"Home is Little Tokyo": race, community, and memory in twentieth-century Los Angeles

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“HOME IS LITTLE TOKYO”:

RACE, COMMUNITY, AND MEMORY

IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LOS ANGELES

by

Hillary Jenks

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

August 2008

Copyright 2008 Hillary Jenks

ii

DEDICATION

For my beloved grandfathers –

Herbert Jenks (1919-1978) and Captain George Walker (1912-2003)

and the Queen –

Lucy McQuillan Walker (1915-2008)

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I had no idea what I was getting into when I became a member of the first
graduate student cohort of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the
University of Southern California, but I have been grateful for my extreme good fortune
in being part of this challenging and supportive intellectual community every day of the
past seven (!) years. I credit my advisor, George Sánchez, for setting the course and tone
of our department as its first director with the same wisdom and thoughtful care with
which he guided me through the process of writing this dissertation. I am extraordinarily
appreciative not only of George’s guidance, but of his patience and his willingness to let
me find my own way, however slowly and circuitously.
The rest of my talented committee has contributed a great deal to the theoretical
and interdisciplinary components of this dissertation. Marita Sturken has been a
wonderful model of not only engaged cultural scholarship, but of being a good boss;
working with her on American Quarterly was a true pleasure. Leland Saito has offered so
many insights into the Japanese American community, land use policies, and multiracial
politics in Los Angeles; in the busy whirl of academia, the fact that he was so often
willing to offer them while standing at the copier or in the midst of a department holiday
party speaks to his kindness and his rapport with graduate students. Phil Ethington first
showed me how much fun history could be in an undergraduate class on the American
West more than a decade ago; I am grateful not only for his support during my initial
process of applying to graduate school, but for the bottomless passion for urban history
that he has shared with me. There are many other faculty at the University of Southern
iv
California who have provided me with intellectual sustenance, administrative aid, and
just plain friendship, including (but certainly not limited to) the wonderful Ken Breisch,
Jane Iwamura, Roberto Lint-Sagarena, Tim Gustafson, Greg Hise, Laura Pulido, and Viet
Nguyen.
The dedicated staff at the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity has
made my life easier – and some days, possible – in innumerable ways over the last
several years. Kitty Lai, Sonia Rodriguez, and the incomparable Sandra Hopwood are
treasures, and their commitment to “their” students is appreciated more than they will
ever know.
I have been fortunate enough to receive extensive feedback and both intellectual
and emotional support from a wonderful dissertation writing group, which at various
times has included Cynthia Willis, Laura Barraclough, Dan Hosang, Phuong Nguyen,
Michan Connor, Sean Greene, and Jerry Gonzalez. Laura has been a valued writing
partner and a professional inspiration, and Jerry in particular has gone above and beyond
the call of duty: reading extra drafts, providing sources and advice on research, and
generally demonstrating what it means to be a great historian and a true colleague and
friend. I also offer thanks to the many talented women who were part of my graduate
cohort, including Cam Vu, Karen Yonemoto, Reina Prado, and the ever-fabulous Jennifer
Stoever-Ackerman.
The ideas at the core of this study first took inchoate form during an intensive
summer dissertation workshop led by George Sanchez in 2004, where I received valuable
feedback from Maurice Stevens, Dorothy Fujita-Rony, and David Yoo as well as my
fellow workshop participants. A summer fellowship at the Huntington Library provided
v
by the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West in 2007 introduced me to a
new intellectual community and allowed me to research and write the bulk of my second
chapter. I am grateful to Bill Deverell for this opportunity, and for his interest in, and
support for, my project. I also received generous fellowship support from the USC
Graduate School, the USC College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, and the John R. and
Dora Haynes Foundation.
The graduate courses I took at USC with Carole Shammas, Steve Ross, Lon
Kurashige, Jane Iwamura, Michael Preston, and Lanita Jacobs-Huey provided the
disciplinary and methodological tools, as well as the intellectual framework, that made it
possible for me to write this dissertation. I have also received helpful suggestions and
advice on professional development from Art Hansen, Gail Dubrow, Sarah Schrank, and
Ruthie Gilmore.
I presented my research as a graduate student at several professional meetings,
including the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, the
Organization of American Historians, the Goucher College Forum on Historic
Preservation Practice, the American Studies Association, and the Association of
American Geographers. I am grateful for the generosity of Merry Ovnick, Richard
Longstreth, the late Roy Rosenzweig, and Reuben Rose-Redwood, among others, for
their meaningful feedback at these venues.
I had the valuable opportunity to serve as Managing Editor of American
Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association, for two years while at USC. I
learned from many gifted scholars while in this position, including Raúl Villa, Helena
Wall, John Carlos Rowe, Henry Yu, and Eric Avila. Associate Editors Barry Shank and
vi
Katherine Kinney were not only a joy to work with but also offered encouragement on
my scholarship. My talented co-worker Cynthia Willis uncomplainingly took up the slack
while I prepared for my qualifying exams; indeed, she was so good she could probably
have run the entire office in her sleep. I will never be able to thank her enough. Michelle
Commander has my undying admiration for so smoothly transitioning into the position,
and I owe special thanks to our crew of hard-working interns from American Studies at
California State University, Fullerton.
The Little Tokyo Service Center has been not only a subject of my research, but a
second home to me throughout the dissertation writing process. Bill Watanabe, Ron
Fong, Takao Suzuki, and Amy Phillips in particular have been paradigms of kindness and
dedication to social justice that I feel lucky to know. My involvement in public history
and historic/cultural preservation has also extended beyond LTSC; Peyton Hall, Christy
McAvoy,Donna Graves, and Sharon Sekhon have been instrumental in my participation
in that professional community, as well as being thoughtful and stimulating mentors.
I am grateful to a large number of hard-working and helpful archivists at UCLA’s
Department of Special Collections, the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, the
Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, the Bancroft Library, the
Huntington Library, and the Center for Oral and Public History at California State
University, Fullerton. I would particularly like to single out Jeff Rankin and Robert
Montoya at UCLA, Jay Jones at the Los Angeles City Archives, and Jane Nakasako and
Marie Masumoto at the Japanese American National Museum for their labor on my
behalf and their unfailing good humor.
vii
I particularly appreciate those who supported this project by allowing me into
their lives, and frequently their homes, to interview them: Evelyn Yoshimura, Jim
Matsuoka, H. Cooke Sunoo, Roberto Flores, Clarence “Yama” Yamahira, Bill Watanabe,
Joe Suski, Jack Kunitomi, Ets Yoshiyama, Edward Wada, Harry Yamamoto, and the two
gentlemen who preferred to remain anonymous. I consider getting to meet and spend time
with these wonderful people a highlight of my graduate school experience.
I thank Jennifer and Victor Castellucci for their generous hospitality in housing
me during my research trip to Northern California. I also owe a special debt to Craig
Ishii, then an LTSC intern and UCLA undergraduate and now an employee with the
downtown JACL, for the months he spent investigating the archives of the Japanese
Chamber of Commerce of Southern California and his willingness to share both his files
and his passion for the Nikkei community with me. Craig was a diligent researcher and a
delightful reminder of the joys of working with undergraduates. I also must thank Martha
Nakagawa, a generous and energetic independent scholar whose unflagging investigation
into the “Bronzeville” period of Little Tokyo’s history produced the website that was
such a useful source in my own research.
I served as an officer on my department’s graduate student organization with four
terrific women, remarkable activists and scholars in their own right: Laura Fugikawa,
Michelle Commander, Emily Hobson, and Perla Guerrero. I also served on the Students’
Committee of the American Studies Association with several other caring, hard-working
students; I am especially grateful to have served on that body with the exceptional Susie
Woo. Finally, I would like to thank Lalo Licón and Ana Rosas, whose kindness helped
me survive that interminable first year of graduate school.
viii
I have received an endless supply of patience and support from my friends and
family. My roommate Patrick Mahoney has kindly ignored my particularly cranky days,
and Jen Karie has reminded me of the world beyond graduate school just often enough to
keep me sane. I thank my cousins, especially Scott Carter-Eldred, Tiffany Pokorny, and
Jon Steele; all of my (many) aunts and uncles; Sean Kilty; Paul Moore; Joe and Jaini
Giannovario; Betty Wright; Fred and Brie Karl, and their daughter Emerson, who has
been such a ray of sunshine in my life; and my adored grandmother Betty Jenks Moore,
my first and best example of the value of a life pursued with love and gratitude. I wish
very much that my other grandparents could have made it to this point in the journey with
me; this dissertation, and I hope the best of myself, is dedicated to my grandfather
Herbert Jenks, my grandmother Lucy Walker, and my grandfather Captain George
Walker, USCG Ret.
My father Ronald Jenks has always embraced life on his own terms, with a moral
courage and a lack of cynicism that I envy; while our politics have diverged over the
years, I am grateful for the lessons he has taught me and the ones he let me figure out on
my own. Thanks for being a feminist, Dad, even if you might not think of yourself as
one. My mother Joanne Jenks has been a pillar of support, not only throughout the
dissertation writing process but my entire life. She’s been a great mom and the
embodiment of unconditional love.
I have been lucky enough to have a warm and caring partner, David Giannovario,
at my side over the years who has made our home a welcome refuge from the rigors of
academic life. He has patiently listened to me run through ideas, presentations, and
chapters far outside his field of expertise, and always provided thoughtful feedback and
ix
loving support. It has been a joy to be a member of our little team, and I look forward to
wherever the road will lead us next.

x
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

List of Tables xi

List of Figures xii

Abstract xiv

Introduction: “The Heart and Soul of the Japanese American 1
Community”: Creating and Claiming Little Tokyo

Chapter 1: “Something to Hang Your Hat On”: Immigrants and 27
Enclaves in Pre-WWII Los Angeles

Chapter 2: “This is Bronzeville”: African and Japanese Americans 107
in the Enclave

Chapter 3: Renewing the Past: Urban Redevelopment and Ethnic 199
Community

Chapter 4: Home Is Little Tokyo 288

Conclusion: “We Have to Share It”: Past and Future in the 391
Urban Enclave

Bibliography 398

Appendix A: Archival Collections Consulted 418
Appendix B: Oral Histories Conducted 420
Appendix C: List of LTCC Members, 2006-2007 421

xi
LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1: Population of the City of Los Angeles by Race/Ethnicity, 53
1900-1940

Table 1.2 : Produce Merchants / Dealers at Los Angeles Wholesale 63
Markets by Ethnic Group, 1941

Table 1.3: Population of Little Tokyo-Area Elementary Schools by 84
Race, 1924

Table 3.1: Population of the City of Los Angeles by Race/Ethnicity, 206
1950-2000

Table 4.1: Occupational Data for Los Angeles County, 1970-1990 298

Table 4.2: Population Change in Los Angeles County By Ethnic 301
Group, 1980-2000

xii
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1: Map of Downtown Neighborhoods in Early 31
Twentieth-Century Los Angeles

Figure 1.2: Map of the Greater Little Tokyo Neighborhood, 1908 34

Figure 1.3: East First Street, Circa 1914 38

Figure 1.4: Little Tokyo Businesses in the Vicinity of East First 41
Street, 1926

Figure 1.5: Olivers in the Stimson Institute Practice Yard, 1933 49

Figure 1.6: Pupils of the Japanese language school at the Stimson 91
Institute, 1930

Figure 1.7: Olivers Playing Baseball in Guadalupe, 1930 101

Figure 2.1: Japanese Nationals Evacuated from Little Tokyo, 1942 128

Figure 2.2: Publicity Image for Little Tokyo U.S.A., 1942 137

Figure 2.3: Removing Japanese Signage in Little Tokyo, 1942 140

Figure 2.4: Storefront Living in Bronzeville, 1943 145

Figure 2.5: City Officials Inspect Bronzeville, 1944 150

Figure 2.6: Map of Key Bronzeville Businesses 157

Figure 2.7: Kiichi Uyeda Opens Shop in Bronzeville, 1945 176

Figure 2.8: “Parker Center” Block Prior to Its Demolition, 1949 190

Figure 3.1: Map of Downtown Neighborhoods in Late 203
Twentieth-Century Los Angeles

Figure 3.2: Aerial Photograph of Little Tokyo, Circa 1965 226

Figure 3.3: LTRA Plan for Little Tokyo Redevelopment, 1961 230

Figure 3.4: The New Otani Hotel 250
xiii

Figure 3.5: National Historic Landmark Buildings on East First Street 262

Figure 3.6: Aerial Photograph of Little Tokyo, Circa 1990 267

Figure 3.7: Protest by the Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization, 273
1977

Figure 3.8: The San Pedro Firm Building 283

Figure 4.1: Community Mural at Intersection of East First Street 289
and Central Avenue

Figure 4.2: Map of Little Tokyo, Circa 2004 293

Figure 4.3: The Japanese American National Museum 313

Figure 4.4: Olivers Reunion in Little Tokyo, 2007 319

Figure 4.5: The Far East Building 322

Figure 4.6: Participants in Nikkei Community Day, May 2007 329

Figure 4.7: The Hikari Apartment Building 346

Figure 4.8: Municipal “Wayfinding” Sign for Little Tokyo 359

Figure 4.9: Image of Charlie Parker in Little Tokyo Mural 381

Figure 4.10: March for Immigrant Rights in Little Tokyo, 2006 385

xiv
ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines the spatial and memorial practices through which the
state and racialized communities have together, though with unequal access to power and
resources, produced ethnoracially-inscribed spaces in the twentieth-century American
city with significant material and symbolic consequences for domestic racial formations,
global flows of capital, the use and organization of urban space, and the reproduction of
ethnic identity and community. To analyze these processes, I have focused on Little
Tokyo, a Japanese American enclave in existence in Los Angeles, California for more
than one hundred years. Although geographically small, Little Tokyo – as a diverse
downtown neighborhood undergoing multiple cycles of disinvestment and reinvestment,
while remaining linked to a transnational community occupying radically dissimilar
positions in the U.S. racial hierarchy at different historical moments – represents a key
element in the spatial development of U.S. cities in the twentieth century: the creating,
claiming, and sustaining of ghettos, barrios, and ethnic enclaves. The story of Little
Tokyo’s formation and development offers necessary lessons on the opportunities and
challenges of shaping a just and nurturing home in our collective urban future.
I begin by exploring the immigrant and racialized communities sharing the spaces
of Little Tokyo at the start of the twentieth century, the racial state’s efforts to contain
and domesticate them, and the spatial practices through which enclave communities
resisted these efforts. I then analyze the more extensive and brutal spatial policies of the
racial state during World War II, and the experiences of African American war workers
and returning Japanese American evacuees sharing the enclave. In the following decades,
xv
urban redevelopment divided the Japanese American community until a consensus was
achieved in support of the spatial and memorial practice of historic preservation in Little
Tokyo. Finally, I describe the contemporary focus on constituting community through the
enclave even as ethnic identity is appropriated and commodified by the (multi)racial state
and private capital. My sources range from archival collections housed at Stanford
University, the Huntington Library, and the University of California at Los Angeles to
ethnographic observation and interviews with significant Little Tokyo figures past and
present.

1
INTRODUCTION:
“THE HEART AND SOUL OF THE JAPANESE AMERICAN COMMUNITY”:
CREATING AND CLAIMING LITTLE TOKYO

On April 18, 1906, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about a “tumble-down shack on
Azusa Street, near San Pedro Street,” a few blocks away from City Hall.
1
The shack was
the location of the Azusa Street Mission, the founding church of the Pentacostal
movement of Christianity, where African American pastor William J. Seymour led a
multiracial congregation in a religious revolution from 1906 until his death in 1922 (the
mission remained on Asuza Street through 1931).
2
The Times described the scene at the
Mission in terms both exotic and demeaning: “devotees of the weird doctrine practice the
most fanatical rites, preach the wildest theories…Colored people and a sprinkling of
whites compose the congregation, and night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the
howlings of the worshippers.”
3
Certainly the devotion to equality evident in the Mission’s
congregation and customs – an African American preacher leading black, Anglo, and
Russian and Mexican immigrant worshippers, with women allowed and even encouraged
to testify – seemed both foreign and disturbing to the city elites represented by the paper,
true believers in white supremacy and the segregationist policies that were expanding and

1
“Weird Babel of Tongues,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 18, 1906, II1.

2
For more on the history of the Azusa Street Mission, see Cecil M. Robeck, The Azusa Street
Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement (Nashville: Nelson
Reference & Electronic, 2006); and Larry E. Martin, The Life and Ministry of William J. Seymour
and a History of the Azusa Street Revival (Pensacola: Christian Life Books, 2006).

3
“Weird Babel of Tongues.”
2
solidifying throughout the United States in the early years of the twentieth century. And
yet, in a plain wooden building just a few blocks from the increasingly solid and ornate
office buildings of L.A.’s Anglo downtown, “Azusa Street looked like integration in
action.”
4

It wasn’t only the mission. The network of marginal streets and alleys around it
contained the homes and businesses of a diverse group of immigrants and African
Americans. As Mark Wild pointed out in his book, Street Meeting: Multiethnic
Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles, the “central districts” of Los
Angeles were “cosmopolitan areas where residents of all races mingled in the streets and
public establishments.”
5
The Mission building itself had previously been the site of the
city’s first African Methodist Episcopal church, founded by former slave and midwife
Biddy Mason.
6
And even as Seymour preached his revival, the neighborhood was
becoming the center of a wave of Japanese immigration that would shortly earn it the
moniker of “Little Tokyo.” Although that name implies a uniformly Japanese or Japanese
American “ethnic enclave,” a neighborhood marked by segregation and isolation along
ethnoracial lines, the history and persistence of the Azusa Street mission demonstrates the
actual and ongoing diversity – of race, ethnicity, religion, language, and nationality – in
Little Tokyo.

4
R.J. Smith, The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Lost African American Renaissance
(New York: Public Affairs, 2006): 166.

5
Mark Wild, Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth-Century Los
Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005): 2.

6
Ibid., 160; Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
3
In 2006, a century after the Mission’s founding, a group of Anglos, African
Americans, and Japanese Americans sought to memorialize this “cosmopolitan” past with
SpiritWalk, “an outdoor promenade and a mural depicting the histories of the church and
of the diverse neighborhood where immigrants and nonwhites lived in the early twentieth
century” along Azusa Street, now the site of the Japanese American Cultural and
Community Center (JACCC).
7
Local African American councilwoman Jan Perry
expressed her support for the project, so relevant to the city’s contemporary desire to
model an ideal multicultural metropolis, pointing out that “we have so many common
historical roots in this city.”
8

However, not everyone thought Little Tokyo was the appropriate venue for this
message. Japanese American newspaper columnist George Yoshinaga, a second-
generation Japanese American, World War II veteran, and longtime Little Tokyo
commentator, instead called for a protest against the planned mural, which he saw as
commemorating an African American past that he in no way shared:
Over the past several decades, I have seen the Little Tokyo that we used to
know fading away and I hate to see it continue in that direction. When I
think of the effort and finances JAs [Japanese Americans] put forth to
establish the JACCC, I’m totally disenchanted by all this talk about the
Azusa Project. Yeah, I know. Some will think I take this position because
of the racial overtone associated with the project….Little Tokyo, by its
own name, tells us what our community is all about. Let’s try to protect J-
Town [Japan-town] and what it means to the Japanese American
community. If that makes me a racist, so be it.
9

7
K. Connie Kang, “Pentecostal Memorial is Poised for a Revival,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 6,
2006, B3.

8
Ibid.

9
George Yoshinaga, “Horse’s Mouth: The Death of Mr. Common Sense,” Rafu Shimpo, Feb. 14,
2006, 3.
4

Yoshinaga received several letters of support for his stand on the Azusa Street memorial
from other Japanese Americans. One person wrote “as far as I am concerned, Little
Tokyo is the heart and soul of the Japanese American community and we have to protect
J-Town in order to maintain this togetherness.”
10
These clashing visions of urban space
and ethnic history in Little Tokyo demonstrate that, in the words of Lisbeth Haas, “the
politics of space is closely connected to the formation of collective identities that are
grounded in particular interpretations of the past.”
11

This small downtown neighborhood, associated in the city’s popular
consciousness with a single ethno-racial group for over a hundred years yet
simultaneously a nexus for diverse interethnic and interracial relationships, looms
symbolically large on the urban landscape of Los Angeles. Indeed, Little Tokyo is
significant to the larger history of the twentieth-century United States, as the nation
underwent convulsive cycles of economic and social change, including periods of both
massive immigration and exclusion, urbanization and suburbanization. How was the
diverse district surrounding the Azusa Street Mission inscribed as specifically Japanese
American space, and what has that inscription meant materially and symbolically – to the
dominant Anglo community, the immigrant Japanese community and their descendants,
and the many other migrant, transnational, and racialized communities who shared the
neighborhood? Conversely, how did Japanese immigrants and their descendants

10
George Yoshinaga, “Horse’s Mouth: Overplaying the Race Card?”, Rafu Shimpo, Feb. 22,
2006, 3.

11
Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987): 13.
5
successfully claim “Little Tokyo” as their own, to the extent that it is now the “heart and
soul” of their community, and what have been the political, economic, and social
consequences of this claim for Japanese Americans as well as other Angelenos? What, in
other words, was at stake in creating and claiming this “ethnic enclave?”
That question animated my original interest in this line of research, which has
broadened into a more general exploration of ethnoracially-inscribed space – ghettoes,
barrios, and ethnic enclaves – as a phenomenon of urban political economy, a key site for
interracial encounter and community formation in domestic and transnational contexts,
and a spatial articulation of the political dimensions, both progressive and reactionary, of
collective memory. As the following chapters demonstrate, the ethnoracial inscription of
space in American cities accompanied and aided state policies to classify and divide vast
populations on the basis of arbitrary signifiers of difference (including race, class,
nationality, and other factors), with significant consequences for the distribution and
accessibility of material resources. At the same time, I argue, the development of
overlapping social and economic networks in such spaces – their transformation by ethnic
communities, through use and experience, into places – has allowed residents and workers
to contest and shape state action by claiming them as resources for the reproduction of
ethnic identity and community.
12
In the contemporary period, such claims have been

12
One could theorize the spatial history of Little Tokyo as an ongoing Gramscian “war of
position” between the state and capital on the one hand, cooperating to segment and exploit labor
within an abstracted urban landscape organized by private property, and ethnic- and place-based
groups emphasizing the value of home and neighborhood as a shared community resource (even
as they sometimes engage with the urban real estate market). See Antonio Gramsci, Selections
6
advanced primarily by projects that institutionalize or perform collective memory
through the medium of enclave space, enabling new community-based forms of land use
planning but also creating new avenues for appropriation by both public and private
proponents of a corporate multiculturalism.
Little Tokyo, then, is a case study for understanding the formation, development,
and political and cultural significance of ethnoracially-inscribed spaces within the
American urban landscape. I am particularly interested in three aspects of this process.
First, what is the role of the “racial state” in inscribing ethnoracial identity on the
landscape and with what consequences? Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue that the
state both structures, and is structured by, racial formations, the sociohistorical processes
by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.
13
For
example, the 1790 naturalization law restricted U.S. citizenship to immigrants who were
considered white – the state structuring race as a term of national belonging while also
being structured by race, as the definition and criteria of whiteness itself changed over
time. In the case of Little Tokyo then, how did the racial state function at the federal and
especially the local level to spatially produce the enclave, and how did enclave
communities respond?
Second, how much diversity and interaction has the mono-ethnic name of “Little
Tokyo” concealed from view? The story of the Azusa Street Mission merely hints at the

from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Quintan Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
(New York: International, 1972).

13
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to
the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994, 1986): 55, 82.
7
multiple axes of difference along which people have intersected in the enclave over the
course of the twentieth century, encounters that generated hidden histories with relevance
for contemporary Angelenos. Did interactions among the multiple, overlapping racialized
and transnational communities within the enclave ever produce challenges to essentialist
constructions of racial difference and ethnic identity? If so, how? And at what historical
moments were these challenges most successful?
Finally, what is the significance of present efforts to commemorate various
aspects of the enclave’s past? Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer have
described “acts of memory,” memories recalled and performed in the present in order to
resolve past trauma.
14
Building on their formulation, as well as Maurice Halbwachs’s
theorization of collective memory – that social groups determine what is memorable and
how it will be remembered – I examine the prevalence of projects of memory in the
enclave, communal efforts to revisit and resurrect a usable past.
15
Specifically, I ask how
memory projects within the enclave constitute community and whether they counter or
collaborate with the racialized spatial practices of the state. To answer these questions, I
build on three separate but interrelated areas of scholarship: urban history, ethnic studies,

14
Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the
Present (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999).

15
Halbwachs’s work was written in France prior to World War II, but not translated and
published in English until 1980. See Maurice Halbwachs, “Historical Memory and Collective
Memory” in The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New
York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980), and On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). James E. Young has elaborated on Halbwachs in
relation to the dialogic quality of memorials, in which a collective interpretation of many
individual memories is achieved through the shared spatial framework of the site. See Young, The
Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1993).
8
and investigations into collective memory, particularly the political and spatial
dimensions of memory projects.
As Henri Lefebvre has argued, social relations are produced and sustained
through space.
16
He conceived of a “spatial triad” composed of three parts:
representational space (lived space, or place), representations of space (conceived space,
the abstract space of planners, scientists, and developers), and spatial practices (perceived
space, the use and organization of space that mediates between the other two parts of the
triad). Lefebvre built on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony – essentially,
the idea that elites rule society not by economic exploitation alone, but also through a
sophisticated process of ideological domination in which cultural institutions and
expressions negotiate the consent of the ruled.
17
Lefebvre’s groundbreaking work also
relied on Michel Foucault’s insight that the state classified and controlled its subjects
through hegemonic discursive practices that limited the boundaries of acceptable
knowledge, creating a body of official wisdom that supported and justified state action.
18

Lefebvre demonstrated that economic and racial hierarchies are similarly constructed and
normalized through the hegemonic spatial practices of the modern state, a key focus of
this dissertation, as when zoning policies situate industrial concerns among immigrant

16
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Blackwell,
1991).

17
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. See also Stuart Hall, “The Problem of
Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees,” Marx: 100 Years On, ed. B. Matthews (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1983): 57-83, and “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and
Ethnicity,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.2 (1986): 5-27.

18
Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), and Discipline and
Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977); Alec W. Mchoul and Wendy Grace, A Foucault Primer:
Discourse, Power, and the Subject (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
9
and racialized communities, which are then declared examples of “blight” that require a
process of slum clearance, displacement, and corporate reinvestment.
David Harvey has clarified Lefebvre’s rather muddled description of spatial
practice by defining four types: accessibility and distance (flows of goods, money,
information); the appropriation of space (land uses, “turf” designations, social networks);
the domination of space (private property, state divisions of space, exclusionary zoning,
policing and surveillance); and the production of space (creation of physical
infrastructures, such as built environments, and the territorial organization of social
infrastructures). As Harvey wrote, “spatial practices derive their efficacy in social life
only through the structure of social relations within which they come into play. Under the
social relations of capitalism, for example, spatial practices…become imbued with class
meanings.”
19
Similarly, given social relations structured by race, spatial practices become
imbued with racial meanings.
Lefebvre’s work has been particularly influential for urban historians, who had
long documented such spatial practices without benefit of the comprehensive theoretical
framework he provided. The Chicago School of sociologists that studied the many
immigrant enclaves and ethnoracial ghettoes of that city in the 1910s and 1920s were thus

19
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989): 222-223. The importance of Gramsci’s theory of cultural
hegemony is its explication of the processes by which these social relations are reproduced and
naturalized through acts of negotiation and consent that creates a shared “common sense” about
space; for instance, what constitutes a “good” or “bad” neighborhood. The memorial practices
described in this dissertation are likewise situated in a hegemonically-determined set of social
relations that lend them their meaning and political efficacy, For example, the hegemonic
valorization of military service makes it difficult for anyone to protest the World War II veterans’
memorial in Little Tokyo, despite the community’s history of internment and segregated service
during that conflict; such an action would be outside accepted boundaries of sensible and
politically meaningful behavior.
10
left to argue that such ethnically-determined spatial segregation was a natural process,
part of the ecological development of the city and a predictable multi-stage progression
of immigrant assimilation that would ensure the enclave’s disappearance within three
generations.
20
With the question of ethnoracially-inscribed urban spaces thus resolved,
limited additional attention was paid to these neighborhoods in America (excepting a few
studies of black ghettos) until the urban unrest of the 1960s demonstrated that, at the very
least, Park’s theories did not apply equally across all migrant and racialized
communities.
21
The resurgence of scholarly analysis that followed produced several
excellent studies describing the decidedly unnatural political and economic policies at
both local and federal levels that created and maintained black ghettoes.
22

Over the same period of time, renewed attention by historians to social and then
cultural history first emphasized a recovery of the voice and agency of historical actors
themselves, followed by a focus on their recreational and cultural pursuits as a means to
understand the degree to which they accepted or resisted the demands of industrial capital

20
See for example Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, 1925); W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The
Polish Peasant in Europe and America, (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1927); and Robert E. Park,
Race and Culture (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950).

21
Two of the major works on urban black life between the 1930s and 1960s were Gunnar Myrdal,
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944);
and St Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern
City (New York: Harbinger Book, 1970, 1945).

22
The most important of these works are Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto –
Negro New York, 1890-1930 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); Allen Spear, Chicago: The
Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Kenneth
Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois,
1979); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton,
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1993).
11
and the hegemony of the modern state. These developments produced a series of
groundbreaking studies, many of which surveyed the European immigrant experience in
U.S. manufacturing centers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “from the
bottom up.”
23
To a lesser degree, works also emerged from these historical “turns” that
explored the understudied urban communities of U.S. immigrants from Asia and Latin
America.
24

As the impact of Lefebvre’s work has gradually spread through the Anglophone
academy, urban historians, sociologists, and geographers have begun to reexamine the
neighborhoods of immigrant and racialized communities with a renewed attention to the
spatial dimensions of their formation and evolution. Remarkably, three of the best of

23
Key examples of such works bridging urban and immigrant history include Frank Thistlewaite,
“Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” XI Congres
International des Sciences Historiques, Rapports 5 (1960): 32-60; Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours
for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1983); Donna R. Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social
Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880-1930 (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1984); Steven J. Ross, Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing
Cincinnati, 1788-1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Ewen,
Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985); and Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial
Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

24
For instance, Albert Camarillo and Ricardo Romo examined Mexican immigrant communities
in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, while scholars such as Lon Kurashige and Dorothy Fujita-
Rony wrote about the Japanese and Filipino immigrant communities, respectively. See Albert
Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in
Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1979); Ricardo Romo, History of a Barrio: East Los Angeles (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1983); Lon Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity
and Festival in Los Angeles, 1934-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and
Dorothy Fujita-Rony, American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the
Transpacific West, 1919-1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Because both
Mexican and many Asian immigrants had, at least initially, a larger presence in rural agricultural
centers rather than industrial urban ones, they have received correspondingly less attention from
urban historians.
12
these works have focused on Chinatowns, the first American spaces to be discursively
inscribed and spatially contained as “Asian.” Kay Anderson’s historical and geographical
analysis of Vancouver, British Columbia’s Chinatown emphasized the importance of the
space itself to the formation of the racial category of “Chinese,” as the concreteness of
the physical neighborhood was used to support discourses about the alien and
inassimilable nature of the Chinese.
25
As Anderson wrote, “Chinatown has been a critical
nexus through which a system of racial classification has been continuously constructed.
Racial ideology has been materially embedded in space…and it is through ‘place’ that is
has been given a local referent, become a social fact, and aided its own reproduction.”
26

Jan Lin’s study of New York’s Chinatown in some ways followed in Anderson’s
footsteps, with a chapter devoted to the signification of Chinatown in American popular
culture, but also with greater attention to the forces of global capital on the contemporary
spatial and economic contours of the enclave.
27
Finally, Nayan Shah’s work on the
intersection of spatial practice and official discourse in San Francisco’s Chinatown has
yielded rich insights into how the spatial and social policies of public health authorities

25
Kay Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980 (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991).

26
Kay Anderson, “The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the
Making of a Racial Category,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77.4 (1987):
580-598, 584.

27
Jan Lin, Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1998).
13
first condemned and then rehabilitated Chinatown in concert with the shifting
requirements of the local economy and global diplomacy.
28

Building on the insights of these works, I interrogate how the racialized spatial
practices of both the federal and local state, in league with property owners and
developers in Little Tokyo, have produced social relations premised on inequality and
exploitation for the communities living and working there. This research contributes to
our understanding of the processes by which marginal spaces were ethnoracially inscribed
and filled with similarly inscribed bodies, such that entire neighborhoods were historically
devalued, appropriated, and confiscated, as the communities associated with them were
discriminated against, stereotyped, and repeatedly relocated. At the same time, to a far
greater degree than previous studies, I highlight the spatial practices of resistance in which
enclave communities themselves engaged to claim the space as a political and economic
resource, to protect its institutions and prevent its demolition, and to produce more
engaged and democratic social relations within and beyond it.
As an examination of a key space for the Japanese American community in Los
Angeles, my dissertation builds on an enduring branch of ethnic studies scholarship
exemplified by works on the institutional, social, and cultural life of local racialized
communities in the United States.
29
Yet this study is also connected to newer work in

28
Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

29
This is now a voluminous literature; some of the most relevant works with regard to this
dissertation include George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and
Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Valerie
14
ethnic studies that emphasizes diasporic communities linked by transnational flows of
labor and capital, capturing the economic, social, and cultural imperatives that sustain
migration and connection across borders in spite of efforts by the racial state to contain
immigrant populations within a solely domestic context.
30
In particular, my
understanding of Little Tokyo as a site where Japanese Americans encountered multiple
overlapping communities, each with their own political and cultural traditions and
situated in different positions relative to the racial state and a hierarchical regional
economy, is influenced by Mark Wild’s excellent monograph on the multiethnic
neighborhoods of downtown Los Angeles prior to World War II.
31
Little Tokyo was
never the mono-ethnic entity its name implied but a diverse urban neighborhood with
significant residential communities of Filipinos, Latinos, and African Americans, as well
as an even more diverse population of regular visitors in the form of schoolteachers,
police officers, customers, tourists, suppliers, developers, politicians, and more. These

J. Matsumoto, Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-
1982 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black
Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Linda
España-Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos
and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); and José M.
Alamillo, Making Lemonade Out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a Southern
California Town, 1880-1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

30
See, for instance, Kristin Mann, Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black
Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil (New York: Routledge, 2001); Catherine Ceniza
Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003); Elana Zilberg, “Fools Banished from The Kingdom: Remapping
Geographies of Gang Violence between the Americas (Los Angeles and San Salvador),”
American Quarterly 56.3 (September 2004): 759-779; and Wanni W. Anderson and Robert G.
Lee, eds., Displacements and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2005).

31
Wild, Street Meeting.
15
individuals were at once “at home” in Little Tokyo, either literally or figuratively in that
the neighborhood was part of their daily spatial routine, while at the same time they
moved physically and metaphorically between multiple other homes, both within and
beyond the borders of the United States. All these networks and circuits crossed paths in
Little Tokyo, marking the enclave as a key site for short-term encounters and long-term
relationships across multiple boundaries. Thus my work bridges community and diaspora
studies through its focus on the intersection of multiple transnational, migrant, and
racialized groups within a single domestic space, especially the political conflicts and
commitments arising from such encounters.
Little Tokyo in its current incarnation is suffused with memory projects –
rehabilitated historic buildings, public art such as the 1
st
and Central mural, museum
exhibits exploring Japanese American history, and community festivals carrying on
Japanese American traditions. It is what Pierre Nora has described as a lieu de mémoire,
or site of memory, a location that embodies a collective memory on which national or
ethnic identity is predicated.
32
Although Nora did not necessarily conceive of these
“sites” as solely spatial, his work on the lieux de mémoire critical to the ongoing
reproduction of French identity linked the political aspect of collective memory – the use
of the past to address present problems – to its spatial aspect, that is, physical space in

32
Pierre Nora, trans. Marc Roudebush, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,”
Representations 0 (spring 1989): 7-24. An interesting counterpoint to Nora is Norman Klein’s
book The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, (London: Verso, 1997),
which focuses on sites that embody forgetting and erasure in contemporary Los Angeles.
16
which to do (enact, perform, re-present) the remembering.
33
Several cultural studies
scholars have explored the conjunction that Nora identified by focusing on memorial sites
and museums, particularly those dealing with past traumas such as the Holocaust, and
often with only limited attention to their surrounding physical context or community
input and response.
34

I build on these works to explore the political implications of the connection
between memory and space in a place like Little Tokyo, where the various memorials are
all in conversation with one another, while also foregrounding the often untold story of
the community processes and imperatives which shaped and produced these memory
projects as spatial practices. Japanese Americans in Little Tokyo have innovatively
linked multiple memory projects to land use decisions, a strategy that has so far
successfully maintained the Japanese American identity of the enclave. Yet increasingly
these projects have been appropriated or reinterpreted to support essentialist racial
discourses and pro-gentrification policies. My research thus develops our understanding
of the contested political dimensions of collective memory as a spatial practice.
35

33
To my mind, two of the most influential works on the political nature of collective memory,
especially with regard to the construction of community and nation, are George Lipsitz, Time
Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1990), and Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS
Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

34
Two excellent works in this vein that are more attentive to context and/or community are James
E. Young’s The Texture of Memory and Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

35
My thinking on this subject has been greatly influenced by Svetlana Boym’s exploration of the
politics of nostalgia in post-Communist Eastern Europe. See Boym, The Future of Nostalgia
(New York: Basic Books, 2001).
17
Merging and expanding on these literatures, I examine how the state and
ethnoracial communities together, though with unequal access to power and resources,
produce the enclave through a series of spatial and memorial practices. The racial state at
the federal, regional, and municipal levels, responding to the complex needs of capital
and shifting racial formations, unevenly inscribes abstract physical space with ethnoracial
significations carrying both positive and negative connotations, thereby generating a
range of material and emotional consequences for the people living in and associated
with that space. For example, residents of a neighborhood inscribed with a positive
ethnoracial identity may convince the state to engage in spatial practices that respect the
use value of their land over its exchange value, while those living in an area with a
negative ethnoracial inscription frequently fail to achieve the same results.
36
At different
historical moments, this has led in Little Tokyo to both a devaluation of the space –

36
Obviously the ethnoracial inscription of the neighborhood is related to its class status; however,
since “race is…the modality through which class is ‘lived,’ the medium through which class
relations are experienced,” the two factors cannot be extricated from each other. See Stuart Hall,
“Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” Black British Cultural Studies: A
Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996): 16-60, 55. The concept of the “use value” of urban real estate – how a
neighborhood is the locus of belonging, social networks, and so on for its residents – versus its
“exchange value” – the abstract worth of the land as a field for speculative investment and
development – is eloquently explored by John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch in Urban
Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Laura
Barraclough has described how residents of a neighborhood with a positive ethnoracial
inscription – in this case, the Los Angeles community of Shadow Hills, a white upper-middle-
class equestrian enclave – have used spatial and memorial practices, including zoning for large
lots and symbolically drawing on the mythos of the rural West, to sustain the value of their homes
and prevent unwanted development. See Laura Barraclough, “Rural Urbanism: Landscape, Land
Use Activism, and the Cultural Politics of Suburban Spatial Exclusion” (Ph.D. diss., University
of Southern California, 2006). By contrast, Laura Pulido has documented how neighborhoods
marked as poor and associated with people of color have been subject to zoning and development
decisions with negative, even fatal, consequences. Laura Pulido, “Rethinking Environmental
Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California,” Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 90.1 (2000): 12-40.
18
industrial zoning, internment-era neglect, slum clearance – and a corresponding
revaluation of the neighborhood as a Japanese shopping district or zone for urban
gentrification.
And yet enclave communities have sometimes paradoxically embraced such
spatial significations as an act of resistance, using them as a basis for claiming ownership
or drawing boundaries between insider and outsider. In this manner, the enclave becomes
an alternate position from which to make demands for controlling the space and what
goes on in it, creating a (limited and partial) refuge from the demands of the racial state
and global capital. Thus community-initiated spatial and memorial practices in Little
Tokyo are intended to appropriate space for the production of place, the symbolic
communal landscape of lived experience. Doreen Massey has argued that places are not
mere “areas with boundaries around” them, but “articulated moments in networks of
social relations and understandings.”
37
Places are made by specific qualities “embedded
in the use of particular buildings such as neighborhood bars, ethnic groceries, or
notorious apartment buildings,” meanings made not only by the property and capital
relations represented by the buildings but by the histories they contain and embody, such
that spatial and memorial practices are inextricably linked in the production of place.
38

37
Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1994): 154, 156.

38
Christopher Mele, “Globalization, Culture, and Neighborhood Change: Reinventing the Lower
East Side of New York,” Urban Affairs Review 32 (Sep. 1996): 6. This link between stories and
buildings so central to place is predicated on notions of authenticity, that this was the building
where baachan (grandma) was born or that the site of Auntie’s old store. However, as our ideas
about what is authentic are socially and culturally conditioned, we often find some buildings and
sites more “authentic,” or at least more appropriate to the narratives we prefer to tell about
ourselves, than others. See Dell Upton, “Ethnicity, Authenticity, and Invented Traditions.”
19
However, because both place and space are themselves products (and aid the
reproduction) of racial formations, they are always already implicated in racial hierarchy
and inequality, with the consequence that the enclave’s capacity as refuge and incubator
of resistance is vulnerable to being undermined or overturned. In Little Tokyo’s case, this
has occurred when the enclave became symbolic of Japanese Americans’ exclusion from
the body politic during World War II as well as when its symbolic difference was itself
appropriated as a selling point in a process of gentrification that requires containable
differentiation to generate profit.
As an interdisciplinary investigation of ethnoracially-inscribed space and enclave
communities in twentieth-century Los Angeles, this dissertation relies on multiple
methodologies. For the historical aspects of my study, I have relied primarily on archival
research in newspapers and primary document collections (see Appendix A), which are
excellent resources for understanding the actions and relationships of political and
economic elites – the people who get covered by newspapers and make decisions at the
macro level about distributing both capital and people in the landscape. But since it is just
as important to my study to comprehend the agency and experience of people who lacked
access to more official channels of power, I have sought to capture those voices through
oral histories, both ones I have conducted myself as well as oral history collections at the
Japanese American National Museum and the Center for Oral and Public History at
California State University, Fullerton (see Appendix B). I chose my oral history subjects

Historical Archeology 30:2 (1996): 1-7. Thus the spatial practices that shape and memorialize
places are inherently political, for they also lay out the accepted parameters out of which
individuals make their identity; in Greg Dickinson’s formulation, the grammar for possible
performances of the self. See Dickinson, “Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of
Identity in Old Pasadena,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 83:1 (Feb. 1997): 1-27.
20
in some cases because of their participation in key moments of change in the enclave (for
instance, my interviews with anti-redevelopment activists discussed in Chapter 3), and in
other cases because of their representative experiences with living, playing, and working
in the enclave (as with former members of the Oliver sports clubs interviewed for
Chapter 1). Most of my subjects were initially identified through archival research and
subsequently contacted for interviews; on several occasions, those subjects then
introduced me to additional persons with relevant histories in the enclave who also
provided me with their oral histories.
In addition to archival research and oral histories, I have also employed
ethnographic methods for my research into contemporary Little Tokyo. For three years I
attended meetings of the Little Tokyo Community Council, Planning and Cultural
Preservation Committee, and Little Tokyo Historical Society as both a participant and
explicitly as a researcher. I also attended community festivals such as Nisei Week, Tofu
Festival, and Nikkei Community Day. I believe very strongly that ethnography is a two-
way street, so as people in Little Tokyo generously accepted me into their community
and trusted me with their stories I have tried to repay them by sharing my data and
contributing to community-based projects. For example, I participated in a planning
studio and created a walking tour brochure for the Little Tokyo Service Center, and wrote
and executed a grant based on my interviews. I thus make no claim that my research
represents an objective, detached viewpoint; like the local Japanese American community,
I too desire to preserve the history of Little Tokyo, although it has no direct connection
21
to my own personal history. Indeed, I believe that my standing in this context, as both
outsider (not from Los Angeles, not Japanese American) and insider (participant in
community-based land use and memory projects), allowed me to occupy multiple
analytical positions and produce a more complete picture of the practices through which
the state and community organizations have together produced Little Tokyo.
I have also employed elements of textual, visual, and spatial analysis to
supplement my archival and ethnographic research as required by the various forms of
evidence available to me from different moments in Little Tokyo’s history. For instance, I
was able to analyze the film Hito Hata: Raise the Banner, produced by Asian American
anti-redevelopment activists in 1980, as a text that dealt specifically with Little Tokyo as
well as metaphorically with the relationship between third-generation Japanese
Americans and their immigrant grandparents. The avalanche of architectural renderings
and design plans that have accompanied redevelopment and gentrification in Little Tokyo
have proven a rich source for analysis of the iconography used to visually represent the
enclave and signify its cultural meaning in the contemporary moment. Finally, attention to
the organization and use of space in the enclave – the siting and spatial relationship of
memory projects, for example, or the public performances of Japanese American ethnic
identity – is an important analytical component throughout the dissertation.
With regard to language, the majority of materials examined in researching this
dissertation were in the English language. I do not speak or read Japanese, but since
Americans of Japanese descent today often use English as their primary language, even in
22
communication with each other, I rarely required the help of a translator. As this project
focuses on the Japanese American community’s experiences with other ethnic and racial
groups, some of the source materials utilized languages other than English and Japanese –
for instance, the newspaper La Opinión is produced in Spanish and is quoted here in
translation (my own, for better or worse).
The first chapter, “’Something to Hang Your Hat On’: Immigrants and Enclaves
in Pre-WWII Los Angeles,” explores the genesis of the “ethnic enclave” of Little Tokyo,
as well as the state and economic policies and community practices that shaped its
diverse residential, occupational, recreational, and educational spaces. As the only area of
Los Angeles over which Japanese Americans had anything like a recognized claim, Little
Tokyo was the nexus where immigrant Japanese and their children encountered other
communities with shared challenges, experimented with responses to the restrictions
imposed upon them, and negotiated conflicts within the Japanese American community
and with the other immigrant and racialized communities of Southern California.
Chapter Two, “’This is Bronzeville’: African and Japanese Americans in the
Enclave,” is an in-depth examination of African and Japanese American Angelenos
during the contentious wartime period when Japanese Americans were evacuated from
Little Tokyo and African American war workers moved in. The neighborhood was
reinscribed with the name “Bronzeville,” until the closing of the internment camps
brought Japanese Americans back to an enclave they could no longer claim as their own.
It was in “Little Bronze Tokyo,” at a historical moment in which the racial state took
unprecedented steps to contain and control urban space and ethnoracial populations, that
23
blacks and Japanese Americans negotiated their uneven trajectories within the landscape
and the polity, as well as their volatile but enduring relationships with each other. In their
brief attempt to claim and defend a space for shared belonging and interracial accord,
African and Japanese American Angelenos challenged the divisive hierarchies promoted
by both state action and cycles of economic investment and disinvestment.
Chapter Three, “Renewing the Past: Urban Redevelopment and Ethnic
Community,” describes the arrival in Little Tokyo of the most common spatial practice of
the later-twentieth-century American state: urban renewal. However, redevelopment for
the enclave was a decidedly unorthodox process, initiated by the Japanese American
community rather than local planners and eventually producing a consensus for the
memorial practice of preservation supported by both state officials and Little Tokyo
community organizations. Over three decades, the enclave was physically remade and
packaged for Japanese tourists and Pacific Rim consumption even as it nurtured
communities of resistance that challenged essentialist constructions of national and ethnic
identity and racial difference. That tradition of resistance continues in the activism of the
Little Tokyo Service Center, the community behind many contemporary spatial and
memorial practices in the neighborhood.
Finally, “Home Is Little Tokyo,” the fourth chapter, focuses on current efforts by
Japanese Americans to inscribe Little Tokyo as a Japanese American place in order to
build community and consolidate control over the spaces of the enclave as gentrification
pressures steadily grow. Japanese Americans have pursued a strategy of memory projects
and land use policies that ever more forcefully marks the enclave as Japanese American
24
space even as corporate investment increasingly trivializes and appropriates these
projects as lifestyle dressing for upscale new residents. Japanese American community
organizations have merged spatial and memorial practices in their efforts to transform the
enclave into sacred ground; in the process, they have begun to recover their historic
connections to other racialized communities and reject contemporary forms of state and
economic oppression. Little Tokyo today is balanced on the edge of yet another moment
of convulsive change, one that promises to chart the possible futures for the ethnic
enclave, and the relationship between race and space more generally, in the global cities
of the twenty-first century.
Ethnoracially-inscribed spaces such as ghettos, barrios, and enclaves were
somewhat unusual in the colonial American city; it was not until the 1820s, as slavery in
the north died out, that concentrations of free African Americans became common in
cities like Philadelphia.
39
By the 1840s, as the first waves of Irish famine emigrants
arrived in the mercantile city of New York, a neighborhood like Five Points was
thoroughly and multiply signified as poor, black, and immigrant and subject to spatial
practices intended to contain and reform its diverse population.
40
As cities grew and

39
Indeed, Shane White has written that, in the initial years following emancipation in New York,
free black households were “well-distributed throughout the city,” often living in the cellars of
buildings with whites living above. Shane White, “We Dwell in Safety and Pursue Our Honest
Callings: Free Blacks in New York City, 1783-1810,” The Journal of American History 75 (Sep.
1988): 445-470, 461. See also Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s
Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). While this
observation is primarily relevant to colonial British America, it is worth pointing out that there is
likewise little evidence for spatial segregation or ethnic inscription in the urban centers of Spain’s
North American colonies through the eighteenth century.

