The Brief

The tourism industry in Los Angeles, still rebounding from the pandemic, has gotten a rare gift in the form of Shohei Ohtani.

Since the baseball season started in March, Japanese fans have come by the thousands to L.A. despite a historically weak yen, in hopes of seeing the two-way star slug a home run.

The surge is apparent at the Miyako, a mid-sized, unassuming hotel in Little Tokyo that has become a top attraction for Japanese visitors because of its proximity to Dodger Stadium — just 2 miles away — and a 15-story, very ‘grammable mural of Ohtani covering one of its exterior walls.

Inside the Miyako, workers at the Okayama Kobo bakery in the lobby, sell Japanese-style pastries shaped like blue Dodger helmets while reporting that their Japanese is vastly improving from more Japanese guests coming through the door.

A top seller at the Okayama Kobo Bakery inside the Miyako Hotel are Japanese-style pastries shaped like Dodger helmets.

One traveler from Osaka, Megu Adachi, was in the lobby last week checking in with several other friends. They had tickets to watch Ohtani play, or as Adachi fondly called him, yakyu shonen — a kid obsessed with baseball.

“Baseball only!” Adachi emphasized in English.

Tens of thousands of Japanese fans are coming to see Shohei Ohtani play at Dodger Stadium.

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L.A.’s tourism industry eagerly welcomes international travelers for their tendency to stay longer and spend more than domestic visitors, said Adam Burke, president and CEO the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board.

With travel down from China, the biggest pre-pandemic source of overseas visitors to L.A., other countries such as Japan are proving to be increasingly important sources of tourism dollars.

Because of Ohtani's appeal — not to mention the Dodgers also signing of Japanese pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto — Japan this year may surpass visitor numbers for markets like the U.K. and Australia.

“We could be over 400,000 Japanese visitors," Burke said. "It would absolutely make it one of our top four international markets.”

Leading Japanese tour operator JTB alone plans to bring as many as 25,000 customers to watch Shohei play this season.

Osuke Ishiguro, who manages the agency’s L.A. office, said many customers are paying to see multiple games. Some of them are very casual baseball fans, but were stunned to see Ohtani secure his record-breaking $700 million, 10-year contract with a storied franchise.

“They found out he’s a superstar,” Ishiguro said. “So a lot of people want to just see the game, how he does and how he reacts.”

Shift to South Bay

When the Dodgers are playing at home, half of the Miyako's rooms are occupied by Japanese tourists, said general manager Akira Yuhara. Before Ohtani’s arrival, they had little reason to visit Little Tokyo, Yuhara said, noting some perceive downtown as dangerous.

“Especially this area, they don't want to come,” Yuhara said.

Though it is a cultural hub for Japanese Americans that's rooted in history, Little Tokyo is not widely known in Japan, Yuhara said.

Akira Yuhara, general manager of the Miyako Hotel in Little Tokyo, has seen a big uptick in visitors from Japan since Ohtani started playing on the Dodgers.

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Rather, the most famous L.A.-area attractions are Disneyland, Hollywood, Santa Monica and Universal Studios, home to the new Super Nintendo World co-designed by Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.

Yuhara said Japanese businesspeople coming to work in L.A. typically end up staying in the South Bay, where SoCal’s Japanese American population center shifted after World War II.

It’s also where scores of Japanese companies like Honda and All Nippon Airways have located their U.S. operations, and where many of their employees live, eat, bank and shop.

Yuhara said a sister hotel he manages in Torrance has traditionally been more popular with Japanese travelers.

If they want a photographic souvenir of Ohtani, they need go no farther than neighboring Hermosa Beach, which has its own mural of the superstar.

But the pull of Ohtani has more travelers traveling up the 110 Freeway and squeezing in a stay downtown.

A mural of Shohei Ohtani on the outside wall of Oceanview Liquor Store in Hermosa Beach.

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“Even when we don't have a game today, they go to Dodger Stadium,” Yuhara said. “They’re interested in Dodgers [merch] shopping.”

Fried octopus and chicken katsu

At the stadium, visitors can pick up Ohtani’s No. 17 jersey. Concession stands sell chicken katsu sandwiches and takoyaki (fried octopus.)

Signs in kanji characters dot the stadium, where tours are now given in Japanese several times a week.

The demand to see Ohtani has created unexpected new lines of business for companies such as Elite Sports Tours, which creates sports travel packages for customers.

Elite went from having "zero" bookings from Japan to, seemingly overnight, working with Japanese tour operators to secure tickets and advising on L.A. traffic, said CEO Tim Macdonell.

JTB manager Ishiguro said the gambling scandal involving Ohtani's ex-interpreter that exploded at the start of the season didn't seem to affect interest among Japanese travelers wanting to see Ohtani.

