What Happened to Japanese Restaurants?

One of my fondest food memories of San Francisco is Yamato Sukiyaki, the Japanese restaurant where we got to sit on the floor and have a Japanese waitress cook the meal tableside (usually sukiyaki with tofu and beef and bean thread noodles).  Willy's first eating out experience was at a similar restaurant, Maiko, on San Pablo in Berkeley when he was about a week old.  I don't remember eating sushi at all then and now all the Japanese restaurants seem to be sushi bars.

There is a Japanese Izakaya in the Mission District that is very intriguing: Izakaya Yuzuki, which uses koji (the yeasty rice that they make miso out of) in its cooking.  There's a review in the Chronicle and in BarFlySF.  Its presentation looks very simple, elegant and very Japanese and they serve fresh home-made tofu.

 

There's also Nombe in the Mission District but it doesn't look as appealing and pushes its RamenBurger.

Apparently more of the Japanese are in outlying areas, like Mountain View.  Or there seem to be a lot in the inner and outer Sunset, like Nabe, which does have sukiyaki and they are open for lunch.  But all the way to the Inner Sunset? What else is there?  Oh, wait!  That's just on the south side of Golden Gate Park, a block from the San Francisco Botanical Garden.  One of the Yelp reviews gave this tip:

"If you are a tourist (or a local) going to the Academy of Sciences, I recommend that you go early to the museum, leave at lunchtime and walk over to either Kiki's (a casual Japanese restaurant) or Nabe for lunch, then go back to the Academy. You will enjoy Kiki's or Nabe's a lot more than the food at the Academy (the food at the Academy isn't bad but it's expensive)."

The Kiki restaurant is probably more along our price line, especially for lunch, but they don't have sukiyaki!  Do you think that was a purely American invention of the 1960s??   Hold on, here's a list of restaurants from Yelp that have sukiyaki listed in the reviews.  I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to walk by the restaurants and choose them by their looks.  I'm afraid Yamato Sukiyaki is no longer in business.