40
Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (New York:
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2001, 1928); Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New
25
industrialized and immigrant populations exploded, ghettoes, barrios, and enclaves
became a common feature of American urban life, a feature that, to a substantial degree,
outlived Park’s predicted three generations and are currently transforming and expanding
in an era of new immigration and racial formation. In Los Angeles today, East Los
Angeles is an unincorporated Latino barrio of more than seven square miles and
immigrant enclaves are so numerous, and so vigorously claimed and named, that “Thai
Town” actually shares a corner with “Little Armenia” in Hollywood. Once considered
dozens of suburbs in search of a city, Los Angeles could now as reasonably be declared a
collection of enclaves instead. Little Tokyo, as one of the most enduring, diverse, and
repeatedly reinvented of these enclaves, provides an excellent case study of the impact of
both the racial state and immigrant and racialized communities on the urban landscape.
Beyond the United States, enclaves have followed the new routes blazed by
global capital in neoliberal late modernity, with Beijing’s “Koreatown” growing so
rapidly it may soon displace L.A.’s as the largest concentration of Koreans living outside
Korea.
41
As people become more globally mobile, their spatial concentrations and
practices in homes outside their homelands, as well as the memorial practices by which
they claim or remember their multiple homes, become an ever more significant
component of the twenty-first century city, as do the spatial practices by which nation-

York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most
Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001).

41
Kim Kiho, “Koreatown Grows in District of Beijing,” Arirang News, Sep. 19, 2007, at
http://www.arirang.co.kr/News/News_View.asp?code=Ne6&nseq=74583&category=7 (accessed
on Apr. 18, 2008). My understanding of neoliberalism, along with the uneven geographical
distribution of global capital, as features of “late modernity” is informed by David Harvey, The
Condition of Postmodernity, and Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical
Development (London: Verso, 2006).
26
states and local states attempt to contain, categorize, and domesticate them. Thus the
history of one ethnic enclave that, over the course of the twentieth century, was subject to
a range of state spatial practices that both shaped and responded to shifting racial
formations, as well as the innovative and sometimes counter-hegemonic spatial and
memorial strategies of its diverse inhabitants, offer necessary lessons on our collective
urban future and how to survive it.
27
CHAPTER 1:
“SOMETHING TO HANG YOUR HAT ON”:
IMMIGRANTS AND ENCLAVES IN PRE-WWII LOS ANGELES

Little Tokyo history is this way – a mix of people of various backgrounds.
-Harry Honda
1

Jack Kunitomi grew up on the streets of Little Tokyo. As a little boy in the 1920s, he and
his Japanese American friends played at samurai sword-fighting in the alleys off East
First Street and then practiced baseball in the gravel field behind the Japanese language
school on Hewitt. Egged on by Peter, an older boy with a Japanese father and Mexican
mother, Jack played on the lot where the Japanese Union Church was under construction,
digging in the clay walls of the basement excavated by construction workers. At Amelia
Street Elementary School, Jack picked up some Spanish from his classmates, more than
half of whom were from Mexican immigrant households. In the afternoons, he walked
the banks of the Los Angeles River, along the eastern edge of Little Tokyo, looking for
grasshoppers, lizards, and butterflies to use in his science projects. The second-generation
Russian children living on the other side of the river did the same, and the two groups
would engage in turf battles over the riverbed using slingshots and bb guns.
2

1
Harry Honda, “Wrong Side of the Tracks,” Pacific Citizen, Sep. 14, 1984, 10.

2
Interview with Jack Kunitomi, Sep. 8, 2006; “Life History of Peter,” Box 29, Folder 251,
Survey on Race Relations (hereafter SRR) Records, Hoover Institute, Stanford University. During
the war, Kunitomi was interned at Manzanar and then Heart Mountain before entering Military
Intelligence.
28
When Jack was older, he walked west into downtown Los Angeles in the
mornings, catching the streetcar to Lincoln High School on North Broadway, where his
best friend was Hugo Munioni, the son of Italian immigrants. Jack played with Italian and
Mexican Americans on his school sports teams, and with other Japanese American boys
on a Little Tokyo team called the Olivers. The Olivers played in the Japanese Athletic
Union, an informal ethnic league in which players were required to have at least one
parent of full Japanese “blood.” The Olivers had a good record, although Jack didn’t
enjoy playing football against the local team of Japanese Hawaiians, several of whom
were half Polynesian or Portuguese. They had a “huge fella, 6’4” and 300 pounds…he
was a terror, no one wanted to tackle him,” he recalled. When he wasn’t at school or on
the field, Jack worked for his family – five brothers and sisters and his parents – and at
the Grand Central Market a few blocks west of Little Tokyo at Third and Broadway,
where his co-workers represented a wide range of ethnic and immigrant communities.
3

Although he was raised, schooled, and employed all within a few blocks of the
Japanese “ethnic enclave,” Jack Kunitomi’s life was not consistently restricted by either
its physical or its ethnoracial boundaries, nor was the diverse spectrum of his personal
connections and daily experiences unique compared to other Japanese Americans of his
generation raised in Los Angeles. Certainly, Kunitomi’s world was constrained in
multiple ways by the segregationist and discriminatory state policies and economic
practices that marked the early decades of the twentieth century in the United States; yet,
at the same time, his story reveals a rich mix of influences and pursuits rather than the

3
Interview with Jack Kunitomi, Sep. 8, 2006; Frank Fukuzawa, Olivers Commemorative
Booklet, 1990, 9 (in author’s possession).
29
isolation and deprivation that are stereotypically seen as characteristic of “ghetto”
communities and their residents. Official policy and informal immigrant practices acted
(and reacted) in concert to produce the liminal, but nevertheless generative, spaces that
constituted this landscape of immigrant L.A. The racialized space of urban immigrant
enclaves nurtured both the institutions and locations that supported ethnic community and
the place-based networks of work, school, and play that connected those communities to
each other.
The central nihonmachi, or Japantown, in Los Angeles County, Little Tokyo was
the biggest and busiest of more than forty Japantowns in the state of California prior to
World War II.
4
With its Japanese-oriented shops, bathhouses, doctor’s offices, churches,
temples, restaurants, newspaper offices, and movie theater, along with the flower and
wholesale produce markets that operated along its periphery, Little Tokyo was the center
of social and economic life for the immigrant, or Issei, generation.
5
As the Nisei (or

4
For more information on California’s prewar Japantowns, see the California Japantowns
preservation project, funded by the California Civil Liberties Public Education Project, at
www.californiajapantowns.org (accessed Feb. 6, 2008). On the relative size of L.A.’s Little
Tokyo compared to other California Japantowns, see Koyoshi Uono, “The Factors Affecting the
Geographical Aggregation and Dispersion of the Japanese Residences in the City of Los
Angeles” (M.A. thesis, University of Southern California, 1927): 19.

5
The original scholarly work on ethnic (generally European immigrant) enclaves by Chicago
sociologists Ernest Burgess and Robert Park described them as temporary spatial agglomerations
of immigrant groups that eased adjustment to American society over multiple generations through
co-lingual commercial services and employment networks. More recent work by scholars such as
Alejandro Portes has emphasized the enduring nature of many ethnic enclaves and argued that
they represent an alternative means of incorporation into American society that does not
necessarily imply assimilation to the cultural “mainstream.” See Robert E. Park, Ernest Burgess,
and Roderic McKenzie, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925); Stanley
Lieberson, Ethnic Patterns in American Cities (New York: The Free Press, 1963); Alejandro
Portes, “Assimilation or Consciousness: Perceptions of U.S. Society among Recent Latin
American Immigrants to the United States,” Social Forces 59.1 (Sep. 1980): 200-224; and Min
Zhou, Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave (Philadelphia: Temple
30
second generation) came of age, Little Tokyo was likewise a key economic site – with
only 10 to 20 percent of Nisei working outside the ethnic economy
6
– as well as the heart
of an emerging Nisei social and cultural world.
7
While the neighborhood certainly
functioned as an “ethnic enclave,” a highly organized social and economic resource and
refuge for the Japanese community of Los Angeles, it was also a space in which Japanese
immigrants and their children encountered members of other migrant, transnational, and
racialized communities inhabiting different domestic positions relative to the racial state,
the global economy, and each other.
8

University Press, 1992).

6
According to sociologist Dorothy Thomas, fewer than 10 percent of Nisei in Los Angeles in
1940 worked in Anglo-operated businesses; Leonard Bloom and Ruth Reimer estimated that
perhaps as much as 20 percent of the Japanese American population of prewar L.A. were
employed by non-Japanese. The majority of Nisei, then, were employed by Japanese agricultural
or commercial concerns. See Dorothy Swaine Thomas (with the assistance of Charles Kikuchi
and James Sakoda), The Salvage [Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement] (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1952): 41; Leonard Bloom and Ruth Reimer, Removal and
Return: The Socio-Economic Effects of the War on Japanese Americans (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1949): 67; David K. Yoo, Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture
among Japanese Americans of California, 1924-49 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press,
1999): 32-33; and Lon Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of
Ethnic Identity and Festival in Los Angeles, 1934-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002): 27.

7
For the importance of Little Tokyo to Nisei social life, see Valerie J. Matsumoto, “Japanese
American Women and the Creation of Urban Nisei Culture in the 1930s,” Over the Edge:
Remapping the American West, eds. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999): 291-306; Yoo, Growing Up Nisei; and Kurashige,
Japanese American Celebration and Conflict.

8
Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, in their investigation into the processes of racial
formation in the post-Civil Rights United States, argue that the nation-state (and its regional and
municipal iterations) both structures, and is structured by, ideologies of race in its institutions,
policies, and social relations; thus the state itself is racial. See Michael Omi and Howard Winant,
Racial Formation in the United States From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1986,
1994): 83.
31

Figure 1.1. Downtown Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles.
Courtesy David Giannovario.

Counter to prevailing popular and academic understandings of the enclave, Little
Tokyo was a residentially diverse place, where young Nisei attended elementary school
alongside Mexican, Russian, “white ethnic,” and African American children and grappled
with their confinement within an “Oriental” racial category that also included spatially
overlapping, but politically and socially distinct, Chinese, Filipino, and Korean
32
immigrant (and, in the Chinese case, second- and even third-generation) communities.
9

The lives of Japanese Americans were further enriched by an ethnically and racially
mixed collection of daily visitors to Little Tokyo with varying degrees of interaction
with, and significance to, the enclave’s residents: teachers in the neighborhood schools,

9
Oscar Handlin famously argued that immigration to the United States constituted a traumatic
and almost total break with the communities and traditions of the homeland in The Uprooted: The
Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (New York: Little, Brown &
Co., 1951). He built his argument on the work of sociologists such as William Thomas, Florian
Znaniecki, and Robert Park; see Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and
America (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1927), and Park, Race and Culture (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free
Press, 1950). Handlin’s argument was considerably undermined by Frank Thistlewaite’s
discovery of the vast number of European immigrants who returned to their home country
permanently or traveled repeatedly between their new and old “homes”: see Frank Thistlewaite,
“Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” XI Congres
International des Sciences Historiques, Rapports 5 (1960): 32-60. Research into Japanese
immigration patterns by Yuji Ichioka and Eiichiro Azuma also found repeated journeys across the
Pacific, although, due to the greater immigration restrictions facing Asian Americans, from the
1920s on it was more typical for the American-born second generation to return to Japan for
schooling or employment. See Yuji Ichioka, Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese
American History, eds. Gordon H. Chang and Eiichiro Azuma (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2006), and Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism
in Japanese America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). John Bodnar and Elizabeth
Ewen completed the revision of Handlin’s thesis, emphasizing the innovation and agency of
immigrants as they fused old and new economic and cultural practices. See John Bodnar, The
Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1985), and Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on
the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985). In this way,
immigrant practices might produce a variety of adaptations to American society ranging from
alienation to acculturation to assimilation, as described by Milton Gordon in his book,
Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1964). Nevertheless, scholars such as Lizabeth Cohen and Gary Gerstle
have highlighted the political, economic, and cultural constraints within American society that
limited immigrants’ ultimate freedom to construct hybrid or alternative identities: see Lizabeth
Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), and Gary Gerstle, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,”
The Journal of American History 84.2 (Sep. 1997): 524-580. Finally, David Roediger has
outlined how “white” European immigrants came to understand the salient racial categories of the
United States and sought to differentiate themselves from African Americans; Yuji Ichioka has
demonstrated that Japanese immigrants went through a similar process and focused on
constructing an identity counter to Anglo stereotypes of the Chinese, the “other” to whom
Japanese immigrants found themselves most consistently compared. See David Roediger, The
Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso,
1991), and Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants,
1885-1924 (New York: The Free Press, 1988), especially Chapter 6.
33
residents of adjacent neighborhoods waiting for the next streetcar, and customers and
suppliers transacting business at the shops and wholesale markets.
Japanese Americans also traveled outside the enclave for better housing, work in
racially-defined labor markets, and play in both mono-ethnic and mixed-race settings.
These connections between the enclave and its corollaries or opposites nurtured Japanese
American ethnic bonds while simultaneously expanding notions of community and
belonging. Nevertheless, the enclave remained the heart of Japanese American
community life; as Kango Kunitsugu described it, “we looked at other areas as not
necessarily foreign, but at the same time slightly different from ours…I think what Little
Tokyo represented to us was something to hang your hat on.”
10
As the only space in Los
Angeles over which Japanese Americans had anything like a recognized claim, Little
Tokyo was the nexus where Japanese Americans encountered communities with shared
challenges, experimented with responses to the restrictions imposed upon them, and
negotiated conflicts within the Japanese American community and with the other
immigrant and racialized communities of Southern California.

10
Kango Kunitsugu, interviewed by Dave Biniasz for the Japanese American Project, Nov. 28,
1973, Center for Oral and Public History (hereafter COPH), California State University,
Fullerton.
34

Figure 1.2. Map of the greater Little Tokyo neighborhood in 1908, adapted from Chart IV
in Koyoshi Uono, “The Factors Affecting the Geographical Aggregation and Dispersion
of the Japanese Residences in the City of Los Angeles” (M.A. thesis, University of
Southern California, 1927). The dots indicate Japanese residences or businesses.

35
Inscribing and Containing Ethnic Space: From “Little Berlin” to Little Tokyo
Prior to the 1880s, Los Angeles had no residents of Japanese descent. The low-lying
district that would become Little Tokyo – south of the old Mexican Plaza area and its
adjacent Chinatown, and east of the emerging civic and financial Downtown of the
American era – was home to some modest frame residences, stable yards, a few nascent
industrial concerns and commercial structures, and the remnants of the Wolfskill citrus
orchards.
11
Sloping towards the river, the land would often flood during the spring rains,
with water sometimes creeping west all the way to Main Street.
12
This marginal land
attracted the city’s marginal communities, immigrant and racialized populations who
could afford the low rents for their residences and industrial and commercial endeavors.
According to historians William Mason and John McKinstry, the “area before 1900 with
some justification could have been called ‘Little Berlin,’ for the Germans were the largest
single nationality in the district.”
13
Two large German breweries marked an emerging
light industrial district along Alameda Street. The Jewish Newmark brothers had a
warehouse for their coffee, tea, and spice business on the corner of East First and San
Pedro Streets.

11
Sanborn Map, Los Angeles, 1894, Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867-1970, Los Angeles Public
Library; Violé Los Angeles tract map, Section 5, 1907, Los Angeles City Bureau of Engineering;
and Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 1995, 1999): 152,159.

12
I thank Greg Fisher, a city employee working in Councilwoman Jan Perry’s office and
probably the most knowledgeable unpublished historian of Los Angeles, for pointing out this
feature of the historical landscape to me.

13
William M. Mason and Dr. John A. McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles (Los Angeles:
History Division of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, 1969): 7, 20.
36
The area was also considered the “Negro district” of Los Angeles. Under Mexican
rule, what is now Los Angeles Street in the vicinity of the old Plaza was known as Calle
de los Negros; under the Americans, the name was vulgarized to “Nigger Alley.”
14

Farther south, African American Bob Owens ran a corral and stables on San Pedro Street
near 2
nd
in the 1850s and ‘60s. Both his family and that of celebrated midwife Biddie
Mason also lived on that block, a central node in L.A.’s emerging African American
community in the late nineteenth century.
15
Over time, black Angelenos spread west to
Central and then moved south along both sides of the Avenue, setting up the Los Angeles
Sunday Forum at the Odd Fellows Hall on 8
th
between Maple and San Pedro, and the
California Eagle newspaper at 8
th
and Central.
16
The mixed neighborhood also contained
Jewish secondhand shops, Irish saloons, and Chinese laundries.
17

During the 1880s, the population of Los Angeles exploded and its economy
boomed following the completion of a second rail line into the city and the resulting fare
war between carriers. As both freight and passenger loads skyrocketed, the railroads
responded by building stations, repair facilities, and switching stations on inexpensive
land along the west side of the Los Angeles River near downtown. The rail lines were

14
A detailed history of the Plaza area, particularly the overlapping immigrant and racialized
communities that called it home throughout the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can
be found in William Estrada’s The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2008).

15
Hayden, The Power of Place, 139-167.

16
Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005): 25, 95.

17
Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles, 7; Uono, “The Factors Affecting the
Geographical Aggregation…,” 43.
37
joined the following decade by local streetcar lines, adding to the increasingly urban
character of the “Little Berlin” area, which now featured brick commercial blocks and a
variety of small industrial sites. The 1880s boom also introduced a Japanese presence into
the neighborhood, as Japanese immigrants came south from San Francisco to take
advantage of opportunities in the rapidly growing city. A former sailor known as Charles
Kame or Hama, whose given name was probably Hamanosuke Shigeta, opened a
restaurant at 340 East First Street around 1886, serving American-style food to a white
and black clientele. Two years later, a Japanese boarding house that was known in
English as the “Japanese YMCA” opened on Alameda between First and Second
Streets.
18
The Japanese business and residential presence in the area grew slowly, like the
Japanese population of Los Angeles, over the next fifteen years – the 1900 census
counted only 150 Japanese immigrants living in the city.
19

The population and business presence began to grow quite rapidly after that, with
the establishment of a tailor, doctor, dentist, baker, bathhouse, department store,
confectionary, and a daily newspaper, the Rafu Shimpo. By 1905, Anglos in Los Angeles
had begun to refer to the area with a new nickname: Little Tokyo.
20
In December of that
year, there were 3387 Japanese in the city of Los Angeles (of whom only 142 were

18
Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles, 1; Ichiro “Mike” Murase, Little Tokyo:
One Hundred Years in Pictures (Los Angeles: Visual Communications, 1983): 6.

19
Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles, 3. There were also small Japanese
business and residential neighborhoods around 4
th
and Spring and 6
th
and Olive prior to 1906,
although these died out due to the expansion of the downtown business district as well as the
attraction of lower rents in the East First Street area; see ibid., 11, and Uono, “The Factors
Affecting the Geographical Aggregation…,” 32, 36, 41.

20
Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles, 9.
38
women and 42 children), plus an additional 2570 in the rest of the county.
21
Many of
those living beyond the boundaries of Little Tokyo were engaged in fishing at Terminal
Island, near the San Pedro harbor, or small-scale farming of fruits, vegetables, and
flowers on leased plots. These family farms, and particularly the Japanese nurseries
which came into existence to serve them, often located along the new streetcar lines to
ease the transport of plants and seeds to the farms and of produce and cut flowers to the
downtown markets.
22
The same streetcars also brought them to Little Tokyo for shopping
and entertainment.

Figure 1.3. East First Street in 1914, looking east from San Pedro Street. The one-story
building with awnings at the far left is currently the Little Tokyo Visitors Center.
Courtesy Archie Miyatake, Toyo Miyatake Studio.

21
Ibid., 15-16; Murase, Little Tokyo, 7.

22
Noritaka Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperativism and Immigrant Agriculture: A Study of Japanese
Floriculture and Truck Farming in California” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1982): 107.
39

Another two to three thousand Japanese left San Francisco for Los Angeles
following the 1906 earthquake and the increasingly strident anti-Japanese movements
that followed in its wake, with Los Angeles actually surpassing San Francisco in the size
of its Japanese population by 1910.
23
The Little Tokyo area was attractive to Japanese
entrepreneurs for its central location, cheap rents, and the increasing number of streetcar
lines that served the area for Japanese living in outlying agricultural districts.
24
In 1910,
half of the retail space on East First Street was rented by Japanese merchants, and by
1915 that number had climbed to 75 percent, though Jewish merchants retained a
noticeable, if limited presence, on the streets of Little Tokyo.
25
By 1924, sociology
student Gretchen Tuthill described Little Tokyo as stretching from Aliso on the north to
Fourth Street on the south, and from Vignes on the east to Los Angeles Street on the
west: “East 1
st
and San Pedro Streets…are primarily occupied with stores, while the other
streets are more nearly residential.”
26
Many Japanese also resided in the blocks to the
south of these somewhat artificial boundaries, particularly around the wholesale produce

23
Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles, 16, 22-23; Murase, Little Tokyo, 7; and
Uono, “The Factors Affecting the Geographical Aggregation…,” 19. By 1910, the Japanese
population of the city of Los Angeles had grown to 6000; Mark Wild, Street Meeting: Multiethnic
Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005): 24.

24
Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles, 10; Uono, “The Factors Affecting the
Geographical Aggregation…,” 46.

25
Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles, 25. Harry Yamamoto recalled that his
older brother George gained the nickname “Joresh” in the 1920s after a Jewish merchant in Little
Tokyo repeatedly greeted him by Yiddish-accented name. Interview with Harry Yamamoto, Nov.
30, 2006.

26
Gretchen Tuthill, “Japanese in the City of Los Angeles” (Los Angeles: University of Southern
California Master’s Thesis in Sociology, 1924), abridged, 11; Box 25, Folder 70, SRR Records,
Hoover Institute, Stanford University.
40
and flower markets that had been established over the preceding two decades at Ninth
and San Pedro, Seventh and Central, and Seventh and Wall.
27

27
Wild, Street Meeting, 26; Uono, “The Factors Affecting the Geographical Aggregation…,” 47.
41

Figure 1.4. Little Tokyo businesses in the vicinity of East First Street in 1926, reproduced
from Uono, “The Factors Affecting the Geographical Aggregation….”

As early as 1908, the Los Angeles Times had noted the spatial contiguity of
Chinatown and Little Tokyo, pointing out that “the Japanese colony has grown and
42
extended its boundaries until it embraces a large part of what was formerly the Chinese
section.”
28
The ethnic Chinese population of Los Angeles had declined in the aftermath
of the 1882 proscription on new immigration, from 4,424 in L.A. County in 1890 to
2,602 in 1910, leaving buildings within the accepted boundaries of Chinatown available
for lease by other immigrant communities in need of the cheap rents and central location
made possible by Anglo disinvestment in spaces that had become racially
“undesirable.”
29
One Chinese immigrant recalled that “the inhabitants of 1920s
Chinatown [were] mostly Italian and Mexican.”
30
The presence of Mexicans in
Chinatown was not particularly unusual, given the close proximity of both Chinatown
and Little Tokyo to the old Plaza area of Los Angeles, the center of the Spanish and
Mexican pueblo which, under American rule, had morphed into the “Spanish” ethnic
enclave of Sonoratown (see Figure 1.2).
31
While the Plaza had been an area of Mexican
settlement for over a century by the time the first Japanese arrived, the dislocations
accompanying the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and the Mexican Revolution that
followed in 1910 brought a fresh wave of Mexican migration to Los Angeles, increasing

28
Quoted in Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles, 24.

29
Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006): 7.

30
Quoted in Wild, Street Meeting, 24.

31
See Bill Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its
Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004): 16, for a discussion of the ways in
which Anglos presumed Mexicans to metaphorically “not even live in Los Angeles” in the latter
half of the nineteenth century.
43
the population of foreign-born Mexicans from 1,613 in 1900 to 33,644 in 1920.
32
Thus
the growing Mexican and Japanese immigrant communities shared the racialized spaces
of Chinatown and its environs with the declining Chinese community.
33

Like the Chinese before them, many Japanese immigrants were initially transient
single men, moving seasonally between agricultural and urban job opportunities. The
growing nihonmachi, or Japantown, catered to their needs with hotels and boarding
houses, pool halls, restaurants, and nomiya (bars with female waitresses who sang and
played the shamisen, a banjo-like musical instrument, for the patrons). While a few
Japanese gambling clubs operated in Little Tokyo, such as the Tokyo Club on Jackson
Street, many Japanese immigrants also went to the more numerous gambling dens just a
few blocks north along Alameda in Chinatown, where there was also a row of “cribs”
offering Japanese (along with white, black, and Chinese) prostitutes.
34
The clientele of

32
Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?, 7. The Los Angeles Plaza area remained a major site of settlement
for newcomers from Mexico until at least World War II; see George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican
American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993): 73. For more on the shared experiences of Chinese and Mexican
immigrants with the racial state in their overlapping enclaves, see Cesar López, “El Descanso: A
Comparative History of the Los Angeles Plaza Area and the Shared Racialized Space of the
Mexican and Chinese Communities, 1853-1933” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 2002) and
Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?.

33
To further demonstrate the connection between disinvestment in, and racial inscription of,
urban space to create the linked forms of ghetto, barrio, and enclave, Carey McWilliams notes
that many of California’s Chinatowns “had developed around the adobe huts of Sonoratowns;” in
some cases, “the Chinese had moved in and taken over the old adobes around the Plaza.” See
Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country: Island on the Land (New York: Duell, Sloan &
Pearce, 1946): 86. The Plaza, which contained the most valuable urban real estate under Mexican
rule, was too racially “contaminated” for Anglo habitation, according to the white supremacist
logic of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States, and was thus abandoned to
other racially suspect communities.

34
Murase, Little Tokyo, 13-14; Linda España-Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s
Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s (New York: Columbia
44
these brothels and gambling clubs were a mix of Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, African
Americans, “white ethnic” immigrants (such as the Italians living in Chinatown and the
Lincoln Heights neighborhood just to its north), and the Anglo majority. Marshall
Stimson, for instance, an upper-class Anglo attorney who had attended Los Angeles High
School in the 1890s, and whose father established the philanthropic Stimson Industrial
Institute in Little Tokyo, recalled that he and his friends often left the school, located on a
hill above the old Plaza, at noon to gamble in Chinatown. On one occasion, he escaped
arrest during a police raid but recognized three of his less fortunate L.A. High pals being
carted off to the police station alongside blacks, Chinese, and Mexicans.
35

Like Little Tokyo then, Chinatown and the adjacent Plaza/Sonoratown
neighborhood were fluid, ethnically and racially diverse places obscured by discursive
practices emphasizing a knowable, mono-ethnic community connected to a fixed and
securely bounded space. In the United States and Canada, at least, Chinatowns in
particular have been associated with vice and disease, linking ideological assumptions
about the Chinese as “a morally aberrant community” with “the image of Chinatown as

University Press, 2006), especially Chapter 2; Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los
Angeles, 7; and Wild, Street Meeting, 124-126. Something of a local mythology has grown up
around the Tokyo Club, with some Little Tokyo old-timers claiming no memory of it and others
recalling it as a hidden power in the neighborhood that commanded loyalty by providing food and
sleeping quarters to indigent agricultural laborers in the winter season. James Oda has even
declared that Club boss Hideichi Yamatoda was not killed in the late 1930s, as other reports have
it, but was actually a double agent who fled to Mexico and was picked up there by a Japanese
submarine! See Murase, Little Tokyo, 13-14; Brian Masaru Hayashi, “For the Sake of Our
Japanese Brethren”: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism Among the Japanese of Los
Angeles, 1895-1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995): 81-82; Alec Dubro and David
Kaplan, "California's Yakuza: Foothold in Little Tokyo," Californians 5 (1987): 34-41; and
James Oda, Heroic Struggles of Japanese Americans: Partisan Fighters from America’s
Concentration Camps (North Hollywood, Calif.: J. Oda, 1980): 273-274.

35
Marshall Stimson, “Fun, Fights, and Fiestas in Old Los Angeles,” typed manuscript draft, 65-
67, Box 4, Folder 3, Marshall Stimson Papers, Huntington Library.
45
an unsanitary sink.”
36
As Kay Anderson has written, “’Chinatown’ accrued a certain field
of meaning that became the justification for recurring rounds of government practice in
the ongoing construction of both the place and the racial category” of Chinese.
37
Nayan
Shah has explored how public health officials in San Francisco used their “knowledge” of
Chinatown and the Chinese to rationalize policies containing and “purifying” both the
people and the neighborhood.
38
In describing Los Angeles’ Chinatown, Mark Wild noted
that “Anglo officials allowed prostitution, gambling, drugs, and other vice industries to
pool in Chinatown as a way to keep them out of ‘respectable’ areas;” as a corollary, the
presence of such vice and its association with the Chinese was used by the city to justify
municipal neglect: “Despite its central location, Chinatown languished without basic
infrastructure improvements and regular garbage collection into the twentieth century.
Streetlights were not installed until about 1913, and as late as 1922 the neighborhood had
only two paved roads.”
39

Japanese immigrants sought to prevent the application of similar discursive and
spatial practices to themselves or to Little Tokyo. Yuji Ichioka has written about the
lengths to which the Japanese in America went in order to differentiate themselves from

36
Kay Anderson, “The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the
Making of a Racial Category,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77.4 (1987):
580-598, 586.

37
Ibid., 584.

38
Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

39
Wild, Street Meeting, 16, 23. The negative racial connotations assigned to the Chinese justified
more than municipal neglect; in October 1871, following the accidental shooting of an Anglo by a
Chinese man, a white mob entered Chinatown, stole $40,000 in cash, and lynched nineteen
Chinese in the streets. McWilliams, Southern California Country, 91.
46
the Chinese in the Anglo mind, rapidly adopting Western-style clothes, furnishings, and
food and supporting American public education for their children.
40
The stronger position
of Japan relative to China on the world stage allowed the Japanese government to support
their efforts, negotiating a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with the American government in
1907-08 that allowed the wives of Japanese laborers to enter the United States.
41
The lack
of a similar agreement with China after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882
had doomed most Chinese immigrants in America to lifelong bachelorhood amid a
dwindling Chinese community. Japanese community leaders in Los Angeles sought to
foster an increasingly domestic and family-oriented Japanese community as another
means of differentiating the Japanese from their Chinese immigrant predecessors and
mitigating anti-Japanese agitation. They also sought to prevent Japanese immigrants from
participating in activities denigrated by the Anglo majority, such as patronizing the
brothels and gambling establishments of Chinatown, even going so far as to physically
stand guard outside the dens and shame any Japanese patrons who entered.
42
When
elements of the vice industries did break into the open in Little Tokyo, as when Bunkichi
Minamide was shot to death in 1905 on North San Pedro Street over a gambling dispute,
the Japanese Association of Los Angeles quickly intervened to restore order and

40
Ichioka, The Issei, particularly Chapter 6.

41
Since many Japanese laborers could not afford to return to Japan, select a wife, and then
purchase two passages back to the United States, a practice called “picture brides” developed. A
matchmaker in the laborer’s home village would select a bride for the man through family
recommendations and the mutual approval of photographs of the prospective bride and groom.
The woman would then wed the man through a proxy in Japan and board a ship to the United
States, where she would present the necessary paperwork to enter the country as the wife of a
legally resident Japanese laborer.

42
España-Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila, 63.
47
propriety.
43
Founded in 1897 to handle local issues in place of the Japanese Consulate in
San Francisco, the Association responded to the shooting by instituting a directory of all
the Japanese in Los Angeles and requiring that all moves and extended periods of
unemployment be registered with the Association.
Despite these efforts, the Issei found that the city’s Anglo reformers often
conflated their communities with those of the longer established, yet still incurably
“foreign” Chinese in descriptions emphasizing “dens, density, and the labyrinth” of
congested alleyways.
44
As in Chinatown, white “slumming parties” entered Little Tokyo
to partake of the exotic and decadent pleasures of the Far East; a 1908 Los Angeles Times
article noted that outraged Japanese proprietors were “extremely rude to [such]
‘sightseeing’ callers.”
45
Anglo reformers saw the increasingly built-up environs of Little
Tokyo as evidence of the unhealthy Eastern mentality associated with Chinatowns; as one
1915 state government report opined, “Everywhere there is bad housing, frightful
overcrowding, congestion of peoples in houses and houses on lots…Nothing except the
social agencies…bring [sic] any American influence into this neighborhood.”
46
Given the
associations that accrued to the overlapping raced spaces in central Los Angeles, it is
perhaps not surprising that the local state enacted policies which sought to control and
remove these “problem” populations; beginning in 1910, the Los Angeles City Council

43
Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles, 14.

44
Shah, Contagious Divides, 19.

45
Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles, 19.

46
California Commission on Immigration and Housing (CCIH), A Community Survey Made of
Los Angeles City (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1917), quoted in Wild, Street Meeting, 24.
48
rezoned the entire east side of downtown Los Angeles, including parts of the old Plaza
neighborhood and the Chinatown and Little Tokyo “enclaves,” for industrial use. These
ordinances denied the neighborhoods any new residential development and doomed the
existing housing stock to slow deterioration and “speculative selling.”
47

Such policies produced an ethnic enclave with, according to historian Lon
Kurashige, “the characteristics of an inner-city ghetto,” including high poverty rates and
“substandard housing.”
48
Japanese immigrants, increasingly living in nuclear families and
raising young children due to the increased migration of Japanese women through the
picture bride arrangement, discovered that Little Tokyo was becoming a dangerous place
to call home. As early as 1921, Anglo reformer Alice Bessie Culp described the southern
section of Little Tokyo (and beyond to Washington Boulevard) in this manner: “This part
of the city is the least [desirable] because there are many factories, packing houses,
warehouses, gas works, and railroad buildings. More foul air, less shade, more dusty and
unpaved streets, and poorer houses are found here than in any other part of the city.”
49
Ets
Yoshiyama recalled seeing the grisly aftermath when his friend Jiro’s brother was killed
by the streetcar turning onto First at Alameda: “He was riding a bicycle and he got run

47
Ibid., 54.

48
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 188.

49
Quoted in William Deverell, “My America or Yours? Americanization and the Battle for the
Youth of Los Angeles,” Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s, ed. Tom Sitton and
William Deverell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 277-301, 279.

49
over by a train. All I can remember is that his feet and shoes were torn off, it just cut his
ankle area. His shoes, I remember, his feet were in them.”
50

Figure 1.5. An Oliver football team on the club’s Little Tokyo practice field behind the
Stimson Institute in late 1933. At right looms one of the two enormous gas storage tanks
that fed the enclave’s industrial concerns, as well as its cooking stoves. Jack Kunitomi is
fourth from the left in the front row. Courtesy Joe Suski.

Other children suffered similar fates. The young son of a Japanese family living
on Central was hit by a car and killed; the family later moved in the hopes of finding a
safer environment for their four other children.
51
Another Little Tokyo family moved so

50
Interview with Ets Yoshiyama, Jan. 9, 2007.

51
Uono, “The Factors Affecting the Geographical Aggregation…,” 80.

50
that their children would no longer have to cross busy streetcar lines to get to school.
52
A
1927 study by Koyoshi Uono noted that, in addition to the Little Tokyo neighborhood,
significant Japanese residential concentrations had developed in Boyle Heights (just east
of Little Tokyo, across the river); the West Adams/36
th
Street area near the University of
Southern California (see Chapter 2); around Madison Avenue (also known as the Virgil
or Dayton Heights neighborhood, near the present-day location of Los Angeles City
College); Hollywood; and Uptown (a neighborhood in the area of 10
th
Street, now
Olympic Boulevard, just south of Downtown).
53
Many of these areas, like Little Tokyo,
lacked restrictive deed covenants, directives in the property deed barring sale to, or
residence by, members of any number of “undesirable” ethnic groups – almost always
African Americans, usually “Orientals” and Mexicans, and sometimes Jews as well. This
spatial practice of private individuals, legitimated and enforced by the racial state in court
decisions until the late 1940s, helped to produce the diversity in most L.A. enclaves, as
those restricted from living amongst the Anglo mainstream inevitably found themselves
living together in the neighborhoods that remained available to them. Uono found in a

52
Ibid., 81.

53
Ibid., 33. These communities were also diverse; for example, many (though not all) of the
Jewish merchants from the Little Tokyo area moved east to Boyle Heights around 1913, as the
blocks of East First Street west of the Los Angeles River increasingly took on the character of a
Japanese commercial district. In Boyle Heights, those merchants were patronized by Jewish,
Japanese, and Mexican residents of the neighborhood. See Harry Honda, “Boyle Heights,”
Pacific Citizen, May 18, 1984, 12; “Boyle Heights: The Power of Place” exhibit, Japanese
American National Museum (hereafter JANM), Sep. 8, 2002 – Feb. 23, 2003.

51
survey of Little Tokyo merchants that one quarter lived in the Little Tokyo area, another
quarter in the Uptown district, and the rest in Boyle Heights.
54

Thus, despite the commercial dominance of the Japanese, Little Tokyo was never
an all-Japanese district either residentially or in the daily experiences of those who lived
and worked in the neighborhood. Sociology student Gretchen Tuthill, writing in the early
1920s, noted “there are very few streets even in Japanese communities where there are
Japanese families in every house. There are people of other races living next door in
many cases.”
55
Koyoshi Uono wrote a few years later that, of the thirty hotels and
rooming houses in Little Tokyo, fully one-third were “entirely for the white laborers even
at present.”
56
Indeed, by 1940 only about 20 percent of the Japanese and Japanese
American population of Los Angeles County resided in the Little Tokyo area, although it
remained the key location for Nikkei Angelenos to work, shop, worship, and socialize.
57

This residential diversity remained a feature of Little Tokyo throughout the
prewar period; in the 1940 census, the tracts encompassing Little Tokyo showed a

54
Uono, “The Factors Affecting the Geographical Aggregation…,” 50.

55
Gretchen Tuthill, “Japanese in the City of Los Angeles,” 13.

56
Uono, “The Factors Affecting the Geographical Aggregation…,” 46.

57
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 38. “Nikkei” is a Japanese word
referring to people of Japanese ancestry living outside Japan. The term has increased in usage
over the past two decades, as Japanese Americans have become more aware of Japanese-descent
communities in Canada and Latin America and the diasporic connections that link these groups
back to Japan. An excellent resource for exploring this nascent identity in formation is Discover
Nikkei (www.discovernikkei.org), a quadrilingual (Japanese, English, Spanish, and Portuguese)
website produced by the Japanese American National Museum and the International Nikkei
Research Project, with funding from The Nippon Foundation, that attempts to provide a
comprehensive overview of the Nikkei diaspora. In this context, I am using the term as a way to
delineate the community of both Japanese immigrants living in the United States and their
American-born children.
52
resident Japanese population of between 29 and 36 percent, with substantial numbers of
white, black, and Spanish-surnamed residents as well.
58
In this diversity, Little Tokyo
was not unique, but rather typical of many ethnoracially-inscribed spaces. As Thomas
Philpott has shown, even the foundational Chicago immigrant communities studied by
Park and Burgess had residential populations that failed to match their monikers: the
Swedish “ghetto” had a Swedish population of only 24 percent. Little Italy, home to the
white ethnic group considered most segregated, was only 50 percent Italian.
59

Nevertheless, the noticeable “foreignness” of the Japanese population – their alien
alphabet, Buddhist religion (although many Japanese immigrants had converted to a
variety of Christian denominations), and especially the color of their skin – acted as an
outsize “screen” that blinded Anglos to the multiple other immigrant and racialized
communities that not only made Little Tokyo their home, but participated daily in the
enclave’s commercial, educational, and recreational spaces.

58
John Modell, The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation: The Japanese of Los
Angeles, 1900-1942 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977): 70-74.

59
Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle Class
Reform, Chicago, 1880-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 137-145.
53
Table 1.1. Population of the City of Los Angeles by Race/Ethnicity, 1900-1940
“Whites” Negroes Japanese Mexicans* Total Pop.
1900 98,082 2,131 150 817 (FB) 102,479
1910 305,307 5,101 4,238 5,632 (FB) 319,198
1920 546,864 15,579 11,618 21,598 (FB) 576,673
1930 1,073,584 38,894 21,081 97,116 1,238,048
1940 1,406,430 63,774 23,321 36,840 (FB) 1,504,277
Source: Reproduced from Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in
Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006): 7.
*Since Mexicans were legally considered white between 1900 and 1920, only foreign-
born (FB) Mexicans, not native-born Angelenos of Mexican ancestry, were counted. In
1930, Mexicans were classified as a non-white group; thus the data for this year includes
all people of Mexican ancestry regardless of birthplace or citizenship. In 1940, the census
reverted to its previous method, once again counting only foreign-born Mexicans.

Ethnic Economies: Doing Business in Immigrant Niches
As immigrants were restricted to marginal, ethnoracially-inscribed residential areas by
the racial state’s spatial practices, they were likewise constrained within marginal,
ethnoracially-inscribed occupational areas by its economic practices. And as diverse
racialized and immigrant communities interacted in the neighborhoods they shared, they
likewise encountered each other in the overlapping occupational niches where they
labored together and sometimes competed against one another. These meetings and
transactions always occurred on the shifting and uneven terrain of domestic racial
formations, even as they were shaped by the transnational influence of the politics and
histories of each community’s homeland. In particular, the Japanese shared the
commercial spaces of Little Tokyo with, and defined themselves in contrast to, other
54
Asian immigrant communities; “white ethnic” immigrants from European nations; and
Mexican immigrants fleeing that country’s Revolution in the years following 1910.
60

As mentioned above, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos were viewed
along similar lines of difference socially and culturally within the domestic context of the
United States. The racial lens through which each group was collectively viewed and
classified by the Anglo American mainstream was shaped by the imperialist imperatives
of an Orientalist worldview, in which inhabitants of Western nations marked those of
Eastern nations as exhibiting traits categorically opposite to their own. In other words,
“Orientals” were popularly represented as weak, effeminate, and incapable of self-
government, in contrast to supposedly strong, masculine, and self-reliant Anglos, who
were thus justified in expropriating their labor and lands.
61
Erika Lee has argued that the
“white settler societies” of the Pacific world shared an Orientalist rhetoric that supported
coordinated exclusionary and discriminatory anti-Asian policies in pursuit of a “White
Pacific.”
62

For Chinese immigrants to the United States, this insistence on the impossibility
of their assimilation to white, Christian cultural norms carried severe social, economic,

60
While Japanese immigrants also shared contacts and conflicts with African Americans within
and beyond Little Tokyo, the differing citizenship status and shifting, region-specific racial
categorization of each community makes it difficult to compare their relationship with that of the
Japanese and other immigrant groups. Thus I examine black-Japanese relations in Los Angeles
separately in Chapter 2.

61
The still-foundational study of the ideological parameters of Orientalism is Edward Said,
Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). While Said focused mainly on representations
and policies related to the Middle East and Arab nations, his arguments are equally applicable to
the larger Orient and the Asian nations bordering and within the Pacific Ocean.

62
Erika Lee, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and Asian Exclusion in the Americas,” Pacific Historical
Review 76.4 (2007): 537-562.

55
and spatial consequences, including being removed from certain areas by the threat or
application of violence (especially when their labor was no longer required or considered
too competitive with white labor), and finally complete exclusion from additional
immigration beginning in 1882.
63
Japanese immigrants, despite their native government’s
greater standing on the geopolitical scene, faced similar harassment and discrimination,
and were excluded from further immigration by the state in 1924.
64
Finally, immigrants
from Asian nations such as China and Japan, unlike those from Europe or Latin America,
were barred from naturalization on the basis of their race by the American courts.
65

Filipino migrants to the United States, who began to arrive in large numbers
during the 1920s (to salve a need for cheap labor left unfulfilled following Japanese

63
For more on anti-Chinese state policy and public practice in the United States, see Alexander
Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Cheng-Tsu Wu, ed., “Chink!” A Documentary
History of Anti-Chinese Prejudice in America (New York: World Publishing, 1972); Ronald T.
Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown,
1989); Sucheng Chan, Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-
1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers:
Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1995); Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese
Americans (New York: Random House, 2007); and Maxine Hong Kingston’s two novels, The
Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Knopf, 1976) and China
Men (New York: Knopf, 1980).

64
See Ichioka, The Issei, especially Chapters 5, 6, and 7.

65
See ibid., Chapter 6, and Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration
Law: A Re-Examination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86.1
(Jun. 1999): 1115-35. The courts based their decision on Asians’ racial ineligibility for
citizenship, most notably in Ozawa v. United States (1922), on the 1870 Nationality Act that
restricted citizenship to a matter, literally, of black and white. An imperfect fit in either category
under the racial “common sense” of early twentieth-century America, Asian immigrants were
denied an opportunity to gain the benefits of citizenship. Additional scholarship on the legal
construction of race includes Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of
‘Race’ in 20
th
Century America,” The Journal of American History 83.1 (Jun. 1996): 44-69; and
Ian F. Haney-Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York
University Press, 1996).

56
exclusion, just as the Japanese began arriving in large numbers in the 1880s following
Chinese exclusion), followed a similar path of racialization within the “Asian” or
“Oriental” category, but the issue of citizenship played out quite differently for them.
66

As the Philippines had been a territory of the United States since the Spanish-American
War in 1898, the residents of the island nation were considered U.S. “nationals” and
could travel freely between the islands and the United States mainland. Like Japanese and
Mexican immigrants, Filipinos were incorporated into the domestic U.S. economy largely
within the racialized occupational niche of migrant farm labor. With the onset of the
Depression and the near-collapse of the West Coast agricultural economy in the early
1930s, along with Filipinos’ increasingly militant labor activism (often alongside
Mexican farm workers), growers faced a crisis: as nationals, Filipinos could not be easily
excluded or deported now that their labor was not needed. The state provided a solution
in the form of the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act, which closed further migration from the
Philippines to the U.S. while offering an olive branch in the form of a promise of
eventual independence for the Philippines.
67

At the same time that these groups shared occupational categories, immigrant
experiences, and the burdens of racially discriminatory policies in the United States, they
also carried with them a transnational connection to the domestic and regional concerns

66
For an overview of the Filipino (im)migration experience, see Dorothy Fujita-Rony, American
Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919-1941 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), and España-Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s
Little Manila.

67
See Fujita-Rony, American Workers, Colonial Power, especially Part III; Mae M. Ngai,
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004), Chapter 3; and Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1939): 130-132.
57
of their homelands. As the relations between the native nations of Asian (im)migrant
communities in Los Angeles had long been troubled by conquest and exploitation, the
interactions between their members in and around the Little Tokyo enclave were, not
surprisingly, often inflected by remembered injury and, increasingly, anger over
contemporary acts of aggression. Although sharing many broad cultural similarities,
China and Japan had a long history of mutual disregard that was only heightened by the
Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Sue Kunitomi Embrey recalled witnessing a
fight between Japanese American and Chinese American students outside the Japanese
language school in Little Tokyo “over the war in China.”
68
Chinese American film star
Anna Mae Wong, who grew up with Japanese and Korean immigrant families in the
West Temple neighborhood just northwest of Little Tokyo, also allowed the politics
surrounding the Manchurian Invasion to influence her behavior in a local context,
refusing to permit a Japanese American dancer to act as her double.
69

The small Korean population of Southern California, estimated at about four
hundred persons in the early 1920s, included many refugees who had fled Korea after its
occupation by the Japanese empire in 1910.
70
As Asians, Koreans were often restricted to
the same residential spaces and occupations as the Japanese immigrants they identified
with their occupiers, producing relations informed by the emotions of homeland politics.

68
Sue Kunitomi Embrey, interview by Arthur A. Hansen, David A. Hacker, and David J.
Bertagnoli for the Japanese American Project, Aug. 24, 1973, COPH, California State University,
Fullerton.

69
Harry Honda, “Wrong Side of the Tracks.”

70
“The Koreans in Southern California,” Box 37, Folder 416, SRR Records, Hoover Institute,
Stanford University.

58
Mr. Hong, a Korean grocer in Los Angeles, explained that he enjoyed the Hearst Herald
Examiner newspaper, infamous for its anti-Asian politics, “because it doesn’t like the
Japanese very much.”
71
Ironically, as just another Asian immigrant in the domestic
American context, the Examiner wouldn’t have liked Mr. Hong very much either. Lane
Nakano, a Nisei who visited the flower market at Seventh and Wall Streets every
morning to buy stock for his mother’s Boyle Heights flower shop, remembered that the
Koreans there were always loud and defensive with him, which he believed was a result
of their having “been kicked around so much” by the Japanese in Korea.
72

The Chinese, in turn, had a “tenuous” relationship with the Filipino community,
as their longer-established commercial presence in Los Angeles mirrored their unpopular
position as an “elite merchant class” in the Philippines under Spanish colonial rule.
73
The
Japanese, who like the Chinese often encountered Filipino migrants through relations of
merchant to customer or even grower to worker, also experienced moments of inter-
ethnic conflict with Filipinos. In the northern California city of Stockton, for example, an
incident in which a Japanese father refused to accept his daughter’s marriage to a Filipino
man produced a full-fledged boycott of Japanese stores by Filipino customers. While this
might seem like a local and domestic disagreement, it in fact was rooted in transnational
concerns: pre-existing tensions in the community centered around class and race, with

71
“Life History of Mr. Hong, Korean,” Box 37, Folder 416, SRR Records, Hoover Institute,
Stanford University.

72
Lane Nakano, interviewed by Darcie Ike for the Boyle Heights Oral History Project, Jul. 25 and
Aug. 9, 2001, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM.