He expects even more Japanese fans will come during the summer and into the fall should Ohtani stay healthy, the Dodgers make the postseason and the yen recovers.

The agency is booking guests in and around Little Tokyo, shuttling them to and from the stadium and their hotels, Ishiguro said.

He said not since another Japanese superstar, Hideo Nomo, played for the Dodgers two decades ago have this many Japanese tourists regularly flocked to this part of town.

Yutaka Umezawa has noticed more people speaking Japanese on the street and at Daikokuya, the ramen shop where he works.

"I can hear that they're Japanese and usually they're talking about Ohtani," said Umezawa, who moved to L.A. eight years ago from Chiba.

Yutaka Umezawa works at the Daikokuya, which is selling Dodgers-themed shirts celebrating the ramen shop's anniversary. He says that Japanese tourists prefer official MLB jerseys.

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Outside the Miyako hotel, Tadashi Onaka was visiting the Ohtani mural with his son Yusuke, who lives in Arizona. He had traveled from Japan with the intent of seeing his son, but made sure to take a detour to L.A. so he could watch Ohtani play at home.

“He hit a run in the first inning,” Onaka recalled. ”Just getting to see it was good.”

Now he found himself in Little Tokyo, a place he was surprised to learn has existed for 140 years.

Very small, he said, and very different from Japan, he said. Rather, it's its own thing that legions of Ohtani fans are now getting to discover.

Flies, rodents and other pests have been a persistent problem in Boyle Heights and nearby communities as millions of tons of food rot in a nearby burned-out warehouse. It’s gotten bad enough that L.A. Mayor Karen Bass is asking for action from the L.A. County Department of Public Health.

In a letter sent Tuesday to county Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, Bass said she’s “concerned with County DPH’s pace in addressing this disaster” and the risks it posed to health and quality of life.

“Possibly the worst manifestation of these risks is the severe infestation of flies in Boyle Heights and neighboring communities,” Bass wrote.

LAist has asked the Department of Public Health for comment and will update this article when they respond.

The back-and-forth between jurisdictions

Bass wrote that the city of L.A., which does not have its own health department, is largely dependent on L.A. County for control of potentially disease-carrying vectors. The city has said elsewhere that its Sanitation Department did set about 250 rat traps in surrounding areas.

Bass’ letter says the county took its first steps to hold Lineage accountable for a fly infestation on July 17, ordering Lineage to remove flies and mosquitoes from the warehouse.

“Although I appreciate that County DPH has taken this first step, the County’s report only directs Lineage to eliminate flies from Lineage’s own property,” Bass’ letter to Ferrer states.

Bass urged the county to compel Lineage to address pests at neighboring properties “with aggressive measures to eliminate the flies and any other vectors.”

As for L.A. County’s Department of Public Health, a spokesperson told LAist on July 17 that it had itself directed the city and Lineage to address the pest situation.

“Los Angeles County Department of Public Health requested that both Lineage Logistics and the City of Los Angeles develop and implement a vector/insect control plan,” the statement reads.

Lineage’s part

According to Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who represents Boyle Heights on the L.A. City Council and met with Lineage representatives on Monday, an inspector contracted by the company confirmed that the rotting food at the warehouse is serving as a breeding ground for flies. The infestation won’t go away without addressing the root cause, Jurado reported the contractor as saying.

“Removing waste, adding odor-control equipment, and conducting a pest inspection are important,” Jurado said in a statement. “But residents are asking a more fundamental question: Are conditions actually improving? They deserve evidence, timelines and accountability — not just a list of activities.”

Lineage has not yet presented its pest control plan to the public.

A ticking clock

The first day of instruction for L.A. Unified schools is Aug. 12, three days before the city’s current deadline to clear the warehouse — a deadline Lineage does not appear to be on track to meet.

That’s led many teachers and parents to raise the alarm about smells and pests that may very well still be around when school starts. An LAUSD spokesperson told Boyle Heights Beat that it is prepared to temporarily relocate nearby schools, as they did with summer programs during the warehouse fire.

Lineage meets deadline at last minute

Meanwhile, Lineage also faced a deadline of Tuesday to present a plan to air quality officials on how to address smells. A South Coast Air Quality Management District spokesperson said that the agency received a response from Lineage at 5 p.m. and is evaluating it.

L.A.’s homeless services agency has not completed any internal audits in years — and one that was started two years ago is still incomplete because management is taking months to provide responses, officials said Monday.

The delayed audit has been looking into why the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA, failed to spend $7 million in federal dollars it was granted to house and serve people in need. The roughly six-page audit report hasn’t been released because it’s missing LAHSA management responses that were requested over two months ago, officials said.

