no available parking within a reasonable distance, a fact underscored by their longtime valet parking service. The bike ride could be a mountain stage in the Tour de France, the steep inclines being further complicated by the buses, cars, and pedestrians that seem intent on getting you killed before you reach your destination. The only ‘reliable’ public transportation is the Green Line’s B branch, a line that has made its name in the city with its unique combination of frequent delays, the slowest moving trains in the region, and the half dozen stops that service the BU campus.
These problems all stem from Ittoku being located next to nothing. One of Brighton’s only appealing features is the ease of wandering from one block to the next, relying on the naked eye to pick out an interesting bar or restaurant that had gone unnoticed during prior internet searches. For a night out in Brighton, the best itinerary is itinerant lest the advantages of rootlessness go wasted. This does not apply to Ittoku given the lack of any destination within a reasonable walk of the storefront. I suppose this point is reinforced by how its nearest Hubway docks – er, I mean Blue Bike docks – remain stuck at the outer edges of the ever-expanding bike share system. The only thing harder than finding Ittoku is finding home from Ittoku.
Porter Square solves for each and every problem I outlined above. In Porter, Ittoku will be easier to access, will be in a neighborhood with higher foot traffic, and will likely attract more drop-ins from the popular eateries with which it will soon share a mailing address. History perhaps supplies the only possible objection. My brother has smartly pointed out that the new location is ‘cursed’, a theory based on two and a half decades of carefully observing one idea after another fail in the same location, but I know history guarantees nothing except for change. The same concern was once raised about Stats, a bar just a few blocks over from my first Boston apartment. I still remember how whispers about the past faded away once Stats established its credentials within those cursed walls as the most popular bar in the neighborhood.
So yes, curses notwithstanding I found the relocation decision entirely understandable. And yet, despite how sensible I thought the move would be from a business perspective, something felt wrong to me. If I am to be fully honest, I just didn't like the idea of Ittoku moving out. I noticed this feeling on the first couple of visits I made to Ittoku after I learned about the relocation. There was something missing that I hadn't considered about the relocation and this was bothering me during these visits. As I looked around the familiar interior and thought about which decorations from these walls would make it to the new home in Porter, I tried in vain to put my finger on exactly what I was experiencing.
About a month or so later, I was wandering around Boston as I do from time to time and thinking about the future. The big question on my mind was moving and whether starting over was a reasonable idea. At the time, I was primarily concerned about being thorough with the process because the last thing I wanted to do was to make a hurried decision. I figured having a better job opportunity than what I could muster in Boston was a good start and so I’d started browsing openings from a shortlist of cities I determined might be a good fit for me. Of course, the other half of it was that if I’d honestly applied the criteria I’d used to draw up my shortlist, the best fit was Boston, and Boston boasted plenty of opportunity. Was I already where I was trying to go? Things were, you could say, delicately poised, and it wasn’t clear whether I was looking for a good reason to stay or a good reason to leave.
It was in this period of contemplation that I realized how there wasn't a single place in the area where I held solely positive associations. This doesn’t mean I had no happy memories – it just means that everything around me was heavy, weighed down by a delicate balance of remembered joys and sorrows. It was never clear to me on a given day how these scales might tip. One evening, I might have enjoyed a stroll down the picturesque Charles Street. The next day, the same trip might remind me of feeling completely alone for the first time in my life as I walked home after visiting my mom in hospice. Another day might see me take in a beautiful morning as I crossed the Mass Ave bridge on bike or foot. And yet, the same path sometimes reminded me of how I’d once dragged myself across the bridge, dead inside after losing my job. This process seemed to play out anywhere I went, each location housing its own blend of reminders about the ups and downs I had accumulated over nearly a decade of calling the same city home.
One day, I recognized that there was one exception, one place where I’d managed to keep the walls unadorned with my negativity, and that place was Ittoku. I just cannot associate a bad memory with the restaurant. Every single guest I’ve introduced to the place has loved it. I’ve celebrated more important occasions there in the past four years than I have in every other local restaurant combined. I’ve dined there countless times to catch up with old friends and I’ve gotten to know new people there who have since become important parts of my life. Even the very idea for TOA was hatched at a table in the bar area!
I admit my surprise that Ittoku has made it so long without my associating it with a single bad memory. I’ve been going for just over four years and this period of my life has been no picnic. The first time I went to Ittoku was right around the end of June 2015 when my dad, brother, and I were spending a lot of time with my mom while she was hospitalized at Brigham and Women’s hospital. We were just in that swerve lane between continuing treatment and starting hospice care and I was overcome with an urge to write down as much as possible in a journal. One of its first entries is written on the back of a Yelp review about Ittoku that I had printed out on June 29. I remember my mom’s tired reaction to my report about the restaurant, a perfectly understandable response given how her cancer had limited her meals over the prior three months to only the smallest morsels of food. Mom never improved enough in hospice to have a meal with me at Ittoku. It was a lost opportunity because I know she would have very much enjoyed the izakaya.