73
España-Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila, 56.

59
Japanese merchants and labor contractors envying Filipinos’ access to the mobility
afforded by U.S. citizenship, and Filipinos believing that the Japanese received protection
from their consul that the American government did not provide them as they sought
better wages and working conditions.
74
The hostility between Japanese and Filipinos in
the U.S. only increased when Japan occupied the Philippines in 1941.
Despite the underlying tensions produced by transnational connections to the
tumultuous geopolitics of the pre-World War II era, Asian immigrant communities in the
United States were linked by their common encounter with the spatial and economic
practices of the American racial state and private capital. Filipinos arriving to replace the
Japanese as migrant agricultural workers in California’s racialized labor market slept in
the Little Tokyo boarding houses and ate in the enclave restaurants that previous
Japanese immigrants had established twenty years prior to fulfill the needs of their
countrymen. While the resulting relationships sometimes bore the strains of unequal
financial and emotional obligation, they could also blossom into mutual support and even
fictive kinship, especially since Filipino migrants were primarily unmarried young men.
Fumiko Nishihara Satow noted that mostly Filipinos patronized Little Tokyo’s Lincoln
Restaurant, where both her parents worked during the Depression, because they liked her
mother’s familiar method of cooking fish.
75
Ets Yoshiyama recalled how one Filipino

74
Arleen de Vera, “The Tapia-Saiki Incident: Interethnic Conflict and Filipino Responses to the
Anti-Filipino Exclusion Movement,” Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed. Valerie
J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999): 201-214;
Azuma, Between Empires, Chapter 8.

75
Fumiko Nishihara Satow, interviewed by Sojin Kim for the Boyle Heights Oral History Project,
Oct. 23, 2000, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM.

60
man, who ate at his parents’ establishment “morning, noon, and night,” came to see his
mother when she was interned at the Santa Anita Assembly Center and “was just crying
and crying” over her impending absence.
76
When Filipino entrepreneurs began to open
their own businesses to serve other Filipinos, such as barber shops, pool halls, an
employment agency, a newspaper, and restaurants, they located them amongst the Little
Tokyo businesses and hotels where their customer base was already concentrated due to
discriminatory policy and racial association. Thus Little Manila came into existence
within the boundaries of Little Tokyo’s northwest quadrant, along Weller, San Pedro, and
Los Angeles Streets, and Japanese and Filipinos shared the overlapped enclaves.
77

As Filipinos gained a foothold in domestic American society via Japanese spaces,
Japanese immigrants had likewise found an early refuge in the shops, gambling dens, and
chop suey houses of the Asian immigrant community that had directly preceded them to
the United States and was already well-established in Los Angeles, the Chinese. Given
the constraints of the racialized labor market, the dwindling and aging Chinese
population in the aftermath of exclusion, and the widespread agricultural experience that
Japanese immigrants had gained in their home country, it is perhaps not surprising that so
many Issei also took up the main occupation of the Chinese: small-scale farming. By
1895, according to local historian Carey McWilliams, “some four thousand Chinese were

76
Interview with Ets Yoshiyama, Jan. 19, 2007.

77
Harry Honda, “Wilmington/Weller,” Pacific Citizen, Jun. 22, 1984, 2; Harry Honda, “First &
Main,” Pacific Citizen, Jun. 29, 1984, 6; and España-Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los
Angeles’s Little Manila, Chapter 1.

61
producing and distributing nearly all the vegetables consumed in Los Angeles.”
78
Most of
these fruits and vegetables were originally sold door to door from small wagons; after the
city tried to regulate this trade, which brought Chinese men into even the most upscale
districts of the city, a market was formed in Chinatown where farmers brought their
produce and brokers purchased it and arranged for its delivery to homes and stores.
79
By
1903, this market had moved to Third and Central Streets, in what was just about to
become Little Tokyo.
80

As the Chinese moved increasingly into produce brokerage at the market,
Japanese agricultural laborers drew on their savings or ethnic credit associations to lease
small plots of land throughout Los Angeles County and raise fruits and vegetables – a
pursuit that became more productive for them as, unlike most Chinese, they were able to
bring over wives and then use unpaid family labor in the fields.
81
As early as 1905, fifty
Japanese farmers in Los Angeles County were farming 1,950 leased acres. In 1910, the
Japanese agricultural presence had increased to a total of 6,173 acres under cultivation on

78
McWilliams, Southern California Country, 85.

79
In his memoirs about growing up in the then-upscale neighborhood around the intersection of
Hoover and Adams in Los Angeles, Marshall Stimson recalled that “our vegetables were brought
to us by a Chinaman…. John Chinaman always brought my mother Chinese lilies and candy and
leeche (sic) nuts for the children on Chinese New Years.” See Marshall Stimson, “Fun, Fights,
and Fiestas in Old Los Angeles,” Stimson Papers, Huntington Library.
80
George and Elsie Lee, "The Chinese and the Los Angeles Produce Market," Gum Saan Journal
9 (Dec. 1986): 5-17; Isamu Nodera, “A Survey of the Vocational Activities of the Japanese in the
City of Los Angeles” (M.A. thesis, University of Southern California, 1936), 105.

81
For a more detailed description of the vertical integration of Japanese in the produce industry of
Southern California, see Bloom and Reimer, Removal and Return, 92-96; and Edna Bonacich and
John Modell, The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American
Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), Chapter 3.

62
531 farms, surpassing the holdings of the Chinese.
82
Japanese berry farms that year
produced a crop valued at $337,978, or about $1500 per farm; vegetable growers
averaged $1075 per farm.
83
By 1916, about 80% of the produce purchased by Los
Angeles produce companies was grown by Japanese farmers.
84

In 1908, at the Los Angeles Public Market at Third and Central, Japanese farmers
were selling their produce to 400 Chinese, 150 Italian and Greek, and five Japanese
produce peddlers for an annual total of $1-1.5 million.
85
Despite the overwhelming
presence of Asian immigrant and Asian American peddlers, the Chinese/Chinese
Americans and Japanese had no say in the operation of the market and faced
discriminatory rents for the stalls required to conduct their business.
86
In 1909, Chinese
and Japanese produce merchants sought to remedy this situation, joining together with
Anglos (including some Russian and Italian peddlers) to develop the new City Market at
Ninth and San Pedro Streets, a few blocks beyond the southern edge of Little Tokyo.
87

The initial division of shares was split between the Japanese (18 percent), the Chinese (41
percent), and the “Americans,” or Anglos and white ethnics (also 41 percent), a more
representative ownership arrangement that was also reflected in the composition of the

82
Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles, 13-14.

83
Ibid., 21-22.

84
Ibid., 31.

85
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperativism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 191.

86
Ibid.

87
Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles, 28.

63
market’s first executive board: an Anglo president, E.J. Fleming; Italian and Chinese
vice-presidents; a Japanese secretary; and a Russian accountant.
88
By 1939, there were
149 Japanese-operated produce wholesalers in Los Angeles; two years later, Japanese
wholesalers were estimated to handle more than 60 percent of the total produce business
in Los Angeles, grossing $26.5 million.
89

Table 1.2. Produce Merchants / Dealers at Los Angeles Wholesale Markets by Ethnic
Group, 1941
Commission
Merchants
Permanent Stall
Operators
Total
Ethnicity Number Percentage Number Percentage Number Percentage
Total 167 100.0 232 100.0 399 100.0
Japanese 29 17.4 134 57.8 163 40.8
“American” 94 56.3 81 34.9 175 43.9
Chinese/Korean 44 26.3 17 7.3 61 15.3
Source: Reproduced from Leonard Bloom and Ruth Reimer, Removal and Return: The
Socio-Economic Effects of the War on Japanese Americans (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1949): 84.

The produce markets, commercial spaces functioning in the interstices of a
thoroughly racialized labor market, mirrored the ethnic residential makeup of Little
Tokyo produced through racialized spatial practices; according to William Mason and
John McKinstry, they “were meeting places for diverse nationalities and ethnic groups,
with Greeks, Italians, Russian and German Jews, Armenians, Syrians, not to mention

88
Nodera, “A Survey of the Vocational Activities of the Japanese…,: 101; Yagasaki, “Ethnic
Cooperativism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 192; Peter Fleming, interviewed by Roy Ito for the
Japanese in the Los Angeles Produce Industry Project, May 4, 1999, Hirasaki National Resource
Center, JANM. The Los Angeles Public Market on Third and Central later moved to Sixth and
Alameda and finally to Seventh and Central in 1918, where it came to be called the Wholesale
Terminal Market. While the Japanese also played a major role in this market, handling one-
seventh of the $70 million in transactions in 1934 for instance, they had no official role in the
management or ownership of the market. See Nodera, “A Survey of the Vocational Activities of
the Japanese…,” 105-106.

89
Thomas, The Salvage, 34-35.
64
Anglo-Americans, all of whom were bidding for vegetables and berries which were
largely Japanese-grown.”
90
While many of the produce companies themselves were
mono-ethnic, such as the Japanese-owned Sun Produce, others like H&F Produce
employed both Japanese and non-Japanese workers.
91
In addition, the busy markets and
the surrounding shops and restaurants that catered to their employees were the site of
numerous casual cross-ethnic and cross-racial encounters. The restaurant outside the
main entrance to the Southern California Flower Market at Seventh and Wall Streets
advertised a tellingly wide selection of chop suey, chow mein, noodles, steaks and chops,
and waffles.
92
A sociologist noted that “the workers in the market, be they colored or
white, frequently hang around these restaurants where they can chat, laugh, and yell
freely as if there were no racial barrier between them.”
93

The division of market workers into categories of “colored” and “white,” and of
the ethnically diverse group of City Market shareholders into “American,” Chinese, and
Japanese, speaks volumes about the uneven processes of racialization that immigrants
and their children encountered in the domestic context of the early twentieth-century
United States. As immigrants, French, Dutch, Germans, Italians, Greeks, and other
“white ethnics,” like the Japanese, found themselves directed into overlapping

90
Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles, 31.

91
Roy Ito, Japanese in the Los Angeles Produce Industry, December 2000, Hirasaki National
Resource Center, JANM.

92
Naomi Hirahara, A Scent of Flowers: The History of the Southern California Flower Market,
1912-2004 (Pasadena, Calif.: Midori Books, 2004): 16.

93
Kim Fong Tom, The Participation of the Chinese in the Community Life of Los Angeles (Los
Angeles: University of Southern California M.A. Thesis in Sociology, 1944): 33, quoted in Wild,
Street Meeting, 26-27.
65
occupational trajectories, whether because of language barriers, previous experience and
skills, ethnoracially structured hiring practices, or some combination of the three. Often,
as was the case for the Japanese, European immigrants were eventually able to leverage
past agricultural experience and participation in California’s migrant agricultural labor
economy into their own farming operations; for example, many Greek, Italian, and
French immigrants parlayed their knowledge of specialized crops and farming practices
appropriate to a Mediterranean climate into successful vineyards and flower farms.
94
At
the same time, European immigrants were able almost immediately to secure
advantageous positions relative to the Japanese by virtue of their skin color and
America’s changing racial taxonomy.
David Roediger and Matthew Frye Jacobson, among other scholars, have
described how different communities of European immigrants processed and internalized
the racial codes of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States and, in so
doing, aligned themselves with the Anglo mainstream to improve their material and
psychological well-being while also participating in a revision of U.S. racial thinking that
simplified many varieties of ethnoracial difference into a few static categories of racial
identity.
95
The separate trajectories of Asian and European immigrants became clear in

94
McWilliams, Southern California Country, 139-143, 322-323; Hirahara, A Scent of Flowers,
Chapter 2; Gloria Ricci Lothrup, Chi Siamo: The Italians of Los Angeles (Pasadena: Tabula Rasa
Press, 1981); and Paola A. Sensei-Isolani and Phylis Cancilla Martinelli, eds., Struggles and
Success: An Anthology of the Italian Experience in California (New York: Center for Migration
Studies, 1993).

95
Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York:
Routledge, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants
and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Karen Brodkin, How
Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (Camden: Rutgers
66
the experiences of the second generation: Nisei and Italian Americans, classmates and
neighbors, nevertheless found that the former could not access certain neighborhoods or
occupations that the latter entered easily. For instance, in the early 1920s a Mr. J. Sato
purchased a home in the East Los Angeles community of Belvedere, where he planned to
live with his parents while attending the University of Southern California. “It was only
two weeks when two gentlemen came to us and asked us politely, but not too cordially, to
leave the house as we cannot live among white people,” he said. “White people! I
suppose white people were Jewish, Italians, Russians and low class Europeans. This was
my first experience with a real conflict between foreigners against foreigner.”
96
As an
American-born Japanese, Sato no doubt recognized that he was in fact not an actual
foreigner, but would be treated as such in comparison to European immigrants. The
consequence of these practices of exclusion and discrimination along racial, rather than
ethnic or national, lines became brutally evident with the coming of World War II. Ets
Yoshiyama recalled the moment that race marked a meaningful difference between
himself and his Italian American friends from school in early 1942: “And curfew I think
was around 7 o’clock, and I said, ‘You know, I gotta get home at 7.’ [They said,] ‘Ah,
what the heck? We’re Italian, we’re at war with Italians too.’ I said, ‘No, that’s
different.’… I never, never could maintain my friendships with them, because when the

University Press, 1998); and Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and
Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

96
“An American Born Japanese in America,” Box 26, Folder 107, SRR Records, Hoover
Institute, Stanford University.

67
war started I went to Santa Anita assembly center.”
97
Unlike Ets, his Italian American
friends were not singled out on the basis of racial difference with regard to either the
enforcement of curfew or evacuation to internment camps.
The spatial practices of private individuals, like the residents of Belvedere, were
supported by the policies of the racial state. Besides the most obvious federal example,
the internment of citizens of Japanese descent, the California Alien Land Law of 1913
barred aliens not eligible for citizenship (almost exclusively meaning immigrants from
Asia, presumed inassimilable on the basis of race) from owning land, a tremendous
economic blow to an immigrant community so invested in agriculture. While Japanese
immigrants sought ways to continue farming – emphasizing short-term leases, growing
less profitable annual flowers, and buying land in the names of their citizen children –
European immigrant communities pursued prosperity in agricultural ventures without
state interference. Given the rapidly rising land prices in twentieth-century California, the
ability of “white ethnic” immigrants to own land produced material benefits beyond
short-term agricultural gains. Paul Ecke, son of a Dutch poinsettia grower in Southern
California, “learned to buy land near a city…In a matter of time, the real estate values
were bound to go up.”
98
Another state Alien Land Law, passed in 1920, closed many of
the “loopholes” of the previous law, preventing aliens ineligible for citizenship from
owning land in guardianship for their American-born children or even leasing land from
citizens. According to Koyoshi Uono, this harsher version of the law caused many
Japanese farmers to lose their leases and move into the cities, where they put their

97
Interview with Ets Yoshiyama, Jan. 19, 2007.

98
Hirahara, The Scent of Flowers, 61.
68
expertise to use in wholesale and retail produce and nurseries, or took up an altogether
new occupation within the confines of the racialized labor market, such as railroad work
or boarding house management.
99
By 1940, when the Japanese were growing flowers on
2,549 acres, they were still renting 80 percent of that land, using elaborate legal dodges
such as dummy corporations to gain short-term leases.
100

The divergent experiences of Japanese and European immigrants in Los Angeles
can be seen most clearly in the development of two separate, racially segregated flower
markets on the periphery of Little Tokyo. In the same year that the initial Alien Land
Law was enacted, Japanese flower growers opened the Southern California Flower
Market on South Los Angeles Street in Little Tokyo. One of the reasons that Japanese
growers sought to incorporate was that “other ethnic stocks” – primarily German, Dutch,
Greek, and Italian flower growers – “were putting price pressure on the Japanese.”
101

Given the increased difficulty in acquiring stable title to land that Japanese flower
growers faced compared to “white ethnic” growers, the Japanese growers decided to band
together for self-protection. The market’s business was conducted in Japanese and,
although ethnic membership restrictions were dropped in 1915 in a bid to ease anti-
Japanese sentiments, it remained an all-Japanese market until World War II.
102
In the
meantime, those “other [white] ethnic stocks” incorporated a flower market of their own,
which they tellingly named the American Florists Exchange. However, when the

99
Uono, “The Factors Affecting the Geographical Aggregation…,” 14.

100
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperativism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 120.

101
Ibid., 111.

102
Ibid., 130, 152.
69
Southern California Flower Market moved to 753-755 South Wall Street, just south of
Little Tokyo, in 1923, the American Florists Exchange quickly followed suit, purchasing
and converting a former taxicab garage at 754 South Wall Street. As Naomi Hirahara
wrote, “the Japanese clearly outnumbered the European American growers, and Paul
Ecke and others knew that they had to stay close to the Southern California Flower
Market to survive. While they were essentially colleagues in the same industry, Wall
Street served as a dividing line that few growers crossed.”
103
The spatial distance across
Wall Street represented the American chasm of race, and its attendant benefits or
liabilities, which separated Japanese and European flower growers. Despite all they had
in common, these two sets of immigrant entrepreneurs were divided by the wildly
divergent ways in which they were incorporated – or blocked from incorporation – into
an American society that was presumed, legally and culturally, to equate to white
society.
104
Only with the arrival of the Depression and New Deal did the “Japanese”
market and the “American” (i.e., white) market begin working together; in the name of
efficiency, the National Recovery Administration reorganized the two markets under a
single trade association, with an equal number of Japanese and various “white ethnic”
board members.
105

103
Hirahara, The Scent of Flowers, 62-63.

104
Gary Gerstle has described this system of social organization as “racial nationalism,” a
justification of inequality and exclusion on the explicit basis of racial difference and discrete
histories. See Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

105
Yagasaki, “Ethnic Cooperativism and Immigrant Agriculture,” 153.
70
While the domestic racial hierarchies of American society prevented the
articulation of a common identity as immigrant flower growers among the two
communities, there were nevertheless many personal relationships, even friendships,
which successfully negotiated these barriers. As Hirahara notes, the “tenuous” relations
between Issei and European growers “didn’t mean there weren’t close business dealings
between individuals;” she describes the collaboration of Wataru Kitagawa and Tom
Wright on the cultivation of Kitty’s Mystery Gardenias as one such example.
106
In
addition, European immigrants brought with them the politics and prejudices of their
homelands just as those from Asia did. On occasion these transplanted patterns,
influenced by the diversity of Los Angeles and domestic racial hierarchies, also opened
up business and personal relationships between Japanese Americans and “white ethnics.”
For instance, a Little Tokyo dentist named Keitoku Watanabe noted that 60 percent of his
patients were Japanese while the rest were a mix of different nationalities, particularly
Russian.
107
The refusal of these Russian clients to patronize the Russian Jewish dentists
in the area, due to negative stereotypes about Jews carried with them from Russia,
produced an unexpected intersection between Russian and Japanese immigrants in Los
Angeles despite past hostilities between their two native countries.
These local relationships with European immigrants even helped some Japanese
Americans to save their land and businesses during World War II. For example, the
founders of H&F Produce, Aijiro Hori and Kuju Fukunaga, retained both their business

106
Hirahara, The Scent of Flowers, 66-68.

107
“Interview with Dr. Keitoku Watanabe, Japanese Dentist Located at 226 ½ East First Avenue,
Los Angeles, California,” conducted by Chloe Holt on Aug. 22, 1924; Box 26, Folder 121, SRR
Records, Hoover Institute, Stanford University.
71
and the Fukunaga home while interned by putting them into the care of Kelly Curci, an
Italian American friend of Fukunaga’s son Ichiro.
108
Ironically, though Kelly and Ichiro
were both American-born sons of families who had emigrated from nations with which
the United States was now at war, Ichiro faced internment as a racially “foreign” subject
of American state power, while Kelly avoided this fate and was able to aid the Fukunaga
family only because of the presumption of assimilated loyalty carried in his “white” skin.
Japanese immigrant families encountered one other key immigrant community in
the racialized agricultural labor market and the urban “ethnic enclaves” of pre-World War
II Southern California. Although not accepted within the Anglo mainstream as
(particularly second-generation) European immigrants were, Mexican immigrants and
their American-born children were classified as “white” by the racial state and thus had
access to the opportunity of naturalization denied Japanese immigrants. At the same time,
the long duration of Mexican habitation in Southern California, the proximity of the
border between the two nations, and the informal racial linkage by most Anglo
Americans of Mexicans with Indians made Mexicans the target of schizophrenic
economic and spatial practices that clearly marked Mexican immigrants and their
children as socially, if not legally, non-white – temporary workers to be added to or

108
Fumi Fukunaga Fukuyama, interviewed by Roy Ito for the Japanese in the Los Angeles
Produce Industry Project, Apr. 21, 1999, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM. The
Fukunagas were not alone in maintaining their title to commercial enterprises and properties
through the aid of European immigrant families met in the produce and floral businesses; for
instance, Akira Mori turned over the operation of Mori Nursery to French American Fred
Sarrazin for the duration of the war. Fred had been Akira’s employee at the nursery as well as a
Boy Scout troop leader for Mori’s three Nisei nephews. Dutchman Jacob Dekker of United
Wholesale Florist leased the Southern California Flower Market and operated several Japanese
flower farms during the war, as well as quietly writing letters on behalf of Issei growers to the
Department of Justice in support of their release from camp. Hirahara, The Scent of Flowers, 109-
113.
72
removed from the workforce and the metropolis as needed rather than permanently
incorporated into the body politic.
109

The experiences of Mexican and Japanese immigrants share significant parallels;
as Natalia Molina has written, given the manner in which immigrants were racialized in
regionally specific ways and in relation to each other, “what it meant to be ‘Mexican’ in
Los Angeles was determined in part by what it meant to be ‘Japanese.’”
110
Indeed, the
very paths of migration the two communities followed were sometimes the same; many
Japanese first entered the United States through the “back door” of Mexico as a means to
avoid the immigration restrictions the American racial state leveled at Asians.
111
Kibei
Karl Yoneda wrote that, when he was briefly held at Angel Island Immigration Station
upon his return to the United States in 1926, the others held with him were Japanese who
had entered illegally through Mexico and were awaiting deportation.
112
Yuji Ichioka has

109
See Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, especially his discussion of the rhetorical move to
categorize and constrain the “typical” Mexican, and Phoebe S. Kropp, “Citizens of the Past?
Olvera Street and the Construction of Race and Memory in 1930s Los Angeles,” Radical History
Review 81 (fall 2001): 35-60. Kropp notes that, in sites for tourist consumption like Olvera Street,
Mexicans were presented by Anglo boosters as both “natural” in the landscape and yet
simultaneously “temporary,” as their supposedly pre-modern ways would surely fade away in the
face of the modernity of the metropolis. Both of these works, as well as Molina, Fit to Be
Citizens?, contain excellent descriptions of the spatial practices through which Mexican
immigrants and their families were marginalized from the city’s Anglo mainstream even as their
labor was central to urban and agricultural development and expansion.

110
Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?, 9.

111
Murase, Little Tokyo, 8.

112
Karl G. Yoneda, Ganbatte: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker (Los Angeles: University of
California, Los Angeles Asian American Studies Center, 1983): 5. “Kibei” refers to American-
born Japanese who spent at least part of their youth being educated in Japan. The kibei Nisei often
aligned politically and culturally with the Issei due to their extensive exposure to Japanese
society; see, for example, Thomas, The Salvage, 90, and Kurashige, Japanese American
Celebration and Conflict, 87.
73
written that “a good deal of the Okinawan population of Southern California can be
traced back to Mexico,” especially to a group of contract laborers who fled poor working
conditions in Mexican mines.
113
In some cases, Japanese immigrants heading to Mexico
first landed at the harbor in San Pedro before heading to Mexico by train; Reverend
Kitagawa of Little Tokyo’s Koyasan Buddhist Temple offered a tour of the city on the
way to the depot, providing the immigrants (who planned to immediately sneak back over
the border) with much-needed knowledge on the locations of boarding houses and
employment agencies.
114
In the aftermath of the Alien Land Laws and Japanese
exclusion, many Japanese even considered leaving the U.S. for “pro-Japanese” Mexico;
some actually made the move.
115
And although Mexican immigrants never faced the
polices of exclusion and internment leveled at the Japanese and their American-born
children, they too bore the devastating consequences of the racial state’s spatial practices
– in the depths of the Depression, 400,000 Mexicans (half of them children with U.S.
citizenship) were repatriated to Mexico to remove them from American relief rolls.
116

Urban neighborhoods like Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights were home to
overlapping communities of Japanese and Mexican immigrants, and as such the two
groups often patronized each other’s commercial ventures, sometimes even learning how

113
Ichioka, The Issei, 70.

114
Koyasan Buddhist Temple, 1912-1962 (Los Angeles: Koyasan Betsuin, 1974), 136.

115
Ichioka, The Issei, 240-243; interview with Mr. U. Uyeda, Nov. 25, 1924, Box 33, Folder 1,
SRR Records, Hoover Institute, Stanford University; Azuma, Between Two Empires, 80.

116
Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law;” Sánchez, Becoming
Mexican American, Chapter 10; Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American
Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900-1939 (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1994).
74
to communicate with one another. Nisei youth bought tamales from street vendors and
roadside stands.
117
Store windows in Little Tokyo that featured the Roman alphabet, in
addition to the distinctive characters of Japanese, advertised “Se Habla Español.”
118

Similarly, the signs in Little Tokyo’s many pool halls, where immigrants could play for 2
½ cents per cue, were posted in English, Japanese, and Spanish.
119
Dr. Peter Suski
(originally Susuki) learned Spanish so that he could work with the Mexican patients he
treated at a weekly free clinic, as well as those who came to his Little Tokyo office.
120

In addition to their shared experiences as targets of the racial state’s immigration
policy and as customers of each other’s businesses, the Japanese also encountered
Mexicans as co-workers, competitors, and sometimes employees in the racialized labor
market of California agriculture. Japanese farm workers competed for jobs with, and
worked alongside, Mexican farm workers on the berry farms of El Monte, Garden Grove,
and Lomita from March to August and the vineyards of Delano, Fresno, and other Central
California farm towns from August through November.
121
The two communities also
often experienced the same discriminatory treatment, low wages, and decrepit worker

117
Interview with Harry Yamamoto, Nov. 30, 2006; Cedrick Shimo, interviewed by Sojin Kim
for the Boyle Heights Oral History Project, Mar. 19, 2001, Hirasaki National Resource Center,
JANM; John J. Saito, “Memories of Little Tokyo,” in Nanka Nikkei Voices III: Little Tokyo –
Changing Times, Changing Faces, ed. Brian Niiya (Los Angeles: Japanese American Historical
Society of Southern California, 2004): 97-98.

118
See, for instance, the photograph accompanying “Evacuated ‘Little Tokyo’ May Be Latin-
American Quarter of City,” Los Angeles Times, Jul. 12, 1942, A1.

119
Harry Honda, “Not Giving Up,” Pacific Citizen, Feb. 10, 1984, 3.

120
Interview with Joe Suski, Sep. 5, 2006; Gretchen Tuthill, “Japanese in the City of Los
Angeles,” 9.

121
Nodera, “A Survey of the Vocational Activities of the Japanese…,” 61.
75
housing.
122
In 1903, 200 Mexican and 500 Japanese farm workers harvesting sugar beets
in Oxnard ignored racial, religious, and linguistic barriers to strike together, protesting
broken promises on wages and unjust subcontracting and supply policies, and won a new
contract with higher wages.
123
The newly formed Japanese-Mexican Labor Association
applied to the American Federation of Labor for a charter; when the AFL agreed to grant
a charter only if Japanese laborers were barred from membership, the Mexican secretary
of the Oxnard union, J.M. Lizarras, replied:
In the past we have…lived on very short rations with our Japanese
brothers, and toiled with them in the fields, and they have been uniformly
kind and considerate. We would be false to them…if we now accepted
privileges for ourselves which are not accorded to them…We will refuse
any other kind of charter, except one which will wipe out race prejudice
and recognize our fellow workers as being as good as ourselves.
124

However, Mexican and Japanese immigrants struggled to retain this sense of
brotherhood as they experienced the consequences of racially differentiated state policy
and economic practice in California agriculture. As new Japanese immigration was
blocked following the 1924 exclusion law and Mexican immigration continued to grow,

122
Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los
Angeles, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill: The University of California Press, 2001): 51-52. For more on
the experience of Mexican immigrants in California agriculture, see Carey McWilliams,
Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in Southern California (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1939), and North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1990, 1948); Gilbert G. González, Labor and Community:
Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950 (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1994); and José M. Alamillo, Making Lemonade Out of Lemons:
Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town, 1880-1960 (Champaign: University
of Illinois Press, 2006).

123
Tomás Almaguer, "Racial Domination and Class Conflict in Capitalist Agriculture: The
Oxnard Sugar Beet Workers' Strike of 1903," Labor History 25.3 (1984): 325-350; Ichioka, The
Issei, 96-99.

124
Ibid.; Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1993): 188.
76
Mexicans and Japanese increasingly ceased to labor as “brothers” in the field, and
Mexicans instead labored under Japanese “bosses” leasing land from Anglo owners.
125
In
some cases, a sense of racial or immigrant solidarity sustained close personal
relationships despite the increasing class divide; in fact, several Japanese American
farming families retained their land during World War II by turning it over to their
Mexican employees. Daniel Kawahara, a Boyle Heights resident, recalled that his
cousin’s farm in Fresno survived thanks to the family’s “Mexican foreman that worked
for him for years,” and Robert Bautista’s father, a laborer on a Japanese farm, took over
the farm’s title for his boss and “good friend” during the war and even visited the family
at the Pomona assembly center.
126
Nevertheless, the Japanese, squeezed by their
landlords and as non-citizens lacking many legal protections, often engaged in their own
exploitation of Mexican laborers. Miguel Alonzo, a laborer on a Japanese-operated farm,
complained that “they [the Americans] don’t want us here, even the Japanese mistreat the
Mexicans without any thought whatsoever, they think we are less than they are, as we
allow ourselves to be exploited, they do what they want with our labor, and rob us with
impunity in various ways.”
127

125
Charles Wollenberg, “Race and Class in Rural California: The El Monte Berry Strike of
1933,” California Historical Quarterly 51 (1972): 155-164.

126
See Daniel Kawahara, interviewed by Sojin Kim and Darcie Ike for the Boyle Heights Oral
History Project, Dec. 18, 2000, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM; and Robert J.
Bautista, "Barrio Kids along the Rio Hondo," Cuentos de la Historia: The Journal of Barrio
Literature and History 3.1 (fall 2005): 35-36. I am indebted to Jerry Gonzalez for pointing out the
latter reference to me.

127
Quoted in Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?, 79.
77
Perhaps the most well known instance of strife between the two communities was
the berry strike that began in El Monte’s Hicks Camp, in the San Gabriel Valley northeast
of downtown Los Angeles, in the summer of 1933 and which eventually spread to the
coastal vegetable farms of Venice, Santa Monica, and San Pedro. Mexican farm workers
receiving, in many cases, less than subsistence pay from Japanese farm operators walked
out in ever-increasing waves; by mid-June, 7000 Mexicans were on strike and the
situation had escalated into an “ethnic as well as economic conflict.”
128
Both
communities sought aid from representatives of their native countries, underscoring their
marginalized relationship to the American state and its political and economic
institutions. While the Mexican Consulate became deeply involved in the strike in
support of the demands of Mexican workers, the Japanese Consul in Los Angeles took a
low-key approach, sitting in on the discussions that eventually settled the strike “as an
individual” rather than a representative of the Japanese government.
129

Despite the emphasis on ethnic conflict among non-white immigrant communities
and the transnational nature of the negotiations to resolve it, “the attitude and actions of
San Gabriel whites were to have a significant effect on the outcome of the berry strike” as
well.
130
As landowners, local Anglos sought to sustain the profitability of their tenants’
farms and deflect attention from the questionable legality of their leasing arrangements
with Japanese nationals; to this end, Nisei youths were granted permission by local

128
Wollenberg, “Race and Class in Rural California,” 159. An account of the strike focusing
more intensively on the Mexican perspective can be found in Ronald Lopez, “The El Monte
Berry Strike of 1933,” Aztlán 1 (1970): 101-114.

129
Wollenberg, “Race and Class in Rural California,” 159-160.

130
Ibid., 161.
78
authorities to stay home from school and help their families bring in the berry harvest.
The racial state also intervened at all levels to protect the interests of capital and the
domestic racial hierarchy in which both Mexican and Japanese immigrants were fixed:
the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the state Bureau of Industrial Relations, and the
federal Department of Labor all became involved in efforts to end the strike.
The problems in the fields carried over to the urban streets of the ethnic enclave.
“While the strike lasted,” wrote Fumiko Fukuoka, “the economic condition of the
Japanese farmers was critical. Finally they stopped coming to the Japanese town” for
their weekly shopping trips, and Little Tokyo’s merchants began to suffer as well.
131
At
the same time, the residents of ethno-racially diverse urban neighborhoods sometimes
carried knowledge earned in the city into the fields. George Takei, fluent in Japanese,
English, and Spanish after living in both Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights as a child,
recalled his experience picking strawberries in Orange County, where he overheard two
Japanese American paymasters say – in Japanese – that they supplied only partial
payment to the Mexican workers who spoke no English. Infuriated, the fourteen-year-old
Takei insisted that the Japanese American growers rectify the situation or else he would
call the authorities.
132
Takei’s linguistic facility, picked up in the overlapping urban

131
Fumiko Fukuoka, “Mutual Life and Aid Among the Japanese in Southern California with
Special Reference to Los Angeles” (M.A. thesis, University of Southern California, 1937): 10.

132
George Takei, To the Stars: The Autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu (New
York: Pocket Books, 1994): 109-112. Takei’s fluent trilingualism may have been somewhat rare,
but many first- and second-generation Japanese Americans developed a basic command of
Spanish through their urban and rural encounters with Mexicans. It is still quite common to hear
Nisei and even Sansei raised in either Boyle Heights or agricultural areas casually drop Spanish
terms into their conversation; W.T. “Wimpy” Hiroto, a Nisei columnist for the Rafu Shimpo,
typically tosses one or two Spanish words into every column.
79
communities of Mexican and Japanese Americans, allowed him in this one case to halt
the mistreatment of Mexican agricultural laborers by Japanese American growers.
Japanese and Mexican labor activism also connected urban and rural immigrant
communities. While the governments of Japan and Mexico adopted very different
political attitudes towards workers’ rights – Japan having outlawed socialism during the
Meiji era and Mexico, after the participation of many socialist factions such as the
Partido Liberal Mexicano in the Revolution, eventually adopting many socialist policies
– significant segments of each nation’s ethnic community in Los Angeles agitated on
behalf of labor, joining unions and in some cases even the Communist Party. George
Sánchez has described how second-generation Mexican American Angelenos, the
majority of whom found themselves restricted to a racialized working class in both
industry and agriculture despite their American citizenship and English language skills,
became key participants in labor union activism and the Communist-front organization El
Congreso de Pueblos que Hablan Español during the 1930s.
133
Local unions with
significant Mexican American membership included the International Ladies’ Garment
Workers’ Union and the CIO United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers
of America.
134

Among the Japanese, many political radicals of the Issei generation were fleeing
repression at home; Japanese Communists such as Sen Katayama and Shusui Kotoku
planted the seeds of socialism among Japanese in the United States through political

133
Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, Chapter 11.

134
In addition to Sánchez, see Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women/Cannery Lives: Mexican Women,
Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1987).
80
study groups and meetings with radical domestic unions such as the Industrial Workers of
the World.
135
Kibeis such as James Oda and Karl Yoneda developed their political
outlook in Japan, and then returned to the United States to avoid compulsory military
service for a Japanese government they saw as repressive and imperialist. Each was
involved in cross-racial union activism that organized both rural and urban workers: Oda
of retail produce clerks and the Los Angeles wholesale produce markets, and Yoneda of
agricultural and cannery workers and longshoremen up and down the West Coast but
primarily in California.
136
Each also sought converts through the political arena of the
public sphere, Oda through his work on the socialist newspaper Doho (meaning
“brotherhood”) and Yoneda through street speaking on the corners of Little Tokyo every
Saturday night during winter, when the farm workers were living in town. On one
occasion, Yoneda hung a large banner commemorating the tenth anniversary of the
Russian Revolution outside the Hori Brothers department store at the center of Little
Tokyo; on another, he and other activists spoke to a meeting of Issei in the Union
Church.
137

Fellow members of the second generation were as relevant an audience to Oda
and Yoneda as the Issei; between 80 and 90 percent of them worked within the ethnic
economy, regardless of their citizenship, English language skills, and frequently their

135
Ichioka, The Issei, Chapter 4; Karl G. Yoneda, “The Heritage of Sen Katayama,” Political
Affairs 54.3 (Mar. 1975): 38-57. Katayama became one of the founders of the Communist Party
in the United States in 1919.

136
Yoneda, Ganbatte, and Oda, Heroic Struggles of Japanese Americans, Chapter 6.

137
Yoneda, Ganbatte, 19.
81
college degrees.
138
In Los Angeles County in the years prior to World War II, 40 percent
of Japanese American women who worked, and nearly 30 percent of men, were working
without pay for their parents.
139
Joe Suski was comparatively lucky; after he graduated
from UCLA, he went to work in the office of a Japanese produce commission merchant:
“I didn’t like it, but that was about all I could find!”
140
Suski worked in the wholesale
produce industry until his retirement. Harry Yamamoto, working at a retail produce stand
during high school, discovered that “a lot of the young Nisei boys working there had
graduated from college… I used to ask them, ‘Can’t you find a better job than this?’…So
they said, ‘We can’t get a job, nobody will hire us.’ So then I found out that if you’re a
minority you have a hard time getting a job.” Yamamoto decided to “forget about
college” on the spot.
141

Radicals like Oda and Yoneda were called aka, or Reds, by those within the
community who did not share their views.
142
Although their numbers were always small
– Mark Wild notes that the official Communist Party membership of Japanese Angelenos
in the 1930s was between sixty and one hundred, although anti-Communist investigators
listed many times that as sympathizers and demonstration participants – their labor
activism further connected the Japanese to other immigrant communities in the spaces of

138
Thomas, The Salvage, 41; Bloom and Reimer, Removal and Return, 67.

139
John Modell, The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation, 131.

140
Interview with Joe Suski, Sep. 5, 2006.

141
Interview with Harry Yamamoto, Nov. 30, 2006.

142
Sue Kunitomi Embrey, interview by Arthur A. Hansen, David A. Hacker, and David J.
Bertagnoli for the Japanese American Project, Aug. 24, 1973, COPH, California State University,
Fullerton.
82
the enclave and throughout Los Angeles.
143
Thus, while Little Tokyo may have been an
“ethnic enclave,” it was certainly not isolated from other ethnic communities or from the
Anglo mainstream. At the center of many diverse residential communities, and the
wholesale produce and flower markets which were the urban destination of rural farmers
operating in racialized labor markets, Little Tokyo was the nexus of multiple overlapping
webs of labor, consumption, recreation, and residence that repeatedly drew immigrant
communities together despite the classifying and dividing spatial and economic practices
of the racial state and private capital. For the second-generation children of these
communities, the classrooms, streets, and playgrounds of the enclave were no less
diverse, and no less subject to the intrusions of the racial state.

That Cosmopolitan Eastside Population: Growing Up in a Multi-Ethnic Enclave
In a 1925 article in the Los Angeles School Journal, William Smith described the
“cosmopolitan population” of L.A.’s schools by going through a roll call of imaginary
students at a typical central city school: “Dominick Vestuto, Hans Dinkelspiel, Masao
Miyamoto, Jose Gonzalez, Isaac Goldstein, Jacob Kubicek, Ole Johnson, Patrick
Mullowney, Louis Thibault, Ko Wing Kan, Stanislaw Porzycka, and just plain Bobbie
Jones.”
144
It was in such diverse classrooms that the children of Little Tokyo first
encountered the categories and hierarchies of racialized citizenship as practiced in local

143
Wild, Street Meeting, 191. For more on Japanese American Communists during the
Depression years, see Scott Tadao Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles: Black and Japanese
American Struggles for Racial Equality in the 20
th
Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of California,
Los Angeles, 2000), Chapter 6.

144
William C. Smith, “The Cosmopolitan Population of Los Angeles in Relation to the Schools,”
Los Angeles School Journal 8.32 (Apr. 27, 1925): 15.
83
institutional contexts. For second-generation children, the schools, streets, and
playgrounds of the enclave were the spaces in which they learned their “place” in L.A.
and America, as its markets and businesses had been for their immigrant parents.
145

Nisei living in the vicinity of Little Tokyo primarily attended one of three local
public elementary schools: Amelia Street School, Hewitt Street School, and Ninth Street
School.
146
Several members of the Oliver sports clubs, including Jack Kunitomi and his
siblings, Joe Suski and most of his siblings, Harry Yamamoto, and Ets Yoshiyama
attended Amelia Street, located in the northeastern section of Little Tokyo. Suski recalled
that, when he attended in the early 1920s, the school was a “half and half” mix of
Mexicans and Asians – mostly Japanese but also a few Chinese. “Most of my early
friends were Hispanic people,” he remembered at age 93, like “Rafael Colón [and] Tony
Perez.”
147
Hewitt Street, where Miss Nellie Oliver, the sponsor of the Oliver clubs, had
begun teaching kindergarten in 1906, was by the 1920s “majority…Japanese, Chinese

145
For more on the shared locations and experiences of first- and second-generation children in
Los Angeles and other cities, see Wild, Street Meeting, Chapter 4, and Melissa R. Klapper, Small
Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in America, 1880-1925 (Chicago: Ivan R.
Dee, 2007).

146
There was also a Boyd Street School that served some Nisei living in the vicinity of Fourth
and Crocker, closer to the southern end of Little Tokyo. Boyd Street and Hewitt Street both
closed between the late 1920s and early 1930s, indicative of the decreasing number of children
being raised in the area. Interview with Ets Yoshiyama, Jan. 19, 2007. There was also a school
for Japanese American children at the Maryknoll Japanese Catholic Center.

147
Interview with Joe Suski, Sep. 5, 2006. Sue Kunitomi Embrey, who attended Amelia Street a
decade later than Suski, felt that the percentage of Japanese had risen closer to “ninety percent”
by the time she got there. Sue Kunitomi Embrey, interview by Arthur A. Hansen, David A.
Hacker, and David J. Bertagnoli for the Japanese American Project, Aug. 24, 1973, COPH,
California State University, Fullerton.
84
and Mexican,” along with “some negro children,” according to her own report.
148
The
Ninth Street School, located south of Little Tokyo near the wholesale produce and flower
markets, had many Japanese and Chinese, as well as Mexican and European, second-
generation children.
149

Table 1.3. Population of Little Tokyo-Area Elementary Schools by Race, 1924
School Total
Enrollment
“White” Black Asian Mexican Other
Amelia St. 543 14 0 219 310 0
Hewitt St. 393 22 5 191 167 8
Ninth St. 891 229 139 226 278 19
Source: Adapted from Mark Wild, Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early
Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005): 108.

The curricula at enclave schools often tried to creatively and productively address
this diversity. For example, Sophia Tucker, a teacher at Hewitt Street School, led her
third-grade students through a yearlong curriculum she termed “Travel in Other Lands,”
in which they studied the culture and history of the Dutch, American Indians, ancient
Bethlehem, Eskimos, China, and Japan. At one point, the class went on a field trip “to the
Oriental stores near the Plaza” to gather ideas and materials for their posters and
projects.
150
Sue Kunitomi Embrey recalled that Amelia Street School “used to bring in
Indians, and they’d have dances and we’d ask them questions…On May 5 there was

148
“Oriental Children in School. Interview with Miss Nellie Oliver” by William C. Smith,
undated, Box 35, Folder 314, SRR Records, Hoover Institute, Stanford University.

149
“Life History of Kazuo Kawai,” Mar. 2, 1925, Box 30, Folder 296, SRR Records, Hoover
Institute, Stanford University.

150
Sophia C. Tucker, “A Project in the Third Grade – Hewitt Street School,” Los Angeles School
Journal 6.33 (May 7, 1923): 21-22.
85
Cinco de Mayo and Japanese Boys’ Day, and they used to have people come in from the
community or have kids from the school to do these programs. We actually had a cultural
program all year round that emphasized the different ethnic groups.”
151
Mark Wild has
written that, while this “internationalist” curriculum “addressed the legacy of World War
I more explicitly than…mixed student bodies and neighborhoods,” it “could serve as a
metaphor for local interaction.”
152
However, such programs also identified children in a
static, essentialist manner with the native culture of their parents; even more problematic,
they were often taught by educators to whom the daily lives of second-generation
children seemed utterly and intrinsically foreign.
The teachers in these schools, primarily unmarried Anglo women, struggled with
educating children raised in such alien and diverse cultural, linguistic, and religious
traditions. An article in the Los Angeles School Journal noted that “teachers are very
frequently recruited from economic, racial, or cultural levels quite different from those on
which the children under their care are living,” and had to overcome “these
barriers…powerfully reinforced by racial, religious, and national prejudices.”
153
A Miss
James frankly confessed, “When I came from the East a year ago and was assigned to this
school with the large number of Orientals and Mexicans, I was disappointed to say the

151
Sue Kunitomi Embrey, interview by Arthur A. Hansen, David A. Hacker, and David J.
Bertagnoli for the Japanese American Project, Aug. 24, 1973, COPH, California State University,
Fullerton.

152
Wild, Street Meeting, 113.

153
Erle Fiske Young, “The Value to the School of Community Studies,” Los Angeles School
Journal 8.32 (Apr. 27, 1925): 11.
86
least.”
154
These prejudices manifested themselves in the assumptions of teachers and the
policies of administrators, who often believed that Japanese and Mexican children came
from dirty or unhygienic homes and were incapable of advanced intellectual work (or had
no cause to pursue it, as they would be unable to secure white collar employment in
California’s racialized labor market).
155
Jack Kunitomi remembers that the Amelia Street
School custodian came into the classrooms every morning to ask if any of the children
wanted to be given a bath, and that the curriculum emphasized industrial education,
including basket weaving, sewing, shoe repair, and woodworking.
156

Anglo teachers at enclave schools were often the key actors in educating second-
generation youth about each other’s domestic racial positions and expected behaviors, as
they freely grouped ethnic children along biologically-determinist lines. Miss James
actively compared her pupils and declared that “the Japanese…are aggressive and eager
to acquire knowledge,” the Chinese “needs to be patted on the back and be handled with
kid gloves,” and the Mexicans “try to get by as easily as possible” – a diagnosis that

154
“Oriental vs. Mexican Children in School. Interview with Miss James” by William C. Smith,
no date, Box 35, Folder 327, SRR Records, Hoover Institute, Stanford University.

155
See Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in
Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

156
Jack Kunitomi, “Bits of Little Tokyo History,” in Little Tokyo: Changing Times, Changing
Faces, 27-28. These practices were typical of Americanization campaigns aimed at the children
of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While a liberal Progressive
strain of Americanization thought aimed to bring immigrant social and cultural behavior in line
with Anglo middle-class norms in order to aid their accession to, and full exercise of, the benefits
and privileges of citizenship, a nativist interpretation that became dominant following World War
I saw Americanization as a means to make immigrant communities merely tolerable and
economically manageable, rather than full partners in legal and social citizenship. See Gary
Gerstle, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” The Journal of American History
84:2 (Sep. 1997): 524-558. The entire project of Americanization was complicated in the case of
Japanese immigrants by race, as Asians were legally barred from naturalization.
87
neatly paralleled common Anglo assumptions about the militaristic Japanese, the passive
Chinese, and the lazy Mexican.
157
Mrs. Claud Sparks felt that her Chinese and Japanese
students “seem a little timid” and that, though Mexican children tended toward truancy,
she could not help liking them: “The better class ones are charming and if they are your
friend they are always your friend.”
158
Nellie Oliver believed that the Japanese were more
“particular about their personal appearance” than Mexicans and more courteous and
respectful than the “Mexican girls [who] say that the school teachers have nothing to do
after three o’clock with them.”
159
The pupils of these teachers doubtless learned some of
their prejudices along with lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Indeed, Oliver also
reported that Mexican American children at Hewitt Street School had tried “to drive the
Japanese and Chinese out of school by calling them names and throwing stones at them,”
and that, while this had improved of late, “on the playground there is [still] a tendency for
the children to fall into racial groupings.”
160
Public schools in the enclave, then, were
often a key site for second-generation children to learn the salience of racial difference
and the gulf that separated ethnic identity and the Anglo mainstream.

157
“Oriental vs. Mexican Children in School. Interview with Miss James” by William C. Smith,
no date, Box 35, Folder 327, SRR Records, Hoover Institute, Stanford University. For a
discussion of the historical development of California’s conditional and relational racial
hierarchies, see Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White
Supremacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

158
Interview with Mrs. Claud Sparks by Catherine Holt, Dec. 10, 1924, Box 35, Folder 337, SRR
Records, Hoover Institute, Stanford University.

159
“The Oliver Club, Los Angeles. Interview with Miss Oliver” by William C. Smith, no date,
and “Oriental Children in School. Interview with Miss Nellie Oliver” by William C. Smith, no
date, Box 35, Folders 314 and 313, SRR Records, Hoover Institute, Stanford University.

160
“Oriental Children in School. Interview with Miss Nellie Oliver” by William C. Smith, no
date, Box 35, Folder 314, SRR Records, Hoover Institute, Stanford University.
88
Americanization projects were put into play in the schools and elsewhere in the
enclave by state officials, social workers, and nativists to bridge that gulf. Several
scholars have examined the role of the local state, particularly public health officials and
public school teachers, in Americanization programs aimed at Mexican and Asian
immigrant populations in California, whose race complicated the question of
assimilation. Natalia Molina, in her comparative examination of public health as a site of
racialization for Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese Angelenos, wrote that health officials
did not extend “the notion of Americanization to Mexicans as easily or comprehensively
as they did to European immigrants. Health officials publicly chastised Mexicans for
their ‘unclean living habits’ even while engaging in rhetoric that advocated
Americanization.”
161
At the same time, they also differentiated between Mexican and
Japanese communities on the basis of their access to citizenship as well as their roles in
California’s agricultural economy. Molina notes that city and county health officials
lambasted Japanese mothers for working long hours in the fields of their own farms, with
their children left in the house or carried with them, but rarely complained about Mexican
mothers doing the same as laborers on Anglo farms.
162

These communities tended to experience far greater levels of state intrusion as
part of Americanization campaigns than did “white ethnic” immigrants, which sometimes
put limits on the extent to which the enclave could protect its residents from Anglo
discrimination. William Deverell and Nayan Shah have described the response of Anglo
health officials to outbreaks of bubonic plague in “Mexican” and “Chinese”

161
Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?, 193.