Internal audits are considered critically important to protecting taxpayer dollars at every level of government. L.A. County auditors, for example, issued about 100 reports in a recent fiscal year.

“ We haven’t gotten anything,” said Erum Shahnawaz, LAHSA’s chief internal auditor, referring to the lack of response from LAHSA management at a meeting of the agency’s audit committee on Monday.

“That’s the only thing that's holding us from issuing the final report,” Shahnawaz said of the underspending audit.

That audit is examining a repeat problem. A previous, external audit in January 2022 found LAHSA had left $3.5 million in federal grants on the table by not using them.

Shahnawaz flagged management’s delays to the LAHSA Commissioner Justin Szlasa, Szlasa said. He chairs the commission’s audit committee, and has repeatedly called out LAHSA executives’ delays in providing information about taxpayer spending over the past year.

“ I've been trying to intervene and use whatever I can to try to help provide support,” said Szlasa as he described his attempts to get the auditor the answers needed to complete the report.

Szlasa was appointed to the commission by L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger.

 “It shouldn't take us two months to receive a…management response to an internal audit,” Szlasa said at Monday’s meeting. He said the industry standard for internal audits is eight or nine weeks from start to finish. That compares to the two years — and counting — for LAHSA’s federal underspend audit.

“We haven't had a single internal audit completed here in the last couple of years, which is nuts,” Szlasa added. He called for internal audits to happen much more frequently.

Long delays to LAHSA audits also are not new. In November 2024, the county issued a widely-seen audit that included findings that LAHSA was failing to complete internal audits.

Half of LAHSA’s governing commission is appointed by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and half appointed by each of the five county supervisors. Bass is also the only elected official on the commission. She served on the audit committee for several months last fall. Records show she was absent for all of the meetings during that time.

Janine Lim, LAHSA’s deputy chief financial officer, said management’s responses to the audit on underspending haven’t been provided yet because LAHSA leadership did not have clearly defined roles for who is supposed to coordinate responses to internal audits.

“ We need to work on clarifying that role internally,” Lim said.

 “The last two months have been probably some of the most stress-filled two months that we've had at LAHSA,” said Paul Rubenstein, chief of staff to LAHSA CEO Gita O’Neil, pointing to mass layoffs.

Szlasa said there’s not that much in the audit for management to respond to.

“It's like, six pages or less,” he said.

Szlasa said  another option is to “just say we've asked management for responses and we're awaiting management response. We can publish the results.”

In response, Shahnawaz said that if management doesn't have an updated timeline for a response, then she’ll go ahead and issue the report without the response.

Once they floated that idea, Lim committed to providing the responses by next Tuesday.

LAHSA’s leadership has downsized the internal audit team — dropping from a staff of three to just one in the agency’s proposed budget up for approval Friday.

Delays in getting access to financial records

The delayed responses from management are not the only thing that’s been slowing down audits, Szlasa said at the meeting.

LAHSA policy, approved by its governing commission, says internal auditors are “ authorized to access all organizational records, personnel, and systems necessary for conducting audits,” he said.

But the auditor has faced challenges in actually getting that access, Szlasa said — including delays in being allowed to view LAHSA’s databases that show contracts and financial payments.

 ”We finally were granted access, but it wasn't, it wasn't easy, it wasn't immediate. It was slow,” Szlasa said.

Many failed outside audits

The delays on the internal audit come even after LAHSA failed multiple external audits in recent years, which have found the agency — overseen by city and county elected officials — has neglected to properly track billions of dollars in spending.

Largely in response to earlier audits, L.A. County supervisors pulled funding from LAHSA and are having the county instead oversee it directly. L.A.’s mayor and City Council have continued to have LAHSA manage the city’s homeless spending while the council delays plans to start studying a possible plan to transition away city tax dollars.

Signatures under scrutiny

LAHSA is also in the midst of a different internal audit — expected to finish in late August or early September — examining whether top officials followed requirements when signing contracts and letting others sign. It was launched in the wake of LAist reporting that found LAHSA’s then-CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum’s signature finalized a $2.1 million contract with her husband’s employer.

LAist also discovered Adams Kellum’s signature, as LAHSA’s CEO at the time, finalized a quarter-million-dollar contract between LAHSA and a longtime service provider she led up until two months earlier.

That contract was signed so soon after she left the service provider — St. Joseph Center — that the contract paperwork still listed her as one of St. Joseph Center’s points of contact and authorized signers.

She is currently under a state ethics investigation into whether her actions were an illegal conflict of interest.

When Bengara opened in Los Angeles' Arts District earlier this year, its owner and head chef had something special lined up in their kitchen arsenal.

