‘Tis the season for sweets and hot drinks! For almost one hundred years, Steveston has had both on the same southwest corner of No. 1 Road and Moncton Street.
Rocanini Café sits today in the location which was once home to Mukai Confectionery, a popular spot for sweets in the 1930s. The shop had a little bit of everything: candy up front, a pool hall in the back, ten bedrooms upstairs, a taxi service, and—somewhat ironically for a candy store—a space used by a visiting dentist once a week.
Mukai Confectionery was one of no less than FIVE candy and chocolate shops in Steveston! It was first owned by Miss Iwa Anno, who later married Mr. Yoshizo Mukai. They raised two sons, including Kenji, born in 1921, who worked as a clerk in the family store. Like many businesses in the area at the time, Mukai Confectionery was Japanese Canadian owned. In the 1930s almost three-quarters of Steveston’s residents were of Japanese descent.
Everything changed with the forced uprooting of Japanese Canadians in 1942, who were sent to internment camps until 1949, four years after the end of the Second World War. The Mukai family appeared to have been interned at several sites across BC, including Sicamous, Lillooet, and Midway. While interned in Lillooet in 1944, Yoshizo passed away. Only about a third of Steveston’s Japanese Canadian community returned after internment. Sometime between 1942 and 1951, the original Mukai Confectionary building burned down.
Today, the building on this corner is called “Mukai”, as a nod to the original shop. Built in 2010, it echoes the look of the old storefront, with residents living above retail spaces. One of the retail spaces is the Rocanini Café, where locals and visitors gather to share hot drinks and baked goods – a perfect spot to warm up on a cold winter day and to take a moment to reflect on Steveston’s “then and now”.