162
Ibid., 56-57.
89
neighborhoods; in both cases, as Deverell writes, “officials perceived an overlap between
ethnicity and disease” that caused them to place entire ethnoracially-inscribed
neighborhoods under quarantine and disrupt important social and economic networks.
163

Molina has described such public health interventions as occurring “always within the
context of a general pathologizing of Mexican culture and Mexican spaces,” a process
that echoed the discursive and spatial pathologizing of Chinatowns as documented by
Anderson and Shah.
164
Once so contaminated, immigrant enclaves required the
intervention of the racial state in the form of additional policing of both public and
private behavior: nurses for home monitoring visits, truancy officers to ensure attendance
at the Americanizing public school, and the provision of classes in U.S. government, the
English language, and even American-style cooking.
Despite the Issei’s status as permanent foreigners, they nevertheless became an
object of Americanization projects due to the United States citizenship of their American-
born children. While the public school was the central vehicle of incorporation for the
second generation, the increasingly nativist turn of Americanization campaigns following
World War I brought the private sphere of the immigrant home under suspicion as well –
thus the attention to health, cleanliness, and cooking. This meant that the Issei,
particularly Issei women, became targets of Americanization; convincing immigrant
women to Americanize the domestic space of the home would, so the theory went, make
second-generation children safe for domestic incorporation into the nation despite their
visible racial difference. As one sociologist described it, “’Go after the women’ should

163
Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 184; Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides.

164
Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?, 77.
90
become a slogan among Americanization workers, for after all the greatest good is to be
obtained by starting the home off right…’Go after the women’ and you may save the
second generation for America.”
165
Thus we find an Anglo widow teaching immigrant
Japanese, Mexican, and Russian women to cook “American-type food” on the second
floor of the Stimson-Lafayette Industrial Institute in Little Tokyo, even as Nisei children
attended the Japanese language school downstairs – an elegant spatial representation of
the coexistence of state efforts to assimilate and domesticate immigrant communities and
those communities’ own efforts to sustain transnational connections to their indigenous
nations and cultures.
166

165
Alfred White, The Apperceptive Mass of Foreigners as Applied to Americanization: The
Mexican Group (Los Angeles: University of Southern California M.A. Thesis in Sociology,
1923), quoted in Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 98. See also Garcia, A World of Its Own,
65-68.

166
Interview with Joe Suski, Sep. 5, 2006. The Institute, at 318 North Hewitt Street in Little
Tokyo, was built in 1897 with funds provided by Martin Stimson, a banker and philanthropist
who moved his family to Los Angeles from Massachusetts in the 1880s (the Lafayette in the
building’s name referred to the original street name, before it was changed to Hewitt). Stimson’s
son Marshall (the gambling L.A. High student mentioned above) changed the name to the
Stimson Memorial Institute upon his father’s death. The upstairs also hosted sewing classes and
“lectures, demonstrations, and conferences” on American society and culture. See Fukuzawa,
Olivers Booklet, 12. Marshall regarded his father as “very democratic, and a firm believer in the
doctrine that those who worked had as good a right as any one to a place in the community.”
Although Marshall Stimson was a well-known Progressive in L.A. politics and a friend of liberal
Americanization proponents such as the Reverend G. Bromley Oxnam throughout his life, it is
clear from his autobiography that he was raised in a household with thoroughly racialized notions
of citizenship, labor, and space. See Marshall Stimson, “Fun, Fights, and Fiestas in Old Los
Angeles,” typed manuscript draft, 65-67, Box 4, Folder 3, Marshall Stimson Papers, Huntington
Library.
91

Figure 1.6. Nisei language school students in front of the Stimson Industrial Institute,
1930. Courtesy of Photographic Collections, Visual Communications.

Just as Nisei children navigated between the mono-ethnic population of the
Japanese school and the multi-ethnic classrooms of the enclave’s public schools, they
likewise engaged in both mono- and multi-ethnic play in Little Tokyo’s streets and alleys
and beyond. While they accompanied their parents to the Fujikan Theater on East First
Street to watch Japanese silent films narrated by a benshi, they also joined other second-
generation youth to watch Charlie Chaplin and Little Rascals comedies projected in the
front window of Mr. Iwata’s camera shop every Saturday night.
167
Neighborhood
boundaries and street addresses could sometimes trump racial difference: Kango
Kunitsugu, growing up a few blocks south of Little Tokyo near the wholesale produce

167
Interview with Joe Suski, Sep. 5, 2006; Sumi Utsushigawa Shimatsu, “Birth of Little Tokyo,”
in Little Tokyo: Changing Times, Changing Faces, 29-30.
92
market, recalled how an Anglo neighbor named Thomas Stone joined with him and other
“minority” youth “to chase white people from the neighborhood.”
168
The Nisei even
created turf divisions within their own ethnic community: kids living west of Central
were the “Central Avenue gang” and those on the east were the “Turner Street gang.”
According to Jack Kunitomi, there were “no hardcore rivalries” between the two, just
friendly games of kick-the-can.
169

In some cases, the privileging of territoriality over ethnic community led to far
less friendly rivalries; over time, Little Tokyo became the “turf” which the downtown
Olivers defended from inakamono, the “hicks” from outlying settlements who came to
the enclave for the annual Nisei Week festival or on the weekends to shop and eat. The
1938 Nisei Week was marred by an infamous fistfight between the Olivers and Cougars,
a similar Japanese American sports club from just across the river in Boyle Heights, and
some Orange County Nisei who had come up with hakujin (white) friends to take on the
city boys.
170
As one Oliver explained it, “we were the city slickers, so to speak…our
fellows would spot them, and gang up on them, and they had fights… And so, in a way,
this was our domain and if they came in intruding – look out – that was the kind of
attitude.”
171
When Oliver Kenji Taniguchi was asked why the Olivers fought with other

168
Quoted in Wild, Street Meeting, 94.

169
Interview with Jack Kunitomi, Sep. 8, 2006.

170
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 60-61.

171
Quoted in Isami Arifuku Waugh, “Hidden Crime and Deviance in the Japanese-American
Community, 1920-1946” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1978): 142-143.
93
boys from the Japanese American fishing community on Terminal Island, he laughingly
replied, “It was just – they’re from Terminal Island. That was all.”
172

Reinforcing the notion that local turf trumped ethnic community, even Nisei-only
sports clubs like the Olivers sometimes played with local non-Japanese members; Harry
Yamamoto recalled how he snuck a Filipino friend, Sergio Mendoza, onto the baseball
team under the pseudonym of So Maeda. Although the ruse was eventually discovered,
Yamamoto and Mendoza remained friends, with Mendoza working as a driver after the
war for Yamamoto’s beer distributing company for nearly thirty years.
173
The Cougars
likewise retained Anglo Bruce Middlebrooks, African American Atoy Wilson, and
Mexican American Manuel Ortega for games played outside the Japanese Athletic Union
league.
174
Clearly, Japanese American children growing up in the diverse context of Little
Tokyo recognized racial boundaries and conformed to them when necessary, but these
were not the only salient group boundaries or markers of belonging in their lives.
At other times, young Japanese Americans engaged in play along explicitly ethnic
or racial lines. Oliver football teams played a “bruising contest” against a Chinatown
team, as well as a Mexican American team from nearby Macy Street.
175
In the late 1930s,
one Oliver football team even traveled to Victor McLaglen Field in Griffith Park to take

172
Kenji Taniguchi, interviewed by Sojin Kim, John Esaki, and Florence Ochi for the Boyle
Heights Oral History Project, May 15, 2002, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM.

173
Interview with Harry Yamamoto, Nov. 30, 2006. Yamamoto’s company, Towne Distributing,
was located on Towne Street, on the southeastern edge of Little Tokyo.

174
Daniel Kawahara, interviewed by Sojin Kim and Darcie Iki for the Boyle Heights History
Project, Dec. 18, 2000, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM.

175
Fukuzawa, Olivers Booklet, 16.
94
on Mickey Rooney’s All-Stars, which mostly consisted of the white Santa Monica High
School “B” team; as Harry Yamamoto recalled it, “we beat them first game by a pretty
big score. And the second game we beat them 19-6. And then the third game, they
brought the varsity from Santa Monica High School and they beat us. They didn’t whup
us, but they beat us.”
176
In addition to taking Nisei youth far from the enclave, such
displays of athletic prowess, like the intra-community fistfights and accompanying
bragging rights, powerfully undermined Orientalist stereotypes about passive or
effeminate Asian men and Anglos’ supposed supremacy over them.
Mark Wild has stated that playgrounds “presented, in a more structured fashion,
the kinds of opportunities for ethnoracial interaction so prevalent in central neighborhood
streets.”
177
However, the few playgrounds and recreational spaces in Little Tokyo were
often tied to Japanese community institutions, which limited their use by non-Japanese
children. The Union Church had an indoor gymnasium open from seven to nine in the
evenings used by many Nisei boys for basketball games, jujitsu exhibitions, and wrestling
matches.
178
There were also playgrounds at the Maryknoll Japanese Catholic school and
the Stimson Industrial Institute. The Stimson yard served as a practice field for the Oliver

176
Interview with Harry Yamamoto, Nov. 30, 2006.

177
Wild, Street Meeting, 102.

178
Gretchen Tuthill, “Japanese in the City of Los Angeles,” 15; Catherine Lee Wahlstrom,
“Recreation for the Japanese in Los Angeles,” Los Angeles School Journal, 7 (Mar. 3, 1924): 11-
14.
95
clubs, which met upstairs with Miss Oliver on Friday evenings, and a makeshift baseball
diamond for Nisei boys and “tomboy” girls before and after Japanese school.
179

As with the schools, enclave playgrounds were subject to actions by both the
racial state and institutional authority figures that reinforced the racial segregation and
race-based hierarchies that increasingly dominated American society between the world
wars. In 1920, the Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance that prohibited alien
Japanese from playing on public tennis courts; an amendment the following year likewise
barred them from use of the public golf courses.
180
Children from several different
racialized communities were also barred from using public swimming pools, or were only
allowed in on the last day before the pool was cleaned.
181
Fumiko Nishihara Satow
recalled her humiliation when she was not permitted to swim at Brookside Park while her
“white ethnic” friends from Sunday school – the children of Russian and Italian
immigrants – entered without difficulty.
182

Nevertheless, athletic recreation was generally a field of convergence between the
interests of Issei parents and those of Anglo proponents of Americanization. Many Issei
supported certain Americanization programs as a complement to the transnational

179
Sue Kunitomi Embrey, “Little Tokyo – My Neighborhood, My Community, My World,” and
Sue Kunitomi Embrey and Jack Kunitomi, “The Olivers Story,” in Little Tokyo: Changing Times,
Changing Faces, 16-20.

180
Bruce Wallace, “Recreation for the Japanese in Los Angeles,” May 29, 1924, Box 34, Folder
314, SRR Records, Hoover Institute, Stanford University. While the ordinance technically only
applied to Japanese immigrants, it tended to have a chilling effect on use by the Nisei as well.

181
“Life history of L. Toyama,” Box 38, Folder 459, SRR Records, Hoover Institute, Stanford
University; Atoy Wilson, interviewed by Paul Spitzzeri and Lisa Itakagi for the Boyle Heights
Oral History Project, Jan. 25, 2001, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM.

182
Fumiko Nishihara Satow, interviewed by Sojin Kim for the Boyle Heights Oral History
Project, Oct. 23, 2000, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM.
96
“bridge” mentality they sought to instill in their children and a means to improve the
ethnic community’s collective social and economic position.
183
Eiichiro Azuma has
written that many Issei saw “Japanese-American compatibilities (not divides)” and
sought to combine the linguistic and moral instruction of the Japanese schools with the
civic and social education of American public schools, believing that “the Japanese spirit
would enhance some ‘American’ qualities in the Nisei, reinforcing what Americanization
offered to them.”
184
In terms of athletic competition, the Issei felt participation in sports,
particularly in “American” sports like baseball and football, demonstrated the Nisei’s
domestic cultural integration while simultaneously instilling an appreciation of loyalty,
honor, and collective effort, all valued attributes of the Japanese bushido ethic. For
proponents of Americanization informed by “muscular Christianity,” an influential strain
of thought prevalent in Protestant reform circles at the turn of the century, competitive
sports were viewed as embodiments of moral and purportedly American (or at least
Anglo-Saxon) traits of teamwork, community, and fair play.

183
The Issei saw their children, products of both American and Japanese culture, as a
transnational “bridge of understanding” that would link the two nations and challenge
discriminatory policies against Japanese immigrants, improving the future prospects of all
Japanese Americans. While, as David Yoo has written, “very few of the second generation could
have served as true bridges, since they lacked adequate knowledge of Japanese language, history,
and culture,” “the bridge metaphor allowed Nisei to maintain connections to persons and things
Japanese” despite “the pressures of Americanization through the schools.” Using Little Tokyo’s
annual Nisei Week festival as a window into articulations of ethnic community and national
identity, Lon Kurashige has argued that Japanese Americans engaged in a kind of strategic
biculturalism, stressing either affinities with Japanese culture or loyal all-Americanism as
required by domestic political and economic currents in order “to gain broad-based acceptance,
legitimacy, and class status.” See Ichioka, Before Internment, Chapters 2 and 3; Azuma, Between
Two Empires, Chapters 5 and 6; Yoo, Growing Up Nisei, 32; and Kurashige, Japanese American
Celebration and Conflict, 6.

184
Azuma, Between Two Empires, 112-131.
97
Evidence for this common philosophical ground can be found in the funding of
both English classes and a gymnasium at Union Church by the mission home boards of
the Presbyterian and Congregational churches, and the Issei-led Federation of Japanese
Young Men’s Associations sponsoring both intellectual and athletic activities as part of a
Young People’s Week in Little Tokyo in the spring of 1925.
185
The athletic activities
included both baseball matches – between, for example, the Olivers and the Terminal
Island team – and tournaments in jujitsu and fencing (probably meaning kendo). In
addition, Issei parents showed their gratitude to Nellie Oliver for her role in starting the
Oliver sports and social clubs for Nisei youth by sending her on a two-month tour of
Japan with the principal of the enclave’s Japanese school and several Nisei students in
1925.
186
Almost two years prior to Young People’s Week, a large “field day” was
organized by Japanese Angelenos that involved 600 participants competing in basketball,

185
Tuthill, “Japanese in the City of Los Angeles,” 31; Masao Dodo, “Report on Young People’s
Week,” Box 38, Folder 445, SRR Records, Hoover Institute, Stanford University. While the focus
of Young People’s Week was intended to be the American-born generation, language barriers
prevented many Nisei from full participation and many who attended the social and intellectual
events were instead the youngest Issei, those who had arrived in America over the previous
decade.

186
Waugh, “Hidden Crime and Deviance in the Japanese-American Community,” 138;
Fukuzawa, Olivers Booklet, 7-8. The social components of the Oliver Club involved instruction
by Miss Oliver in community singing, parliamentary procedure, “American” dancing, and public
speaking. A proponent of “muscular Christianity,” she even bought dumbbells for the boys and
brought in an instructor to teach them how to be used properly. Supportive of the liberal
Progressive strain of Americanization, Nellie Oliver was determined to endow the Nisei with the
cultural capital to succeed in mainstream Anglo society, should they ever be granted the
opportunity to try. Unlike most agents of Americanization, Miss Oliver is remembered with
affection by “her boys” as a kind and fair teacher; indeed, at the age of 81 she even traveled to
Manzanar on a hot summer day to visit her charges, and wrote letters on their behalf to the
Department of Justice during the war. Jack Kunitomi said of her, “she taught us more about
democracy than our textbook.” Fukuzawa, Olivers Booklet; Interview with Joe Suski, Sep. 5,
2006; Interview with Jack Kunitomi, Sep. 8, 2006; and Interview with Harry Yamamoto, Nov.
30, 2006.
98
tennis, baseball, wrestling, and jujitsu. Although the meets had to be held at the local
YMCA, as some of the younger Issei participating were barred from the local
playgrounds and courts due to their alien status, the event attracted an estimated 5000
spectators.
187
Such public events simultaneously nurtured ethnic community,
demonstrated the efficacy of Nisei Americanization programs to Anglo reformers, and
reinforced the bicultural identity of second-generation Japanese Americans.
As second-generation youth aged, they were increasingly forced to restrict their
multi-ethnic and multi-racial worlds and socialize within their own ethnic communities.
As Mark Wild points out, “growing social pressure began to register in the social
interaction of students at higher grades,” especially given the taboo against dating across
racial and sometimes even ethnic lines.
188
The trials of Melba Yonemura, a young woman
of mixed Japanese and Anglo parentage, highlighted the difficulty of maintaining diverse
connections past puberty. A Nisei friend of Melba’s stated “it is kind of hard for her
because she looks like an American and if she goes with Japanese boys people look at
her, but if she goes with American boys they soon find out that she is Japanese.” Melba’s
teacher shared that an Anglo boy in her class had become “quite seriously interested in
her,” until the teacher “talked to him a little bit about it” and made him understand “it
couldn’t go on.”
189

187
Wahlstrom, “Recreation for the Japanese in Los Angeles.”

188
Wild, Street Meeting, 116.

189
“Interviews Regarding Melba Yonemura” by Catherine Holt, Feb. 19 and Feb. 25, 1925, Box
38, Folder 446, SRR Records, Hoover Institute, Stanford University.
99
Increasingly, high-school and college-age Nisei constructed what Lon Kurashige
described as a largely mono-ethnic “social universe – complete with styles of dancing,
dating, dressing, and language – that paralleled, yet rarely intersected with, white
America.” According to an unpublished study quoted by Kurashige, “[t]he identification
was with American ways, but not with Caucasians.”
190
In this manner, Nisei youth in Los
Angeles were not unlike the second-generation immigrant youth in Chicago chronicled
by Lizabeth Cohen, participating in the commercial mass culture of the 1920s and 1930s
“in ethnic company.” Cohen argued that the practices of these youth made them both
more “American” than their parents but also more “ethnic” – Italian, Jewish, or Polish –
in the domestic American context.
191
Nevertheless, the opportunity to become
“American” by embracing mass culture was limited in a society structured by racial
nationalism: color lines divided the “unmeltable” difference of non-whites from the
supposedly less rigid difference of “white ethnics.” Thus, while Nisei and Italian
Americans in Los Angeles might see the same movies, listen to the same radio programs,
and shop in the same downtown stores, they often did so, by the time they reached high
school, within co-ethnic groups that mediated their encounters with both mass culture and
each other, and with different degrees of incorporation into Anglo society.
192
As adults,
the Nisei thus made their living within the ethnic economy and had their fun in what Yoo

190
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 59.

191
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: 144-147. For more on the ethnically-bounded
participation of second-generation Japanese Americans in commercial mass culture, see
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, Chapters 1 and 2, and Matsumoto,
“Japanese American Women and the Creation of Urban Nisei Culture in the 1930s.”

192
Mexican American youth underwent a similar, parallel process; see Sánchez, Becoming
Mexican American.
100
has called “a rich Nisei subculture…that represented a vital, alternative space between
immigrant and native contexts.”
193

In all facets of their everyday lives, Nisei merged the authority of their Japanese
parents and ethnic institutions, “American” schooling and mass culture, the constraints of
Anglo discrimination, and the influences of other immigrant and racialized communities
encountered in and near the enclave to develop a distinctive, and very active, second-
generation social identity. As many as four hundred Nisei-specific clubs existed in Los
Angeles in 1938; of these, sports clubs like the Olivers were central in providing
leadership opportunities, eliding existing differences among the Nisei, and building
connections to other Nisei beyond Los Angeles.
194
Aside from Miss Oliver’s sponsorship,
the Oliver clubs were an entirely Nisei-directed operation; older Olivers coached the
younger ones, and the clubs held carnivals and sold tickets to venues like the Venice
Funhouse on commission to bring in money to pay for uniforms and sporting
equipment.
195
As one Oliver said, “We just went out and hustled…but we raised quite a
bit of money because we ran the whole show. And we were only in the teens and nobody
was an advisor except Miss Oliver.”
196
In addition, being an Oliver was an identity that
crossed boundaries of class, religion, and personal experience, if not neighborhood
territories. Members were Buddhist and Christian – both Protestant and Catholic, in an

193
Yoo, Growing Up Nisei, 2.

194
Matsumoto, “Japanese American Women and the Creation of Urban Nisei Culture in the
1930s,” 295.

195
Fukuzawa, Olivers Booklet; Interview with Harry Yamamoto, Nov. 30, 2006; Tuthill,
“Japanese in the City of Los Angeles,” 17.

196
Quoted in Waugh, “Hidden Crime and Deviance in the Japanese-American Community,” 141.
101
era when those two groups were still strongly antagonistic in Anglo society. They were
also both American-raised Nisei and Kibei, and came from poor families that ran Skid
Row bars, like Ets Yoshiyama’s parents, as well as upper-class professional families, like
Joe Suski’s, whose father was a respected, well-traveled physician. In addition, as the
Olivers’ reputation for sporting excellence grew, they traveled to Japanese American
communities throughout the state playing other Nisei teams; in 1933, the Oliver football
players traveled by rickety truck to San Francisco, where they played that city’s leading
team, the Soko Athletic Club (Soko being Japanese for San Francisco), to a 0-0 tie in the
rain before a cheering ethnic crowd at Kezar Stadium.
197

Figure 1.7. Olivers at a baseball game against another Nisei team in the Central Valley
farming town of Guadalupe, 1930. Courtesy Joe Suski, who is standing on the far right.

197
Interview with Joe Suski, Sep. 5, 2006; Fukuzawa, Olivers Booklet, 17.
102
The strengthening of ethnic communal ties through these clubs could even lead to
the resurrection of transnational ones. In the mid-1920s, the senior Olivers joined with
another Nisei club, the Uptown Diamonds, to create the semi-pro Los Angeles Nippons
baseball team. The “Nips,” as they were called, were known as the “Pride of Li’l Tokio”
and played both white and black semi-pro teams throughout the Southland, and were
talented enough to play the Chicago Cubs rookie team in training on Catalina Island.
198

As Joe Suski, who played for the Nippons after graduating from UCLA, recalled, “We
being an all-Japanese team, when we played in Fullerton or Pasadena, a little ways out,
they don’t see different faces, they see two white teams playing all the time…So we were
kind of attractive, just like the colored Giants were, so we could demand more
[money].”
199
In 1931, the Nippons made a “dream trip” to Japan to play the baseball
teams that had been started at several universities there, traveling the country for several
weeks and returning with a record of 23-4.
200

For the Nisei, Little Tokyo was the physical embodiment of this “vital,
alternative space” for the development of second-generation ethnic identity, specifically
the locations within the diverse enclave that catered primarily to the Japanese ethnic

198
Yoichi Nagata, “The Pride of Li’l Tokio: The Los Angeles Nippons Baseball Club, 1926-
1941,” More Than a Game: Sport in the Japanese American Community, ed. Brian Niiya (Los
Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 2000): 100-109.

199
Interview with Joe Suski, Sep. 5, 2006. Suski was playing a game with the Nippons against the
Paramount Studios team on December 7, 1941. When the bombing of Pearl Harbor was
announced on the radio being played over the loudspeaker during pre-game warm-ups, the
assembled crowd assumed it was an Orson Welles-type hoax and the game started as planned. It
was only when Suski returned to Little Tokyo that evening that he discovered the announcement
was not a bad joke. Suski was interned at Heart Mountain, entered Military Intelligence, and
arrived in Japan just two days before hostilities officially ceased.

200
Fukuzawa, Olivers Booklet, 16.
103
population, such as the bathhouses, Buddhist temples, and ethnic Japanese churches.
201

Indeed, the Nisei found it possible to create geographical and temporal circuits in Little
Tokyo that maximized their encounter with the ethnic community and their performance
of “American” rituals in Japanese-inflected forms, acts of self-definition that qualified as
neither complete assimilation nor pure ethnic retention. Kango Kunitsugu described the
circuit his family traveled when he was a child: “Saturday nights were the big nights…It
was a feast at the local chop suey houses, a shopping foray into the Kimura Brothers or
Hori Department Stores, stocking up on shoyu and rice and some precious canned goods
from Japan at the Enbun Market and ending the night at the Fujikan.”
202
As a teenager,
Jack Kunitomi ran a slightly different circuit on Saturday nights: “We’d play a game of
baseball, head for the bathhouse around the corner at Jackson and San Pedro streets, and
then go to the Far East [restaurant], stand in line freshly bathed, hoping to meet girls.”
203

Both Kunitsugu’s and Kunitomi’s activities mirrored those of young men elsewhere in
the city – dinner, shopping, movies, sports, and picking up girls – but pursuing them in
the place of the enclave allowed both Nisei to be Americans in a way that sustained their
transnational connection to Japanese culture and community.
Larry Tajiri captured Little Tokyo’s meaning for the Nisei when he described it as
“Middletown with an Oriental accent.” The enclave may have been “always on the wrong
side of the tracks,” he wrote, but “Little Tokyo was home. Little Tokyo meant America to

201
Daniel Kawahara, interviewed by Sojin Kim and Darcie Ike for the Boyle Heights Oral
History Project, Dec. 18, 2000, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM; Cecilia Rasmussen,
“Little Tokyo Landmark Plans a Comeback,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 17, 2002, B4.

202
Quoted in Murase, Little Tokyo, 13.

203
Cecilia Rasmussen, “Little Tokyo Landmark Plans a Comeback.”
104
a lot of Nisei but it was just a curiosity to the tourists…It was all quaint to them, a
sentence in a strange Oriental tongue, punctuated by the flickering light of Japanese
lanterns.”
204
Unable to see the ways in which the enclave fused Japanese community and
American practices, Anglo visitors focused on the supposedly “authentic” representations
of Japanese society to be found there. For example, Lon Kurashige writes that when film
star Charlie Chaplin visited Little Tokyo’s Nisei Week festival in the mid-1930s, he saw
it as a “treasured artifact of an endangered culture” rather than a “regenerative process” in
which “time-honored rituals and memories were reprogrammed to meet changing
historical circumstances.”
205
Even those Anglos whose lives brought them into daily
contact with the enclave had difficulty thinking of it as an American place, the locus for
Nisei adaptation and regeneration, rather than as an embodiment of Japan displaced to the
other side of the Pacific Ocean. Nellie Oliver herself sometimes fell into this trap, writing
to a friend in the early 1920s that Little Tokyo’s “picturesque element is not quite lost.
Rice cookies, mushrooms, dried fish, and Japanese pottery are still for sale. In March, at
the Feast of the Dolls, the fascinating emperor and empress with their retinue and all their
belongings…are worth a long journey to see.”
206
While the enclave may have meant
“America” to the Nisei, it still meant “Japan” to white Angelenos; while the Nisei might
be “at home” in Little Tokyo, Little Tokyo was apparently not “at home” in America.
The harsh consequences of learning, resisting, and reinventing Japanese
Americans’ “place” among the diverse communities of the enclave, and despite the limits

204
Quoted in Harry Honda, “Wrong Side of the Tracks,” Pacific Citizen, Sep. 14, 1984, 10.

205
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 42-43.

206
Gretchen Tuthill, “Japanese in the City of Los Angeles,” 11.
105
of a racial nationalist ideology that declared Asian immigrants and their offspring as
permanently foreign, is perhaps best captured in the words of Kazuo Kawai. Brought to
the United States by his minister father at the age of six, Kawai struggled to understand
the multiethnic landscape in which he found himself and the domestic racial hierarchy
that structured it. At first, he disliked the multiple forms of difference he was asked to
engage with in the enclave: “I started going to Ninth Street School, one of these eastside
schools which is infested by a horde of poor and dirty little Mexican, Negro, Italian,
Greek, and Jewish children. I wasn’t conscious of any national or race distinctions then,
so that didn’t bother me, but I frankly did not like the kind of children who went to that
school.” However, gradually Kawai came to recognize the echoes of his own experience
in those of his schoolmates and to feel accepted in his new home: “I learned all the ways
of the eastside, and very soon, I became one of the regular gang…I was an integral part
of that cosmopolitan east-side population that was being molded by the zealous school
teachers into good Americans.” Yet as he reached adulthood, Kawai increasingly felt the
dissonance between his teachers’ rhetoric of Americanization and the social and
economic limitations he faced due to his Japanese heritage. With great sadness, he wrote,
“I thought I was American, but America wouldn’t have me.”
207
Like other members of
his generation, he found comfort from the pain of this rejection in the ethnic community
geographically, economically, and emotionally centered on the enclave.
That Japanese American community, and its singular relationship to Little Tokyo,
was forever altered with the coming of World War II, when the enclave’s inscription as

207
“Life History of Kazuo Kawai,” Mar. 2, 1925, Box 30, Folder 296, SRR Records, Hoover
Institute Stanford University.
106
Japanese American space was violently erased. The new name “Bronzeville” indicated
the enclave’s transformation into an African American “ghetto” during World War II.
The reclaiming of Bronzeville by Japanese Americans, and its reinscription as Little
Tokyo, illuminates a great deal about the shifting racial formations of the mid-twentieth-
century United States and the complexities of sustaining interracial dialogue and
coalition-building in the context of divisive political and economic policy. The next
chapter explores the orbit of African and Japanese American Angelenos through and
around Little Tokyo during some of the most assertive and destructive actions of the
twentieth-century American racial state.

107
CHAPTER TWO:
“THIS IS BRONZEVILLE”:
AFRICAN AND JAPANESE AMERICANS IN THE ENCLAVE

Bronzeville and Little Tokyo have been betrothed. Out of a marriage of convenience has
come a genuine attachment and affection between the two peoples.
1

In July 1946, a feature in Ebony magazine captured a key moment in Little Tokyo’s
history: the merging of the Japanese American enclave with the black ghetto of
Bronzeville. The article depicted the two separate ethnoracially-inscribed places
occupying the same urban space; a single, racially harmonious home for African and
Japanese American Angelenos. Neighborhood institutions appeared to model integration
in action, with black, Japanese, and white doctors staffing the First Street health clinic
and black and Japanese American children playing together at the Pilgrim House nursery
school. Photographs accompanying the article documented a variety of casual interracial
encounters in the public spaces of the ghetto/enclave: Japanese barbers cutting black hair,
African and Japanese American wives conversing in the corner market, and men of both
races sharing a game in a neighborhood pool hall. Members of both communities
announced their commitment to peaceful coexistence, with emblems in the windows of
Japanese and African American stores proclaiming “We respect all,” and black and Nisei
veterans cooperating on the neighborhood’s American Veterans Committee. The name of
the article – “The Race War That Flopped” – alludes to the violence that many had

1
“The Race War That Flopped,” Ebony, Jul. 1946, 3-9.
108
expected to develop between these two differently-raced communities thrown into close
proximity, and the spatial rapprochement that instead seemed to be blossoming on shared
streets.
This chapter traces the process by which Little Tokyo was re-raced during World
War II. Although many African Americans had lived and worked within the area that
became “Little Tokyo” since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, and African
and Japanese Americans had shared diverse connections at several points throughout the
city, the “Bronzeville” period represented a new phase in both the complex racial
geography of Los Angeles and the form and extent of the power exercised by the racial
state. Entire populations were classified by race, segregated, and moved across vast
distances via federal mandate or fiscal policy: in the case of Little Tokyo, as the
neighborhood was emptied of Japanese Americans in early 1942 by Executive Order
9066, it was refilled with African Americans entering Los Angeles to find work in the
many war factories, producing a new place – Bronzeville.
2
In the years following the war,
Japanese Americans returned to navigate the shared space of “Little Bronze Tokyo” and
reclaim the enclave. In this simultaneously collective and contested space, blacks and
Japanese Americans negotiated their fraught relationship to the racial state at both the
local and federal level, with markedly divergent outcomes in their paths to belonging
within the landscape and the polity. In their brief attempt to claim and defend a common

2
George Sánchez has shown how city and county government in Los Angeles responded to
national economic and political crises in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s by (re)moving members of
racialized communities, rewriting the city’s racial geography in the process. See Chapter Four of
Bridging Borders, Remaking Community: Racial Interaction in Boyle Heights, California in the
20
th
Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).
109
place, African and Japanese American Angelenos challenged the divisive hierarchies
promoted by both state action and cycles of economic investment and disinvestment.
Given the complicated historical relationship of “black” and “yellow” within the
shifting U.S. racial context that shaped the years before, during, and after World War II,
what did it mean for Japanese Americans to return to “their” neighborhood after the war?
How (and why) did Bronzeville become Little Tokyo again, and how did African
Americans feel about “surrendering” the space to returning Japanese Americans? What
was the impact on African American/Japanese American relations in Los Angeles in the
years that followed? To answer these questions, we must first examine how the two
communities intersected in Los Angeles in the years immediately before the war.

The Color Line Is Drawn More Finely: African and Japanese Americans in the
Multiracial City
As noted in the previous chapter, African Americans laid claim to the physical spaces of
Little Tokyo long before there was a Japanese population in Los Angeles. Prior to the
turn of the twentieth century, when the city’s black community numbered less than 2,000,
matriarch Biddie Mason bought property for her family and founded the city’s first
African Methodist Episcopal church in the blocks around First and Second Streets and
San Pedro.
3
Later, as William Seymour transformed the old First AME building into his

3
See Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1995): 138-187 and R.J. Smith, The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Lost
African American Renaissance (New York: Public Affairs, 2006): 160; for population numbers,
see J. Max Bond, “The Negro in Los Angeles” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California,
1936): 40.
110
revolutionary Azusa Street Mission, the black community expanded south and east along
Central Avenue. By 1920, when the black population had passed 15,000 and the Japanese
presence in the Little Tokyo area was well established, the center of black L.A. had
shifted to Central between 8
th
and 12
th
Streets.
4

The two communities were hardly rigidly separated, however; although
residential overlap was relatively limited within Little Tokyo itself, anecdotal evidence
suggests that African Americans and Japanese Americans frequently mingled in its
commercial, social, and educational venues.
5
For instance, in his autobiography George
Takei recalled that a tall black man ironically called “Little Joe,” or sometimes Johnny
Little, regularly danced the ondo in traditional Japanese garb during the annual Nisei
Week festivities in the late 1930s, much to the crowd’s delight.
6
A 1911 photo taken in
the Japanese-operated San Pedro restaurant in Little Tokyo shows a group of primarily

4
Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), especially pp. 25-26 and 120-122. Up until the 1920s it was
in some ways difficult to refer to L.A.’s black community in a spatially restricted way, as there
were several small black enclaves in different areas of Los Angeles as well as in nearby towns
such as Pasadena. However, as the city’s racial dynamics began to shift in the late 1910s and
early 1920s, black Angelenos found themselves increasingly faced with residential, social, and
geographic restrictions that mirrored their limited employment opportunities. See for example
Lawrence B. de Graaf, “The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-
1930,” Pacific Historical Review 39.3 (Aug. 1970): 323-352; Flamming, Bound for Freedom,
especially chapter 6; and the public history website on early African American history in Los
Angeles, 8
th
and Wall (http://www.eighthandwall.org/).

5
Little Tokyo was just one of the many “ethnic enclaves” and multiracial neighborhoods that
overlapped each other in the polyglot central city of prewar Los Angeles. Mark Wild has
memorably depicted the diverse interactions that marked street, school, romantic, and political
interactions in these districts. See Mark Wild, Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in
Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
6
George Takei, To the Stars: The Autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu (New
York: Pocket Books, 1994): 100, and “Zadankai: Talk Goes Around,” Nisei Week souvenir
booklet (1990), Hirasaki National Resource Center, Japanese American National Museum
(hereafter JANM).
111
African-American customers eating lunch, and both blacks and Japanese were frequent
customers of the neighborhood’s seven chop suey restaurants.
7
African Americans also
worked alongside Issei and Nisei in the wholesale produce markets that edged the Little
Tokyo area.
8
In addition, Japanese and African American children shared classrooms and
playgrounds at the Hewitt Street and Ninth Street elementary schools that served Little
Tokyo.
9

Outside of Little Tokyo, Japanese Americans could often be found living
alongside blacks in several areas of the city – generally bound by the same restrictive
covenants, and thus faced with similarly limited housing options, blacks and Japanese
Americans often became next-door neighbors whether it pleased them or not.
10
For
instance, Boyle Heights, a largely unrestricted neighborhood just across the Los Angeles
River from Little Tokyo, was home to Jews, Mexican Americans, blacks, Japanese
Americans, and Russian immigrant families of the Molokov sect. Many of the children
who grew up in Boyle Heights prior to World War II retain fond memories of, and even

7
Mason and McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles, 4; Harry Honda, “Chop Suey Houses,”
Pacific Citizen, Aug. 31, 1984, 12.

8
Wild, Street Meeting, 26-27.

9
See for example “Oriental Children in School. Interview with Miss Oliver,” Box 35, Folder 314,
and “Life History of Kazuo Kawai, Los Angeles, March, 1925,” Box 30, Folder 296, both in the
Survey on Race Relations Records (hereafter SRR Records), Hoover Institute, Stanford
University.

10
By the late 1930s, approximately 95 percent of the city’s residential areas carried restrictions
against African American residency, and 80 percent were restricted against members of the
“Oriental” race. See Keith E. Collins, Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940-1950
(Saratoga, Calif.: Century 21 Publishing, 1980): 26, and Scott Kurashige, “Transforming Los
Angeles: Black and Japanese American Struggles for Racial Equality in the 20
th
Century” (Ph.D.
diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2000): 231. In addition, the Issei generation were
barred from becoming citizens, which prevented them from owning land under California law.
112
friendships with, their diverse playmates. Atoy Wilson, as one example, was friends with
many members of the Japanese American Cougar sports teams in the neighborhood and
still attends their annual reunions as an honorary member. The best man at his eldest
son’s wedding was also Japanese American. His sister Mollie, who visited the beach at
Terminal Island with her Nisei friends every summer, studied Japanese at UCLA and
later visited Japan.
11

Another area of particularly robust interaction was the neighborhood the Issei
called seinan-ku, the Southwest district surrounding the intersection of Normandie and
35
th
Street. As the black population of Los Angeles had continued to grow rapidly,
surpassing 38,000 in 1930 and 63,000 in 1940, it had surged south along Central Avenue,
such that the center of the community had shifted by 1940 to the Dunbar Hotel at 42
nd

and Central.
12
However, the area had also become increasingly congested, as restrictions
on black social and residential mobility imposed by both the racial state and its private
supporters hardened during the 1920s and 1930s. Surrounding neighborhoods with Anglo
(both native-born white and European immigrant) majorities began to more vigorously
enforce deed covenants barring African Americans (and often Mexican and “Oriental”
persons as well) from taking up residence, creating an invisible wall around blacks’

11
Atoy Wilson, interviewed by Paul Spitzzeri and Lisa Itakagi for the Boyle Heights Oral History
Project, Jan. 25, 2001, and Mollie Wilson, interviewed by Sojin Kim and Darcie Ike, Jan. 18,
2001, Boyle Heights Oral History Project, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM.

12
For population figures, see Bond, “The Negro in Los Angeles.” For more on the process by
which the African American community expanded south along Central Avenue, see Flamming,
Bound for Freedom, 97-98.

113
potential expansion southward along or west of Central Avenue by the late 1930s.
13
In
addition, changes to the zoning for the northern section along Central produced an
explosion of industrial uses (the streamline moderne Coca-Cola bottling plant at 13
th
and
Central being a particularly enormous example) that also negatively impacted residents in
the district.
14
Some of the more financially stable black families were able to escape this
situation by purchasing homes not covered by restrictive covenants in what they called
the West Adams or West Jefferson district, a few miles west of the University of
Southern California campus.
15

Japanese Americans also settled in this area because of its lack of covenants, as
well as its proximity to Japanese-run nurseries and Westside gardening jobs. Although
not as compact as Little Tokyo, seinan-ku offered many of the institutional and

13
Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the
Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): 34. A 1940 survey by the Los Angeles
Urban League demonstrated the mismatch between the population’s diversity and how the
different ethnic groups were distributed. The survey found 22,000 African Americans, 20,000
Mexicans, and 26,000 “native whites” living in the region roughly bounded by Olympic
Boulevard on the north, Alameda on the east, 60
th
Street on the south, and Main Street on the
west, as well as 1975 Jews, 1817 Japanese, 1736 Chinese, 1580 Italians, 1027 Germans, 316
Armenians, 316 Scandinavians, 261 Greeks, 237 French, 190 Dutch, 158 Russians, 103
Hungarians, and 79 Poles. However, a hand-colored map accompanying the survey showed how
blacks, Asians, and Mexicans were concentrated in the blocks closest to Central, while the native
whites and Caucasian immigrant groups – especially the Germans and Poles – clustered at the
peripheries. See Karl Holton, “Notes on the Negro Districts in Los Angeles,” Jan. 1940 report to
the Deteriorating Zone Committee, Box 1, Folder 14, Los Angeles Urban League (hereafter
LAUL) Collection, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

14
Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 45-46.

15
Approximately 3900 African Americans resided in the West Jefferson neighborhood in 1940;
see Holton, “Notes on the Negro Districts in Los Angeles,” Box 1, Folder 14, LAUL Collection,
Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. For more information on the high
rates of homeownership among blacks in Los Angeles (36 percent in 1910), and the importance
of homeownership and even property speculation as a means of economic security and
advancement for African American Angelenos, see de Graaf, “City of Black Angels,” and
Flamming, Bound for Freedom, 51.
114
commercial resources of a nihonmachi: the Senshin Buddhist Temple as well as
Centenary United Methodist Church, a Japanese language school, some shops. The
“Japantown” and “colored town” overlapped almost completely: a 1933 map, for
instance, shows that West 29
th
Place between Cimarron and St. Andrews was home to
four black, nine Japanese, six Mexican, and thirteen “white” families. The next block
further east hosted eight black, three Japanese, four Mexican, and eleven “white”
families.
16
Such a high degree of integration was not initially welcomed by many of the
residents; one black property owner, a Mr. Joyce who rented out two homes on West 36
th

Street to Japanese families, recalled that initially “there was some objection in the
neighborhood. The negroes [sic] felt that he should rent to his own people.” However,
after six years, “that opposition has all died out and he is no longer criticized for renting
to the Japanese.”
17
A Japanese man, asked about race relations in the neighborhood,
concurred with Joyce: “There are no evidences of race feeling. They [Negroes] mind their
own business and are not bothersome.”
18
Most of the time, Japanese and African
American Angelenos lived together peacefully in the Southwest district, just as they did
in Boyle Heights.
Yet not all Japanese American Angelenos were sanguine about the color
composition of their shared neighborhoods. In early 1940, a group of Nisei sought, with

16
Bond, “The Negro in Los Angeles,” 96.

17
“Interview with Mr. Joyce (Negro), West 36
th
Street, May 21, 1924,” Box 36, Folder 347, SRR
Records, Hoover Institute, Stanford University.

18
Gretchen Tuthill, “Japanese in the City of Los Angeles” (Los Angeles: University of Southern
California Master’s Thesis in Sociology, 1924), abridged, 11; Box 25, Folder 70, SRR Records,
Hoover Institute, Stanford University.
115
the help of white bankers and contractors, to build their own housing development,
Jefferson Park, in the open land beyond the western end of the seinan-ku neighborhood,
with restrictive covenants allowing only people of Japanese and other Asian ethnicities
and Caucasians to reside there.
19
The racial politics of the proposed development elicited
controversy among some elements of the Japanese American community; Shuji Fujii,
editor of the radical Japanese American newspaper Doho, wrote an exposé insisting that
the development was “unworthy of support” because it “discriminates against other racial
groups.”
20
The Nisei, however, could point to African Americans as the inspiration for
their plan: African Americans in L.A. had previously sought to create all-black suburban
developments as a means to better living standards and economic opportunities while
flying under the radar of white hostility.
21
Scott Kurashige has argued that Jefferson Park
“revealed more of a class than racial bias,” and that some of the Nisei putting down
deposits in Jefferson Park “privately believed that they would remove or circumvent the
restrictions against blacks and Mexicans when they took occupancy.”
22
Some, but
certainly not all. It is perhaps most accurate to say that both class and race prejudice were
at work in attracting Nisei buyers to “exclusive” Jefferson Park.

19
John Modell, The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation: The Japanese of Los
Angeles, 1900-1942 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977): 14-15.

20
“Jefferson Project Unworthy of Support,” Doho, Aug. 15, 1940; quoted in Kurashige,
“Transforming Los Angeles,” 242.

21
For the sad saga of one such proposed development, Gordon Manor, see Kurashige,
“Transforming Los Angeles,” 191-194; more generally, see Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own:
African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004).

22
Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 238.
116
More importantly, the Jefferson Park incident exposes how thoroughly such class
and race prejudices were shaped by the structural forces determining the Nisei’s
residential and employment opportunities. Given the widespread belief among lenders
and realtors that the presence of Japanese (even Japanese Americans) was almost as
detrimental to neighborhood property values as the presence of blacks, and the FHA
guidelines that considered “heterogeneous” neighborhoods a bad credit risk, it is perhaps
not that surprising that the for-profit developers sought to make Jefferson Park restricted
and exclusive.
23
Nor is it difficult to understand why many Nisei sought to improve their
financial position through homeownership, a path that had been successfully followed by
many African American Angelenos but that the Alien Land Law of 1913 had denied to
their Issei parents.
Ironically, Jefferson Park eventually brought the black and Japanese American
communities in L.A. closer together. As the development ran into opposition from
neighboring white homeowner groups agitating against the “Japanese menace,” Japanese
Americans found sympathetic support from some of the city’s black civil rights activists.
The Los Angeles Sentinel, the leading black newspaper at the time, found that the
complaints raised by white homeowners were “raised against Japanese in the same
manner and with as much justice, or rather lack of justice, as the cry of ‘rapists’ is raised

23
For a survey of realtors’ attitudes towards the Japanese, see Chloe Holt, “Interviews with Real
Estate Dealers of Hollywood, October 20, 1924,” Box 35, Folder 323, SRR Records, Hoover
Institute, Stanford University. An excellent source on the institutionalization of racial prejudice in
the policy and guidelines of the Federal Housing Administration is Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass
Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

117
against Negroes.”
24
The City Council at first approved the Jefferson Park tract map, as
the developers had abided by all the regulations, and then reversed themselves the
following day. Although finally forced to approve the development by the courts, the
months of lingering uncertainty, and the vitriolic opposition from local whites, prompted
prospective Nisei homeowners to pull out of the subdivision and the Jefferson Park plan
collapsed. Nevertheless, as Kurashige notes, the effort by many Nisei to combat
discrimination in the Jefferson Park case led to greater political organization within the
Japanese American community, in the form of establishing the JACL Equality
Committee, and stronger connections to leading local liberals such as County Supervisor
John Anson Ford and attorney and writer Carey McWilliams. The campaign to “Save
Jefferson Park” showed the beginnings of a nascent coalition in which, according to
Kurashige, “the Nisei would have shared the interests of civil rights leaders in the black
and Chicano communities, fighting discrimination in wartime employment, racist
violence, and police abuse.”
25
The residential intertwining of black and Japanese within
the convoluted context of L.A.’s racial diversity and discriminatory structures –
scapegoats and schoolmates, unwelcome neighbors and civil rights comrades – produced
a complex matrix of interracial relationships marked by ambivalence, resentment, and
longing. The situation was further complicated when African and Japanese Americans
left home and went to work.
As a city with limited industrial manufacturing prior to the late 1920s, Los
Angeles lacked many of the employment opportunities that attracted immigrants and

24
Quoted in Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 261.

25
Ibid., 262.
118
racialized minorities to cities such as Chicago and Detroit. At the same time, L.A. was a
major tourist attraction and boasted a growing film industry, creating employment
opportunities that were limited or non-existent in most other U.S. cities.
26
This unusual
economic picture produced distinct occupational niches for both African and Japanese
Americans in the region. For instance, tourist traffic produced a demand for porters, an
occupational category generally associated with African Americans, and indeed “porter”
was a common occupation among black Angelenos. Likewise, the many well-to-do
Anglos (retirees, tourists, film stars) required multiple categories of domestic servants,
producing racialized employment opportunities for black chauffeurs, maids, and cooks as
well as for Japanese houseboys and gardeners. Civil service, especially in custodial
positions, was another frequent occupational category for African Americans. Finally, the
growing black and Japanese communities eventually required professional services that
the most educated members of each community sought to provide, such as doctors,
dentists, attorneys, journalists, realtors, and so forth. While these urban occupations
provided the bulk of African Americans’ employment opportunities prior to the Great
Depression, the majority of Japanese Americans could be found working in some
capacity related to the growing and marketing of produce, flowers, and plants, with only
a limited number engaged in these other types of work.
27

26
Tom Sitton and William Deverell, eds., Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

27
For a more detailed discussion of African American occupational trends in the 1910s and
1920s, see de Graaf, “City of Black Angels,” and Flamming, Bound for Freedom, 71-78. Sources
for occupational data on the Japanese include William M. Mason and Dr. John A. McKinstry, The
Japanese of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: History Division of the Los Angeles County Museum of
Natural History, 1969) and Modell, Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation. In the
119
Industrial manufacturing on a large scale in Los Angeles began in the 1920s and
increased through the 1930s despite the Great Depression. Opportunities in these
industries for either black or Japanese American Angelenos, however, remained scarce;
for instance, in 1930 only 2.1 percent of the men engaged in manufacturing in the city
were African American.
28
In addition, those labor unions that accepted African
Americans generally segregated them into all-black locals.
29
Japanese Americans,
meanwhile, tended to pursue economic niches in ethnic-based small business and
produce-related fields rather than seek industrial employment.
30
This tactic provided
some protection from the worst blows of the Depression: while African American
unemployment was nearing fifty percent in 1933, the unemployment rate among Japanese
Americans hovered between five and ten percent.
31
Indeed, the vertically integrated
business methods and ethnic loyalty of the Japanese were frequently a source of envy
among local African Americans. In 1921, Joseph Bass wrote in the California Eagle that

1915-1916 period, for instance, Mason and McKinstry note that the Japanese owned ten percent
of the produce companies in L.A., three percent of the grocery stores (up to eight percent by
1940), 45 percent of L.A. nurseries, and were cultivating 15,800 acres, 75 percent of them leased.
At the same time, there were about 3000 Japanese domestic workers and 300 independent
Japanese gardeners.

