25-Year-Old Daughter Of Popular Japanese Mee Pok Hawker Back To Helm Stall After 5-Year Break - 8days Skip to main content

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25-Year-Old Daughter Of Popular Japanese Mee Pok Hawker Back To Helm Stall After 5-Year Break

“Being a hawker is hard, but I saw how busy my father was handling everything himself in Singapore and I wanted to come back,” says the second-gen hawker of Japanese fusion bak chor mee chain Li Yuan Mee Pok who returned to Japan after a two-year stint as her dad’s cook.

25-Year-Old Daughter Of Popular Japanese Mee Pok Hawker Back To Helm Stall After 5-Year Break

When 8days.sg last spoke to Naoji Kuribara two years ago, the 56-year-old Japanese owner of Li Yuan Mee Pok (a reference to Naoji’s family name in Chinese) was working solo to build his Japanese fusion bak chor mee business in Singapore. The former corporate salaryman, who has been in the hawker trade for a decade, has since opened five noodle stalls under the Li Yuan brand. 

While many veteran towkays have found it hard to pass their torch on to the next generation, Naoji says he is “very happy” that his 25-year-old daughter Reina has returned to the family business recently. Naoji, his wife and two children had been living in Singapore since 2005. Five years ago, they moved home to Chiba (a city near Tokyo) as his family wanted to live in Japan. Prior to the relocation, Reina cooked at one of Naoji’s mee pok stalls at Clementi West from when she was just 18 years old, along with her then teen brother. Her bro and mum are still living in Japan now.

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“I’ve been thinking of the mee pok business for about a year [before deciding to return],” Reina tells us over the phone. “Being a hawker is hard, but I saw how busy my father was handling everything himself in Singapore and I wanted to come back. I like cooking and I like to see customers happy [when enjoying our food], so I asked my husband if he wanted to do it together and he said yes.” Reina and her husband Hikaru (shown in pic), 24, married last August and relocated to Singapore in December 2022. Hikaru was recently granted an S-Pass (Reina is a Singaporean PR) and the couple are now managing Li Yuan Mee Pok’s Commonwealth branch together.

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