In 1996, Morgan Doizaki was 16 years old when his parents sent him from his LA home to live with his aunt, uncle and cousins in Colorado for the summer. When he arrived, his aunt led him through the front door. As she made her way into the kitchen, she noticed the message light blinking on the phone.

That message would change the family’s fortunes and his life forever.

“She pressed play, and there on speaker, one of the messages was Uncle Akira was murdered. He was actually murdered inside the store,” Doizaki recalled. “My aunt left right away, so that has haunted me. I missed my uncle’s funeral, the uncle I had such fond memories of.”

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Doizaki’s great-uncle wasn’t an ordinary man. Akira Yokomi was a legendary merchant who opened Central Fish Company, a Japanese fish market, wholesaler, general store and restaurant in 1950 in the heart of Fresno’s Chinatown. Until his murder at age 75, when a 22-year-old former employee and a 14-year-old accomplice stabbed him to death during an attempted robbery while he was staying late at the business doing paperwork, Yokomi staked his and his store’s reputation on fairness, kindness and quality. More than 1,200 mourners went to the Fresno Buddhist Temple for his funeral days later.

A plaque with a newspaper clipping from the Fresno Bee that highlights Akira Yokomi at Central Fish Company in Fresno, Calif., seen on June 30, 2025.

“All his earthly endeavors touched each one of us in so many ways,” Yokomi’s friend George Teraoka said during his eulogy. “We were stunned beyond belief to learn the news that someone so close to our heart had become a victim of a senseless act.”

Yokomi, born in Fresno in 1921, grew up on a farm about 11 miles southeast of downtown in a small town called Fowler. During World War II, Yokomi and his family were sent to a prison camp in Jerome, Arkansas; Yokomi later served in the Army before returning home to start his business. He bought an old grocery store in Chinatown on Kern Street, just down the block from where Central Fish stands today.

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“There’s great stories of how my uncle would hand out rice candy to all the kids that would come into the store,” Doizaki, 44, told SFGATE from a small meeting space upstairs at Central Fish that overlooks the entire operation. “And these people still come up and tell me these stories. But the craziest thing, these people are over 65 years old and say, ‘When I was a kid ...’”

Founders Akira and Nofuko Yokomi of Central Fish Company in Fresno, Calif., June 30, 2025.

After Yokomi’s death, his wife, Nofuko, ran the Fresno landmark. But after two years, then in her early 70s, she was ready to call it quits. In 1998, Nofuko sold Central Fish to her nephew, Morgan’s father, Ernie Doizaki. However, Ernie had a fish wholesaling business of his own in Los Angeles and was forced to become an absentee owner.

Morgan Doizaki recalled having worked at the store during holidays and summers starting at around age 9, when he was old enough to bag groceries; a couple of years later, he’d be in the back cutting fish, as he was “old enough to hold a knife.” After about five years of the store’s business dwindling, Doizaki, who said he was attending Cal State Northridge and “just partying too much,” was given an opportunity to help out.

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“I was 23, in the prime of my life,” he smiled. “But Central Fish wasn’t doing well, so I said, ‘Let me go up there and focus on working.’”

He moved from LA to Fresno, transferred to Fresno Pacific University, finished his degree and focused on bringing Central Fish back to its heyday. “It meant so much to me, and to see it doing so poorly, it was time, I said, to just put your head down and go to work,” he recalled. “Work. Work. Work.”

Morgan Doizaki, owner of Central Fish Company in Fresno, Calif., June 30, 2025.

The work happened, and so did the store’s turnaround. From fewer than a dozen to the store’s current roster of about 50 employees as it celebrates 75 years in business, Central Fish is everything you might imagine a business that anchors a neighborhood........

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