28
Collins, Black Los Angeles, 11.

29
Sides, L.A. City Limits, 28.

30
These choices originally grew out of the language barriers faced by the Issei and their
background in agriculture in Japan. According to Lon Kurashige, the top five occupations for
American-born Japanese in 1941 were sales clerk, retail manager, farmhand, gardener, and truck
farmer. See Lon Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic
Identity and Festival in Los Angeles, 1934-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002):
29.

31
Flamming, Bound for Freedom, 296 and Ichiro Mike Murase, Little Tokyo: One Hundred Years
in Pictures (Los Angeles: Visual Communications, 1983): 12.
120
a comparison of the Japanese merchants’ success on East First Street with the struggle of
black merchants on Central Avenue “will make you sick, it will show you up.”
32

Outsiders to the community sometimes made the same argument: J. Max Bond, in his
1936 dissertation on black Angelenos, commented that “the Negro might well emulate
the Japanese” if he wished to better his situation.
33

The specter of economic competition for limited resources troubled black-
Japanese relations. Bond noted that, prior to the immigration restrictions that went into
effect in 1924, African Americans were increasingly competing with both “Nordic and
Japanese” immigrants, and that “even the seemingly inapproachable shoe-shining field
was competed for by the Greeks.”
34
In 1930, the Eagle attempted to discourage the hiring
of Asians in jobs that had previously been associated with African Americans by arguing
that Chinese and Japanese workers “could not be trusted with intimate secrets frequently
disclosed by statesmen in public conveyances or lodging places.”
35
Another newspaper
editor in 1944 wrote, “in the pre-war days...[t]he Japs invaded the domestic field, long the
baliwick [sic] of the Negro in Los Angeles. It became fashionable to have a Jap house
boy. The domestic working Negro and Jap piled up hatred against each other.”
36
But
there was also a great deal of workplace cooperation between African and Japanese

32
Quoted in Flamming, Bound for Freedom, 228.

33
Bond, “The Negro in Los Angeles,” 296-297.

34
Ibid., 50-51.

35
Harry Levette, “Mass Meeting and Parade for Economic Freedom Big Success,” California
Eagle, Apr. 18, 1930: 1, 7.

36
“Reconversion,” clipping from 1944 Spotlight newspaper in Box 76, Negro Relations – 1944
Folder, John Anson Ford (hereafter JAF) Collection, Huntington Library.
121
American Angelenos. For instance, Len Greer, a black longshoreman, got his Kibei
friend Karl Yoneda inducted into the International Longshoreman’s Association by
“adopting” him, the children of members receiving automatic induction.
37
African
Americans also patronized Japanese-run businesses, in Little Tokyo and also on Central
Avenue itself.
38

These complex relationships between blacks and Japanese Americans in Los
Angeles were evidence of the double-edged sword faced by racialized communities in the
city. On the one hand, L.A.’s remarkable ethnic and racial diversity could limit the
discrimination faced by any one group by providing a surfeit of possible targets for local
racists. As Helen Bruce put it in a 1933 report to the Los Angeles Urban League, “the
presence of other dark-skinned people, Mexicans and Japanese, tends to cause the color
line to be drawn more finely.”
39
Scott Kurashige has pointed out that, prior to the era of
restricted immigration and increased social segregation that began in the late 1910s and
early 1920s, it was African Americans who occupied the role of “model minority” –
church-going, school-attending, property-maintaining – while the Japanese were
inassimilable aliens associated with vice and disease. In 1909, the Times even anointed
them “good, God-fearing law abiding men and women.”
40

37
Wild, Street Meeting, 1-2.

38
See for instance the Feb. 20, 1942 letter from Mayor Fletcher Bowron to Tom Clark, Special
Assistant to the Attorney General, Box 52, Folder 2, Fletcher Bowron (hereafter Bowron)
Collection, Huntington Library.

39
Quoted in Sides, L.A. City Limits, 20.

40
Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 139.
122
At the same time, as noted above, members of minority and immigrant
communities competed with each other for the available jobs and housing at the lowest
end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Japanese and African Americans found their lives
and livelihoods subject to the unpredictable permutations of racial stereotypes stretched
almost to the breaking point from trying to encompass multiple elaborations of
difference. In a 1926 survey of 456 manufacturing plants undertaken in Los Angeles by
the National Urban League, sociologist Charles S. Johnson found a racial “common
sense” that made no sense. “In certain plants,” he wrote, “Mexicans and whites worked
together; in some others white workers accepted Negroes and object[ed] to Mexicans;
still in others white workers accepted Mexicans and object[ed] to Japanese. White
women worked with Mexican and Italian women, but refused to work with Negroes.”
41

Thus while blacks and Japanese both faced prejudice and barriers to advancement in Los
Angeles, they did not face the same barriers, at the same times, in the same guises.
African American journalists, activists, and intellectuals led the way in attempting
to integrate Japanese Americans into their understanding of the workings of race in the
United States. According to David Hellwig, most African Americans on the West Coast
(at least of the more economically stable middle class that was writing editorials)
maintained a sympathetic attitude towards Japanese immigrants in their struggle for
acceptance in a racist America, precisely because they recognized that the prejudice
deployed against the Japanese was just another facet of the same discrimination they
themselves endured. Hellwig even documents instances of blacks’ ability to view anti-

41
Quoted in Flamming, Bound for Freedom, 246.
123
black practices by the Japanese with pity instead of anger, seeing in these acts not so
much a Japanese superiority complex as a desperate desire to protect fragile gains by a
people excluded from the body politic and from American citizenship itself.
42
One
particularly moving example of this empathy can be found in an obituary printed in the
Eagle for Sanshiro Fujita, an Issei resident of East 28
th
Street near Central who died in a
car accident in 1927. Remembered for his “human kindness and little friendly acts,” Mr.
Fujita had “lived an exemplary life in a country whose laws unjustly denied him freedom
and citizenship,” noted the article.
43
Daniel Widener has argued that this sympathy was to
some degree mutual, pointing to a benefit for the Scottsboro defendants organized by
Japanese radicals and the publishing of black newspapers’ attacks on city council racism
in the Rafu Shimpo.
44

Overall, however, the Japanese – particularly the Issei – seemed less concerned
than African Americans with how their racial status in America might have mirrored that
of blacks (although the Jefferson Park incident described above did seem to crystallize a
nascent sense of shared concerns between blacks and Niseis). Rather, the bulk of their
prewar political efforts focused on issues of citizenship and ownership, a belonging to
America that was tenuous in a very different way from that experienced by African
Americans. Their status as a racialized immigrant group brought their relationship to the
nation of Japan into the American racial equation, an international resource – and threat –

42
David J. Hellwig, “Afro-American Reactions to the Japanese and the Anti-Japanese Movement,
1906-1924,” Phylon 38.1 (1977): 93-104.

43
Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 162-63.

44
Daniel Widener, “’Perhaps the Japanese Are to Be Thanked?’ Asia, Asian Americans, and the
Construction of Black California,” positions11.1 (spring 2003): 135-181.
124
that African Americans lacked. After all, the differing “axes of discrimination” with
which African and Japanese Americans had to contend were grounded in local
experiences, but also had roots that traversed the globe.
45
For instance, Gerald Horne has
shown how African American support for the nation of Japan itself, as a leading global
power countering the rhetoric of white supremacy, impacted blacks’ views about
Japanese in the U.S. context.
46

Thus the connections that drew African and Japanese American Angelenos
together, and the structural forces that pushed them apart, were at play in the local
landscapes of Los Angeles, in the domestic racial formations of the United States, and in
global foreign policy and intellectual currents. The intersection of the latter two elements
– the inherent association of Japanese Americans with Japan among both blacks and
whites, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7, 1941 – would alter the

45
For instance, see Shana Bernstein, “Building Bridges at Home in a Time of Global Conflict:
Interracial Cooperation and the Fight for Civil Rights in Los Angeles, 1933-1954” (Stanford:
Stanford University Ph.D. Thesis in History, 2003) for a discussion of how international relations
and diplomatic imperatives impacted the domestic status and relationships of U.S. racial
minorities from the Depression through the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. I take the
notion of differing axes of discrimination from Mark Brilliant, “Color Lines: Civil Rights
Struggles on America’s ‘Racial Frontier,; 1945-1975 (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2002).

46
Gerald Horne, Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire
(New York: New York University Press, 2004), especially Chapters 2, 5, and 9. There is now a
rich literature on the ways that African Americans’ struggle for freedom and the rise of anti-
colonialist movements in Asia and Africa influenced and inspired each other, from Japan’s defeat
of Russia in 1905 to Gandhi’s nonviolent perseverance against the British Empire in India to Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s stance against poverty and violence on a global level. Some of the best
include Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000); Vijay Prashad, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth
of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is A Country: Race and the
Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Laura
Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, & Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006).
125
spatial and racial landscape of Los Angeles, and the positions of blacks and Japanese
Americans within it, forever.

All of Them Must Go: The Evacuation of Little Tokyo
The already liminal position of Japanese Americans within both local and national racial
hierarchies became far more precarious with the bombing of Pearl Harbor Naval Station
in Hawaii by the Japanese military on the morning of December 7, 1941. Within hours,
the FBI had descended on Little Tokyo and detained many of the Issei community
leaders, such as Katsuma Mukaeda and Gongoro Nakamura.
47
The fishing community at
Terminal Island, near the port and shipyards at San Pedro, was immediately placed under
martial law.
48
While some of the Japanese in Little Tokyo stayed home from school or
shuttered their businesses on December 8
th
, many determinedly (or fatalistically) went
about their normal routines. However it rapidly became clear that no one knew what
“normal” might be for a racialized transnational community caught between two
countries at war.
Japanese Americans in Little Tokyo sought first to deal with the threat of
vigilante violence. At one meeting of the Anti-Axis Committee of the Japanese American

47
Katsuma Mukaeda, interview by Paul F. Clark for the Japanese American Project, May 22,
1975, Center for Oral and Public History (hereafter COPH), California State University,
Fullerton; Murase, Little Tokyo, 15.

48
Reverend Takahashi of the Koyasan Buddhist temple in Little Tokyo was leading a service on
Terminal Island on December 7
th
, and was forced to remain overnight due to the imposition of
martial law. He was able to return to Little Tokyo the next day because the soldiers guarding the
bridge mistook him for a Mexican. Nevertheless, he was picked up by the FBI at his house on
December 9
th
, and spent most of the war interned at Crystal City, Texas. See Koyasan Buddhist
Temple, 1912-1962 (Los Angeles: Koyasan Betsuin, 1974): 176.
126
Citizens League, it was proposed that buttons proclaiming their citizenship status be
manufactured and given to all Nisei as a means of protection.
49
If anyone suggested an
alternative protective measure for the alien Issei, it was not noted. Meanwhile, fires were
set at several of the small Japanese hotels in the neighborhood; the culprit, finally
arrested in 1944, admitted that he had hoped to burn not only the structures but also the
people in them.
50
The next major problem was the economic fallout from the bombing.
The Treasury Department summarily closed all of the Japanese-owned wholesale produce
houses, producing an employment crisis among the Nisei, who made up ninety percent of
the workers at the Seventh and Ninth Street Markets, as well as a looming food shortage
as fruits and vegetables rotted on Japanese farms.
51
In January 1942, Japanese American
employees of the City of Los Angeles all took “voluntary” leaves of absence for the
duration of the conflict so that their presence would not cause, in the words of Mayor
Bowron, “certain embarrassing situations” to develop; state employees were forced to
resign.
52
By February 1942, the situation among merchants in Little Tokyo was dire, due
to both the falloff in trade from the suffering farmers and a boycott by many non-
Japanese customers; one report noted that “[s]ome businesses in Lil’ Tokyo are folding

49
Minutes of Anti-Axis Committee of the Japanese American Citizens League (hereafter JACL),
Dec. 10, 1941, Box 74, Japanese Relations – 1941 Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library.
50
Martha Nakagawa, “Crime,” www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007).

51
Minutes of the JACL Anti-Axis Committee, Dec. 9, 1941, Box 74, Japanese Relations – 1941
Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library.

52
Statement by Fletcher Bowron, Jan. 27, 1942, Box 52, Folder 1, Bowron Collection,
Huntington Library; Kevin Allen Leonard, “Years of Hope, Days of Fear: The Impact of World
War II on Race Relations in Los Angeles” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 1992):
187.
127
up right now, they are hit so hard...Lil’ Tokyo drug stores report business on the whole
way off and six months should finish the business due to high rents.”
53

President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19,
1942. The Order placed the West Coast under military authority and authorized the head
of the Western Defense Command, General John DeWitt, to remove persons from
designated areas on the basis of military necessity. At first the federal government and
the Army had advocated a process of voluntary evacuation from Military Area No. 1, the
Pacific coastal regions. Nine thousand Japanese Americans had already left to start over
in the interior of the Pacific states or inland states such as Colorado when Public
Proclamation #4 was issued on March 27, 1942, forbidding any further change of
residence by persons of Japanese ancestry living in Military Area No. 1. Another
proclamation on June 2
nd
forbade movement by those in the “Free Zone,” the eastern
sections of the Pacific states, so that these Japanese Americans were also subject to
Executive Order 9066.
54
The mandatory evacuation orders began on April 1
st
, with
Japanese Americans having at most two weeks – and in some cases only a few days –
before they were required to leave for the camps. Those officials to whom Japanese

53
“General Survey of the Occupational and Financial Problems of the Citizens and Alien
Japanese Residing in Metropolitan Los Angeles, These Problems Resulting From the Present
Conflict Between Japan and the United States, and Some Suggestions for Their Solution” by the
Nisei Writers’ and Artists’ Mobilization for Democracy under direction of Rev. Fred Fertig, Feb.
6, 1942, Box 74, Japanese Relations – 1942 Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library. As
George Sánchez has pointed out, this situation threatened to throw a large proportion of the
county’s previously self-sufficient Japanese American population onto relief. The county reacted
as it had under a similar threat from Mexican families impoverished by the Depression – by
seeking to physically remove the “alien citizens.” See Sánchez, Bridging Borders, Remaking
Community, chapters Four and Five.

54
Dorothy Swaine Thomas (w/ assistance of Charles Kikuchi and James Sakoda), The Salvage
[Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement] (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1952): 83-84.
128
Americans might have looked for protection from such a criminal breach of their rights
instead betrayed the influence of three generations’ worth of “yellow peril” propaganda.
Mayor Fletcher Bowron, a native Californian and an attorney and judge heretofore
known for his integrity and progressive credentials, actively sought the removal from
California of all Japanese, citizen and alien alike, for the duration of the war at least – and
forever if possible.

Figure 2.1. Japanese nationals board bus for evacuation and relocation, 1942. Box 51,
neg. # 27067-4, Los Angeles Daily News Negatives (Collection 1387). Department of
Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

Far from undermining local hysteria, Bowron fanned the flames in his weekly
radio broadcasts. During one broadcast in early February 1942, he insisted, “If there is
129
intrigue going on, (and it is reasonably certain that there is), right here is the hotbed,” and
muttered darkly that “something should be devised for keeping the native born Japanese
out of mischief.”
55
By the next broadcast, he knew what that “something” was:
All of them must go, good and bad alike, for the safety of the nation,
because there is no way to determine those loyal to this country and those
loyal to Japan. A declaration of allegiance to the United States would not
be sufficient. The cunning, deceptive minds of those who perpetrated the
dastardly attack on Pearl Harbor would willingly, and with a show of
patriotism, pledge their allegiance to this Government in order to remain
where they could be most useful, and then stab the American people in the
back.
56

That same week, Bowron met in San Francisco with then-state Attorney General (and
soon-to-be governor) Earl Warren and General John DeWitt, head of the Western
Defense Command. Bowron declared the necessity of removing all Japanese, both alien
and citizen, in order to prevent crippling sabotage and unrest in a vital war production
area. Just three days later, DeWitt recommended the internment plan to FDR.
57
Even after
Japanese Americans were evacuated from Los Angeles, Bowron remained unsatisfied;
several of his May and June 1943 broadcasts, as the racial tensions that led to the Zoot
Suit Riots were cresting around him, focused on preventing any Japanese from returning
to the West Coast, lest their presence (rather than police brutality, a racist criminal justice
system, and marauding military personnel) lead to race riots. Bowron even went so far as

55
Text of KECA radio broadcast, Feb. 5, 1942, Box 52, Folder 2, Bowron Collection, Huntington
Library.

56
Text of KECA radio broadcast, Feb. 12, 1942, Box 52, Folder 2, Bowron Collection,
Huntington Library.

57
Tom Sitton, Los Angeles Transformed: Fletcher Bowron’s Urban Reform Revival, 1938-1953
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005): 64-67.
130
to argue that the citizenship status of American-born Japanese was legally tenuous and
should be reconsidered by the courts.
58

Bowron was only the most bombastic of the elected officials of the racial state
who failed in their duties toward Japanese American Angelenos and promoted openly
racist spatial practices. Earl Warren, once elected to the governor’s office in the fall of
1942, also remained adamantly anti-Japanese over the course of the war. Warren, who
was ironically born in 1891 to Scandinavian immigrants in a house on 457 Turner Street,
which later became a residential section of Little Tokyo, declared in a speech at the
National Conference of Governors in June 1943 that releasing Japanese Americans from
the camps would mean “no one will be able to tell a saboteur from any other Jap.”
59
Even
Los Angeles County Supervisor John Anson Ford, usually a reliable friend to Japanese
Americans, meekly tolerated the evacuation, referring to it as a necessary state of
“quarantine…without accusing all who were ‘quarantined’ of being ‘infected.”
60
This

58
Text of KECA radio broadcasts, May 19 and Jun. 2, 1943, Box 52, Folder 2, and “Claim to
American Citizenship of Japanese Born in America Hangs by Legal Thread – Bowron,” Los
Angeles Daily Journal, Jun. 4, 1943, Box 52, Folder 1, Bowron Collection, Huntington Library.
Bowron’s betrayal has apparently lost none of its sting among surviving Nisei; I once overheard
an elderly Little Tokyo native, looking at a picture of Bowron taken at a prewar Nisei Week
Festival, mutter “That bastard.”

59
Undated draft of letter from Edmund Jung, also born in that house, to President Lyndon
Johnson, “1966-February” Folder, Japanese Chamber of Commerce Archives; Bill Hosokawa,
Nisei: The Quiet Americans (New York: Morrow, 1969): 373.

60
Letter from John Anson Ford to Attorney General Francis Biddle, May 4, 1942, Box 74,
Japanese Relations – 1942 Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library. The reference to
“quarantine” echoes the association of racialized immigrant populations such as the Chinese,
Japanese, and Mexicans with the threat of disease in state spatial policies before the war; see
William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its
Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), and Natalia Molina, Fit to Be
Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006).
131
questionable distinction offered small comfort to Japanese Americans faced with the loss
of homes and businesses, not to mention their constitutional rights.
The reactions to the evacuation order varied widely within the Japanese American
community of Los Angeles. While some Nisei, such as Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred
Korematsu, determined to call the nation to account by fighting internment through the
courts, others were disillusioned to find America’s democratic promise an apparent
illusion.
61
John Suzuki, a Nisei father of three and former manager of a Los Angeles
produce house, summed up the bitter feelings of many Japanese Americans about the
nation’s racialized construction of citizenship when he was interviewed in Manzanar.
“What security have we?” he asked. “You can’t tell a German from an Englishman when
he walks down the street. But when I go down the street, they say, ‘There goes a
Jap’…the one hundred thirty millions in this country are hostile.”
62
For some Nisei, the
experience served to strengthen their nascent sense of kinship with other racialized
communities. Kay Sugihara, an officer of the Japanese American Citizens League, wrote
to Supervisor Ford: “Is there not a danger that certain democratic rights have been
infringed and race discrimination placed above law…? Is there not a possibility that this
may lead to wider types of discrimination after the war in which the fever of hatred
would not yet have cooled. Namely, I mean the Jew and the Negro groups in certain

61
Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943) and Korematsu v. United States 323 U.S. 214
(1944).

62
Quoted in Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 107.

132
sections of the country.”
63
Despite widespread anger and frustration over their
government’s betrayal, the majority of both Issei and Nisei saw no possibility of
effectively fighting the order. As one Kibei woman later put it, “to fight back in those
days would have been annihilation.”
64
Thus most Japanese Americans complied with the
order, hoping their obedient response would undermine the suspicion of disloyalty.
The suddenness with which Executive Order 9066 was put into effect produced
serious economic hardship for the evacuees, as even Fletcher Bowron was later to
testify.
65
Barred from legal ownership of their land or places of business, the Issei were
forced to leave crops unharvested or clear out inventory at fire sale prices.
66
One African
American woman recalled that her mother’s boss had purchased the entire inventory of a
notions shop in Little Tokyo for only $3500, commenting, “I thought that wasn’t an
adequate price for that inventory.”
67
Directed to bring with them only what they could
carry, many Japanese Americans sold their cars, furniture, and appliances for next to
nothing; Cedrick Shimo remembers his mother being so angry at the offers of five or ten
dollars for all her furniture and appliances that she refused to sell, instead leaving

63
Letter from Kay Sugihara to John Anson Ford, May 25, 1942, Box 74, Japanese Relations –
1942 Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library.

64
Katsumi Kunitsugu, interviewed by Sherry Turner for the Japanese American Project, Jul. 15,
1973, COPH, California State University, Fullerton.

65
Bowron told a congressional committee holding hearings on evacuee claims in 1954 that
Japanese Americans had been removed “too quickly to properly settle their business affairs.” See
“Bowron Says Nisei Evacuated Too Suddenly Here in Last War,” Los Angeles Daily Journal,
Sep. 3, 1954, Box 52, Folder 1, Bowron Collection, Huntington Library.

66
Murase, Little Tokyo, 15-16; “Hundreds Hunt Bargains at Little Tokyo Sales,” Los Angeles
Times, Mar. 25, 1942, 9.

67
Martha Nakagawa, “Blues for Bronzeville,” Rafu Shimpo, Dec. 12, 2006, 9.
133
furnished rooms for the next tenant.
68
Others stored their belongings in the community’s
churches and temples – many of these were vandalized over the course of the war, the
items stolen.
69
Those who were lucky enough to own their own homes asked black,
Anglo, and Mexican friends to look after their belongings or even rent the premises for
the duration. Edward Wada’s father asked his neighbors, the Weibecks, to live in his
house rent-free for the duration to keep an eye on things, and Mary Oyama rented her
new home to sympathetic fellow writer Chester Himes and his wife Jean.
70
The Wadas
and Oyamas were fortunate to return to intact homes, willingly restored to them; many
others found tenants unwilling to leave without the intervention of the sheriff, or even
tenants who had become owners by purchasing the building at auction after “neglecting”
to forward the property tax bills.
71

In the hysteria that gripped Los Angeles following Pearl Harbor, few rose to the
defense of Japanese Americans as they were shipped out of the city. Though black
Angelenos were some of the first and the most vocal of internment’s critics, the
community was hardly of one mind about Executive Order 9066. For many, the
evacuation was a startling and even disheartening event, but one that competed for their
attention with the daily press of survival itself. One black Angeleno recalled his own

68
Cedrick Shimo, interviewed by Sojin Kim for the Boyle Heights Oral History Project, Mar. 19,
2001, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM.

69
Leonard, “Years of Hope, Days of Fear,” 185.

70
Interview with Edward Wada, Jan. 23, 2007; Mary Oyama, “A Nisei Report from Home,”
Common Ground 6.2 (winter 1946): 26-28.

71
Toshiko Nagamori Ito, interviewed by Darcie Iki, Apr. 2, 2001, and Sandie Saito Okada,
interviewed by Sojin Kim and Darcie Ike, Jan. 18, 2001, Boyle Heights Oral History Project,
Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM.
134
reaction this way: “I couldn’t give a damn about the war, the Japanese, the Chinese, the
Germans, the Italians, the Pawnees or White folk of any kind! I didn’t have a job, I had
been out of work for four months, my rent was due, my baby was sick.”
72
The Eagle
failed to report on the evacuation, except indirectly. Scott Kurashige has argued that such
ambivalence about the internment of Japanese Americans “highlighted the contradictions
of black popular front ideology.”
73
What it highlighted perhaps even more clearly were
the complex racial dynamics that shaped relations between African and Japanese
American Angelenos. Given the highly unstable but materially consequential racial
formations structuring daily life in Los Angeles on the eve of World War II, the removal
of the Japanese was akin to setting off a bomb in the diverse landscape of Los Angeles,
reconfiguring the terrain and leaving everyone scrambling to react to the new “normal.”
Many African Americans, especially those in (or trying to enter) the petit
bourgeoisie, saw internment as a golden opportunity for black entrepreneurship and
regaining a more favored status in the local racial hierarchy. Charlotta Bass saw a
possibility for blacks to return to the land as independent producers, arguing (well before
the evacuation order was given) with regard to Japanese farms “if it must be lost to them,
why shouldn’t it fall into our hands?”
74
The National Negro Business League opined,
“Negroes have the greatest opportunity ever offered in the state of California.”
75
But
many African Americans, especially those active in fighting for social equality or who

72
Collins, Black Los Angeles, 51.

73
Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 359.

74
Charlotta Bass, “Back to the Farm?,” California Eagle, Feb. 12, 1942, 8A.

75
Quoted in Horne, Race War, 125.
135
had enjoyed close relationships with Japanese friends and neighbors, were chilled by the
negative impact of a state power they saw could just as easily be used against them.
African American attorney Hugh Macbeth, a resident of the seinan neighborhood whose
son attended Japanese school with his Nisei friends, joined with ACLU attorney A.L.
Wirin in 1942 to file habeas corpus petitions on behalf of the Wakayama family. He also
represented Japanese Americans in the landmark Korematsu v. United States and People
v. Oyama cases.
76
Although the Eagle lagged the upstart Los Angeles Tribune in
denouncing internment, the paper finally took a stand in 1943, stating “persecution of the
Japanese-American minority has been one of the disgraceful aspects of the nation’s
conduct of this People’s War.”
77
Black journalist George Shuyler concurred: “Once the
precedent is established with 70,000 Japanese-American citizens, it will be easy to
denationalize millions of Afro-American citizens…Their fight is our fight…and the
sooner we realize it the better.”
78

Chester Himes, awakening every day to the ghostly presence of the interned
Oyama family while renting their home – tending Mary’s tomato plants, sleeping in her
bedroom – realized this sense of solidarity more deeply and painfully than most.
79
In his
novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, the imprisonment of Japanese Americans foreshadows
his own fate as a person of color seeking freedom and autonomy in a society thoroughly

76
Greg Robinson, “The Great Unknown and the Unknown Great: African American Attorney
Was Defender of Japanese Americans During WWII,” Nichi Bei Times, Jun. 7, 2007.

77
“A Point Well Taken, We Think,” California Eagle, Nov. 11, 1943, 8A.

78
Quoted in Horne, Race War, 125.

79
R.J. Smith, The Great Black Way, 104.
136
organized and stratified by race. Himes begins the novel with an attempt to describe the
anxiety that increasingly oppresses him, and traces its onset to the moment of evacuation:
Maybe it had started then, I’m not sure, or maybe it wasn’t until I’d seen
them send the Japanese away that I’d noticed it. Little Riki Oyana singing
‘God Bless America’ and going to Santa Anita with his parents the next
day. It was taking a man up by the roots and locking him up without a
chance. Without a trial. Without a charge. Without even giving him a
chance to say one word. It was thinking about if they ever did that to me,
Robert Jones, Mrs. Jones’s dark son, that started me to getting scared…I
was the same color as the Japanese and I couldn’t tell the difference. A
‘yeller-bellied Jap’ coulda meant me too.
80

At the close of the novel, Himes’s alter ego, Bob Jones, is indeed arrested on a false
charge and must enter the army to avoid prison, with no opportunity to speak in his own
defense. Himes calls on us to recognize the shared doom faced by African and Japanese
Americans in a nation built on the vision of white supremacy.
If the removal of Japanese Americans from L.A. produced both new opportunities
and renewed insecurity for the city’s African American community, then the epicenter of
these shifts was Little Tokyo. In some ways, the black community that exited the war
was a stranger to the one which had entered it in 1941 – as civil rights attorney and
journalist Loren Miller said, “if you want to understand Los Angeles Negroes at
all…since 1940, [the key] is the constant waves of migration that upset old patterns, that
upset old leadership all the time…Every ten years it’s a new city.”
81
As the Japanese
enclave was re-populated by African American newcomers desperate for housing in a
city whose geography was thoroughly racialized, established leaders in both the black

80
Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1945): 3-4.
Mary Oyama’s school-age son was named Ricky.

81
Loren Miller, interviewed by Lawrence de Graaf, undated (probably late 1960s), COPH,
California State University, Fullerton.
137
and white communities struggled to catch up to, contain, and direct the residents of this
altered urban space in competition with new leaders and new philosophies. The
boundaries that had defined and divided racialized communities before the war were
strained to the breaking point, producing unexpected responses by officials of the racial
state and managers of real estate capital as well as alternate visions of the shape of race
and community by enclave populations. Thus the racial topography of postwar Los
Angeles can first be glimpsed in the transformation of Little Tokyo into “Bronzeville.”

Figure 2.2. Little Tokyo as a haven for disloyalty and danger. Little Tokyo U.S.A., 1942,
Twentieth-Century Fox.

138
“If Things Were So Good, Why Were They So Bad?”: The Birth of Bronzeville
In July of 1942, the Los Angeles Times reported on the “victims” of the evacuation of
Japanese Americans from Little Tokyo – the Anglo, Mexican, Eastern European, and
Jewish property owners.
82
“Buildings that were once packed to the rafters with Japanese
tenants were empty,” the paper pointed out, but “their taxes and other overhead…went
on.” Although replacement tenants had been found for some of the buildings – pensioners
had moved into the Alan Hotel, and a shoe factory and railroad traffic agency established
– the district still retained the character of a “ghost town.”
83
Mayor Bowron, unable to
ignore the situation on the very doorstep of City Hall, wondered at the owners’ “apparent
inability to rehabilitate this area,” but he failed to recognize how thoroughly the
neighborhood had been racially inscribed in the local and national imaginary.
84
The
Times article referred to Little Tokyo as “a city within a city…used exclusively by
Nipponese,” which “honest American citizens viewed…with large and disturbing
questions in their minds.”
85
The prologue to a sensationalist film released in the summer
of 1942, Little Tokyo USA, claimed that the neighborhood had housed a “vast army of
volunteer spies, steeped in the traditions of their homeland: Shintoists, blind worshippers

82
The numbers usually given for Japanese American property ownership in Little Tokyo are ten
percent of the hotel and apartment buildings and twenty percent of the commercial and office
buildings. See, for example, “The Race War That Flopped,” Ebony, Jul. 1946, 5.

83
“Evacuated ‘Little Tokyo’ May Be Latin-American Quarter of City,” Los Angeles Times, Jul
12, 1942, A1.

84
Letter from Bowron to Irl Brett, Nov. 2, 1942, Box 1, Letters – 1942 Folder, Bowron
Collection, Huntington Library.

85
“Evacuated ‘Little Tokyo’ May Be Latin-American Quarter of City.”
139
of their Emperor.”
86
Although property owners in the district sought desperately to de-
race the neighborhood – changing the name of the Miyako Hotel to the Civic, for
example, and removing signage written in Japanese characters – it seemed unlikely that
the space could be recuperated sufficiently for white habitation.

86
Quoted in Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics,
Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York: Free Press, 1987): 72.
140

Figure 2.3. Removing evidence of the Japanese presence from a Little Tokyo storefront
in July 1942. Courtesy Los Angeles Times.

Thus the owners turned to another racialized community to resolve their dilemma,
with a plan for Little Tokyo to “become Los Angeles’ Latin-American quarter,” a zone
for consulates and trade organizations to handle the expected postwar “boom in Pan-
141
American trade.” In this way, according to the Times, the negatively raced space of Little
Tokyo would be transformed into “another colorful community asset,” a district bearing
positive racial connotations related to Southern California’s “Latin” heritage and FDR’s
“Good Neighbor” policy.
87
Perhaps the owners were inspired by the tourist and
commercial success of nearby Olvera Street, or else by the photo accompanying the
Times article, which depicted property manager Ralph Strong glumly scraping kanji
lettering off the window of a Little Tokyo storefront but leaving the words “Se Habla
Español” unmolested. Despite their high hopes, however, the consulates and businesses
showed little interest in taking on Little Tokyo’s cultural baggage, and the Latin-
American quarter never materialized. Within a few months, Mayor Bowron sought to
have the buildings put to use for federal storage in order to mitigate “the effect [that] had
to fall so heavily upon a comparatively few property owners”: apparently the
neighborhood’s status had sunk so low it was considered more appropriate for housing
paper than people.
88

Neither the owners nor Bowron anticipated the tremendous demographic changes
that were soon to reconfigure Los Angeles, and in which Little Tokyo would feature so
prominently. Centers of defense, and then wartime, industry faced severe labor shortages
as they sought to ramp up production; for instance, 550,000 new jobs were created in Los
Angeles between 1940 and the middle of 1943, even as 150,000 workers entered the

87
“Evacuated ‘Little Tokyo’ May Be Latin-American Quarter of City.”

88
Letter from Bowron to Irl Brett, Nov. 2, 1942, Box 1, Letters – 1942 Folder, Bowron
Collection, Huntington Library.
142
armed services.
89
Executive Order 8802, signed by President Roosevelt on June 25,
1941, mandated training and employment in the defense industries without discrimination
on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin – meaning that, for the first time,
African Americans had access to high-paying, skilled manufacturing jobs. This
combination of manpower shortage and anti-discrimination legislation drew enormous
numbers of African Americans, largely from the urban South, to Los Angeles: by mid-
1943, an average of 5500 African Americans were arriving in the city every month, and
the Central Avenue and West Adams neighborhoods were straining desperately to hold
them all.
90
The housing situation for black war workers had reached crisis proportions as
early as December 1942, prompting a meeting of 1500 people at First AME Church
calling on the City Housing Authority to abolish the quotas that limited black occupancy
in its projects.
91
A February 1945 report by the Los Angeles Sentinel noted that only 942
of the 51,000 housing units constructed in the city between the bombing of Pearl Harbor
and the first day of 1945 were open to blacks – less than two percent.
92
Given the near-
universality of restrictive covenants that prevented either the expansion of existing black

89
Collins, Black Los Angeles, 20.

90
Memo from Arthur Miley to John Anson Ford regarding meeting of Leadership Round Table,
Jul. 8, 1943, Box 76, Negro Relations – 1943 Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library. Keith
Collins notes that the initial spike of African American arrivals were recruited in summer 1942 to
work on the Southern Pacific Railroad, but it is unclear how many of the approximately 3000
black workers imported by the railroad remained in Los Angeles. See Collins, Black Los Angeles,
18-19.

91
Martha Nakagawa, “Housing,” www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007).

92
Kevin Allen Leonard, “’In the Interest of All Races’: African Americans and Interracial
Cooperation in Los Angeles during and after World War II,” Seeking El Dorado: African
Americans in California, ed. Lawrence B. de Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor (Los
Angeles: Autry Museum of Western Heritage in association with Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2001): 309-340, 313.
143
neighborhoods or the integration of white ones, the empty storefronts, hotels, and houses
of Little Tokyo beckoned as the city’s only available unrestricted space. New African
American arrivals could not afford to be too particular about the area’s unsavory
connotations, and property owners breathed sighs of relief as rents began to be paid once
more in the late spring and early summer of 1943. Thus was “Bronzeville” born.
93

Given the magnitude of the influx, Bronzeville quickly became overcrowded as
well. In an area where perhaps as few as 7500 Japanese Americans had lived prior to
evacuation, 30,000 people, more than half of them African American, were residing in
1944; other estimates eventually climbed as high as almost 80,000.
94
Although some
residents were able to “squat” in vacant buildings whose owners had been interned or that
had been condemned by the city, many were forced to pay outrageous sums for squalid,
cramped quarters.
95
As Howard Holtzendorff of the City Housing Authority testified, “In

93
This sequence of events was not unique to Los Angeles. For instance, African Americans
seeking war production work in San Francisco and its environs moved into the empty buildings of
that city’s large Japantown. As Martha Nakagawa notes, this period of owner neglect and
overcrowding initiated abatement and demolition procedures in many West Coast Japantowns
that made them more difficult for Japanese Americans to reclaim after the war and left them
vulnerable to redevelopment pressures. Fifty-seven buildings were condemned in L.A.’s Little
Tokyo in just five months in 1944. See Martha Nakagawa, “Housing” and “Japantowns,”
www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007), as well as Thelma Thurston Gorham,
“Negroes and Japanese Evacuees,” The Crisis 52.11 (Nov. 1945): 314-316, 330. From the
opposite perspective, Jacalyn Harden has described how African Americans in Chicago forged
connections with Japanese Americans who resettled there during and after the war. See Jacalyn
D. Harden, Double Cross: Japanese Americans in Black and White Chicago (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

94
Leonard, “Years of Hope, Days of Fear,” 70; Dorothy Baruch, “Sleep Comes Hard,” The
Nation 160.4 (Jan. 27, 1945): 95.

95
Kariann Akemi Yokota, “From Little Tokyo to Bronzeville and Back: Ethnic Communities in
Transition” (M.A. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1996): 52, 55. Mikko Fukui Dyo
recalled that when her family returned to Little Tokyo after the war to reopen their business,
144
an abandoned storefront and two nearly windowless storage rooms in Little Tokyo
twenty-one people were found to be living – and paying $50 a month for these
quarters.”
96
The Eagle reported on deteriorating conditions in Little Tokyo in early June
1943, pointing out that workers “upon whose sweat and brawn depends our victory” were
forced to find “a home, one reeking with filth and dilapidation,” in the “rancid, rat-
infested area” because they were barred from living elsewhere.
97
The City Health
Department scrambled to respond to the sanitation crisis and the increase in tuberculosis
and venereal disease that accompanied the overcrowding, assigning two sanitary
inspectors and two public health nurses to the neighborhood. Bronzeville exemplified the
wartime paradox with which black Angelenos struggled (what Josh Sides has termed “the
prosperous ghetto”), as new employment opportunities and wage scales opened up to
them even as their neighborhoods and institutions suffered from the stress of welcoming
so many newcomers under restricted circumstances. As one African American put it,
looking back upon the period: “If things were so good, why were they so bad?”
98

Fukui Mortuary, they found that African Americans had been sleeping in the building’s morgue.
Martha Nakagawa, “Blues for Bronzeville,”11.

96
Statement of Howard L. Holtzendorf before the Izak Subcommittee of the House Naval Affairs
Committee investigating war housing conditions in Los Angeles, Nov. 10, 1943, Part 9, p. 1764;
quoted in Collins, Black Los Angeles, 27.

97
“Ghetto Housing Must Go!,” California Eagle, June 3, 1943, 8A.

98
Sides, L.A. City Limits, 46; Collins, Black Los Angeles, 63.
145

Figure 2.4. Wartime housing in Little Tokyo’s Bronzeville, Los Angeles, 1943. Box 64,
Negative # 29954-10, Los Angeles Daily News Negatives (Collection 1387). Department
of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

Despite requests from local black leaders such as Floyd Covington of the Urban
League and Thomas Griffith of the NAACP, white officials rejected most proposals for
integrating housing projects or even creating black-only housing in white neighborhoods
as possible solutions to the problem of overcrowding in Bronzeville and along Central.
Holtzendorff, frustrated at the pressure put on his agency to provide adequate housing for
black newcomers, blamed the federal government instead, arguing that it had failed to
commit to public housing “so located that it can be used by racial minority groups…If the
national housing agency programmed the City of Los Angeles, they forgot the fact that
146
racial minority groups cannot live in any part of the city they desire.”
99
The head of the
County Housing Authority, a Southerner, acknowledged that there were no African
Americans in any county housing projects and insisted “it would not be a favor to them to
locate them in any of the present projects,” although he hoped the federal government
would build some segregated units in and around existing black ghettoes.
100
In the
meantime, the mayor’s office and the Health Department pondered ways to stop the flow
of black bodies into Los Angeles. Bowron’s aide, Orville Caldwell, testified that “If in-
migration is not stopped until such time as these people can be properly absorbed into the
community, dire results will ensue

.”
101
In response to criticism by leftists and black
journalists, Caldwell insisted he did not intend “drawing any distinction between race or
color,” and that if any were to be discouraged from coming to Los Angeles for work, then
all should be so discouraged.
102
Considering the ballooning labor needs of L.A.’s war
industries, such discouragement was not forthcoming, and the spatial practices of the
racial state continued to place housing pressure on areas inscribed as black ghettoes.
A survey conducted in 1943 found more than 55 percent of Bronzeville’s
residents living in overcrowded conditions (more than 1.5 persons per room), with

99
Meeting on War Housing for Negroes, Board of Public Works, Aug. 10, 1943, Box 1, Jul.-Dec.
1943 Letters Folder, Bowron Collection, Huntington Library.

100
Memo from Arthur Miley to John Anson Ford regarding County Housing Projects, Jul. 12,
1943, Box 76, Negro Relations – 1943 Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library.

101
Statement by Orville Caldwell before the Izac Subcommittee of House Naval Affairs
Committee Investigating Congested Areas, Nov. 10, 1943, Box 1, Jul.-Dec. 1943 Letters Folder,
Bowron Collection, Huntington Library.

102
Letter from Caldwell to Mayor Fletcher Bowron, Nov. 29, 1943, Box 1, Jul.-Dec. 1943 Letters
Folder, Bowron Collection, Huntington Library.
147
situations where five people lived in a room with only one skylight for ventilation and
thirty people were sharing one bath, forty a single toilet.
103
In January 1945, Dorothy
Baruch published an article in The Nation describing how, “behind the shabby fronts”
where before there had been “bright bolts of silk, gay kimonos…shrimp and sukiyaki,”
and “polite little barbers [that] bowed to polite little customers,” there were now “people
who had come to work in war plants set[ting] up housekeeping.”
104
The “housekeeping”
she observed was deficient and unsanitary: “In place after place children lived in
windowless rooms, amid peeling plaster, rats, and the flies that gathered thick around
food that stood on open shelves or kitchen bedroom tables…Many of the beds were ‘hot,’
with people taking turns sleeping in them.”
105
Even more than the physical problems such
conditions produced, Baruch seemed to fear the resulting “diseases of the mind…
delinquency, crime, and prostitution; disillusionment and a sense of not being wanted;
resentment and unreasoning hate” that would “cause the desire for retaliation to mount
until it finds release through the blackjack in dark alleys, the crack of a pistol, the flash of
a knife.”
106
Such images demonstrate that the imagination of even this liberal reformer
was haunted by the specter of black criminality. Faced with a booming, restive
population, Baruch seems to long for the somehow less threatening forms of difference
embodied by prewar Little Tokyo, the quaint shops and restaurants with “polite,” “little”

103
Report from City Health Officer Dr. George Uhl to Mayor Fletcher Bowron, Sept. 15, 1943,
Box 1, Jul.-Dec. 1943 Letters Folder, Bowron Collection, Huntington Library.

104
Baruch, “Sleep Comes Hard,” 95.

105
Ibid., 95-96.

106
Ibid., 96.
148
Japanese, despite the fact that wartime propaganda depicted such politeness as a mere
cover for murderous intentions.
Baruch’s concerns place her well within the mainstream of racial liberalism in the
New Deal era, typified by a rejection of biological racism but a conflation of race with a
hierarchical sense of culture, in which whites were associated with industrial civilization
and modernity, people of color (although biologically capable of advancing up the ladder
of civilization) with nature and the primitive.
107
Thus, while Baruch sees Bronzeville’s
decrepitude as a result of discriminatory residential restrictions, rather than innate black
inferiority, she also fears blacks’ capacity for “unreasoning” violence, for their supposed
proximity to the primitive, even as she romanticizes the exotic nature of Japanese culture.
This outlook seems to have similarly colored the view of the public health professionals
working in Little Tokyo. Although the Bronzeville survey showed that fully 56.5 percent
of the neighborhood’s residents had an urban background, with another 30.4 percent
coming from small towns, the health department reports repeatedly painted the majority
of Bronzeville’s residents as completely ignorant of the systems by which a modern city
functioned.
108
For example, Dr. George Uhl, the City Health Officer, questioned whether
residents had ever been vaccinated against smallpox and diphtheria. The department’s
inspectors speculated that sanitation problems were the result of newly arrived blacks not
yet having “mastered the mechanical difficulties of the modern flush toilet, nor realized

107
This line of reasoning is evident in the work of Robert E. Park, influential figure in the
development of the Chicago School of sociology, in particular his Introduction to the Science of
Sociology, with Ernest W. Burgess (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1921) and Race and
Culture (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1950).

108
Report from City Health Officer Dr. George Uhl to Mayor Fletcher Bowron, Sep. 15, 1943,
Box 1, Jul.-Dec. 1943 Letters Folder, Bowron Collection, Huntington Library.
149
the urgency of adequate disposal of garbage,” and sought to “design courses on making
the necessary adjustments to local mores and living conditions.”
109
It is unclear just
which “local living conditions” these classes would have assisted African Americans in
better comprehending, given that they faced similar problems with crowding and
deteriorated buildings almost everywhere they were allowed to live in Los Angeles.

109
Minutes from meeting of Los Angeles City Health Inspectors, Jul. 9, 1943; quoted in Yokota,
“From Little Tokyo to Bronzeville and Back,” 52. The racialized assumptions and paternalistic
programs of urban public health departments in the early to mid-twentieth century have been
well-documented. See for example Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San
Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) and Molina, Fit to Be
Citizens?.
150

Figure 2.5. Mayor Fletcher Bowron, City Health Officer Dr. George Uhl, and City
Housing Authority Chair Nicola Giulli inspect Bronzeville housing in 1944. Photograph
by Otto Rothschild, courtesy Los Angeles Public Library, Herald-Examiner Collection,
Box 5892, no. 00068539.

Bronzeville, like Chinatown in the early decades of the twentieth century, was
also known as a center of vice. Jim Hodge, a young African American who set up a
newsstand in front of the Civic Hotel in 1942 and stayed for forty years, recalled that
151
“this neighborhood here was nightclubs and gambling and prostitutes and pimps.”
110
The
LAPD, in accord with a long-standing spatial practice of ignoring vice operations so long
as they remained confined to “colored” neighborhoods, did not interfere with these illicit
operations in Bronzeville. The 2 A.M. curfew on liquor sales was infrequently enforced in
Bronzeville, and its many storefront “shoeshine parlors” – brothels – operated
unmolested.
111
Episodes of violence also erupted among the stressed and congested
residents, with a June 1944 shooting spree at the San Mark Hotel and several vicious
murders, including the stabbing by Miss Bronzeville of another woman who had
displayed undue interest in the beauty queen’s husband.
112
Police indifference and the
presence of forty-seven liquor stores in the small neighborhood drew “undesirable and
unwholesome … amusement seekers from other parts of the city,” adding to
Bronzeville’s problems.
113
Angelenos of long duration were shocked by the
neighborhood’s rapid deterioration. As Doris Shields Crawford put it, “the environment
had turned bad…all the hotels down there were taken over by winos and alcoholics. It
was just low class, really bad and scummy. It was never like that before. The restaurants
used to be nice and families used to live here.”
114

110
Murase, Little Tokyo, 16.

111
Sides, L.A. City Limits, 47.

112
Martha Nakagawa, “Crime,” www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007).

113
Letter from John Anson Ford to Mr. William Bonelli of the State Board of Equalization, Sep.
14, 1944, Box 76, Negro Relations – 1944 Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library.

114
Yokota, “From Little Tokyo to Bronzeville and Back,” 51.
152
The more established members of L.A.’s black community reacted with concern
to this situation in Bronzeville, partly out of compassion but also fearing the impact such
negative depictions might have on their own racial standing. In addition to anxieties
about Bronzeville’s criminal enterprises, L.A.’s black elite expressed consternation over
the rise in venereal disease cases being treated at the Southeast Polyclinic, the public
health facility near Central Avenue that served African Americans. The clinic,
responding to an increase in venereal cases from 228 in November 1941 to 7,977 in
August 1943, was unable to adequately treat other health complaints.
115
Black leaders
including Floyd Covington of the Urban League, George Beavers and Norman Houston
of Golden State Life Insurance (the most prominent black-owned business in Southern
California), and Thomas Griffith of the NAACP joined in sending a letter to Mayor
Bowron complaining that people visiting the Southeast Clinic were told that “nothing is
treated here but venereal diseases.”
116
They felt that such an association stigmatized the
entire black community, and in particular that “respectable” visitors to the clinic should
not have to be embarrassed by the implication that they had venereal disease. At the same
time, this group sponsored showings of educational films and blood testing to help
prevent and treat venereal disease in the black community.
117

The actions taken in Bronzeville by much of L.A.’s established black leadership
similarly combined a sense of responsibility to aid “their own” with a distancing

115
Report from City Health Officer Dr. George Uhl to Mayor Fletcher Bowron, Sep. 15, 1943,
Box 1, Jul.-Dec. 1943 Letters Folder, Bowron Collection, Huntington Library.

