A look back at the 1980s riverfront: today this is Water Works Pavilion, but for decades it was home to Fuji-Ya. It was Minnesota’s first Japanese restaurant and a trailblazer in introducing sushi and teppanyaki to the Twin Cities. The building sat on historic mill ruins and helped lay the groundwork for the revitalized riverfront and parkland we enjoy today. Fuji-Ya was founded by Reiko Umetani Weston, a true visionary who opened her first Minneapolis restaurant in 1959 featuring her mother’s traditional Japanese cooking. She expanded to the riverfront in 1968 at a time when Japanese American representation in the region was rare and helped spark new interest in transforming the industrial riverfront into a vibrant public space. These MPRB site photos (1980 and 1994) show the building during different moments in its history. In the 1994 photo, the windows appear boarded over, but the original architectural design by Newton Griffin, based on a plan by Shinichi Okada, was meant to be ...