Hidden Gem: Japanese bakery Kogetsu-Do in Fresno’s China town

Lynn Ikeda continues a century-old family tradition of making Japanese pastries from her grandfather’s secret recipes in Fresno’s Chinatown.

She owns the Kogetsu-Do bakery, which is the only one of its kind in the San Joaquin Valley. Kogetsu-Do is Japanese for “lake moon.” Her immigrant grandfather, Sugimatsu, chose that name when he opened in 1915 on Kern Street. The business moved to its current location on F Street in 1920.

People come to the bakery from throughout the state. “I wouldn’t be here without my customers, friends and people who find me on Yelp,” Ikeda says. Mochi — a sweet rice flour dough wrapped around fruit or bean paste — is among the most popular pastries. Fruit options include apricot, blueberry, boysenberry, cherry, cinnamon apple and peach. Ikeda gets her fruit from local farmers, and she features whatever fruit is in season. She also uses her grandfather’s small branding irons to imprint a crane or a rose on the pastries, displayed in the same wooden boxes and glass cases he used.

As a child, Ikeda watched her grandfather work and heard his stories of continuing his craft even when the family was wrongly imprisoned with other Japanese-Americans during World War II. Her father, Mas, and her uncle, Roy, worked with their father in the bakery after the war. Ikeda was a girl in the 1960s when she started sweeping the floor and cleaning the windows at the bakery.

She earned a degree in criminology from Fresno State but took over the bakery in the late 1970s when her father became ill. “There is a lot of history here. I think of all the families who knew my parents and my grandparents,” she says. “I just didn’t want to see it die.”

Ikeda, now 62, says her daughter is not interested in running the bakery. “It’s going to go with me. It’s a dying trade,” she says. But the good news is that Ikeda has no plans to retire anytime soon.

Her grandfather — who continued to work into his 80s — set an example she hopes to follow. “I might move a little slower, but I’m going to keep on doing it,” Ikeda says with a smile.

This story was originally published March 16, 2018 at 6:04 PM with the headline "Hidden Gem: Japanese bakery Kogetsu-Do in Fresno’s China town."