It was genshiyaki, a rare traditional Japanese grilling method that dates back 1,500 years.

Chef and co-owner Tyler Burges had only encountered it once while traveling in Japan at a robatayaki spot in Fukuoka, a port city on the island of Kyushu.

Robatayaki, a style of slow, ember-cooked grilling rooted in Japan's rural coastal kitchens, usually centers on an open charcoal hearth. But the restaurant Burges visited had something even more noteworthy: a genshiyaki pit, a gentler, ambient method of cooking that uses radiant heat instead of direct flame.

Loving the unusually subtle, delicate flavor and texture it produced, he and head chef Phil Mireles decided to bring genshiyaki back to the U.S. and build their Arts District restaurant around it. The genshiyaki pit is a rare enough technique that Burges had to work with fabricator Phil Roxworthy for six months just to get the grill built to spec.

It's Burges' and Mireles' first L.A. project. The pair are also behind Smoke Door, their acclaimed Lake Tahoe restaurant, and Bengara brings a more casual, day-to-day take on the same fire-driven cooking.

All roads lead to the Arts District

Chef/owner Tyler Burges (left) and head chef Phil Mireles at Bengara.

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Burges and Mireles both got their start at San Francisco's Saison and Angler under chef Joshua Skenes — who's now just down the street in L.A. at LYNX with fellow alum Brandyn Tepper.

Burges traces Bengara's DNA back to two mentors: Ron Siegel, who introduced him to Japanese ingredients and technique in his mid-20s, and Skenes, who taught him to cook with live fire. It was Skenes, Burges said, who showed him that fire didn't have to mean char and bravado.

"The one thing I loved about wood-fire cooking is you get this subtle, sweet barbecue flavor when you cook correctly over embers, and you don't cook directly over the fire," Burges said. "Most places, when you think about grilling something, you think of char, bold flavors, masculine flavors. But Chef Josh — it's like a master art, getting really delicate, subtle flavor using that grill method."

The uni kiritampo, Bengara's take on a traditional Akita-prefecture rice skewer, finished with scallion.

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What sets the food apart

Take their luscious miso cod. On a normal grill, the marinade's sugars would blacken before the fish cooked through. On the genshiyaki pit, the cod sits at a distance from the embers, cooking gently until the very end, when it's given one last pass directly over the coals — what Burges describes as a final "kiss" of heat before it hits the plate.

To fuel genshiyaki's slower, ambient style, ordinary charcoal or wood is replaced with binchotan, an ultra-dense, pure-carbon hardwood charcoal traditionally made in Japan, which burns hotter and cleaner.

The signature dish

A perfect example of how this cooking style comes together is the uni kiritampo, the Akita prefecture rice skewer, reimagined with uni and cooked via genshiyaki — born of an offhand kitchen conversation with one of the restaurant's Japanese chefs about regional dishes cooked over fire.

Once they realized genshiyaki was the dish's original, historic cooking method, the rest fell into place.

"It's like the most delicious thing," Burges said. "I don't know why it never made it over to the United States earlier."

Bengara's Arts District dining room pairs industrial bones with warm, low lighting and long communal tables.

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The chewy exterior, with just a hint of smoke, gives way to a creamy inside, like a caramelized custard, that’s topped with a decadent amount of uni, providing a semi-sweet finish — one memorable bite.

Tasting menu option

Bengara recently added a daily eight-course tasting menu ($98) that doubles as a greatest-hits tour of the kitchen — Toyosu carpaccio with chili coffee oil, pork belly "tacos" wrapped in mochi crepes, miso cod, Mary's half chicken, and handmade citrus soba, with optional wagyu and uni add-ons.

The price includes a beverage pairing, with a full non-alcoholic option alongside the boozy version. Walk-ins are welcome, and reservations can be booked via OpenTable.

Topline:

Why it matters: Museum officials said you will “likely experience high demand and long wait times in the queue" and thanked people for their patience.

LAist saw estimated wait times up to 6 hours, and it took a little more than 4.5 hours for this reporter to get through. On the bright side, there were still plenty of tickets left, including for the first day. Do not refresh the page or you may lose your spot.

The details: All tickets are timed entry. Tickets are $25 for adults and $21 for those 65 and older. Children, members, active-duty military, personal aides or attendants and EBT cardholders have free entry. Museum neighbors in the LM37 program will also be free, with that pass opening in August.

But how do I buy: Each person is limited to nine tickets, and you’ll have 20 minutes to check out once they’re added to your cart, according to the museum. You can find the link here.

What's next: The grand opening is Sept. 22.

Go deeper: How to secure Lucas Museum of Narrative Art tickets ahead of the fall opening