ethnic Japanese in the Houston area lived around Webster, and no ethnic Japanese were in the Houston city limits. By 1991, Interstate 45 bordered the area of the original farm. A Fiesta Mart opened. In 1991, there were two members of the Webster rice colony who were still alive. One of them, Kichi Kagawa, lived with her son Bill on a plot of land that was once part of the original farm. The name of Kichi's husband and Bill's father was Yonekichi. In 2015 the Japanese Business Association of Houston (ヒューストン日本商工会 Hyūsuton Nihon Shōkōkai) had 681 members. Its membership had increased by 50 percent in a two-year span. Demographics Bruce Glasrud, a historian, stated that the real figure of ethnic Korean residents in Texas and Houston may be higher than official U.S. Census estimates as some previous Korean immigrants were counted as Japanese, as Korea was then under the Empire of Japan. Economy Houston's first Japanese grocery store, the Nippan Daido (大道日本食料品店 Daidō Nihon Shokuryōhinden) at Westheimer Road at Wilcrest, in the Westchase district. It opened in 1978. As of 1998 Japanese is the predominant language and most items are marked in Japanese and English. In 1988 Leslie Watts of the Houston Chronicle wrote that it is "[v]irtually identical in appearance, sound and smell to the small neighborhood markets found in Japan". As of 1988 the store offered noodles, fruit and vegetables. vegetables, cigarettes, video rental, underwear and lingerie, socks, origami kits, toys, dolls, cockroach traps, and pharmaceuticals. As of 1998 the store offered fish, teas, soy sauces, frozen potstickers and dumplings, alcohol, tofu sauces, miso soups, rice cookers, chopsticks, and Japanese videos. It was a branch of a chain based in White Plains, New York; In 1988 this chain, a Japanese American business, had four other U.S. locations. The store's fortunes declined as other shops owned by larger corporations opened, resulting in its September 2019 closure. Toyo Hagiwara and another person acquired the shop and reopened it in December of that year. In 2015 Hideo Matsujiro, a cofounder of Marukai Market, announced that he planned to open the first large Japanese grocery in Houston; the store was scheduled to open in the fall of 2015 at the Ashford Village shopping center in the Houston Energy Corridor. The shopping center was previously unoccupied. The store, called "Seiwa Market" (セイワ・マーケット Seiwa Māketto), held a "soft opening" in August 2016. A realtor