However, in an entirely unanticipated development, her never having set foot inside the restaurant must have protected me from experiencing any difficult feelings of loss or grief when I went there after her death. Given that Ittoku is a Japanese restaurant, I suppose this lack of association seems somewhat unlikely, but since my mom rarely cooked the food that I've enjoyed at Ittoku, their menu items don't remind me of her dishes. There have been some close calls over the past four years, moments where it seemed likely that I was about to force an association, but events conspired to stop me in my tracks. A few months after her death, for example, Japanese cousins swung through Boston for a day to visit her grave - we surely would have gone out to dinner but their early train to New York meant we didn't have enough time for a trip to the inaccessible Ittoku. And then there were those clumsy attempts on the anniversary of her death, July 12, to go to Ittoku for dinner - each time, the restaurant was inexplicably closed for some form of routine maintenance.
In a city I was increasingly recognizing for its lack of solely positive spaces, I saw Ittoku as a hypothesis that the future can have no obligation to the past. Their humble walls always checked certain feelings at the door so that I could peacefully enjoy the next couple of hours without carrying the weight of memory. It is difficult to overstate the magic of the place. Each time I went to Ittoku, the safety, comfort, and anticipation I felt was a lot like being a little kid again, coming home from a summer day at the pool and having my mom ask me if I wanted anything to eat.
I suppose there is something appropriate about Ittoku moving, out of all places, to Porter Square. Porter was the first place I remember going to in Boston after moving here from Japan. We traveled there by train to find specific grocery items like natto, browse the catalog in the nearby Japanese bookstore, and, most importantly, eat lunch at Sapporo Ramen. For most of my childhood years, my mom chaperoned us on these trips made during school vacations or special weekends. Porter Square is home to enough personal history that my adult experiences at Sapporo Ramen have been essentially the opposite of those at Ittoku - the food is poignantly familiar, the routine of the place transports me across decades, and the memories of lunch there with my mom remain vivid after all these years.
And yet, I go back, and I go back often, diving headfirst into a mixture of emotions each time. I've gone to Sapporo Ramen with friends and family on my birthday and I've gone alone to think over important decisions. I don't go back seeking the same sense of protection that I know from Ittoku. Rather, I return with a broadening understanding that it's important to go to places where recollections are easily stirred and the ghosts of the past bring fleeting insights to questions about the future. It doesn't matter that these ghosts have no new information - they only exist in my memory, after all, and their wisdom remains limited by my recall. What's important is that the past represents a vital part of who I am and reminding myself of my experiences ensures I don't leave my values behind when I think about my next move.
Ittoku may have demonstrated to me the joy of a future that unfolds without obligation to the past but this doesn't mean every good future starts by blocking out unwanted thoughts or feelings. The protection offered by walls sometimes comes at the expense of keeping you locked inside. If you can't confront what's happening, you can't start the process of moving forward. The trick is to find resilience so that you can focus on what to do next when the protection you've always relied on isn't sufficient to block everything out. With resilience, we can dive in and move forward even if it shocks us at first. I recognized this in my mixed feelings about Boston - even though I struggled to find places where my happy recollections weren't cancelled out by some negative memory, the fact that I've continued living here and walking the same streets where I once struggled has real meaning. It isn't so much about being happy where I live, it's more about knowing that I live in a place where I can bounce back, and I know I can do so again because I've already done it. It's about having roots in a place where if I get cut down, I know I can grow again because the foundation I need is there for me.
It's too bad that Ittoku is moving out of a home that I've come to share and love over the past four years. I'm not sure I'll have that same feeling of protection and comfort in another place for quite some time but I know I've been taught well to embrace this relatively trivial change. The first thing we all learn from our mothers is how to crave that feeling of protection and comfort because it's fundamental to thriving as we learn about our place in the world. I suppose eventually the first thing we fear is losing this feeling as we move out of familiar surroundings and explore the possibilities beyond our protective walls. Our mothers teach us about this one, too, by showing us the resilience needed to move forward through uncertainty and reminding us that we always stay connected to what we've shared and loved. One day, we are faced with perhaps the toughest challenge of all, a loss encompassed by the disappearance of a lifelong teacher, and it's all we can do to keep tabs on the past until the searing memories can be looked at again with unprotected eyes. Eventually, we teach ourselves that meaning in events, things, and places is really a matter of how we think, feel, and talk about them. When the walls talk, it's only a selective echo of our own thoughts, our own words, and our own memories. When the walls talk, it's time to talk back, and create new meaning so that the past informs a better future. All things come and go, even the walls that once made a home, but the one thing we can't lose is home as long as we remember that home is anyplace we find to share and love our roots.
