When I make butter mochi, I always pick up a box of Koda Farms’s mochiko, or sweet rice flour.Recently, I noticed there’s a recipe for chocolate mochi — not butter mochi — on the box ...

At Sakuraya, a traditional Japanese mochi shop in Gardena, two brothers work to preserve 64 years of family tradition, as long as their bodies will last.

But stores run by Japanese Americans are a special breed, and there are a vanishing few. Benkyodo in San Francisco’s Japantown is expected to close at the end of the year. More widely, the Japantown ...