116
Letter from South District Community Health Association to Mayor Fletcher Bowron, Sep. 3,
1943, Box 1, Jul.-Dec. 1943 Letters Folder, Bowron Collection, Huntington Library.

117
Martha Nakagawa, “Health,” www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007).
153
expression of condescension in line with a long tradition of “racial uplift.”
118
The Eagle
expressed it clearly in 1942, declaring that African American Angelenos needed to teach
“the basic rules of culture” to “Negroes fresh from the lower strata of Southern life,”
whose rowdy public behavior was “understandable” yet “unseemly.”
119
Novelist Chester
Himes likewise captured the flavor of this distancing effort in his description of African
American social workers discussing the “rat hole” of Little Tokyo. One of the women
insists, “what they should really do is to stop all these Southern Negroes from coming
into the city.” Another decries that idea as unrealistic, yet still disassociates herself from
the residents of Bronzeville: “It’s a ghetto problem involving a class of people with
different cultures and traditions at a different level of education.” Ever adroit at
puncturing hypocrisy, Himes’ alter ego Bob Jones responds, “Different from what?”
120

In fact, the newcomers populating Bronzeville were not an indivisible mass of
bumptious black Southerners; indeed, the diversity of the old enclave was one of the few
elements that survived in the new ghetto. The Bronzeville survey conducted in July 1943
interviewed 138 families and found, in the first place, that only about 56 percent of
residents were black. Another 26 percent were Mexican and 7 percent white.
121
In

118
The most thorough work on the ideology of racial uplift among African Americans is Kevin
Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

119
Quoted in Sides, L.A. City Limits, 50-51.

120
Himes, If He Hollers, 84.

121
Report from Uhl to Bowron, Sep. 15, 1943, Box 1, Jul.-Dec. 1943 Letters Folder, Bowron
Collection, Huntington Library. This numeric diversity is supported by anecdotal evidence: for
instance, Seymour Kaufman, a Jewish doctor, had a clinic at First and San Pedro streets and
contributed medical columns to the Eagle. One of the few black victims of the Zoot Suit Riots,
154
addition, while more than 50 percent were from Texas and Louisiana and another 10
percent from Oklahoma and Arkansas, nearly 14 percent were from elsewhere in
California and 5 percent were from New Mexico. Neither were they unaware of, or
indifferent to, the conditions in which they were forced to live. In a statement that turned
the suppositions of the city’s health inspectors on their heads, one resident said, “I was
born in the country and I did better than this. Things were cleaner. I can’t get used to
eating in these dirty restaurants.” Several others expressed a desire to “move further out”
or “live anywhere but here,” but had so far been unable to find better housing.
122
Clearly,
many Bronzeville residents saw the area as a temporary way station, even a necessary
evil, rather than a neighborhood where they might put down roots. Wilmer James recalled
that “Blacks…were transient. They were not setting up homes,” and Elmo Espree
concurred: “The Blacks were staying there on a temporary basis.”
123
Reverend Kingsley
of Pilgrim House, Bronzeville’s social services center, went even further: “It was a
disgrace for anyone to live here more than two years.”
124
Yet if Bronzeville was just a
brief residential nightmare for African Americans, it also offered them fresh opportunities
for black entrepreneurship, cultural expression, and political leadership.

which consisted primarily of white violence against Mexican Americans, was a Bronzeville
resident and war worker who lost an eye after being attacked on East First Street. See Martha
Nakagawa, “Health,” www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007), and “Blues for
Bronzeville,” 9.

122
Report from Uhl to Bowron, Sep. 15, 1943, Box 1, Jul.-Dec. 1943 Letters Folder, Bowron
Collection, Huntington Library.

123
Yokota, “From Little Tokyo to Bronzeville and Back,” 73-74.

124
Interview with Reverend Kingsley, Sep. 16, 1946, Reel 108, Japanese American Evacuation
and Resettlement Records (hereafter JAERR), Bancroft Library.
155
Black businessmen made some of the strongest claims to creating and sustaining a
black community in Bronzeville. The use of the name itself appears to be partly the
responsibility of one of these entrepreneurs: Leonard Christmas, proprietor of the Digby
Hotel at 506 ½ East First Street and the Digby Grill next door, declared in October 1943
that Little Tokyo had ceased to exist and that the neighborhood was now Bronzeville.
125

The following month, he joined with three others to open the Bronzeville Chamber of
Commerce, which distributed placards to the neighborhood’s new businesses stating,
“This is Bronzeville. Watch us grow.”
126
Christmas emphasized the investments that
local and newly arrived blacks were making in Bronzeville, pointing out that while “the
property was practically being given away…it is difficult to secure help to paint and
clean, but the operators are trying to clean the area. They are investing their own money,
and plan to remain.”
127
Christmas also emphasized the superiority of blacks as tenants
over the Japanese. “The proprietors found filth when they moved into the community,
and have been trying ever since to clean the premises,” he said, wondering “why such
filth was allowed among the Japanese.” Within two months, the Chamber could boast
125 members.
128
Sponsoring events such as a 1943 Halloween party attended by 800
residents and a Miss Bronzeville beauty pageant, the Chamber was an early effort at

125
Nakagawa, “Blues for Bronzeville,” 10. Christmas was originally from Cambridge,
Massachusetts.

126
“Chamber Set Up by Negro Group in Little Tokyo,” Eastside Journal, Nov. 3, 1943, clipping
in Box 76, Negro Relations – 1943 Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library.

127
Meeting of the Little Tokyo Committee of the Council of Social Agencies, Oct. 8, 1943,
National Urban League records; quoted in Leonard, “Years of Hope, Days of Fear,” 72-73.

128
Nakagawa, “Blues for Bronzeville,” 10.
156
harnessing the entrepreneurial spirit of Bronzeville’s business operators to the creation of
community. As one report by the philanthropic Haynes Foundation put it, the Chamber
“in a remarkable way, created a ‘neighborhood’ out of the unintegrated mass of in-
migrants settling in that area…giving dignity and a sense of security to the business
people, and, through them, to the…residents in that section.”
129
This report likely
overstates the degree to which the wellbeing of Bronzeville’s residents was reliant on the
status of its striving merchants; nevertheless, the actions of the Chamber demonstrate a
desire to will an alternative Bronzeville into being, to create a real and rooted home for
black newcomers to Los Angeles.

129
Quoted in Yokota, “From Little Tokyo to Bronzeville and Back,” 60.
157

Figure 2.6. Location of key Bronzeville businesses. Courtesy David Giannovario.

Some of the neighborhood’s greatest business successes – its restaurants,
nightclubs, and breakfast clubs – were also its greatest cultural venues, linking
Bronzeville to key national developments in African American music.
130
The major sites
included the Cobra Club and the Creole Palace (both at First and San Pedro), Shep’s
Playhouse at First and Los Angeles, and Club Rendezvous and the Finale Club, both on
East First Street. As one L.A. resident recalled, the “nightclubs were great. Shep’s

130
With shipyards and aircraft manufacturing plants running three shifts per day to meet war
production requirements, enterprising African Americans developed the “breakfast club” to
provide food, drink, and entertainment to swing and night shift workers. Many of the breakfast
clubs did not even open until after midnight, and served until well into the daylight hours.
158
Playhouse was nice, real nice. There was good music and we had a good time.”
131
Shep’s
was opened by Gordon Sheppard, a former cameraman on black motion pictures and pool
hall operator, and was one of the most popular spots, with legendary performers like
Coleman Hawkins, Herb Jeffries, Marva Louis, and T-Bone Walker playing engagements
there.
132
Probably the most famous musician to play in Bronzeville was saxophonist
Charlie Parker, who brought bebop to the Finale Club in 1946 with a band of future
luminaries including a twenty-year-old Miles Davis, Joe Albany, Addison Farmer, and
Chuck Thompson.
133
Davis recalled that “it wasn’t a large place, but it was a nice place
and I thought it was funky because the music was funky and the musicians were getting
down.”
134
Jazz historian Kirk Silsbee has argued that “a trip to the Finale was a
pilgrimage for every young, modern jazzman” passing through Los Angeles.
135

Unexpectedly, Bronzeville became a place to see and be seen, the music attracting
an integrated cavalcade of big names such as heavyweight champion Joe Louis; actors
Louise Beavers, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, and Pearl Bailey; and Harry Nicholas of the
famous Nicholas Brothers dance team. Black club operators reveled in the vibrant scene
they had created out of a ghost town; as R. J. Smith has put it, Bronzeville represented

131
Yokota, “From Little Tokyo to Bronzeville and Back,” 55-56.

132
Martha Nakagawa, “Breakfast Clubs,” www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007).

133
Kirk Silsbee, “Bronzeville Gypsy,” Downtown News, May 22, 2006, 1. Parker stayed at the
Civic Hotel (formerly the Miyako) during this period of time, struggling with his heroin addiction
and his inability to secure a reliable source for the drug. In the early morning hours of July 30,
1946, Parker wandered naked into the Civic’s lobby and later set his mattress on fire; LAPD
officers removed him from the hotel and he spent the next seven months in the Camarillo state
mental hospital.

134
Quoted in Yokota, “From Little Tokyo to Bronzeville and Back,” 56.

135
Silsbee, “Bronzeville Gypsy,” 1.
159
“Negro L.A.’s 40 acres and a mule.”
136
Many of the clubs took on active roles in
constituting Bronzeville as an integral component of L.A.’s black community: the Finale
Club held a fundraiser to purchase equipment for the Bronzeville Playground at Pilgrim
House, Club Rendezvous hosted a testimonial dance for Eagle publisher Charlotta Bass
when she unsuccessfully ran for city council, and Shep’s co-sponsored a show for black
veterans with help from the Eagle and the USO Caravan Service.
137

The artistic energy and community activism visible among black migrants and
workers in the streets and clubs of Bronzeville likewise stimulated a more forceful
political engagement among a new generation of African American leaders in L.A.
According to historian Josh Sides, ministers, journalists, and labor leaders “admired the
aggressiveness of the new migrants and recognized their potential for invigorating the
campaign for civil rights in Los Angeles.”
138
Reverend Clayton D. Russell of the
People’s Independent Church of Christ at 18
th
and Paloma, born in the diverse precincts
of Boyle Heights, was one of the key leaders of this new political movement that sought
to shift the tactics of local black activism from polite pressure to direct mass protest. In
1942 he created the Negro Victory Committee, which focused on broadening black
employment opportunities. When the local office of the United States Employment
Service said that black women weren’t interested in war production work, Russell didn’t
send a letter of protest – he sent wave after wave of women marching into the office
demanding those jobs. At a war bonds rally, he publicly shamed the Los Angeles Railway

136
R.J. Smith, The Great Black Way, 142.

137
Martha Nakagawa, “Breakfast Clubs,” www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007).

138
Sides, L.A. City Limits, 51.
160
Company for impeding the war effort by mothballing cars – and making workers late to
their factory jobs – rather than hiring black conductors. As these and other campaigns
succeeded, and African American Angelenos finally began to enter the industrial
workforce in significant numbers, Russell sought to harness their expanding purchasing
power to political ends by starting a chain of cooperative grocery stores called the
Victory Markets.
139

Fusing older traditions of racial uplift with Russell’s more direct and challenging
style was Pilgrim House, the Bronzeville organization that for a time was the
neighborhood’s anchor institution. Pilgrim House was formed in September 1943 by the
Little Tokyo Committee of the Welfare Council, the city’s social services department,
and took up residence in the Japanese Union Church building at 120 N. San Pedro with
funding from its co-owners, the Presbyterian and Congregational churches.
140
Pilgrim
House initially focused on health, charity, and recreation issues, as church and welfare
organizations sought to intervene in Bronzeville to control and reform the behavior of
newcomers. After the arrival of Reverend Harold Kingsley from Chicago in February
1944, however, the focus broadened further to the plight of Bronzeville’s workers,
specifically workers supporting families. As more and more migrants sent for families
left behind, the number of children living in Bronzeville increased rapidly. Pilgrim House
offered a playground, a nursery school for the children of working parents, and
recreational opportunities such as Boy Scouts, a basketball team, and a toy loan

139
Smith, The Great Black Way, 75-91.

140
C.W. Pfeiffer, “Welfare Council of Metropolitan Los Angeles Report on Pilgrim House,”
1947, Box 76, Negro Relations – Pilgrim House Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library.
161
program.
141
Workers could also avail themselves of employment referrals and counseling
from Pilgrim House staff. In the best tradition of racial uplift, key black institutions
supported these efforts; Golden State Life Insurance sponsored the Scout troop, and two
black sororities supported the library and ceramics program.
142

But Pilgrim House also moved beyond uplift, laying the foundation for contacting
and organizing a more politically engaged community in addition to its philanthropic
endeavors. In June 1944, Pilgrim House hosted a public meeting of the NAACP as well
as participating in a February 1945 conference on racial discrimination in housing.
Recognizing that a unified political program required communication, Pilgrim House
initiated the Common Ground Committee in 1945 to encourage nascent coalitions
between African and Mexican American Angelenos, and to make overtures of welcome
to Japanese Americans as they began returning from the camps. The following year,
Pilgrim House debuted its Vacation Project, in which children of black, Mexican, and
Japanese descent from the Little Tokyo area went to live with white suburban families for
one week each summer, a liberal challenge to the cultural stereotypes buttressed by
spatial segregation.
143

The smaller prewar black community, lacking a stable employment base as well
as the persuasive power of anti-Axis symbolism, had been unable to pursue the more
innovative and aggressive strategies adopted by Russell and Kingsley’s Pilgrim House.

141
Martha Nakagawa, “Pilgrim House,” www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007);
Harold Kingsley, “Report of the 1949 Pilgrim House Vacation Project,” Box 76, Negro Relations
– Pilgrim House Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library.

142
Ibid.

143
Martha Nakagawa, “Pilgrim House,” www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007).
162
As Scott Kurashige has argued, African Americans in the fluid context of World War II
Los Angeles engaged in “the most powerful social movement in the community’s
history,” a “black popular front” in “which proletarian consciousness achieved hegemony
over black political thought” and that, through its successes, “promoted both international
solidarity with oppressed nationalities fighting fascism and colonialism, as well as multi-
ethnic solidarity with communities of color in Los Angeles,” especially Mexican
Americans.
144
African Americans already recognized that Mexicans in L.A. faced similar
struggles with police brutality and racial scapegoating by Anglos – as John Kinloch put it
in the Eagle, “it would be us if the Mexicans weren’t more convenient.”
145
The addition
of shared experiences on the production line and in CIO unions helped black Angelenos
to envision a common political identity with Mexican Americans in the postwar industrial
democracy; Japanese Americans, marooned in distant internment camps, were largely
absent from this collective construction.
146
Nevertheless, the lesson of the Japanese

144
Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 328-331.

145
Smith, The Great Black Way, 87.

146
For example, the CIO had a Minorities Committee that in Los Angeles focused on improving
relations among whites, blacks, and Mexicans. With Japanese Americans absent, Chinese
Americans few in number in Southern California (especially in industrial employment), and
Filipinos often lumped in with Mexican Americans, the issue of relations with Asian American
groups never arose. Likewise, the race riots that shook Los Angeles and Detroit in the summer of
1943 prompted the establishment of several non-profit and government entities charged with
promoting positive interracial relations as part of the war effort, all of which initially ignored
local Asian Americans. Los Angeles had, among others, the city Committee on Home Front
Unity, the County Committee on Human Relations, and the California Council for Civic Unity, a
sub-chapter of the national American Council on Race Relations. The last of these sponsored a
series of educational evenings in the summer of 1944 “intended to sugar-coat the educational pill
with a liberal portion of entertainment.” The six thematically-organized evenings focused on
Negroes, Mexicans, Jews, Middle Europeans, Okies and Arkies, and Americans All – but no
Asians. See California Council for Civic Unity report, Jun. 5, 1944, Box 69, State Relations –
Civic Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library.
163
experience – the suddenness with which a lifetime’s work was destroyed – haunted
African Americans’ confidence in the durability of their hard-won wartime victories and
political coalitions. The fragile nature of each accomplishment floated just beneath the
surface of black predictions about the future, and this was especially true in the
quicksilver streets of Bronzeville.
Despite the assured declarations of Leonard Christmas and the successes of black
nightclub operators, Bronzeville remained a tenuous place for black Angelenos. For one
thing, ownership of the buildings remained largely with Anglos and competition for
leases was fierce both during and after the war.
147
A neighborhood “professional man”
explained how entrepreneurial zeal and spatial restrictions combined to raise rents and
increase business turnover: “What happens is this: one man buys a lease and starts a
business. He does well and begins to make a little money. Then another man seeing his
success starts talking to the owner of the building and tells him that he will pay him more
for the lease when it expires, and also that he will give him more rent.”
148
Even in the
clubs, the spaces most representative of black economic success, the image of ownership
was sometimes false. According to returning internee Taul Watanabe, the lease for the
Cobra Club was actually owned by two Jews, Paul Mirabel and Saul Goldberg, although

147
One report indicated that only six percent of Bronzeville’s property was black-owned at the
end of the war. See “The Race War That Flopped,” Ebony, Jul. 1946, 8.

148
“People in Motion: The Postwar Adjustment of the Evacuated Japanese Americans,” War
Agency Liquidation Unit Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947):
86, Box 3, Folder 22, Japanese American Internment (hereafter JAI) Collection, Special
Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.
164
popular African American Earl Griffin was hired as the establishment’s public face.
149

Jim Hodge declared wistfully that the “sun never went down in this neighborhood. Guys
were spending money with both hands. It was real exciting…but it only lasted about three
years.”
150
R.J. Smith attributed this peculiar mix of attachment and aversion to
Bronzeville among black Angelenos to the uncertainty surrounding African Americans’
claim to the neighborhood: “Federal decree had wiped a choice center square of the map
clean…Nobody around knew who owned a given building. Nobody knew who was
responsible for controlling the streets…it was somebody else’s land…the moment was all
Bronzeville had.”
151

“The moment” of World War II brought unprecedented change to Southern
California, as the region’s population and economy exploded and diversified.
152

Exemplary of these changes were the dizzying shifts in the local racial terrain, as the map
of Los Angeles was literally rewritten by the spatial practices of both the racial state and
new (and newly radicalized) ethnoracial communities. The Japanese had been demonized
and removed, and Mexicans both violently scapegoated and more thoroughly
incorporated into labor unions and interracial political coalitions. The black community
had grown rapidly, as had its internal diversity, occupational opportunities, and

149
Yokota, “From Little Tokyo to Bronzeville and Back,” 76; Nakagawa, “Breakfast Clubs,”
www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007).

150
Murase, Little Tokyo, 16.

151
Smith, The Great Black Way, 142, 148.

152
For an overview of the changes World War II wrought on the urban West, see Gerald Nash,
The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1985).
165
impatience with residential restrictions and social inequality. At the same time, white
Angelenos who had supported internment wondered if they had merely replaced one
“evil” with another. One man wrote to Governor Warren, “In southern states they have
laws that keep the niggers in their places, but unfortunately for the white race in this state,
there is nothing to control them. I wish that this state was back to where it was before this
scum of the nation came here, before the war.”
153
But what would happen after the war?
Exhausted by three years of tumultuous change, Angelenos awaited yet one more as 1945
dawned: would the Japanese return? And what would happen if they did?

Little Bronze Tokyo: African and Japanese Americans on Contested Terrain
On December 17, 1944, the Western Defense Command responded to the Supreme
Court’s Korematsu decision by issuing Public Proclamation No. 21, lifting the exclusion
order for persons of Japanese descent in the western coastal regions as of January 2,
1945. Japanese Americans were now free to return to Little Tokyo, although the WRA
actively discouraged clustering in the prewar ethnic enclaves.
154
Mayor Bowron met with
returning evacuees and assured them of their safety, even as he privately wrote to one of
FDR’s aides that “the happiest and most desirable solution of the problem” would be for
the Japanese to resettle elsewhere as, given the economic and demographic changes
produced by the war, “it will be very difficult indeed to absorb any considerable

153
Quoted in Sides, L.A. City Limits, 48. Sides notes with regard to a similar letter that Mexicans
were perceived as a necessary evil, blacks an unnecessary one.

154
“Hostel Opened for Japanese,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 28, 1945, A1.
166
proportion of the original Japanese population.”
155
The Japanese themselves had reason
to fear returning to the West Coast, concerned about vigilante violence and starting over
economically. But for most Japanese Americans, the West Coast was the only home they
had ever known. Especially for the Issei, the West Coast held old friends, community
institutions that could be revitalized, and whatever property or investments they had been
able to retain; it was, as Harry Honda said, the place where “they felt much more
comfortable living.”
156
Even those Nisei successfully resettled in the East and Midwest
often returned to California within a few years to assist their aging parents. By the end of
1946, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) estimated that 60 percent of the prewar L.A.
County Japanese population – between 25,000 and 28,000 people – had returned.
157

Although much of both academic scholarship and popular history has focused on
the trauma of evacuation and the camp experience, the resettlement period was in some
ways no less difficult for Japanese Americans. Tetsuden Kashima has argued that “the
years between 1945 and 1955, instead of being seen as a transition period, should be
viewed as a crisis period.”
158
Japanese Americans in Los Angeles faced the daunting
prospect of starting over economically as an ethnoracial minority with allegedly suspect
loyalty, in a congested urban center with a history of racial discrimination and violence.

155
Los Angeles Times clipping, Jan. 15, 1945, Box 92, Folder 5, Yuji Ichioka Papers, Special
Collections, University of California, Los Angeles; Letter from Bowron to William H.
McReynolds, Jan. 26, 1945, Box 1, 1945 Folder, Bowron Collection, Huntington Library.

156
Harry Honda, interviewed by Sojin Kim, Leslie Ito, and Cynthia Togani for the REgenerations
Oral History Project, Apr. 1, 1998 and Jun. 17, 1999, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM.
157
“People in Motion,” War Agency Liquidation Unit Report, 82.

158
Tetsuden Kashima, “Japanese American Internees Return, 1945 to 1955: Readjustment and
Social Amnesia,” Phylon 41.2 (1980): 107-115, 108.
167
The city presented returnees with a severe housing shortage, an uncertain employment
picture, and organized anti-Japanese movements, enormous obstacles to be surmounted if
Japanese Americans were to rebuild anything like the stable community that had existed
before the war. After the multiple uprootings of the internment experience, many
Japanese Americans longed to regain a measure of security and permanence and looked
to the familiar environs of Little Tokyo, with its churches and temples, as a key refuge
during the crisis of resettlement. But would Little Tokyo ever again “belong” to them?
One of the most frightening obstacles Japanese Americans faced in their return to
the West Coast were the legal and extra-legal measures taken to intimidate them and
block their resettlement. As early as the spring of 1944, the Japanese Exclusion
Association called on Californians to “make it impossible for Japanese to earn even a
‘rice’ living in California” by signing a petition to amend the Alien Land Law to bar
American-born Japanese from owning land. One of the 178,000 signatures on the petition
belonged to Eugene Biscailuz, the Los Angeles County Sheriff, who was charged with
protecting Japanese Americans returnees.
159
In the first six months following the lifting
of the exclusion order, there were thirty-three reported acts of violence against evacuees
returning to California, twenty of them shooting attacks.
160
Simultaneously, the state
began vigorously prosecuting escheat cases, or those situations in which Japanese
Americans had attempted to circumvent the Alien Land Law by having Nisei purchase

159
“Act to Bar Japs in Calif – Native Sons, 2 Other Groups In Move,” Los Angeles Herald-
Examiner, Apr. 20, 1944, Box 74, Japanese Relations – 1944 Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington
Library.

160
Dillon Myer, “Problems of Evacuee Resettlement in California,” Jun. 19, 1945, Box 2, Folder
3, JAI Collection, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.
168
property for Issei occupation. The most famous case, and one which eventually led to the
Alien Land Law being declared unconstitutional, was that of the Masaoka brothers, two
soldiers who returned from war only to find that the state had evicted their Issei mother
and seized her home. In addition, Japanese Americans returning to Los Angeles found it
impossible to secure business licenses or to buy insurance, and were dogged with
unreasonable property tax demands.
161
For instance, Los Angeles County insisted that the
Koyasan Buddhist temple owed $5000 in unpaid property taxes. The County’s twisted
logic in support of this claim proposed that the temple had lost its right to a church
exemption because it had not fulfilled its religious purpose during the war (when the
entire congregation was interned elsewhere), and that as a hostel it was now performing a
for-profit function. The temple board had to work out a plan to pay in installments to
prevent the County from seizing the building.
162

Returning Japanese Americans could little afford such injustices – they were
released from camp with enough money to cover just one month of living expenses, in
addition to whatever savings and property they retained. The economic impact of
internment had been severe, with one early accounting of evacuation losses showing
3,297 persons, half of them in L.A. County, filing property claims totaling
$65,000,000.
163
The County’s Bureau of Public Assistance found itself overwhelmed by

161
“Some Problems Facing a Community Dealing with Americans of Japanese Ancestry and
Japanese Aliens after WRA Terminates,” undated, Box 74, Japanese Relations – 1945 Folder,
JAF Collection, Huntington Library.

162
Koyasan Buddhist Temple, 187.

163
“Bowron Says Nisei Evacuated Too Suddenly Here in Last War.” This figure fails to consider
additional damages, such as lost wages.
169
the number of Japanese Americans seeking relief in late 1945 and early 1946; although
the numbers declined rapidly after that, the total reached a plateau in 1947 at a number
far higher than anything that had been seen prior to the war.
164
The vertically integrated
network of produce growers, wholesalers, and retailers that formed the backbone of the
prewar Japanese American economy had been utterly demolished. Although the growers
and wholesalers regained some of their previous market share, the retailers could not. For
instance, prior to the war there were 1000 Japanese-operated retail produce outlets in
L.A. County, 75 percent of all such stores – by December 1946, only about thirty of these
stores had been re-established.
165
These economic damages were understood in the
context of L.A.’s racial “common sense,” in which occupation and income levels were
thoroughly racialized. Mits Aiso lamented that “the Japanese are back living like
Mexicans used to. They come back and find the Mexicans and Negroes in the position
they once held. It hurts.”
166

This situation forced most returning Japanese Americans out of the ethnic
economy and into the general employment market, with the result that whereas 10 to 20
percent of Japanese Americans in 1940 Los Angeles worked for whites, that number had
risen to 70 percent by 1948.
167
Contract gardening (primarily for Anglo homeowners)
became a particularly attractive occupational choice for returning Japanese Americans, as

164
Leonard Bloom and Ruth Reimer, Removal and Return: The Socio-Economic Effects of the
War on Japanese Americans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949): 63.

165
“People in Motion,” War Agency Liquidation Unit Report, 62.

166
Interview with Mits Aiso, Sep. 9, 1946, Reel 108, JAERR, Bancroft Library.

167
Bloom and Reimer, Removal and Return, 67.
170
the cost of entry was low and the explosion in suburban postwar home construction
produced a growing market for landscapers. The WRA reported that, prior to the war,
approximately 2000 Japanese American gardeners earned an average of $125 a month; by
1946, there were “3000 or more and earnings of $400 to $600 were not unusual.”
168
By
the late 1940s, one-third to one-half of all Japanese American men in Los Angeles were
working as gardeners.
169
However, the report also noted that the source of this income lay
entirely with whites, making it imperative for Japanese Americans to collectively remain
in Anglos’ racial good graces. Returning Japanese Americans were deeply concerned
about their lack of economic security, believing that “the first depression that comes
along will find many of them without their shirts.”
170
They threw themselves into their
work in order to make up for the losses from evacuation and build up savings for the hard
times they were sure lay ahead.
The housing situation for returning internees was dire, and there were limited
options in Little Tokyo/Bronzeville. Many of those who owned their homes had signed
leases for “the duration,” and so could not evict their tenants until hostilities officially
ceased on September 2, 1945.
171
Even after the war ended, the WRA estimated that no
more than 25 percent of the returned evacuees were living on their own property; many
of the rest were in crowded hostels run by Japanese American churches and temples,

168
“People in Motion,” War Agency Liquidation Unit Report, 93-94.

169
Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 416.

170
“People in Motion,” War Agency Liquidation Unit Report, 109.

171
“The Relocation Program,” War Relocation Authority booklet, 1946, 52-53, Box 16, JAI
Collection, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.
171
where the rent might be as little as a dollar a day per person.
172
Residents at the Koyasan
and Nishi Hongwanji hostels were some of the first Japanese American faces to return to
the streets of Little Tokyo. Some families also found shelter in run-down hotels both
within Little Tokyo and in the Skid Row area along its southern edge. Actor George
Takei remembered that his family moved from Tule Lake to a “grimy, three-story brick
building with a deep orange neon sign that sizzled and flickered,” living in two rooms
whose “walls had brown stains so old that they were starting to fade to a fuzzy beige. The
linoleum on the floor was cracked and torn.”
173
George and his mother found this place to
be “stinkier and noisier” even than camp, but Takei’s father reassured his dejected family
by repeatedly reminding them that their quarters were “only temporary.”
174

The return to a much-changed Little Tokyo was often a bittersweet experience,
bringing home to the returning evacuees that their prewar world was indeed gone forever.
Archie Miyatake said, “One of the first places I went to see was the place where I was
born. But all the houses were gone, and it was a playground called the Bronzeville
Playground.”
175
George Takei recalled his mother’s response as they first entered Little
Tokyo on the streetcar: “I looked up at Mama to watch her reclaim another memory. But

172
“People in Motion,” War Agency Liquidation Unit Report, 180; Evergreen Church Hostel
pamphlet, Box 74, Japanese Relations – 1945 Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library.

173
Takei, To the Stars, 70-71.

174
Returning evacuees who could not find or afford shelter in hostels or hotels given L.A.’s
severe housing shortage were placed in six temporary WRA camps at locations throughout L.A.
County, including El Segundo, the Lomita air strip, and the Winona site in Burbank. These
installations followed the model initiated in the internment camps, with community mess halls
and sparsely furnished trailers or barracks. See Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 471-73.

175
Martha Nakagawa, “Blues for Bronzeville,” 10.
172
instead of the happy anticipation I had expected, she looked shocked. I heard her whisper
to Daddy, ‘So many black people here now.’”
176
Reverend Art Takemoto returned to Los
Angeles in early 1945 to take possession of the Nishi Hongwanji temple at the corner of
East First Street and Central Avenue. He found his old neighborhood newly alarming:
When your first impression is to see all the bars and all that, it's relatively
frightening. You're the only Japanese American there, aside from the
Chinese restaurants. And I lived in the temple, and it's a big building, and
I'm the only one there…Often times I come home to try to open the door,
and there would be several people sitting on the steps back there…I
remember one experience. I just froze…well, they were sort of inebriated.
So they're sitting there, but to have them there and – oh, what are they
going to do next? You keep wondering and finally, after waiting, well I
went to the door, opened it, and closed it. Nothing happened…You know,
appearances are often deceiving.
177

This Buddhist priest’s vivid recollection, fifty years later, of his fear at crossing through a
few drunk African Americans demonstrates the degree to which many Japanese
Americans had absorbed stereotypes of black criminality and violence from mainstream
Anglo discourses. It is clear that Takemoto was disturbed at having to share “his” space
with these revelers, although he simultaneously claims that such daily encounters in
Bronzeville forced him to re-examine his racialized assumptions.
In addition to losing their economic security, then, Japanese Americans feared the
loss of their collective position within L.A.’s complicated racial hierarchy. It seemed
possible that the internment experience, and the accompanying anti-Japanese rhetoric in
both the political arena and popular culture, had pushed Japanese Americans to the
bottom rung of the city’s racial ladder. The disappearance of Little Tokyo into

176
Takei, To the Stars, 68.

177
Reverend Art Takemoto, interviewed by James Gatewood for the REgenerations Oral History
Project, May 19, 1998, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM.
173
Bronzeville, where returning Japanese Americans at first felt “out of place” in the refuge
they had claimed and defended as their own, embodied Japanese Americans’ anxiety over
their alienation. Yet they returned to Little Tokyo nevertheless, an act which one Kibei
woman described as “kinda like huddling together for safety.”
178

The residents of Bronzeville built on the tradition of prewar black/Japanese
solidarity in responding to the return of Japanese Americans to the Little Tokyo district.
On January 19, 1945, Bronzeville’s businessmen hosted a welcoming reception at the
Rendezvous Club.
179
When Kiichi Uyeda opened his five-and-dime store on March 30,
1945 – the first Japanese American business establishment to open in Bronzeville – black
merchants “presented him with floral pieces to celebrate the opening of his store.”
180

Another delegation brought flowers to returning Japanese Americans a few days later, on
Easter Sunday.
181
These hospitable gestures expressed more than a sense of solidarity
with Japanese Americans, however; they were also symbolic spatial practices that
demonstrated African Americans’ claim to Bronzeville in their appropriation of the right
to welcome Japanese Americans back to their own neighborhood.
Yet the ownership structure in Bronzeville belied these claims, ensuring that
neither Japanese nor African American Angelenos would have final say on who belonged
there. Instead, the mostly Anglo and Jewish property owners faced the question of
whether it was preferable to continue renting Bronzeville’s property to blacks or to re-

178
Katsumi Kunitsugu, quoted in Yokota, “From Little Tokyo to Bronzeville and Back,” 63.

179
“Negroes O.K. Japs’ Return,” Los Angeles Examiner, Jan. 20, 1945.

180
Leonard, “Years of Hope, Days of Fear,” 216.

181
Martha Nakagawa, “Transition,” www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007).
174
establish Little Tokyo by renting to Japanese Americans. The property owners and their
agents overwhelmingly chose the latter, repeatedly allowing Japanese Americans to buy
out the leases of African American tenants when they expired. For instance, Kiichi Uyeda
opened his store after buying out the lease of a black merchant, and Roy Kito was able to
reopen the Fugetsudo confectionary after buying out a lease from Mr. Nash, an African
American grocer.
182
Reverend Kingsley of Pilgrim House claimed that, when the
Japanese came back, “they paid 50, 75, 100, 200 percent more for the stores than when
they left. It was Santa Clause for these fly-by-nighter places and they took them. These
Negroes liked that kind of money.”
183
Such hefty investments by Japanese Americans
just out of camp often represented the savings and wages of an entire extended family.
Roy Kito insisted that black merchants “got good money for these businesses. They’d
even ask around for Japanese buyers.”
184

182
Nakagawa, “Blues for Bronzeville,” 10.

183
Interview with Rev. Kingsley, Sep. 16, 1946, Reel 108, JAERR, Bancroft Library.

184
Nakagawa, “Blues for Bronzeville,” 10.
175
Figure 2.7. Kiichi Uyeda (right) with customers in his Bronzeville 5-10-25 Cents Store,
May 1945. Volume 45, Section E, WRA no. H-648, War Relocation Authority
Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement, BANC PIC 1967.014-
-PIC, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

To understand how Japanese Americans began to reclaim the business operations
of Little Tokyo, it helps to understand the complicated layers of leases by which most
storefronts in the neighborhood were attained. One building at 109 N. San Pedro, for
instance, was owned by Sarah Hersh but leased to E. Jay Bullock, the president of the
Eastside Chamber of Commerce, who apparently had bought the leases to several Little
Tokyo storefronts inexpensively following the evacuation. Bullock had then sub-leased
the building to Matsumi Sakamoto after the war, and in 1948 Sakamoto sub-leased it to
Carl Tatsuo Kondo.
185
Sakamoto could have chosen to sub-lease the storefront to an
African American business, but did not. Reverend Kingsley attributed this to a Japanese

185
Box 34, Folders 8 and 9, Japanese American Research Project Collection, Special Collections,
University of California, Los Angeles; Interview with Rev. Kingsley, Sep. 16, 1946, Reel 108,
JAERR, Bancroft Library.
176
American policy of “unobjectionable infiltration,” such that if “a Negro tenant moves out
of a Japanese hotel, he is not replaced by another Negro.”
186
Other sources, however,
make it clear that the property owners structured their leases in order to incentivize sub-
leases to Japanese businesses and discourage leases for black merchants. Taul Watanabe
recalled that in 1945 he worked out a 25-year lease with an Anglo property owner for a
building on East First Street, on condition that he sublease the building’s storefronts to
Japanese businesses and “clean it all up within two years.”
187
Reverend Unoura of the
Japanese Christian Church maintained that “the building owners wanted them [Japanese
Americans] back there. They had experience with both the Japanese tenants, and Negro
tenants, and they preferred the Japanese because they kept the buildings up better, and
boosted the land value.”
188
Kango Kunitsugu recalled that “property owners had this
prejudicial point of view that the Japanese tenants always paid on time.”
189
The smaller
postwar population of Japanese Americans in comparison to the still-growing, and still
restricted, population of black Angelenos doubtless influenced the opinions and
calculations of property owners, who sought to minimize wear and crowding in their
buildings. At the same time, these landlords’ choice of Japanese American over African
American tenants demonstrate that L.A’s racial “common sense” was being actively
revised for an altered postwar context.

186
Interview with Rev. Kingsley, Sep. 16, 1946, Reel 108, JAERR, Bancroft Library.

187
Quoted in Yokota, “From Little Tokyo to Bronzeville and Back,” 77.

188
Interview with Rev. Unoura, Sep. 12, 1946, Reel 108, JAERR, Bancroft Library.

189
Kango Kunitsugu, interview by Dave Biniasz for the Japanese American Project, Nov. 28,
1973, COPH, California State University, Fullerton.
177
African Americans were particularly vulnerable to rent increases and lease
buyouts as the bottom dropped out of Bronzeville’s economy. As U.S. firms began to
restructure for peacetime production, African Americans were the first to lose their
factory jobs, due to low seniority, the unskilled nature of their positions, or simple
racism.
190
Between August 1944 and September 1945, 170,000 workers lost their jobs;
Douglas Aircraft laid off 90,000 people in one week alone.
191
Unemployment in L.A.
County climbed to 10.9% by 1949, double the national average.
192
At the same time, even
those who managed to keep their jobs found their wages failed to keep up with inflation
once wartime price controls were eliminated. Adjusted for inflation, the weekly pay of
L.A. manufacturing workers dropped from $54.74 in June 1945 to $45.64 in December
1947, an almost 17 percent decrease.
193

As African Americans’ purchasing power declined, Bronzeville’s black-operated
businesses began to suffer. The impact of unemployment and inflation was exaggerated
by racially circumscribed consumption patterns; as Reverend Kingsley noted, “Negro
shops cater to the Negroes only, while the Japanese shops cater to Negroes, Whites, and
Japanese. In other words, when a Japanese comes into town, they go to a Japanese store

190
Collins, Black Los Angeles, 23.

191
David Jason Leonard, “’No Jews and No Coloreds are Welcome in this Town’: Constructing
Coalitions in Post/War Los Angeles” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 2002): 313.

192
Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 404.

193
Ibid., 405.

178
or restaurant. The Negro will go into either Japanese or Negro owned shops.”
194
As a
result, Japanese American commercial enterprises were rapidly re-established in Little
Tokyo, serving a black and Japanese clientele, even as African American businesses went
under. Simultaneously, Japanese Americans slowly trickled back to their prewar
residential enclaves in Boyle Heights and the Southwest (seinan) area, sharing homes and
apartments with other families, even as African Americans remained residentially
constrained and continued to live in Little Tokyo/Bronzeville. By the fall of 1946,
Reverend Kingsley was able to describe Little Tokyo by saying that the Japanese “have
their business here, but they live someplace else. The Negroes, on the other hand, live
here, and work someplace else.”
195
Japanese and African American Angelenos shared
Little Tokyo/Bronzeville, then, but on decidedly unequal terms.
Not surprisingly, the increasingly divergent experiences of African and Japanese
Americans in the neighborhood led to rising tensions. Given the housing shortage,
African Americans responded with outrage when Japanese American landlords, new sub-
leases in hand, attempted building-wide evictions. Saburo Kido, president of the Japanese
American Citizens’ League, and Reverend Art Takemoto of the Nishi Hongwanji temple
both recalled intervening in such situations to propose more gradual action and to
reassure black tenants of Japanese Americans’ good intentions.
196
One Little Tokyo

194
“People in Motion,” War Agency Liquidation Unit Report, 98. On pg. 97 of the same report, a
Japanese businessman noted that 60-70 percent of his customers were black.

195
Interview with Rev. Kingsley, Sep. 16, 1946, Reel 108, JAERR, Bancroft Library.

196
Nakagawa, “Transition,” www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007); Reverend Art
Takemoto, interviewed by James Gatewood for the REgenerations Oral History Project, May 19,
1998, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM.
179
scholar has cryptically referred to another landlord who began carrying a gun after an
encounter with angry evicted tenants.
197
In addition to businesses and residences, black
community institutions in Bronzeville also received eviction notices. A Baptist church
housed in the Nishi Hongwanji sanctuary faced eviction when the Buddhist congregation
sought to re-occupy the space; the Baptist minister, believing his church had placed a
down payment towards purchase of the building, threatened to sue.
198
An even larger
uproar followed efforts by the congregation of Japanese Union Church to recover their
building from Pilgrim House. Japanese Americans had raised money for the building’s
construction and maintained partial ownership, along with the Presbyterian and
Congregational Churches. Although Pilgrim House was given a year to find new quarters,
the Tribune called the request a “conscienceless action” and insisted that the “Japanese
have resisted efforts of the center to serve them” and had endangered its Community
Chest funding by calling for the move.
199
Black-Japanese relations were referred to as an
“armed truce.”
As economic opportunities for black Angelenos continued to constrict following
the war, the crime rate in Little Tokyo began to inexorably rise. In the fall of 1945, black
merchants complained “about crime and vice conditions” to a representative of the Urban

197
Bill Mason, interviewed by Ken Hongo, May 15, 1973, “Little Tokyo” file, Hirasaki National
Resource Center, JANM.

198
“Japs Plan Return to Little Tokyo,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 31, 1944, 1.

199
“Minority Unity,” Los Angeles Tribune, Dec. 6, 1947, 17; “Japanese Ask Negro Removal from
1
st
St.,” Los Angeles Tribune, Nov. 29, 1947, 1. Pilgrim House was able to move to a building
occupied by a Filipino Christian church on North Los Angeles Street in mid-1948.
180
League.
200
As black merchants were replaced by Japanese Americans, the racial
distinction between robber and robbed became a source of tension. In addition, aging
Issei became a vulnerable target for muggers. A police investigation determined that
forty-two such “jobs” were pulled in three weeks during the spring of 1947.
201
The
Japanese Businessmen’s Association hired two Nisei Army veterans to patrol the
neighborhood’s streets after dark, a decision that produced a wave of protest among black
residents, who saw it as a vigilante measure intended “to force the Negroes out of ‘Little
Tokyo.’”
202
The Council for Civic Unity called a meeting so that the grievances of each
community could be safely aired. Reverend Kingsley, speaking on behalf of the
neighborhood’s black residents, reminded those present that African Americans had done
more to oppose internment than any other group and had not attempted to prevent
Japanese Americans from returning to Little Tokyo. Kenji Ito, a Nisei attorney, insisted
that the extra patrol was a response to what Japanese Americans felt was an insufficient
police presence, and was not directed against African Americans. When asked whether
Japanese Americans indeed intended to “move out the Negroes,” Ito’s reply was poignant
and direct: “Japanese don’t believe in evacuation.” Assistant Police Chief Joe Reed
claimed that “Little Bronze Tokyo” enjoyed more protection than other neighborhoods
and that the trouble was the work of mysterious “outsiders” – begging the question of
exactly who, in the neighborhood’s fluctuating context, qualified as an “insider.” Was it

200
Nakagawa, “Transition,” www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007).

201
“Little Tokyo’s Discord Aired at Conference,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 4, 1947, A1.

202
“Los Angeles Minority Groups Join Hands to Make Brotherhood Reality,” Daily News, Mar.
4, 1947, Box 76, Negro Relations – 1947 Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library.
181
even possible to transform Bronzeville/Little Tokyo into a “Little Bronze Tokyo” where
both groups belonged equally?
Many African and Japanese Americans made efforts to bring that community into
existence, with varying success. Kiichi Uyeda hired blacks as clerks, and Samuel Evans
hired Japanese American waitresses to work in his restaurant, the Bamboo Room.
203

Pilgrim House employed Nisei Sam Ishikawa to engage in outreach to the Japanese
community and to advise its Common Ground Committee on black/Japanese relations.
204

The Ebony article described at the beginning of this chapter noted the determination of
both blacks and Japanese Americans to keep a lid on tensions and emphasize positive
interactions. Anecdotal evidence demonstrates that the vignettes photographed for that
article were not merely staged for the camera, but were part of daily life in Little
Tokyo/Bronzeville. Several Japanese Americans who as children lived in the hotels and
hostels of Little Tokyo after the war have fond memories of discovering jazz and gospel
music in black storefronts, recalling especially that they were treated as welcome
participants at these performances rather than interlopers.
205
Jim Hodge’s newsstand
carried African American newspapers like the Eagle, the Sentinel, and the Tribune as
well as bilingual Japanese American publications such as the Rafu Shimpo and the Kashu
Mainichi. Hodge himself was embraced by both communities; one Japanese American

203
Nakagawa, “Transition,” www.bronzeville-la.com (accessed Jun. 16, 2007).

204
Samuel Ishikawa, Reprint from Common Ground, Sep. 10, 1945, Box 74, Japanese Relations –
1945 Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library.

205
See, for example, George Morishita, “Little Tokyo, My Hangout,” and Takenori Yamamoto,
“Coming to Los Angeles,” in Nanka Nikkei Voices III: Little Tokyo – Changing Times, Changing
Faces, ed. Brian Niiya (Los Angeles: Japanese American Historical Society of Southern
California, 2004): 35-36 and 40-41.
182
recalled that “he had a nice rapport with the Nihonjin and vice versa. They kind of took
care of him, and he’d take care of the Nihonjin.”
206
The Tribune shared its printing plant
with the Nisei weekly Crossroads, and sought to improve on the inclusiveness of
Hodge’s newsstand by developing a shared conversation between Little Bronze Tokyo’s
two communities in the pages of the paper. Editor Almena Lomax occasionally covered
Japanese American civil rights activism and hired three Japanese Americans – Hisaye
Yamamoto, Chester Yamauchi, and George Yamada – on the Tribune’s staff.
207

Hisaye Yamamoto’s columns in the Tribune provide a unique insight into the
challenges and possibilities of black/Japanese interaction in postwar Los Angeles.
Yamamoto (or “Si,” as Davis called her) had been raised on a farm south of L.A. but,
following the evacuation, had resettled with her extended family on one half of a Boyle
Heights two-house lot. Yamamoto’s columns evoke the racially diverse geography of the
prewar city that continued to thrive for a short while in the postwar period: her stories are
sprinkled with Spanish, French, and Japanese words in addition to depictions of black
slang along the Avenue, and she passes on anecdotes about her Dutch roomer, her Irish
violin teacher, and the Encinas family that lives in the other house on the lot. All the
same, Yamamoto confessed to ignorance about African American life when she first
started on the Tribune, noting that she had only been acquainted with two African
Americans in her entire life prior to evacuation. “After 9 months or so at the Tribune,”

206
Nakagawa, “Blues for Bronzeville,” 11.

207
Ibid.; Yokota, “From Little Tokyo to Bronzeville and Back,” 68-69. For examples of Tribune
coverage of issues affecting Japanese Americans, see for example, “Nisei Officer Weds Popular
Film Actress in Japan,” Apr. 20, 1946, 21; “Nisei Citizenship Renunciation to Be Tested,” Oct.
26, 1946, 8; “U.S. Japanese Problems to Be Told,” Jul. 12, 1947, 3; “Japanese Teachers,” Sep. 6,
1947, 20; and “Orientals and Negroes Hit by Action,” Oct. 25, 1947, 1.
183
she wrote, “the white people have become the rare ones.”
208
Now she understood “that
when you jive, baby, you jive; that when you talk about ofays, Charlies, and
ofaginjees…you mean white people;…that black and white are the main colors held by
the palette within these men’s minds.” Where she fit within that palette was not yet clear
to her.
Yamamoto was clearly fascinated at the insights into black culture garnered
through her work on the Tribune, and she tried to make her column open a window into
Japanese American life for the paper’s black readers. She shared funny stories about her
restless Issei father and hapless pachuco-wannabe brother, but she also brought in other
Japanese Americans to write guest columns about their lives, particularly their internment
experiences and their ideas about interracial coalitions. She translated letters from friends
and relatives in Japan so that L.A. readers could learn about the poverty and desperation
experienced by the Japanese in the months following the war’s end. Yamamoto also
described Japanese American experiences with racial discrimination, experiences that
African Americans shared. For example, Yamamoto related how her friend “Em”
watched an employment agency secretary leaf through a thick binder filled with openings
before saying “No jobs.” In response to her inquiry, the woman confirmed “No jobs for
Japanese.”
209
On another occasion, Yamamoto explained that she “nearly choked on her
toast” when a white couple attending a race relations workshop with her pleasantly
insisted that internment had been “too unfortunate” but “really necessary” since “in a
group like that there were some who were planning sabotage.” The woman then patted

208
Hisaye Yamamoto, “Small Talk,” Los Angeles Tribune, Apr. 13, 1946, 3.

209
Hisaye Yamamoto, “Small Talk,” Los Angeles Tribune, Jun. 21, 1947, 15.
184
Yamamoto on the shoulder and said, “This isn’t anything bad about you…I’ve taught
many Japanese students, and they’ve been the sweetest, nicest things.”
210

As the only Japanese American on the paper with her own column, Yamamoto
was sometimes called upon to answer for the Japanese American community as a whole.
Almena Davis wrote an editorial insisting that “Japanese-Negro relations do stink, Si”
and claiming that “the fact that the Japanese hasn’t been taken to the Negro’s bosom is
his own fault.”
211
An anonymous Bronzeville resident agreed, writing in a letter to the
editor that, “in some Japanese business places, we are coldly received as if our trade
wasn’t wanted, and in others they serve us with a grain of contempt.”
212
At first,
Yamamoto suggested that Lomax was perhaps “hypersensitive about race,” defensively
questioning why “she is holding me guilty for the smell in Negro-Japanese
relationships.”
213
Gradually, however, Yamamoto attempted to more honestly discuss
anti-black racism among Japanese Americans; for example, she described the experience
of one Nisei friend, Chester, who had discovered fellow black, white, and Japanese
American waiters taking their work breaks in racially segregated groups. When Chester
chose to eat lunch with the black group, he was roundly harassed by his fellow Japanese

210
Hisaye Yamamoto, “Small Talk,” Los Angeles Tribune, Jul. 27, 1946, 13.

211
Almena Lomax, “Japanese-Negro Relations Do Stink, Si,” Los Angeles Tribune, Sep. 14,
1946, 12.

212
“The Mail Box – Negro-Japanese Relations,” Los Angeles Tribune, Mar. 1, 1947, 11. These
complaints obviously mirror African Americans’ complaints about immigrant Korean
shopkeepers in Los Angeles on the eve of the 1992 riots, demonstrating the city’s long history of
black/Asian antagonism over social relations in spaces of consumption, as well as the way in
which different groups fill similar positions within the U.S. racial hierarchy as it shifts over time.

