Decades before Great Wall Supermarket opened in 1988 as Pacific Ocean Market, and before the first H Mart arrived in 2004, small Asian grocery stores served individual communities, like in the South Federal Little Saigon business district, or the Koreatown strip of South Havana in Aurora. But the area’s first Asian market, Pacific Mercantile, served the Japanese community.
The store opened in downtown Denver in 1945 after World War II, in the heart of what used to be a thriving Japantown along Larimer Street, stretching from 19th to 36th Streets. Now, after decades of change in the community that surrounds it, the founders’ great-granddaughter is preparing to take ownership of the beloved staple.
A History Lesson
After World War II, both Pacific Mercantile and Granada Fish Market opened in Denver. Granada Fish Market was opened by a former incarceree from the Amache concentration camp in southeast Colorado, who had helped run a fish market in the town of Granada that served both the townspeople and the camp’s prisoners.
Pacific Mercantile was opened by George Inai, who had been incarcerated with his family at Tule Lake in California and then at Topaz in Utah. He resettled after the war in Denver because of Colorado Governor Ralph Carr, who had opposed the incarceration of Japanese Americans…