I didn't spend a lot of time in here and I really just came in here for one item: black sesame spread (among the 10 most delicious food items on the planet). Thankfully they had three little 4oz tubs of my second favorite brand...now they have zero. It is for this one success alone that they get 4 stars. I hope it doesn't take too long to get more because I'll clean them out again in another 4-6 weeks. I did do a walk through the rest of the store and I'll certainly be going back to pick up on some key ingredients of dishes I used to make while living in Tokyo. And the people running the place are actually Japanese so I even got to dust off my Japanese language chops a bit.
What it doesn't have is a Japanese bakery component. So I couldn't get the strawberry daifuku that I was jonesing for (also among the world's 10 most delicious food items). But probably I can get all the necessary ingredients here to make them myself. The worst thing about this place is the part of town it's in - west King West. So filthy and run down with super sketchy people loitering all over the place yelling at passers-by for no reason. Yikes! And if I wanted to do some real shopping here I'd have to make a special bike trip with an empty pack since parking around here while the store is open is near impossible. Oh, that's another complaint: the store closes too early (although that is a general complaint about Toronto). But these two aspects prevent it from achieving five stars...and if they don't have my precious black sesame spread in stock the next time I go they'll be demoted to 3 stars.