213
Hisaye Yamamoto, “Small Talk,” Los Angeles Tribune, Sep. 14, 1946.
185
Americans, who insisted that his actions were “’lowering the Japanese’ and deterring the
flowering of Japanese-white friendship.” One of his black co-workers then tells him, “I
like you, Chester. Why, you’re not like a Japanese at all.”
214
Thus Yamamoto admitted
that many Japanese Americans had adopted negative attitudes and behaviors towards
African Americans, while gently reminding black readers that they too indulged in
stereotypes and had often condoned Japanese Americans’ marginalization.
Yamamoto sought to push the Tribune’s readers past the black-white palette to an
awareness and understanding of her Asian in-betweenness, the neither/nor position that
so often impelled Japanese Americans to reject political and social ties to African
Americans in an attempt to secure or improve their own status. Building on W.E.B.
DuBois’s concept of the veil, Yamamoto plaintively asked, “How could I see clearly
now, I…who am trying to peer through three veils, white, yellow, and black?”
215

Although Yamamoto struggled with a stubborn reticence that prevented her from directly
countering anti-black statements made in her presence, she engaged in an increasingly
open discussion of the ways in which Japanese Americans were raced differently than
African Americans, and the privileges she enjoyed as a result.
216
In one case, while
traveling through the South, she relates an encounter with a white woman who freely
discusses her distaste for blacks with Si; the conversation is juxtaposed with Yamamoto’s

214
Hisaye Yamamoto, “Small Talk,” Los Angeles Tribune, Aug. 30, 1947, 14.

215
Hisaye Yamamoto, “Small Talk,” Los Angeles Tribune, Dec. 21, 1946, 26.

216
In one column, Yamamoto chastises her brother for not speaking out against the segregation of
blacks in his Army unit, but she is clearly reacting out of guilt for what she has also condoned by
her silence. Her brother responds to her admonishment helplessly, repeating, “It just ain’t in my
line, Si.” See Hisaye Yamamoto, “Small Talk,” Los Angeles Tribune, Aug. 30, 1947, 14.
186
conflicted decision to sit in the back of the bus while in the South but at the same time
use the segregated facilities labeled “Whites Only.”
217
In the same column, Yamamoto
quotes from a letter she has received from a drafted Kibei stationed in San Antonio, in
which he declares, “we the Japanese are still lucky” compared to African Americans in
Texas. At home in Los Angeles, Yamamoto finds that the contractor she calls to fix her
roof requires no money down, because “when we’re dealing with you people, that’s the
least of our worries.” Had she been Jewish, she is informed, the contractor would have
required a fifty percent down payment. At the same time, a black friend informs her that
she had tried to rent out a store only to be told “no Negroes” – even as the space next
door is rented to an Asian American merchant.
218

These experiences with the shape-shifting nature of racism pushed Yamamoto
towards a consciously multiracial politics. At first, her actions were largely private and
personal; for instance, she threw away an invitation to a JACL event at Pilgrim House for
Nisei veterans and their “Caucasian friends,” feeling that “an important Japanese-white
dinner in a community where Negroes, Mexicans, Filipinos, Chinese, and who knows
what other –oes, -ans, -os, and –ese dwell, would be rather exclusive.”
219
Eventually,
however, Yamamoto took her politics to the public sphere, participating in a racially
mixed CORE sit-in to protest anti-black discrimination at the Bullocks Wilshire
Tearoom, a then-new practice of resistance to the racist spatial policies of private

217
Hisaye Yamamoto, “Small Talk,” Los Angeles Tribune, Jan. 25, 1947, 15.

218
Hisaye Yamamoto, “Small Talk,” Los Angeles Tribune, Jan. 4, 1947, 11.

219
Hisaye Yamamoto, “Small Talk,” Los Angeles Tribune, Sep. 14, 1946, 13.
187
institutions.
220
Her effort to peer through three veils simultaneously produced
Yamamoto’s political mobilization, but it was not without cost. Since starting on the
Tribune, she wrote, she “had become more aware of Race than ever before in my life,
including the period (vaguely remembered now) when…we were herded together and put
on a train and sent away, because we all, under our infuriating blandness, were certainly
secretly itching to poison water reservoirs.”
221
The problem with race in America, she
had come to realize, was more than just the experience of internment, a white-Japanese
problem. Seeing life through the veil of blackness, she wrote, meant that she had
“acquired things I would have been happier without, a bitter wariness in my association
with whites (always now I look for condescension, always I find it), a heightened sense
of inadequacy, and new doubts of myself.”
222
Nevertheless, in her unflinchingly honest
portrayal of this painful process of insight and engagement, Yamamoto came closest to
envisioning a fusion between Little Bronze Tokyo’s two communities and an alternate,
more fluid concept of race and identity than allowed by the rigidly segregationist policies
of the racial state.
Keith Collins, in his study of African American Angelenos, argued that the
wartime experience strengthened ties between blacks and Japanese Americans, as “only
Black and Japanese Americans felt a unified national policy of segregation,

220
Hisaye Yamamoto, “Small Talk,” Los Angeles Tribune, Jul. 5, 1947, 15.

221
Hisaye Yamamoto, “Small Talk,” Los Angeles Tribune, Jul. 27, 1946, 13.

222
Hisaye Yamamoto, “Small Talk,” Los Angeles Tribune, Dec. 28, 1946, 11.

188
discrimination and deprivation.”
223
Kevin Leonard has written that internment itself was a
politicizing event, particularly among the Nisei, claiming that “many Japanese Americans
emerged from the camps ready to demand their civil rights.”
224
Certainly Japanese
Americans in the postwar period pursued a vigorous agenda focused on legislative and
judicial discrimination against people of color: the Japanese American Citizens League
supported cases that challenged school segregation and restrictive covenants, while a
group called the Nisei Progressives lobbied the City Council for a Fair Employment
Practices ordinance in 1949 and campaigned for the Independent Progressive Party in
1948 and 1952 (the year that Charlotta Bass, editor of the Eagle, ran for Vice-
President).
225

One of the strongest proponents of a more interracial Japanese American political
outlook was journalist Larry Tajiri, who wrote even before the war ended that “the racial
nature of evacuation developed a recognition among many Japanese Americans that they
were inescapably relegated to a place on the color wheel of America, that their problem
was basically one of color.”
226
The next step for Japanese Americans would be to act on
this realization, “to align themselves, wherever they go in their post-evacuation world,

223
Collins, Black Los Angeles, 43.

224
Leonard, “Years of Hope, Days of Fear,” 209.

225
See Chapter Nine in Leonard, “Years of Hope, Days of Fear,” and Box 18, Folder 18, Civil
Rights Congress Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research. See
Allison Varzally, Coloring Outside Ethnic Lines: The Making of a Non-White America in
California, 1925-1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming), especially
Chapter Six, for more on interracial coalitions in postwar Los Angeles.

226
Larry Tajiri, “Farewell to Little Tokyo,” Common Ground 4.2 (winter 1944): 90-95, Box 88,
Folder 4, Yuji Ichioka Collection, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.
189
with…the mass movement of all marginal groups toward the full realization of the
American dream.” Although Tajiri believed that this course could only be pursued
beyond the boundaries of “Little Tokyos,” in Los Angeles it was within “Little Bronze
Tokyo” that African and Japanese Americans most fully and deliberately negotiated the
challenges of interracial solidarity and confronted political and economic policies that
emphasized separation, difference, and conflict. Until, that is, the spatial practices of the
racial state once again intervened in the small neighborhood, a blow that – in addition to
the political repression of the McCarthy years, the striking down of restrictive covenants,
and the development of a pro-Japanese American racial mythology – brought an end to
the shared experiment of Little Bronze Tokyo.

190

Figure 2.8. The northwest block of East First Street at Los Angeles Street prior to its
demolition, 1949. Courtesy Archie Miyatake, Toyo Miyatake Studio.

The Second Evacuation: The Death of Bronzeville and the Birth of the Model Minority
In March 1950, Pilgrim House lamented that planning for that summer’s Vacation Project
was on hold due to the “pending evacuation from our present quarters to make way for
the new Police Administration building.”
227
In its new quarters on Los Angeles Street less
than two years, the center was again forced to seek another home as the city announced
plans to acquire by purchase or eminent domain all parcels on the block bounded by

227
“Report on Pilgrim House Vacation Project for 1950,” Apr. 17, 1950, Box 76, Negro Relations
– Pilgrim House Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library.
191
Main, Los Angeles, First, and Temple Streets for construction of a new police
headquarters. Nearly one-quarter of the Little Tokyo district was demolished, forcing
many newly re-established businesses to move or just shut down; the impact was so
traumatic that Japanese Americans refer to the evictions as the “second evacuation.”
228

What Henry Mori had said about evictions from WRA housing in 1946 was equally
applicable to this latest land grab: “the hurt will never wear off and the repetition of the
evacuation has kept the wound open.”
229
Yet, barely reestablished in the enclave and still,
in the shadow of internment, trying to demonstrate their reliable loyalty to state
authority, Japanese Americans voiced minimal protest.
Yet while the construction of what became Parker Center injured Little Tokyo, it
proved a death sentence for Bronzeville. According to one estimate, 3,000 residents were
evicted from the Parker Center block, ninety percent of them black.
230
The enrollment at
the Pilgrim House nursery school, which had been fairly steady in the postwar years,
began to decrease rapidly as buildings were cleared. An enrollment of sixteen children in
the fall of 1947 had dropped to ten by June of 1950 and then eight by the following
month, when Pilgrim House workers estimated that “children are still moving out of this
section at the rate of 5 per week…At the present time those who are being moved out are

228
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 188; Murase, Little Tokyo, 19. The
Rafu Shimpo newspaper was forced to relocate, while the Toyo and Olympic Hotels and a sumo
dojo closed permanently. See Harry Honda, “Little Tokyo Through the Years,” Nisei Week
souvenir booklet (1990), Hirasaki Resource Center, JANM.

229
Quoted in Yokota, “From Little Tokyo to Bronzeville and Back,” 80.

230
“Struggle for Little Tokyo Grows Heated,” Chicago Defender, Apr. 9, 1949, 1.
192
not being replaced.”
231
The number of children participating in daily programs dropped
from 75 to as few as thirty during the same time period. Projecting into the future, the
Pilgrim House Board sensed that the institution’s days were numbered.
Even before Bronzeville’s demise, African and Japanese American Angelenos
seemed to have shifted positions in the local racial hierarchy, as seen in the preferable
leases granted to returning Japanese Americans and the decreased employment
opportunities for blacks. The diverging trajectories of race for blacks and Japanese
Americans that Hisaye Yamamoto discussed in her columns would increasingly separate
African and Japanese American Angelenos over the following decades. At the same time,
a postwar shift in racial formations reversed the polarity of assumptions about loyalty and
belonging associated with the two groups, as evidenced by the relative depictions of
Japanese and African Americans in a series of broadcasts on Los Angeles radio station
KNX in the spring of 1956. Under the title “Minority Report,” the three episodes focused
in turn on African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Japanese Americans in Los
Angeles, allowing members of the three largest racialized minority groups in the city to
describe their communities in their own words. Emblematic of the nation’s Cold War
racial liberalism, the broadcasts were intended, in the words of KNX newsman John
Beck, to facilitate “a full understanding of the Negro [and other minorities], not as a
sociological problem, but as a human being anxious to live in a better world.”
232

231
Pilgrim House Board Meeting Minutes, Jul. 7, 1950, Box 76, Negro Relations – Pilgrim House
Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library.

232
Apr. 6, 1956 letter from John F. Beck to John Anson Ford, Box 74, Japanese Relations – 1956
Folder, John Anson Ford Collection (hereafter JAF Collection), Huntington Library.
193
The initial episode explored issues of health, housing, employment, crime, and
education in the African American community, underlining wherever possible the
contrasts between the conditions under which blacks lived in L.A. and those of the Jim
Crow South. Indeed, the episode concluded with the words of an Alabama woman newly
arrived in Los Angeles: “It seems to be a wonderful place to me. It’s like coming to a
different world, the way you’re treated.” Although Dan Cubberly, the broadcast’s host,
noted somewhat condescendingly that her “house is very poor” and the “many children
are in shabby clothes,” he nevertheless presented the family’s new home in Watts as a
refuge, contending in a fit of self-congratulation that “by and large, the Negro people feel
that on a community-wide basis, race relations in Los Angeles are among the best in the
nation.” However, even greater dedication to racial equality was necessary, as a brief
discussion of the remaining barriers to adequate housing and employment opportunities
made clear. Cubberly called for a renewed dedication to the American principles of fair
play, not only because it was the right thing to do, but because it was dangerous to do
otherwise. “Even in enlightened Los Angeles,” he intoned,” the color of a man’s skin
does make a difference…And wherever you have discrimination because of the color of a
man’s skin, you have a situation the Communists feed upon.”
233
Such a statement reflects
the common postwar sentiment that effectively fighting the Communist threat abroad
required dismantling racial barriers at home, an approach well documented by

233
Transcript of first KNX “Minority Report” broadcast in March 1956, Box 76, Negro Relations
– 1956 Folder, JAF Collection, Huntington Library; “’Minority Report’ on KNX March 11,” Los
Angeles Sentinel, Mar. 8, 1956, A1.
194
historians.
234
However, in the virulently anti-Communist public sphere of 1950s Los
Angeles, such a comment also implied a subtle questioning of African Americans’
loyalty. Were they faithful Americans? Could they be counted upon not to fall for Red
propaganda?
By contrast, the issue of Communism is never mentioned in the episode
examining the Japanese American community in Los Angeles, which aired after
Memorial Day in 1956. This broadcast instead plays as an extended apology to the
racialized group whose loyalty had been so mercilessly questioned at the start of World
War II. Frank Goss, the narrator for this episode, avers “Something spectacular has
occurred as far as Japanese Americans are concerned,” and produces several examples of
their occupational mobility and integration into the Anglo mainstream since the end of
World War II. To explain such rapid advancement, Goss turns to Japanese Americans’
record of wartime service and the “patience and forbearance” they displayed throughout
the internment experience. The forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West
Coast in 1942 is portrayed as an episode of mass insanity, with Goss claiming his
amazement “that there ever was a time that Americans had so misjudged their fellow
citizens,” even as he recalled the “nightmare of hysteria and confusion” that descended
upon Los Angeles in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Rather than the self-congratulatory tone
of the initial broadcast, a sense of Anglo guilt pervades this episode – Goss captures
former Mayor Fletcher Bowron, who had emphatically called for evacuation, admitting

234
See, for example, Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American
Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold
War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2001).
195
that “it was a grave and terrible injustice perpetrated on the Japanese in our midst” and
emphasizes Japanese Americans’ abiding and now proven loyalty, saying “Those in
whom we lost faith, never lost faith in us.”
235
In fact, the episode closes with the somber
and patriotic ritual of a Memorial Day service for Japanese American veterans at
Evergreen Cemetery, complete with a 21-gun salute, a Boy Scout troop bugling “Taps,”
and soprano Michi Yonemura singing “God Bless America.”
It is clear that here, nearly a decade before its explicit articulation in the aftermath
of the Watts riot, Japanese Americans have moved into the ranks of a “model minority,”
explicitly defined as the antithesis of African Americans.
236
How had the racial landscape
become so fundamentally altered? Japanese Americans have generally credited the
military exploits of Japanese American soldiers with changing Anglo minds, and
certainly mainstream media productions such as the KNX broadcast, or the 1951 Go for
Broke film about the 442
nd
Regimental Combat Team, emphasized that Japanese
Americans had proved their loyalty in blood. The elderly columnists writing in the Rafu
Shimpo today often refer to Nisei exceptionalism, the idea that their generation singularly
triumphed over racism itself to achieve full equality for Japanese Americans.
The narrative of civil rights gained by military sacrifice, however, proves overly
simplistic; as Lon Kurashige has pointed out, “the heroism of black troops since the Civil
War had never produced the sudden social acceptance that Japanese Americans received

235
Recording of “The Exile’s Return,” final KNX “Minority Report” broadcast in June 1956, Box
3, Folder 1, JAI Collection, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

236
See William Petersen, “Success Story Japanese-American Style,” New York Times Magazine
(Jan. 6, 1966), 20ff.
196
in the late 1940s and 1950s.”
237
Neither can Japanese Americans’ racial rejuvenation be
attributed to the courage and forbearance of the Nisei alone; surely the African American
generation that emerged from slavery to take the reins of Reconstruction was no less
exceptional. Rather, economic, political, and demographic shifts within the context of
L.A.’s racial diversity allowed Japanese Americans to occupy a more privileged position
of racial difference relative to African Americans. Almena Lomax, clear-eyed editor of
the Tribune, foresaw the dilemma facing African and Japanese Americans when she
wrote in 1947 that
the Japanese have joined the Negro on the white man’s conscience and
because the Japanese is a new burden and the white man is tired of
dodging responsibility for the old burden, he has begun to embrace the
Japanese with self-righteous relief…[R]eparations to the Japanese,
preachment against intolerance…all are easy, elementary things to do
which temporarily ease the majority’s conscience. Not that the Japanese
shouldn’t get their reparations…[b]ut reparation made them in any way
should not be done at the expense of other minorities, should not be asked
or accepted by the Japanese at the expense of other minorities.
238

Lomax recognized that blacks, Japanese Americans, and other racialized communities
needed to validate each other’s struggles for equality and advance together in pursuit of
civil rights, or else be forced into a zero-sum status competition in which all participants
would ultimately lose. The spatial proximity of different races that had characterized
Bronzeville and fostered efforts to build interracial solidarity proved difficult to sustain in
the increasingly segregated landscape of postwar Los Angeles. Over time, the lived

237
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 124.

238
Almena Lomax, “Minority Unity,” Los Angeles Tribune, Dec. 6, 1947, 17. Lomax’s use of the
term “reparations” is especially prescient, given the successful Japanese American redress
campaign in the 1970s and 1980s.
197
experiences and political goals of African and Japanese American Angelenos grew
further and further apart.
Thus Japanese Americans both claimed and were assigned to a particular position
in the racial hierarchy relative to African Americans from the 1960s onward, a position in
which some other racialized communities, such as Korean Americans, have joined them.
These conflicting positions were reinforced by the racial dynamics of deindustrialization
in the 1970s and 1980s, in which African Americans suffered particularly severe losses
even as U.S. economic problems were laid at the feet of Japanese business practices,
calling Japanese American belonging once more into question in mainstream Anglo
discourses. The result is a contemporary racial dystopia in which, as Jacalyn Harden put
it in her study of black/Japanese American interaction in Chicago, “we secretly
believe…Asians in all their varieties are uppity and hate blacks, blacks are a culturally
damaged people prone to crime who love to cause trouble, and whites are a group that
more and more watches racialized battles among nonwhites from the sidelines.”
239
And
yet, ironically, it is sometimes out of those battles that new lines of solidarity emerge.
When the bill authorizing reparations to former internees was before the House of
Representatives, it was black Congressman Ron Dellums who made an impassioned plea
on Japanese Americans’ behalf, despite the frustration of many African Americans who
felt that reparations for internment should not take precedence over those for slavery.
African Americans have now used the successful Japanese American redress campaign as

239
Jacalyn D. Harden, Double Cross, viii.
198
a model for their own demands of the post-Civil Rights era iteration of the racial state,
with assistance from Japanese American politicians and activists.
During World War II, the racial state engaged in sweeping spatial practices of
appropriation and domination. Indeed, its unprecedented actions produced the tenuous
space of unbelonging, of not-home, that was Bronzeville, despite the creative resistance
evident in the community-building practices of the neighborhood’s residents and
entrepreneurs. African and Japanese American Angelenos, in their brief attempt to claim
and defend a space for shared belonging and interracial accord, challenged the divisive
localized hierarchies promoted by both state action and economic disinvestment. While
their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful – as the racial state again intervened spatially in
the lives of enclaves communities in a discriminatory and materially destructive manner –
the fact that Japanese Americans reclaimed Little Tokyo over the protests of both the
WRA and Mayor Bowron is significant. The enclave has unexpectedly continued to be a
key space for composing, debating, and sometimes resolving questions of ethnic identity
and national belonging through innovative spatial and memorial practices focused on
retaining place and recovering a usable past. The process by which Little Tokyo became
the context for these processes, as the next generation of Japanese Americans rejected the
divisive spatial practices of the racial state and international capital to re-imagine both the
enclave and the very nature of community, is the subject of the next chapter.

199
CHAPTER THREE:
RENEWING THE PAST:
URBAN REDEVELOPMENT AND ETHNIC COMMUNITY

They weren’t just changing buildings; they were removing landmarks and stepping on
people that were part of this community.
-Jim Matsuoka
1

In October 1967, Los Angeles broadcasting personality Ralph Story took his weekly
television program, Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, to Little Tokyo to “penetrate some
oriental mysteries.”
2
Story, though “not overwhelmed with atmosphere,” nevertheless
insisted on exoticizing the Japanese American enclave, referring to it as a “forbidden
precinct” where “the quality and prices of their goods were a competitive insult to the
Caucasian world.”
3
Even the annual Nisei Week festival, marked in the 1960s by such
hyper-American events as a fundraising carnival and a parade featuring Japanese
American veterans and Boy Scouts, became emblematic of the essentially foreign nature
of Japanese America: “During it, we might say that Little Tokyo is not just a colony
within greater Los Angeles. Temporarily – and for the moment – Los Angeles becomes a
colony of Greater Nippon.”
4

1
Interview with Jim Matsuoka, Aug. 5, 2006.

2
Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, script no. 165, first broadcast Oct. 1, 1967 by KNXT Channel 2,
produced by Joe Saltzman and written by Jere Witter and Nate Kaplan, Ralph Story Script
Collection, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles, 1.

3
Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, 4, 7, 12.

4
Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, 8-9.
200
Despite these palimpsestual traces of pre-war racial stereotypes, Story’s broadcast
more broadly followed the emerging racial narrative depicting Japanese Americans as a
“model minority.”
5
The surprising truth beneath the aura of difference that clung to Little
Tokyo, Story claimed, was that most Japanese Americans had joined the economic and
spatial mainstream: “Of the Japanese in Los Angeles, not one in a hundred lives in Little
Tokyo. In these postwar years, Japanese have had at least fair luck finding jobs where
they want to work, and finding homes where they want to live. As luck would have it,
they are not prisoners of the urban jungle,” like African Americans, but participants in the
upwardly mobile, suburban American dream.
6
Indeed, in Story’s presentation, Little

5
The widespread dissemination of the model minority trope in relation to Japanese Americans,
and Asian Americans more generally, is typically dated to the publication of William Petersen’s
article, “Success Story Japanese-American Style,” in 1966. Lon Kurashige, among others, has
argued that this discourse developed as a none-too-subtle reaction to the 1965 Watts riots,
positioning Japanese Americans as the minority group that triumphed over racism through stoic
self-reliance as opposed to African Americans’ vocal demands for equality in the Civil Rights
Movement and eventual violent protest against social and structural racism. As is clear from the
KNX “Minority Report” radio broadcasts quoted in the previous chapter, however, the basic
formula of the black/Japanese comparison actually predates Watts. The model minority trope
exists alongside longstanding Orientalist stereotypes that require little motivation to reappear, as
in the Japan-bashing that returned to dominance in media narratives of the 1980s. At the same
time, it screens the problems and needs of other Asian immigrant communities, who are expected
to follow the Japanese American pattern and solve their problems without outside help. See
William Petersen, “Success Story Japanese-American Style,” New York Times Magazine (January
6, 1966), 20ff; Donald T. Hata, Jr. and Nadine Ishitani Hata, “Asian Pacific Angelinos: Model
Minorities and Indispensable Scapegoats,” Twentieth-Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion,
and Social Conflict, ed. Norman Klein and Martin Schiesl (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1990):
61-100; Stacey J. Lee, Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype: Listening to Asian
American Youth (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1996); Keith Osajima,
“Asian Americans as the Model Minority: An Analysis of the Popular Press Image in the 1960s
and 1980s,” and Lucie Cheng and Philip Q. Yang, “The ‘Model Minority’ Deconstructed,” in
Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, ed. Min Zhou and James V.
Gatewood (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 449-482; and Kurashige, Japanese
American Celebration and Conflict, 151-152.

6
Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, 24-25. Story’s repeated ascription of Japanese Americans’ relative
success to “luck” follows the script of the “model minority myth” precisely by utterly ignoring
201
Tokyo would almost seem destined to go the way of other immigrant enclaves, such as
Little Italy – a diminished symbolic reminder of the struggles that Japanese Americans
had overcome on their way to becoming fully “American,” with “[t]he old Nisei
worry[ing] whether their children the Sansei, will remain attached to Little Tokyo and
respectful of it.”
7
However, Little Tokyo could expect a different fate than the expiring
enclaves of “white ethnic” Americans. Happily, and again in unspoken contrast with the
African American experience in riot-torn Watts, Japanese Americans were taking action
to decide their own future relationship with this symbol of their past: “As a result of
this…concern, Little Tokyo is being renewed. The renewal is being carried out with
Japanese money and Japanese effort.”
8

And why should Story’s audience, presumably mostly Anglo and suburban, tune
in for a program on the past and future of this small ethnic enclave? Because “[w]ithout
them, Los Angeles is only part of a city. With them, it comes very close to being a
sophisticated and worthwhile place to live.”
9
Certainly this is a far different assessment of
Japanese Americans’ presence within the city than was common during the exclusionary
decades preceding World War II and in its immediate aftermath. Story’s startling
conclusion points to the very different position in America’s hierarchical racial system

the institutional components of racism that continued to structure the different opportunities of
Americans of color during the civil rights era and beyond.

7
Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, 25.

8
Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, 28. Ironically, because Story fails to distinguish between Japanese
and Japanese Americans throughout the program, it is ultimately unclear whether he is referring
to local capital or Japanese corporate investment as the primary driving force behind new
construction in the neighborhood.

9
Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, 31.
202
that Japanese Americans were beginning to hold by the 1960s, a position in which they
could be alternately, sometimes even simultaneously, designated as “honorary whites” –
participating in, and thus validating, the nation’s mythic narrative of upward immigrant
mobility and equality for all – and “forever foreigners,” repositories of essentialized
difference embodying cultural attraction and economic threat.
10

Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, despite its clichéd evocation of the exotic Asian
“other” and cheerleading construction of a new “model minority,” made some prescient
statements about what was happening in Little Tokyo in the mid-1960s. Even as Japanese
Americans escaped the “urban jungle” and vaulted into “most favored minority” status –
becoming “structurally assimilated” into the American mainstream, in the words of
Stephen S. Fugita and David J. O’Brien – they not only sustained their presence in Little
Tokyo but increased their commitment to, and investment in, the enclave.
11
Despite the
residential decline and physical deterioration due to age and the period of wartime
overcrowding, Japanese Americans failed to follow the expectations of sociologists such
as Robert E. Park and utterly abandon Little Tokyo to the vagaries of the downtown real

10
For more on the dynamic between these two polarities, see Mia Tuan, Forever Foreigners or
Honorary Whites? The Asian Ethnic Experience Today (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1998).

11
Fugita and O’Brien argued that Japanese Americans by the 1970s met Milton Gordon’s
definition of structural assimilation, in that they were no longer barred from most of the
residential, social, and institutional spaces of white America. They also found, however, that
Japanese Americans “retained a very high level of participation in ethnic voluntary associations
and other forms of behavioral…involvement in ethnic community life.” See Japanese American
Ethnicity: The Persistence of Community (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 4; also
Kaoru Oguri Kendis, Persistence and Maintenance of Ethnicity Among Third-Generation
Japanese Americans (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Ph.D. Thesis in the School of Arts and
Sciences, 1979). Fugita and O’Brien argued that this was due to traditional Japanese cultural
principles that emphasized group and community cohesion, an essentialist argument in line with
the cultural explanations for inequality pioneered by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan
in Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1970).
203
estate market and models of ethnic succession.
12
Rather, they engaged in spatial practices
that maintained their connection to Little Tokyo: participating in community institutions
(churches, temples, and language schools) located in the enclave, working in the
wholesale flower and produce markets, and investing financially and emotionally in the
ethnic-based businesses that had always been the enclave’s foundation. In addition,
Japanese Americans created both formal and informal new connections between the
urban enclave and the geographically dispersed ethnic community.

Figure 3.1. Map showing Little Tokyo’s proximity to the growing Civic Center, the “old”
Anglo downtown, and the “new” downtown of corporate skyscrapers taking shape in the
previously residential neighborhood of Bunker Hill. Courtesy Jason Mejia.

12
See for example Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), originally published 1925, and W.I. Thomas and
Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1927).
204
In the early 1960s, the gravest danger threatening the persistence of Little Tokyo
as a Japanese American enclave was not, as Story’s program implied, the increasing
assimilation of the Sansei and Yonsei generations into Anglo American society – an
uneven and incomplete process in any case – but the land hunger of the downtown Civic
Center, growing almost as rapidly as the region itself.
13
The steps these merchants and
community leaders took to preserve the ethnic enclave in the face of this latest threat
from the local iteration of the racial state – the renewal of which Story spoke – would
echo over the next three decades, colliding with profound changes in the racial and
political landscape of the United States, the spatial practices of international capital, and
constructions of race, class, and identity among the Sansei generation of Japanese
Americans. Little Tokyo would be fundamentally changed – and yet, the enclave would
remain.
In this chapter, I examine how Little Tokyo became the space through which
global capital and social justice movements separately envisioned the future of the ethnic
enclave in the context of rapid shifts in U.S. racial formations. The process of
redevelopment, carried out over more than three decades, forced Japanese Americans to
question concepts of nation, race, and ethnicity, and the evolving function, significance,
and future of the enclave. Distinct constituencies of stakeholders emerged, each with
different reasons for considering Little Tokyo important and different spatial practices
intended to ensure its continued existence. A consensus of a sort was achieved in

13
The population of Los Angeles County had grown from 4.1 million to approximately 6 million
between 1950 and 1960, then grew by another million in the 1960s; 1.8 million additional
residents arrived between 1970 and 1990. Orange County to the south also grew rapidly during
these years, adding approximately 1.7 million residents between 1960 and 1990.
205
adopting the memorial practice of preservation as redevelopment procedure and ethnic
strategy, though it also contained implicit omissions of the enclave’s historic and
contemporary diversity. Ultimately, the redevelopment experience assured the
continuation of the enclave, reanimated shared historical connections between Japanese
Americans and Chicanos, and expanded the possible formulations of Japanese American
political and racial identity. To understand how Japanese American Angelenos responded
to redevelopment and reconnected with Little Tokyo, one must first recognize the
radically altered experiences of the postwar Japanese American community, particularly
in comparison to the African Americans with whom they had so recently shared the
enclave.

206
Table 3.1. Population of the City of Los Angeles by Race/Ethnicity, 1950-2000
14

“Whites” Blacks Japanese Mexicans* Total Pop.
1950 1,758,773 171,209 25,500 66,425 (FB) 1,970,358
1960 2,061,808 334,916 51,500 326,694
a
2,479,015
1970 2,173,600 503,606 54,878 422,350
b
2,816,061
1980 1,842,050 504,301 49,896 310,192 (FB)
c
2,966,850
1990 1,841,182 487,674 45,370 936,507 3,485,398
2000 1,734,036 415,195 36,992 1,091,686 3,694,820
Sources: United States Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Census of the United States:
1950 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1953); Eighteenth Decennial
Census of the United States: 1960 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963);
1970 Census of Population (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973); 1980
Census of Population (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office 1983); 1990 Census
of Population (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1992); and “Los Angeles
City Fact Sheet,” Census 2000 at http:://factfinder.census.gov (accessed Apr. 5, 2008).
*Only foreign-born Mexicans were enumerated in the 1950 and 1980 censuses.
a
The data for 1960 represents both foreign-born from Mexico and native-born with one
or more parents born in Mexico for the “urban area” of Los Angeles-Long Beach (with a
larger total population of 5,901,037).
b
The data for 1970 represents the total number of persons of “Spanish” descent or origin
in the City of Los Angeles and probably double-counts a number of persons included
under the racial category of “white.”
c
In addition to the data on foreign-born Mexicans, the 1980 census also counted 647,865
persons in the City of Los Angeles speaking Spanish at home.

Seasoned Long Enough in Concentration: Japanese American Civil Rights
In the early postwar years, Japanese and African Americans appeared to be charting a
similar course toward social and economic equality. They had both been geographically
constrained by restrictive housing covenants, although the African American community,
now much larger due to wartime migration, faced more severe overcrowding and
consequent policing of its borders. When the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1948

14
The decreasing figures for Anglos, Japanese Americans, and African Americans beginning in
the 1970s reflects the increasing movement of these populations (especially the first two) to other
areas within the Los Angeles metropolitan region but beyond its municipal borders.
207
that such covenants were not legally enforceable, African and Japanese American
Angelenos eagerly sought new housing opportunities.
15
Both communities spread west
from the old seinan neighborhood, with particularly dense mutual settlement in the area
around Crenshaw Boulevard.
16
Kazuo Inouye, a Japanese American veteran who became
a real estate agent after the war, helped Japanese and African Americans purchase homes
in the West Adams and Crenshaw neighborhoods and recalled that “the blacks and the
Japanese always got along. They had no problems. On Jefferson Boulevard we could
walk up and down at nighttime…Nobody would bother us.”
17
Inouye also handled the
sales of fleeing Anglos and Jews, which earned him a reputation as a blockbuster. He
nevertheless insisted, “I didn't do that. One black moves in, everybody else wants to sell.
I just helped them.” Marshal Royal, a black musician, remembered how his new Anglo
neighbors were quick to put up “For Sale” signs when he first moved in, but “two doors
down were Japanese people, and they turned out to be very dear friends.”
18

Black/Japanese interaction in these neighborhoods, generally referred to as the
“Westside,” lasted for a generation and inspired many Japanese American youth who
were active in the civil rights and social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s. For

15
Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948).

16
Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression
to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): 190; Kurashige, Japanese
American Celebration and Conflict, 131.

17
Kazuo Inouye, interviewed by Leslie Ito for the REgenerations Oral History Project, Dec. 13,
1997, Hirasaki National Resource Center, Japanese American National Museum (hereafter
JANM).

18
Clora Bryant et al., Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998): 49.
208
example, one member of a Westside Japanese American street gang recollected that the
members would “talk about the black and white conflict, and that we were very much in
it too. We would identify ourselves with the blacks.”
19
Evelyn Yoshimura has described
how young men attending the annual Nisei Week Carnival in Little Tokyo during the
early 1960s could be broken down into “Westside” and “Eastside” Japanese Americans
based on their clothing: vato-style chinos and t-shirts for the Chicano-influenced kids
from Boyle Heights, and bellbottoms and a “pimp walk” among the Crenshaw boys.
20

African and Japanese Americans also faced resistance to their movement; when
four houses were bombed in the integrating neighborhoods beyond West Adams in 1951
and 1952, two belonged to blacks and two to Japanese Americans.
21
However, the
number of “housing incidents” experienced by blacks was much higher than those
experienced by Japanese Americans, with seventy reported incidents against African
Americans compared to just nine against Japanese Americans between 1950 and 1959.
22

This was not due to the larger numbers of African Americans alone, but also to
decreasing white resistance to Japanese Americans as neighbors. A survey in the mid-

19
Roy Nakano, “Them Bad Cats: Past Images of Asian American Street Gangs,” Gidra, Jan.
1973, 4.

20
Evelyn Yoshimura, “Souvenirs from Little Tokyo,” Nanka Nikkei Voices III: Little Tokyo –
Changing Times, Changing Faces, ed. Brian Niiya (Los Angeles: Japanese American Historical
Society of Southern California, 2004): 156. Such a clean alignment between ethnic influence and
spatial region demonstrates that racial segregation in some ways deepened in Los Angeles in the
years following World War II, with Japanese Americans at first sharing both black and Chicano
neighborhoods as fellow persons of color and later, with increasing structural assimilation,
moving into Anglo neighborhoods as “honorary whites.”

21
David Jason Leonard, “’No Jews and No Coloreds are Welcome in this Town’: Constructing
Coalitions in Post/War Los Angeles” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 2002): 245.

22
Sides, L.A. City Limits, 111.
209
1960s found that only 16 percent of California homeowners expected a negative reaction
from their neighbors should they sell their home to a Japanese American, and a near
universal willingness to make such a sale. By contrast, 70 percent of the respondents
expected neighbors to disapprove of a sale to an African American, and half would not
complete the sale if such objections were raised.
23

Given such a marked change in attitudes, it is not surprising that Japanese
American settlement continued to expand into the new suburban districts springing up
beyond the city of Los Angeles. Meanwhile, de facto segregation tactics such as realtor
steering and discriminatory loan practices increasingly restricted African Americans to
neighborhoods that began to mirror inner-city ghettoes. The willingness of Anglos to live
next to Japanese Americans but not African Americans meant that Japanese Americans
became more residentially scattered throughout majority-Anglo suburbs in the decades
following World War II. By contrast, even middle-class blacks who moved into more
upscale suburbs rapidly found themselves living in majority-black neighborhoods. In
Compton, for instance, blacks made up only 5 percent of the population in 1950, had
increased to 40 percent by 1960, and reached 72 percent of the population in 1970.
24
By
that year, in fact, 43 percent of African Americans lived in areas of the County that were

23
Edna Bonacich and John Modell, The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in
the Japanese American Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980): 201. For
more on the resistance of white (especially white ethnic) homeowners to integration of their
neighborhoods by African Americans, see Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis:
Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

24
Sides, L.A. City Limits, 127; Scott Tadao Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles: Black and
Japanese American Struggles for Racial Equality in the 20
th
Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of
California, Los Angeles, 2000): 491. See also Josh Sides, “Straight into Compton: American
Dreams, Urban Nightmares, and the Metamorphosis of a Black Suburb,” American Quarterly
56.3 (Sep. 2004): 583-605.
210
considered “suburban” but were in fact adjacent to the old urban “ghettoes.”
25
Although
some suburbs were home to large concentrations of Japanese Americans – Gardena, for
instance, saw its Japanese American population increase 480 percent between 1950 and
1960 – the vast majority (almost eighty percent) of Japanese Americans in 1970 were
living in suburbs where Asian Americans constituted less than twenty percent of the
population.
26
Japanese American journalist Harry Honda wrote, “It is always amazing to
some who have been in Los Angeles since it reopened its gate to the Japanese where
some of the Nisei families are purchasing homes – in districts hitherto unfamiliar to
circulation managers of the Japanese newspapers. They have been seasoned long enough
in concentration.”
27

The removal of long-standing causes of Japanese American “concentration”
extended to the occupational opportunities that greeted postwar African and Japanese

25
Sides, L.A. City Limits, 127. For an authoritative visual depiction of African-Americans’
continuing residential segregation, see the animated maps in Philip J. Ethington, “Segregated
Diversity: Race-Ethnicity, Space, and Political Fragmentation in Los Angeles County, 1940-
1994,” Final Report Submitted to the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation, 2000,
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~philipje/CENSUS_MAPS/Animated_Maps/finished_gifs.html (accessed
Jul. 31, 2007). Another resource on African American residential segregation in Los Angeles,
among other U.S. cities, is Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation
and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). The postwar
suburban expansion of Mexican Americans was both more constrained than that of Japanese
Americans and less so than that of African Americans. Like Japanese Americans, Mexican
Americans had agricultural settlements throughout the Southland; these racially-inscribed
colonias often served as the spatial foundation for informally segregated Mexican American
suburban developments. See Jerry Gonzalez, “With Their Wallets in Their Hands: Mexican
American Suburbanization and the Politics of Upward Mobility” (paper in author’s possession).

26
Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 482; Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng,
The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1994): 119.

27
Harry Honda, “Sunny Christmas and Little Tokio,” Nisei Vue (winter 1948), “Little Tokyo”
file, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM.
211
American Angelenos. Although Japanese Americans still found themselves the subject of
employment discrimination, it was on a less frequent basis than African Americans. One
1950 survey in San Francisco found that fully ninety percent of all job orders received in
the State Department of Employment barred black applicants, while 75 percent of the
orders specified “No Orientals.”
28
The nature of the work being done by Japanese
Americans also changed. Whereas before the war college-educated Nisei found
themselves laboring in produce stands, they now moved en masse into white-collar work.
The number of Japanese American clerical and sales workers increased 60 percent
between 1940 and 1950, and another 121 percent during the following decade. Japanese
American professionals increased 142 percent during the 1940s, and another 292 percent
during the 1950s.
29
The number of African American professionals also grew during the
1950s, but at the far more limited rate of 78 percent.
30
In addition, Japanese American
professionals enjoyed patronage from clients of other races, including Anglos – business
that often eluded black professionals. A final report from the War Agency Liquidation
Unit noted that one Japanese American dentist “has an almost exclusively non-Japanese
clientele, and several others draw a considerable proportion from the wider
community.”
31
The old “yellow peril” stereotypes about the wily, clever Japanese were
not erased, merely repurposed to portray Japanese Americans as “naturally” excelling in

28
Report of the American Council on Race Relations, March 1950, Box 18, Folder 3, Civil
Rights Congress Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research.

29
Bonacich and Modell, The Ethnic Basis of Economic Solidarity, 99, 108.

30
Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 418.

31
“People in Motion,” War Agency Liquidation Unit Report, 97.
212
engineering and the sciences. The racialized assumptions remained the same, while the
connotation changed from negative to positive.
The black population continued to grow rapidly in the postwar decades,
increasing by 50 percent in the 1960s alone.
32
African American Angelenos did succeed,
for a brief period, in entering industrial employment in large numbers during the 1950s,
but were then faced with new challenges as plants in South Los Angeles closed entirely
or moved to more distant suburbs in the early to mid-1960s. In what historian Josh Sides
has called “one of the tragic ironies of postwar African American history,” black workers
were the first to lose their jobs and were shut out of pensions because of their lack of
seniority, thus losing their grasp on an economic stability many had just begun to
obtain.
33
Between 1960 and 1965 alone, the rate of labor-force participation among
people of working age in South Los Angeles (which was by then more than 80 percent
black) dropped from 77 percent to 69 percent. At the same time, the median family
income fell 7.5%.
34
Although African and Japanese Americans had worked together
towards a state Fair Employment Act, which finally became law in 1959, legislation
could do nothing to alter the divergent outcomes each community experienced as
deindustrialization gutted a key black occupational niche, and Japanese Americans’

32
Sides, L.A. City Limits, 181.

33
Ibid., 180-184. For more on the impact of deindustrialization and residential segregation on
urban black communities, see Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race, Power, and the Struggle
for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

34
Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 494.
213
growing foothold in the professional and technical workforce guaranteed a solid middle-
class income for the majority of the Sansei.
35

The first attempt at creating a statewide Fair Employment Practices Commission
was the Proposition 11 campaign in 1946, which went down to defeat with only thirty
percent of the vote.
36
This result would seem to demonstrate a rejection of civil rights
legislation by many of the voters, yet another initiative on the 1946 ballot that would
have denied the civil rights of Japanese Americans was soundly defeated. Proposition 15
sought to strengthen the Alien Land Law and promote escheat proceedings against Issei
occupying land bought in the names of their American-born children – in other words, to
seize land that had been purchased in a manner that violated the 1920 version of the state
Alien Land Law. The campaign against Proposition 15 mobilized nascent Anglo guilt
over evacuation and internment, emphasizing the military service of Japanese American
GIs who had “earned the right to fair play for themselves and their families,” while
simultaneously soothing anti-Japanese voters by noting that most of the Issei were now
getting older – “average age, 65” – and thus could “hardly be deemed a ‘threat.’”
37
A
Nisei vet whose family farm was involved in an escheat case deployed the rhetoric of

35
Indeed, the 1990 census found nearly sixty percent of Japanese American households earning
$35,000 or more annually, a figure over fifteen percent higher than in the general U.S. population.
See Ungyo Lynn Sugiyama, “The Place-Making of Little Tokyo: A Cultural and Historical
Appraisal of the Urban Landscape” (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 1996): 60. Japanese
Americans were also active in lobbying for the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act, which was
overturned a year later by Proposition 14. Nevertheless, as with employment, Japanese American
activism in pursuit of fair housing did not produce equitable outcomes for African and Japanese
Americans.

36
Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 439-440.

37
“No on 15” brochure, Box 18, Folder 6, Civil Rights Congress Collection, Southern California
Library for Social Studies and Research.
214
civic nationalism that had been a hallmark of wartime propaganda, declaring that
“[m]any in our outfits died to prove Americanism is in the heart; looks and nationality
don’t count.”
38
Apparently they counted more in some propositions than others.
The defeat of Proposition 15 was not the only civil rights victory that Japanese
Americans enjoyed in the early postwar years. Most Nisei who had renounced their U.S.
citizenship had it restored; internee draft resisters were pardoned by President Truman; a
federal act authorizing payment of certain evacuee financial claims was passed; the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that the Alien Land Law was unconstitutional; and, in 1952, the
McCarran-Walter Act removed the legal exclusions to Japanese immigration and finally
made it possible for the Issei to become naturalized American citizens.
39
The Japanese
American Citizens’ League (JACL) broke ranks with other civil rights groups in its
support for McCarran-Walter; Jewish, black, and Latino organizations decried the bill’s
denaturalization and deportation clauses as restricting civil rights and social justice
activism under the veil of anti-Communism. A letter to the editor of the Rafu Shimpo
insisted that the JACL’s stance constituted a “betrayal” of other people of color who had

38
Ibid. “Civic nationalism” refers to a concept of American identity based on shared devotion to
the nation’s founding principles of liberty and equality, a concept that came to the fore during
World War II. Previously, “racial nationalism,” or the idea that an intrinsic element of American
identity was shared membership in the white race, had held sway. However, the affinity between
racial nationalism and Nazi ideas of a “master race” created an opening for racial liberals to
advance and promote civic nationalism as a more appropriate formulation of American
belonging. See Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

39
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 123.
215
spoken out against internment.
40
Indeed, one scholar has argued that Japanese American
supporters of the bill “relied upon the same immigration security concerns as those
conservatives who linked civil rights activists with communism,” and the JACL found its
support used as evidence to counter arguments that many provisions of the bill were
racially discriminatory.
41

The fragmenting of the postwar civil rights coalition around legislation like
McCarran-Walter, which met the demands of some organizations while undermining
others, demonstrates the truth of Mark Brilliant’s assertion that differing axes of
discrimination in postwar California produced different goals for redress among
racialized communities. While liberal white and black leaders focused on “fair
employment practices, fair housing, and school desegregation,” Mexican and Asian
organizations increasingly sought to “reform discriminatory immigration and
naturalization laws, secure pensions for long-term resident non-citizens, unionize
agricultural workers, end the bracero program, and promote bilingual education.”
42
The
increasingly divergent strategies of civil rights organizations representing different
communities achieved different levels of success; Japanese Americans saw perhaps the
most consistent and widespread repudiation of discriminatory measures in their many
judicial and legislative victories. Clearly, Anglo prejudice against Japanese Americans

40
Shana Bernstein, Building Bridges at Home in a Time of Global Conflict: Interracial
Cooperation and the Fight for Civil Rights in Los Angeles, 1933-1954 (Stanford: Stanford
University Ph.D. Thesis in History, 2003): 332.

41
Ibid., 331, 334.

42
Mark Brilliant, “Color Lines: Civil Rights Struggles on America’s ‘Racial Frontier,’ 1945-
1975” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2002): v.
216
had rapidly and measurably diminished following the war’s end, though this was due less
to Japanese Americans’ endurance of internment or their battlefield valor than a unique
and unprecedented public/private propaganda campaign on their behalf.
In California, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) had joined with non-profit
organizations such as the Pacific Coast Committee on American Principles and Fair Play
(Fair Play Committee), the Friends of the American Way (FAW), and the American
Council on Race Relations (ACRR) to produce pro-Japanese American propaganda
across multiple media platforms even before V-J Day. The Council produced a brochure
entitled “Facts About Japanese Americans” to debunk common anti-Japanese
stereotypes. FAW and the Fair Play Committee sent pro-Japanese American letters to
the editor of newspapers throughout California and set up short-term housing with
Caucasian families for returning evacuees.
43
In addition to sending out “fat envelopes”
stuffed with pro-Japanese American information to California newspapers, WRA chief
Dillon Myer gave speeches countering the comments of anti-Japanese state senator Jack
Tenney. The WRA also worked with the national radio networks to produce dramas
focused on the patriotism and heroism of Japanese American soldiers.
44
One historian has
argued that “not since the Freedmen’s Bureau had a federal agency worked so diligently”

43
“Homeward Bound” Fair Play Committee pamphlet and FAW Report on Democracy in Action,
Box 74, Japanese Relations – 1945 Folder, John Anson Ford Collection, Huntington Library.

44
Kevin Allen Leonard, “Years of Hope, Days of Fear: The Impact of World War II on Race
Relations in Los Angeles” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 1992): 235-238.
217
to improve the status of a racialized community.
45
Unlike the Freedmen’s Bureau, the
WRA was able to take advantage of modern mass media technology and advertising
tactics in its efforts.
Most of the propaganda materials took pains “to domesticate – in the dual
meaning of the word – the image of the Nisei. They stressed that Nisei thought and
behaved just like typical Americans.”
46
Japanese Americans generally cooperated with
this message, emphasizing characteristics that fit in with mainstream Anglo American
society and minimizing anything that might be deemed “foreign” or “subversive.” The
JACL had embraced this tactic from the early days of the war, producing statements like
“The Japanese American Creed” and lobbying for an opportunity to go into combat.
During the resettlement years, most Japanese Americans followed the JACL in believing
that the best way to “win a place for themselves in America was by being better
Americans than most.”
47
A Kibei woman explained her own thinking about Japanese
Americans’ postwar political and social identity in these terms: “What we learned from
the whole experience was that if you don't make waves, try to be very accommodating to
the majority culture, and try to assimilate in that sense – by playing down your ethnic
background, and try to become as ‘American’ as possible – then you'll have a better time

45
Ibid., 227.

46
Kurashige, “Transforming Los Angeles,” 479.

47
Roger Daniels, quoted in Yokota, “From Little Tokyo to Bronzeville and Back,” 83.
218
of it in this country.”
48
Scene, a Japanese American publication modeled after the popular
Life magazine, reported on Japanese American life in the communities throughout the
U.S. where they had resettled. One issue asked Japanese American readers to share the
publication with their Caucasian friends to promote better understanding between the
races and Anglo recognition of the Nisei’s true Americanism.
49

The contents of Scene also demonstrated that, despite efforts to appear all-
American, Japanese Americans retained a transnational component to their identity and
ethnic community: the magazine had a Japanese-language section, carried advertisements
for businesses in Japanese cities, and frequently covered news related to the U.S.
occupation of Japan and Japanese influences on American popular music and film.
Indeed, in its fourth year of existence, the magazine added a new subtitle – “The
International East-West Magazine.” However, this inclusive editorial policy was
evidence, not so much of a resurrected “bridge” mentality among the Nisei, as of Japanese
Americans’ desire to prove their Americanness by remaking Japan. Popular with Nisei
living in Japan as part of the occupation forces or working for Japanese companies, Scene
reported on Nisei efforts to be “better Americans” by reforming Japan’s political and
economic institutions in line with American models. These overseas Nisei, whom Eiichiro
Azuma has referred to as “cultural brokers,” were only too aware that they were marked

48
Katsumi Kunitsugu, interviewed by Sherry Turner for the Japanese American Project, Jul. 15,
1973, Center for Oral and Public History (hereafter COPH), California State University,
Fullerton.

49
Scene, February 1952, 7, Box 129, Folder 2, Yuji Ichioka Collection, Special Collections,
University of California, Los Angeles. Scene began publishing in 1949, and by 1952 had a
circulation of 18,000.
219
as racially different within American culture; thus they sought to change the meaning
associated with that difference by rehabilitating their ancestral nation as part of the
American-led “free world” standing against Cold War Communism.
50
Yuhiko Kushiro
argued that the U.S. government took pains to rehabilitate Japan itself after the war,
making “a calculated effort to move the status of the Japanese race closer to that of the
white race, giving recognition to and praising their closeness to whites based on the
success of postwar democratization efforts” in order to “secure an Asian ally against
communism.”
51
Japanese Americans, as well as the Japanese in Japan, contributed to and
benefited from these efforts, which constituted an alternative path towards equality that
was not available to African Americans.
Japanese Americans participated, both individually and collectively, in the Civil
Rights Movement. The JACL supported the NAACP moderates in their judicial
campaign to dismantle racial segregation, and individuals such as Malcolm X ally Yuri
Kochiyama and Black Panther Richard Aoki were key figures in the great freedom
struggles of the 1960s. However, the majority of Japanese Americans refrained from
overt political engagement, preferring to forget the past and rebuild their futures.
Journalist Harry Honda recalled the limited attention to multiracial solidarity at the

50
Eichiro Azuma, “Negotiating the Boundaries of Race and Citizenship: Nisei Cultural Brokers
in Occupied Japan,” paper delivered to the American Studies Association, Oct. 14, 2006,
Oakland, California.

51
Yukiko Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999): 33. Koshiro notes that this racial accord lasted until the
1980s, when Japan’s economic resurgence brought the buried accommodations on which it
was built out into the open, with “Japan-bashing” in the U.S. as one result (217).
220
Pacific Citizen, the JACL newspaper, by the late 1950s: “PC had a column called
‘Minority Week’ in which we reported in not more than maybe fifty words, different
events that were happening in the minority field, especially with the blacks, just to make
the Japanese American community conscious of what a minority problem was like.”
52

African Americans did not need a newspaper column to remind them “what a minority
problem was like” – red-baited, surveilled, struggling to make their presence felt as they
demanded social justice and equality, they were (as they were constantly reminded) the
problem.
53

As African and Japanese Americans embarked on radically different political,
social, and economic trajectories, their shared history in the landscape of Los Angeles was
undermined and their relative roles in America’s racial hierarchy altered. Caroline Chung
Simpson has claimed that Japanese Americans took on a central yet vacated place in
constructions of American national identity in the years following the war because of the
shadow – the absent presence – of evacuation and internment.
54
I would extend her
argument to say that not internment alone, but the example of Japanese Americans’

52
Harry Honda, interviewed by Cynthia Togami and Sojin Kim for the Regenerations Oral
History Project, Apr. 1, 1998 and Jun. 17, 1999, Hirasaki Resource Center, JANM.

53
I am of course commenting on Gunnar Myrdal’s famous formulation of “the Negro problem,”
but also on the many arguments produced by racial liberals in the postwar years, from Myrdal to
the Moynihan report, which saw African Americans as (or as having) a social problem rather than
explicitly recognizing the role of white supremacy and the discriminatory systems built into
social institutions and legitimized by the racial state. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The
Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Bros, 1944); Glazer and
Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot.

54
Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American
Culture, 1945-1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
221
recovery from internment – removed from the context of the government propaganda
campaigns both domestic and international that facilitated it – became the absent presence
against which the demands of the black-led Civil Rights Movement were measured.
Robert Cozzens, assistant director of the War Relocation Authority, made a speech
shortly after the end of the war in which he claimed that “[o]ur two-front war was fought
to defeat the conflicting theories that this was a white man’s world on the one hand or
that it was a Japanese world on the other. Both theories having been blasted out of
existence, it is assumed that we are now in a world that makes no color distinction.”
55

Japanese Americans’ success at adapting to a (white) American world was seen as proof
of this assertion. The apparent absence of any problems in one racialized community
absolved Anglos of being at fault for the very present problems of African Americans
seeking justice, whether in Selma or in Watts.
Media scholar Herman Gray has stated that strategies of cultural visibility
produce unexpected paradoxes, because for every cultural move there is a countermove.
56

So too with strategies of cultural invisibility. What Lon Kurashige has called the “hard
shell of Nisei Americanism” may have improved Japanese Americans’ social and
economic opportunities, but it was not sustained without cost.
57
An article in the Pacific
Citizen hinted at the constricting surveillance and conformity of aligning every act and

55
Quoted in Leonard, “Years of Hope, Days of Fear,” 226.

56
Herman Gray, Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

57
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 138.
222
decision to Anglo norms: “I’m an average Nisei. Time was, before the war, when I went
my happy and unconscious way…Today I live the life of a goldfish, and my glass bowl is
getting mighty cramped.”
58
Janice Tanaka’s documentary about the impact of internment
and its legacy on her family and those of her friends most clearly demonstrates the price
of Nisei Americanism on their children, the Sansei. Janice’s mother gave her growth
hormones to make her taller, more “American.” When she and her Sansei friends became
adolescents, they scotch-taped their eyelids and wore false eyelashes to achieve the same
Anglicized effect. For her generation, Tanaka says, “academic accomplishment was the
measure of assimilation,” and the Rafu Shimpo published the Japanese American names
on the honor rolls of the local high schools so parents could see who measured up.
Tanaka believes the pressure to achieve and confirm positive stereotypes about Japanese
Americans was too much for many Sansei youth, pointing as an example to the thirty-one
Sansei who died in 1971 after overdosing on drugs intended to help them stay awake to
study.
59
The Japanese American cultural move towards American invisibility eventually
resulted in the countermove of Sansei taking inspiration from Black Panthers and Chinese
Communists to form their own Asian American Movement and Third World ethnic
identifications, as we will see later in this chapter.
Given these enormous shifts in the social, legal, and economic standing of
Japanese Americans, the question of Little Tokyo’s future rose again in the 1960s – did
Japanese American Angelenos need or even want to retain the enclave? By now it was

58
Quoted in “People in Motion,” War Agency Liquidation Unit Report, 248.

59
When You’re Smiling: The Deadly Legacy of Internment, DVD, directed by Janice D. Tanaka
(Los Angeles: Visual Communications, 1999).
223
home to only a few hundred Issei and, while it could still boast a robust economy focused
on providing goods and services to local Japanese Americans, there were secondary
Japanese commercial concentrations in areas such as Sawtelle and Crenshaw, and existing
or planned community centers in places like Gardena, Norwalk, and the San Fernando
Valley.
60
And yet Little Tokyo was not abandoned.
Dean Toji and Karen Umemoto have described the continuing relevance of Little
Tokyo to Southern California Japanese Americans as the “paradox of dispersal.” They
argue that, especially in the case of a racialized community:
as the ethnic population becomes spatially less concentrated, these historic
centers become ever more important as sites for the maintenance of ethnic
identity and a sense of ethnic community. Little Tokyo’s symbolic
significance as a center for the widely dispersed Japanese American
population grew because it ceased to ‘belong’ to any particular segment of
the community…the place remained a common touchstone regardless of
mobility…an emergent space of ethnic connectivity and continuity amidst
distance and diffusion.
61

In other words, as Japanese Americans with diverse individual histories and experiences
increasingly achieved greater professional opportunities outside “traditional” ethnic
niches such as gardening or wholesale produce, and came to reside in more racially
diverse neighborhoods throughout suburban Los Angeles, the enclave became the ground
out of which grew their shared sense of community and identity. Indeed, Little Tokyo

60
For more on the areas of Japanese American residential concentration in post-WWII Los
Angeles, see James Allan and Eugene Turner, The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in Southern
California (Northridge, Calif.: Center for Geographical Studies, 1997).

61
Dean S. Toji and Karen Umemoto, “The Paradox of Dispersal: Ethnic Continuity and
Community Development among Japanese Americans in Little Tokyo,” aapi nexus: Asian
Americans & Pacific Islanders Policy, Practice and Community 1.1 (summer/fall 2003): 21-45,
25.
224
took on increased significance in constructing the boundaries defining Japanese
American community in Southern California. As a redevelopment official later put it,
“The San Fernando Valley farmer didn’t relate to the San Pedro fisherman, but they did
both relate to Little Tokyo.”
62

Thus, for the community as a whole, defending Little Tokyo from the bulldozer
was not just about protecting the livelihoods and economic investments of some Japanese
American merchants, but about retaining a symbolically significant place – the only
shared space over which they had acknowledged, if limited, control – for consolidating
and revitalizing Japanese American community and identity. This motivation strongly
marked the rhetoric of the first redevelopment project manager, Kango Kunitsugu, who
had been born and raised in Little Tokyo before World War II. “When completed, Little
Tokyo not only will be a place where people can visit to purchase, sell, eat and receive
professional services,” he said, “but it will also be a place where people can sing, dance,
learn and live. The master concept plan is dictated by the fusion of commercial, cultural,
religious and residential interests of the Japanese community. We hope that the concept
as proposed is also the beginning of the redevelopment of a cohesive community.”
63

Japanese Americans engaged in a range of innovative spatial practices in an attempt to
make this dream come true.
Little Tokyo, then, had come to symbolize Japanese American common ground, a
function for the ethnic enclave that it seems clear Park had not foreseen. Lon Kurashige

62
David Holley, “Old Temple, Church Symbolize Efforts to Preserve Little Tokyo,” Los Angeles
Times, Sep. 4, 1985, B1.

63
“Little Tokyo Redevelopment Project Approved by U.S. Govt,” Pacific Citizen, Jul. 10, 1970,
3.
225
has argued that this renewed significance of the enclave demonstrated Japanese
Americans’ “softening commitment to integration.”
64
Certainly, the changing social and
structural conditions that accompanied the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War
produced a renewed awareness of ethnic identity and racial hierarchy among second- and
particularly third-generation Japanese Americans, an awareness that vaulted the shared
place of the enclave into a central, perhaps even generative, role in coming to terms with
what it meant to be Japanese American. As a group of young activists put it, “[t]o the
Sansei, Little Tokyo is the geographic heart of their efforts to maintain and confirm their
ethnic heritage… Many feel that without the focus that Little Tokyo provides, that
identity is seriously endangered.”
65
Just as many young Japanese Americans came to
recognize Little Tokyo’s significance, however, the specific history of the enclave –
modest, immigrant, working-class, multi-racial – seemed destined to be permanently
erased.

64
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 189.

65
“Special Report: The Redevelopment of Little Tokyo, A Study by the Little Tokyo
Redevelopment Task Force,” Gidra, Aug. 1973, 1-16, 3.
226

Figure 3.2. Aerial photograph of Little Tokyo, circa 1965. The diagonal street in the
center of the photograph is Weller Street, site of the Sun Building and Sun Hotel.
Photograph by William Reach, courtesy Los Angeles Public Library, Security Pacific
National Bank Collection, File A-004-168, no. 00031834.

Not for the City…For Our Own Purpose: The Little Tokyo Redevelopment Association
Those who retained the most direct physical and financial ties to the enclave – merchants,
property owners, the congregations of the temples and churches – took the lead in acting
to protect Little Tokyo. In early 1961, responding to plans by the Traffic Department to
condemn the north side of East First Street between San Pedro and Central Avenue – the
heart of the reconstituted Little Tokyo – to add additional vehicle lanes for Civic Center
227
traffic, members of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce of Southern California (the
Chamber), Little Tokyo Businessmen’s Association (LTBA), Property Owners Protective
Association, Union Church, and Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist temple sent a petition and
then a delegation to Mayor Norris Poulson’s office requesting that an alternative traffic
solution be found.
66
The petitioners stated their hope for Little Tokyo’s “continued
existence as the center of the social, cultural, spiritual and economic life of the Japanese
in Southern California.”
67
Despite assurances from the Mayor that all other possible
solutions would be examined before any action was taken in Little Tokyo, the
businessmen and community leaders were not comforted. With the support of their
Mexican American city councilman, Edward R. Roybal, the Japanese Chamber of
Commerce succeeded in having the area re-zoned, from M2 (light industrial) to CM
(commercial-manufacturing), with the idea that this would facilitate new commercial
enterprises, making the area more valuable and thus less likely to be condemned.
68

Beginning in June 1963, representatives of Little Tokyo’s businesses, landlords,
churches, banks, and newspapers met to begin discussing specific plans for the
improvement of Little Tokyo. Chamber president Katsuma Mukaeda declared that
“[c]ooperation of all interested parties will be needed if Li’l Tokio is to forestall any

66
Petition to Mayor Norris Poulson, dated Feb. 8, 1961, “1961” folder, Japanese Chamber of
Commerce of Southern California (hereafter Chamber) Archives; “Little Tokyo Pleads with Big
City to Aim Progress the Other Way,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 1. 1961, B1.

67
Petition to Mayor Norris Poulson.

68
“Little Tokyo Ready for Property Improvements,” Pacific Citizen (Oct. 31, 1961), 2; “Renewal
Urged for Little Tokyo, Los Angeles Times, Apr. 22, 1962, 11.
228
‘takeover’ movement by the city for redevelopment, auto parking area and a freeway.”
69

Minutes from that meeting demonstrate the depth of participants’ concern over the
possible loss of Little Tokyo as a Japanese American enclave, with one frustrated
participant arguing, “we are not saving our Japan town for the cities [sic] point of view,
but for our own purpose.”
70
However, the perceived need to keep up with the growth of
the Civic Center and other redeveloping areas of downtown, such as Bunker Hill, or face
being overrun by them, shaped the discussion.
71
Out of this meeting grew the Little
Tokyo Redevelopment Association, or LTRA, consisting of the only three groups seen at

69
“Redevelopment, freeways, auto-park sites for civic buildings may doom li’l Tokio,” Pacific
Citizen, Jun. 28, 1963, 1.

70
“June 27 – Little Tokyo Redevelopment,” “1963-June” folder, Chamber Archives.

71
Bunker Hill was an area just to the west of downtown Los Angeles that became an urban
renewal project in 1958. Once the domain of L.A.’s wealthiest businessmen, the neighborhood’s
grand Victorians had gradually been partitioned into rooming houses as the city’s Anglo upper
class took advantage of new transportation options to move further away from an increasingly
congested downtown. By the early 1950s, the Hill was a convenient and affordable place to live
for a multiracial community of people who worked downtown or required access to services
there. It was also a physically deteriorated space, with aging wooden buildings that posed a fire
risk and rickety hillside staircases – city planners’ prime example of “blight.” The Hill was razed
to build a new downtown of steel skyscrapers housing major corporations, countering to some
degree the postwar political economy of urban disinvestment; it also displaced a large number of
people without providing replacement housing or relocation benefits. The brutal and ill-managed
redevelopment of Bunker Hill has informed all narratives of twentieth-century urbanism in Los
Angeles; see particularly, Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the
Erasure of Memory (London: Verso, 1998) and Phil Ethington, “Ghost Neighborhoods: Space,
Time, and Alienation in Los Angeles,” Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film,
Photography, and the Urban Landscape, ed. Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth (Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute, 2001), 29-56. Little Tokyo was supposed to “be urban renewal’s great
exception.” Little Tokyo Anti-Eviction Task Force, “Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo,” Counterpoint:
Perspectives on Asian America, ed. Emma Gee (Los Angeles: University of California, Los
Angeles Asian American Studies Center, 1976), 327-333, 331.
229
that time as having a legitimate role to play in redeveloping the enclave (because the only
ones with money at stake in it): property owners, businessmen, and investors.
72

Throughout the summer and fall, the directors of the LTRA worked to create a
general redevelopment plan to submit to the city planning commission for approval. First,
they conducted a survey that found 627 permanent residents of the enclave, of whom 548
were Japanese or Japanese American, as well as a daytime working population of 1,226.
73

Next, they set the neighborhood’s boundaries: Los Angeles Street on the west, First and
Jackson Streets on the north, Alameda Street on the east, and Third Street on the south.
Finally, at the end of November, the LTRA submitted its plans to the city. The proposal
called for a community center to be built at the northern tip of the enclave, where it could
share parking facilities with the Civic Center, but otherwise, reflecting the business- and
investor-oriented composition of the LTRA, emphasized more lucrative commercial
redevelopment, including a twenty-story office tower, a “high quality” department store,
and a 250-room hotel to replace the venerable Miyako Hotel, closed in 1962.
74
The plan

72
“June 27 – Little Tokyo Redevelopment,” “1963-June” folder, Chamber Archives. The
participants in Little Tokyo’s initial efforts at self-redevelopment acted as what John Logan and
Harvey Molotch have termed “place entrepreneurs,” those individuals engaged in representing
and boosting a particular locale. In the case of Little Tokyo, ethnic merchants and institutions
paradoxically accepted city planners’ vision of Little Tokyo as abstract space in order to gain
approval of their efforts to retain the specific sites and networks that made the enclave an
important place for the Japanese American community. See John R. Logan and Harvey L.
Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987).

73
Minutes of LTRA Directors Meeting, dated Aug. 26, 1963, “1963-August” folder, Chamber
Archives. The total population of ethnic Japanese in Los Angeles County, according to the 1960
census, was 77,314. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population and Housing, 1960
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1963).

74
LTRA General Plan, dated Nov. 27, 1963, 16-17, “Little Tokyo” folder, Hirasaki National
Resource Center, JANM.
230
argued that a redeveloped Little Tokyo, “thoughtfully designed…with a high quality
oriental atmosphere,” would boast an ideal geographical position – “within a one-hour’s
drive from where 90% of the Japanese people in Southern California reside at present,”
who “have a sentimental attachment toward Little Tokyo;” an unrivaled concentration of
Japanese American services and community organizations; and “very great potential as a
tourist attraction,” given its location “close to El Pueblo de Los Angeles and
Chinatown.”
75

Figure 3.3. LTRA’s plan for Little Tokyo redevelopment, 1961. Courtesy Los Angeles
Public Library, Herald-Examiner Collection, Box 5892, no. 00068545.

75
LTRA General Plan, 10.
231
To support these assertions, Sumitomo Bank, an LTRA member, asked the
Japanese construction company Kajima International to develop a tentative model of
what a redeveloped Little Tokyo might look like. On display at the Chamber offices, their
drawings detailed a cultural trade center, Japanese garden, and theater surrounded by
high-rise office buildings, with a pagoda marking the intersection of Second and San
Pedro.
76
By 1966, this exoticized commodification of the enclave was being aggressively
pursued by Japanese American businessmen, who hoped the patronage of white tourists
would deter plans for civic center expansion where the community uses of Japanese
Americans had not. Bruce Kaji, LTRA president and head of Merit Savings & Loan,
urged his directors to approve the expenditure of $3000 to retain a public relations firm
that would “tell the story of an exciting ‘Little Tokyo’ and…sell it as a tourist attraction
to benefit the city, property owners, businessmen, and the community in general.”
77
The
means by which Little Tokyo as “tourist attraction” would benefit the community in
general is left unsaid, but it would seem that, as far as the LTRA was concerned, a
tourist-oriented Little Tokyo would be better than none at all.
San Francisco’s Japan-town, like Little Tokyo, was a small neighborhood faced
with an aging building stock and accelerating development pressures. Its redevelopment
in the mid-1960s was covered extensively in the Los Angeles Japanese American press
and seemed to serve as a model for the LTRA’s visions. Financed primarily by large
Japanese corporations, the commercial redevelopment project included a 50,000 square

76
“Parking Problem May Be Met in Li’l Tokio Redevelopment,” Pacific Citizen, Sep. 20, 1963.

77
Letter from Bruce Kaji to Edmund Jung, dated Mar. 23, 1966, Chamber Archives, “1966-
March” folder.
232
foot Kintetsu Shopping Center; a Miyako Hotel with shoji screens, Japanese baths, and a
Rickshaw Bar; and a Cherry Blossom Festival billed as “an annual ethnic attraction to
rival San Francisco’s renowned Chinese New Year celebration.”
78
However, despite the
high hopes of San Francisco Japanese Americans, particularly the merchant community,
the results of this massive redevelopment scheme were decidedly mixed. By 1970, with
the Kabuki Theater “a flop” and the shopping center “still going begging for tenants”
because small Japanese American businesses could not afford the rent, San Francisco’s
experiment was being derided as a “tourist trap.”
79
More importantly, as time went on, it
became clear that elderly Japanese residents had faced hardship in being moved out of the
enclave during redevelopment, and that many of them could not afford to return to the
more upscale Japanese specialty shopping district, with far less housing, that had taken its
place.
The reconstruction of downtowns into tourist-oriented, “themed” commercial
zones is a contemporary commonplace whose early roots can be seen in these cases of
ethnic enclave redevelopment. As residential development in the suburbs expanded
rapidly following World War II, aided by federal mortgage and transportation policies
and economies of scale in the construction industry, many downtown commercial
establishments opened satellite suburban centers with expansive parking facilities to

78
“Miyako Hotel, Kintetsu Center to Open Feb. 15,” Pacific Citizen, Jan. 19, 1968; “San
Francisco New Nihonmachi Awaits Formal Dedication Mar. 29,” Pacific Citizen, Mar. 1, 1968.

79
“San Francisco Japanese Center Shortens Name,” Pacific Citizen, Feb. 13, 1970, 1.

233
serve their increasingly spread-out and car-dependent customers.
80
Eventually, lacking
adequate parking facilities and coping, in some cities, with the collapse of effective
public transit, many retailers closed their central city operations entirely. Together with
the construction of new office parks in the suburbs, the suburbanization of commerce and
middle- to upper-class residents produced a fiscal crisis that city governments sought to
resolve in multiple ways. One of these was urban renewal, in which areas of “blight”
(frequently poor and minority residential neighborhoods) were razed to make way for
new shopping and office complexes that, it was hoped, would refill city coffers with new
sources of tax revenue (see footnote 71).
Another spatial practice, one that has become increasingly ubiquitous over the
past two decades, turned the elements and amenities of the urban landscape – art, historic
buildings, sanitized “ethnic” enclaves – into zones for entertainment and consumption
rather than labor and manufacture, attracting the lucrative attention of tourists and
wealthy shoppers.
81
The most obviously “themed” and tourist-oriented area of post-

80
Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1984) is a particularly good primer on residential and commercial
suburbanization in the United States. In Los Angeles, the process pre-dated World War II to a
fairly significant degree; see Richard Longstreth, From City Center to Mall: Architecture, the
Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997) and
Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997). For an overview of the large-scale homebuilder’s impact on
post-World War II Southern California, see Dana Cuff’s discussion of Fritz Burns and
Westchester in The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001).

81
Sharon Zukin has examined the causes and consequences of this strategy in compelling fashion
in her books, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1989) and Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991). An excellent analysis of the hidden narrative codes in
“reclaimed” urban spaces can be found in M. Christine Boyer’s discussion of South Street
Seaport in chapter eight of The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and
234
redevelopment Little Tokyo is the Japanese Village Plaza, the commercial center that
Little Tokyo’s small businesses finally succeeded in constructing in 1978. Japanese
American small business owners chose a design intended to “present a Japanese façade,”
with blue tile roofs and a dramatic yagura, or Japanese fire watchtower, to mark the
entrance.
82
In the case of Little Tokyo, the LTRA’s focus on tourism seemed to shift the
city planning department’s ideas on Civic Center expansion: the 1965 Los Angeles
Master Plan envisioned a downtown “International Zone” packaging the geographically
proximate neighborhoods of Chinatown, Olvera Street, and Little Tokyo for convenient
tourist consumption.
83
Frank P. Lombardi, the executive officer of the planning
commission, began referring to Little Tokyo as “another element in the renaissance of
downtown Los Angeles,” a revival required by the relocation of downtown businesses to
more suburban districts.
84
Apparently, emphasizing the opportunities for generating new
tax revenues through exotic tourism did help the LTRA keep Little Tokyo intact.
Another important driving force behind the LTRA’s vision of redevelopment was
the economic resurgence of Japan, which could be drawn upon both to help fund
redevelopment projects and to induce the city to support them, as a means of bolstering

Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994). Neil Smith has focused on the
role of returning residents, so-called “urban pioneers,” in the gentrification processes that
accompany urban revitalization strategies, most notably in The New Urban Frontier:
Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996). The role of gentrification in
the enclave will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4.

82
Little Tokyo Development Corporation, Little Tokyo Plaza promotional brochure, Box C-1657,
“Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization, 1977” folder, Los Angeles City (hereafter City)
Archives.

83
Little Tokyo Anti-Eviction Task Force, “Redevelopment in Little Tokyo.”

84
“Little Tokyo Project: An Inspiration,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 24, 1963, A4.
235
its trade relationships with Japanese firms. As Ralph Story pointed out in his program on
Little Tokyo, “[t]he Japanese of Japan now dominate trade in the Pacific.”
85
The Los
Angeles Times reported that more than twenty percent of the city’s international trade in
1968 consisted of goods from Japan and, that same year, Japanese corporations including
Honda, Toyota, Japan Air Lines, and Sumitomo Bank became the biggest financial
contributors to the annual Nisei Week festival in Little Tokyo.
86
In a speech to Japanese
American businessmen, Mayor Sam Yorty commented that he had “been criticized by
some as being the only Mayor with a foreign policy,” but given the importance of
Japanese trade to the city’s economy, he chose to “regard it as a compliment.”
87
Lon
Kurashige has argued that the 1960s saw the revival of “the Pacific Era in American
international trade,” interrupted by World War II and its aftermath, and that “Southern
California Nisei leaders began to…reconstruct themselves as a ‘bridge of understanding’
between the trading partners” – with Little Tokyo as a key support pillar in that bridge.
88

The increased importance of Japan to the economic future of Los Angeles helped
move the city towards a reconsideration of its designs on Little Tokyo, but so did the
potential of Japanese capital to foot the bill for the enclave’s renewal through Japanese
banks (such as Sumitomo) and Japanese construction firms (such as Kajima). In the
context of America’s domestic racial landscape, Japanese Americans’ access to

85
Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, 30.

86
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 142, 190.

87
Press release from the office of Mayor Yorty, dated May 11, 1966, Box D-0013, “Project:
Little Tokyo Redevelopment, 1966 and 1967” folder, City Archives.

88
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 138.
236
international capital on the basis of ethnic affinity became further evidence of their
“model minority” status. A Los Angeles Times editorial greeted the LTRA’s
redevelopment plans with enthusiasm: “When private citizens determine to improve their
sector of the community at their own expense, without appeal for public funds, the
rejoicing is not only in heaven…perhaps it would help to restore the confidence of other
citizen groups in the possibilities of helping themselves to rehabilitate their parts of the
community.”
89
Another editorial, two years later, commented “100% privately
financed…[t]his dramatic community rebirth, two decades after the grievous economic
harm its citizens suffered during their forced World War II evacuation, is a tribute to the
indomitable spirit of this fine minority American community.”
90
The fact that a portion of
the “private financing” behind this stage of Little Tokyo’s redevelopment came from the
booming Japanese economy, a resource not easily accessible to most “other citizen
groups” seems not to have occurred to these commentators.
Members of the LTRA occasionally attempted to appropriate this rhetoric for
their own purposes as well. In 1966 for example, Edmund Jung, a Chinese American
LTRA member and Little Tokyo property owner, wrote a letter to President Johnson.
Johnson had been quoted in an issue of Time stating that the federal government was
willing “to help those who help themselves” in relation to urban renewal. Jung, seeking
financial and technical assistance with a redevelopment feasibility study (without
success), wrote:

89
“Little Tokyo Project: An Inspiration.”

90
“Little Tokyo: A Prideful Example,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 4, 1966, A4.
237
…at this very moment, a minority ethnic group, drawn from Japanese,
Chinese and Jewish backgrounds but Americans all, is prepared to
revitalize a deteriorating downtown area popularly known as Little Tokyo.
If we can achieve the objectives we have proposed, I am confident we can
create a shining example of urban renewal under the banner of private
initiative…to develop an ethnic center that can become a significant
tourist attraction as well as a worthwhile commercial entity.
91

In Jung’s rhetorical construction, Asian Americans are likened to Jews, the model
minority that preceded them in the process of “whitening” and that had operated in a
similar “middleman” role in previous decades. The presence of Jews, Chinese Americans,
and, as we shall see later, Korean Americans in the ranks of the enclave’s businessmen
and property owners is not surprising, given the diversity that had marked the enclave
since before it became known as Little Tokyo. However, prior to the changes in
immigration law enacted in 1965 and the resulting arrival of new Asian immigrants,
Japanese Americans were the dominant Asian American community in Southern
California and the most common example referenced in support of the “model minority”
argument; thus, the best positioned to attempt to capitalize on its assumptions.
92

In the end, despite the best efforts of the LTRA to gain the financial support of
Japanese companies and the conceptual support of both the local and federal state for

91
Letter from Edmund Jung to President Lyndon Johnson, dated Feb. 14, 1966, “1966-February”
folder, Chamber Archives. The President’s quote is from an article entitled “The Administration,
Room at the Bottom” in the Feb. 4, 1966 edition of Time.

92
Once the 1965 legislation went into effect, the composition of the Asian American population
in Los Angeles County changed rapidly, with Japanese Americans moving from the largest Asian
American group in 1970 to the fourth-largest in 1990. The ethnic Chinese population grew 132%
between 1970 and 1980 and 159% between 1980 and 1990, and ethnic Koreans increased 598%
between 1970 and 1980 and 141% between 1980 and 1990. By comparison, the ethnic Japanese
population grew only 13% between 1970 and 1980 and 10% between 1980 and 1990. Adapted
from Ong, Bonacich, and Cheng, The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles, 104. These new
immigrants revitalized Chinatown and created the enclaves of Koreatown and the suburban
centers in the San Gabriel Valley, areas where the related essentialist discourses of biculturalism
and ethnic commodification have shaped new ethnic identities along familiar lines.
238
Little Tokyo’s redevelopment, they failed to achieve the renovated tourist district they
had envisioned. It was the investment money of local Japanese American professionals –
primarily bank officials and physicians – that was pooled to renovate a warehouse at
Second and Central into a parking structure, and to build the four-story Merit Savings &
Loan building at 242 East First Street and the ten-story Civic National Bank Building at
321 East Second Street (a new headquarters for Japanese American medical offices).
93

The LTRA did manage to secure Japanese funding for the fifteen-story Kajima Building
at the corner of First and San Pedro in 1966, which became the new home of the Japanese
Chamber of Commerce, Sumitomi Bank, and the Japanese Consulate. However, these
were all blank, heavy office buildings, representative of the corporate international
modernism that transformed the skylines of many major Western cities during the 1960s
and 1970s. While they (arguably) improved the enclave’s physical and aesthetic
condition, they failed to attract any visitors to Little Tokyo beyond those working in the
buildings.
More grandiose plans for hotels and shopping centers were repeatedly felled by
the inconsistency of city planners. Although the city had publicly supported Little
Tokyo’s redevelopment into a commercial and tourism zone, with multiple statements
from the offices of county supervisors, mayors, and city councilmen, the traffic engineers
still had a mandate to efficiently move an ever-increasing number of cars in and out of
the downtown/Civic Center area. In 1963, Taul Watanabe had to abandon his plans to
construct the Empress Hotel at First and Central due to passage of an ordinance

93
Jack Jones, “Japanese Americans Regaining Prosperity,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 8, 1965, A1.
239
condemning fifty feet on the west side of Central for street widening. Enraged, Watanabe
told representatives of the city planning office: “You want all the property for Civic
Center, and not for private enterprise… I will never let the city have the property. I’ll
fight them with every weapon I’ve got!”
94
Similarly, the city’s plan to condemn the north
side of East First Street was unexpectedly raised again in 1965 and 1968, producing
uncertainty and hesitation among the LTRA’s members.
95
Sighed Edmund Jung, “The
government is a monster with 20 different arms.”
96
Apparently, “private” redevelopment,
though much lauded, provided an easy target for interventions by the racial state in the
name of the public (suburban Anglo) good.
The redevelopment process faced increasing hurdles from these renewed threats;
for instance, Union Church, an LTRA stalwart, considered leaving the neighborhood
entirely because the seemingly insatiable street-widening demands of the city’s traffic
engineers conflicted with its desire to expand.
97
Some LTRA members began to question
whether the only way to prevent Little Tokyo from succumbing to piecemeal destruction
was to give the city a vested interest in the enclave’s success by formally involving it in
redevelopment. In 1968, a delegation approached the area’s city councilman, Gilbert

94
“Li’l Tokio Organizes to Assist City Planners on Redevelopment,” Pacific Citizen, Aug. 5,
1963.

95
“Northside of 1
st
St in Li’l Tokio Spared Seizure,” Pacific Citizen, Dec. 3, 1965; “1st St.
Widening Proposal Snags Li’l Tokio Beautification Plan,” Pacific Citizen, Jan. 19, 1968; “Little
Tokyo Merchants on Northside of E. 1
st
St Get Reprieve,” Pacific Citizen, Nov. 15, 1968.

96
Bob Jackson, “Hong Kong-Born Chinese Seeks to Save Section of Little Tokyo,” Los Angeles
Times, Mar. 9, 1966, A1.

97
Minutes of the LTRA Board of Directors Meeting, Oct. 16, 1967, “1967-October” folder,
Chamber Archives.
240
Lindsay (Roybal having been elected to the House of Representatives in 1962) for help.
98

Lindsay was an African American politician elected largely through the votes of fellow
blacks living in the highly segregated neighborhoods of south-central Los Angeles that
made up the majority of his Ninth District; Little Tokyo was a small outlier at the very
edge of his realm, containing a miniscule number of voters. Nevertheless, Lindsay had
developed a warm relationship with the leading members of the LTRA, who took
advantage of the proximity of his City Hall office to meet with him often and invite him
to the enclave’s major events.
99
Lindsay heard the LTRA’s plea and contacted the
Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), the city’s redevelopment organ.
100

98
Kango Kunitsugu, Little Tokyo Magazine 2.1 (1970), 15. Roybal and Lindsay were two early
examples of the postwar political incorporation of non-Anglos in municipal government. The
growing population of multiple communities of color in Los Angeles during the 1950s and 1960s,
along with their segregation within racially inscribed spaces large enough to dominate political
districts, made it possible for the first time for these groups, either alone or in coalition with each
other, to elect representatives from within their communities rather than Anglo proxies. Roybal,
for example, received support from Jews and Mexican Americans, as well as Japanese
Americans, and Tom Bradley advanced from the City Council to the mayor’s office in 1973
thanks to a coalition of Jews and African Americans. See Raphael J. Sonenshein, Politics in Black
and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

99
Minutes of general LTRA meeting, Dec. 17, 1963, “1963-December” folder, Chamber
Archives; Minutes of LTRA Board of Directors meeting, Feb. 21, 1966, “1966-February” folder,
Chamber Archives; Dave Felton, “Japanese Bless Site for 15-Story Building,” Los Angeles Times
(Jul. 27, 1966), A8. By 1971, Lindsay was sometimes addressed by the honorary title “Mayor of
Little Tokyo” in gratitude for his efforts on behalf of redevelopment.

100
The CRA used an innovative “tax increment” financing method, in which the assessed value
of the property to be redeveloped was the baseline on which property taxes were calculated over
the life of the redevelopment project. As the CRA consolidated parcels and recruited developers,
land values would (ideally) rise. The agency then accumulated property tax revenues on the
“increment” of assessed value above the baseline, and used that to fund debts amassed during the
early phases of redevelopment. This system meant that redevelopment projects would not have to
rely on bond issues for funding; however, it also meant that proposals for development that would
raise land values – usually commercial development – were prioritized over more community-
oriented development. See Mara A. Marks, “Shifting Ground: The Rise and Fall of the Los
Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency,” Southern California Quarterly 86.3 (fall 2004),
241-290.
241
The CRA surveyed fourteen community organizations, including the local chapter
of the Japanese American Citizens League, to determine “whether the Japanese American
community-at-large wanted a viable Little Tokyo providing additional cultural,
recreational, educational and housing facilities plus other improvements.”
101
The answer
was a unanimous yes, demonstrating that the limited economic focus of the LTRA’s
spatial practices had failed to fulfill a broader Japanese American community desire to
maintain the enclave as a cultural and social resource for ethnic identity. Other surveys
undertaken at the behest of the CRA determined that the enclave was indeed in poor
physical condition – Tom Kamei’s engineering firm concluded that over eighty percent of
the buildings were either structurally substandard or deficient and that almost all of these
had been built prior to the 1933 adoption of seismic and fire safety requirements.
102
The
CRA also discovered that the enclave’s residential population had dropped further to a
mere 600 people, many of them older single men (42 percent over the age of fifty-five),
living in the sixteen single-room-occupancy hotels in the neighborhood.
103
However, the
CRA found that Little Tokyo continued to thrive economically, with 325 shops and
businesses in the area, including four financial institutions, sixteen gift shops, sixteen
nomiyas (or bars), and eighty practicing professionals. The surveys indicated that fully

101
Harry Honda, “Milder Redevelopment Approach of Little Tokyo Endorsed by JACL,” Pacific
Citizen, Oct. 18, 1968, 1.

102
Tom Kamei Associates, “Summary Report,” dated Jun. 1969, “Little Tokyo” folder, Hirasaki
National Resource Center, JANM.

103
Ethnically, the population broke down as follows: 64 percent ethnic Japanese, 12 percent
Spanish-surnamed, 8 percent African American, 7 percent white, 4 percent each ethnically
Filipino and Chinese, and 1 percent other. See Little Tokyo Fact Book (Los Angeles: Community
Redevelopment Agency, 1970).
242
half of the Japanese American population of Los Angeles County visited Little Tokyo
two to three times a month to shop, attend services, see their doctor, visit a relative, and
so forth.
104
Convinced that Little Tokyo was a neighborhood with strong non-residential
community support and positioned to benefit economically from redevelopment, the
CRA included Little Tokyo in its application to the federal Neighborhood Development
Program in January 1969.
105
A few months later, Mayor Sam Yorty created the Little
Tokyo Community Development Advisory Committee (LTCDAC), a 34-member panel
intended to represent the community’s voice in the redevelopment project. The LTRA,
most of its membership now shifted to LTCDAC, disbanded.
Despite this clear investment by the CRA in redeveloping Little Tokyo as both a
tourist and community destination, the city’s Planning Committee intervened again with a
recommendation to re-designate Second Street as a secondary highway, widening the
street to 86 feet right through the heart of the enclave.
106
With the help of Lindsay and
CRA officials, who argued that the widening would invalidate their new redevelopment
plan and jeopardize funding, Little Tokyo’s merchants and property owners were able to
convince the City Council to vote against the re-designation. Putting the city, in the form
of the CRA, in the lead of redevelopment seemed to prove a successful strategy to
generate more funding for both community- and commercial-oriented redevelopment and

104
Kunitsugu, Little Tokyo Magazine 2.1 (1970), 14.

105
Ibid., 15-16. The Neighborhood Development Program consisted of two-thirds funding from
the federal government and one-third from the City of Los Angeles.

106
“City Planning Commission Agrees with Little Tokyo,” Little Tokyo Community Development
Advisory Committee Newsletter 1.2 (Oct. 1969), 1; “We Won!,” Little Tokyo Community
Development Advisory Committee Newsletter 1.3 (Jan. 1970), 1.
243
to force city planners to live up to their own promises and respond to the community’s
desires.
The CRA redevelopment period in some ways recapitulated the main themes of
the LTRA period, with Japanese capital investment and tourism- and commercial-
oriented projects proceeding at a far vaster scale. However, the Southern California
Japanese American community as a whole had continued to change since the LTRA was
initiated in 1963, and increasingly demanded a stronger voice in the trajectory of
redevelopment. The pivotal social and political upheavals of the 1960s had not left
Japanese Americans untouched, particularly as the Sansei reached maturity and began to
negotiate their own conception of America’s unstable racial equilibrium and Japanese
Americans’ place in it. For Japanese American Angelenos in the 1970s and 1980s, the
transnational forces of rising Pacific Rim financial power and radical Third World
solidarity movements would become literally grounded in the local spaces and
redevelopment processes of Little Tokyo, placing the ethnic enclave once again at the
center of identity and community formation in an urban context that was increasingly
global.

Welcome to the Little Tokyo Zoo: Between Japan and the CRA
On January 29, 1970, the Los Angeles City Council debated approval of the official CRA
redevelopment plan for Little Tokyo. The plan called for the CRA to initiate a five-phase
process of parcel consolidation and developer selection that would lead to “a 300-room
hotel, a 100-unit motel, a major shopping center with specialty shops and restaurants, a
244
trade center with office and exhibit spaces,…a combination cultural community center,
and a residential area for senior citizens, low income families and finally, general
highrise apartments.”
107
To a greater extent than was true for the LTRA’s plan, the CRA
redevelopment project promised something to satisfy every element of the community –
the long-planned hotel and shopping center for merchants and property owners, a trade
center to boost L.A.’s Pacific Rim profile, housing to ensure dignified quarters for the
aging Issei, and a community center that could serve as a resource for constructing and
reinforcing Japanese American identity well into the future. For two hours,
“representatives of community organizations, property owners, businessmen, ministers,
and just plain citizens…marched up to the microphone and one by one declared their total
support.”
108
The City Council then voted unanimously to approve the plan. The chairman
of the CRA Board, astonished at the harmonious hearing and speedy approval, said in
wonder, “This was the most refreshing hearing in the 20-year history of redevelopment in
Los Angeles.”
109

This image of order and unity presents a picture startlingly different from the
extended and acrimonious debates typically chronicled in the literature on urban
redevelopment, in which communities of color fight (often futilely) to preserve their
neighborhoods from the indifference and/or greed of the racial state and corporate capital.
In Little Tokyo, this amicable and unusual state of affairs was the result of the years of

107
Kunitsugu, Little Tokyo Magazine 2.1 (1970), 18.

108
Kango Kunitsugu, Little Tokyo Magazine 2.2 (1970), 63.

109
“Triumph!,” Little Tokyo Community Development Advisory Committee Newsletter, Feb.
1970, 2.
245
uncertainty accompanying LTRA redevelopment efforts, which finally seemed to be at an
end; it was also relatively short-lived. Within three years, the English-language editor of
the Rafu Shimpo wrote bitterly about the results of “official” redevelopment in the
enclave: “Step right up, folks. Welcome to the Little Tokyo Zoo. See the natives sip tea
and eat raw fish. Watch the exotic women and girls as they shuffle down the street in
their colorfully embroidered kimonos.”
110
Community activists, many of them Sansei
students impacted by the nascent Asian American Movement, formed an Anti-
Redevelopment Task Force and later the Little Tokyo Peoples’ Rights Organization
(LTPRO) to protest what they saw as the CRA’s broken promises and the dominance of
large Japanese corporations in the redevelopment project.
111
Irritated merchants and
property owners, the former LTRA members who had so long sought to renew the

110
Ellen Endo, “Housing Now,” Rafu Shimpo, May 18, 1973.

111
The origins of the Asian American Movement are generally dated to the 1968 student strike
for ethnic studies at San Francisco State University, although as described previously Japanese
Americans were active in student and civil rights protests prior to that date (for example, Nisei
Yuri Kochiyama was a close friend of Malcolm X and a supporter of the Black Panther Party and
Puerto Rican independence). Deeply influenced by the Orientalist expressions of anti-Asian
racism that accompanied the Vietnam War, the Asian American Movement sought to resist
militarism and imperialism, and to overcome the differences among Asian-descended
communities in the U.S. – Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, Korean, and later Southeast Asian – on
the basis of their shared experiences of exclusion, discrimination, and internal colonialism. The
Black Panther Party was an important model for many Asian American activists, and in fact much
of the Asian American Movement was explicitly Third World in its ideological outlook. See
Karen Umemoto, “’On Strike!” San Francisco State College Strike, 1968-1969: The Role of
Asian American Students,” Amerasia 15.1 (1989), 3-41, and William Wei, The Asian American
Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). Gidra, the Asian American student
publication that began at UCLA in 1969, was produced largely by Japanese American student
activists in Los Angeles, several of whom participated in anti-redevelopment organizing in Little
Tokyo.
246
economic potential of the neighborhood, reacted to the activists’ critique by disparaging
their “emotional appeal” and calling them “a disgrace to the community.”
112

The disintegration of unified community support for the spatial practices of CRA
redevelopment was probably inevitable, as the agency quickly discovered it had promised
more than it could deliver in Little Tokyo and made choices that alienated key
components of redevelopment’s constituency. After what had seemed a fast start, the
more community-oriented aspects of redevelopment encountered increasingly
problematic delays. The 350-unit subsidized senior housing complex was seen as a long-
overdue improvement in living conditions for the aging Issei who wished to stay in Little
Tokyo for its affordability, lack of language barriers, close-knit community, and relevant
goods and services. The breadth of the Japanese American community’s support for the
project is demonstrated by the partnership formed to finance it: the Japanese American
Citizens’ League, the Southern California Buddhist Church Federation, the Southern
California Christian Church Federation, and the Southern California Gardeners
Federation.
113
Yet the project was brought to a halt by President Nixon’s 1972
moratorium on federal funding of Section 236 housing projects for the elderly. The
commercial center intended to house Little Tokyo small businesses displaced by the
construction of the hotel likewise ran into the same type of problems that had hobbled the
LTRA’s plans. Two development companies comprised of local merchants tried and

112
Ellen Endo, “Chamber Applauds Hotel Project,” Rafu Shimpo, Dec. 12. 1973, 1; Lynn
Simross, “Little Tokyo Image Slowly Changing,” Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1977, G1.

113
“350-unit, high-rise apartment for senior citizens in two years revealed,” Pacific Citizen, Sep.
18, 1970, 3.
247
failed to secure financing for the shopping mall’s construction.
114
The first area of the
redevelopment project to be cleared and consolidated, the shopping center was originally
scheduled to open in 1972; it was not finally completed until 1978, well after the hotel.
Despite these problems, the process of choosing a developer for the luxury hotel
moved forward rapidly. The CRA gave first priority to proposals from those who had
owned property on the site before the CRA purchased and consolidated the parcels. By
December 1972, four proposals were selected for in-depth review by the CRA’s board:
Hiroshima Kenjinkai, a community organization made up of Japanese Americans whose
ancestors came from Hiroshima prefecture; the Sun Investment Corporation, made up of
local property owners; Asiamerica Inc., a company formed by attorney Frank Chuman
and architect David Hyun, both of whom had worked in Little Tokyo for several years;
and Kajima International, at the time the fourth-largest construction company in the
world. Kajima’s proposal was chosen over those of the local groups – in a particularly
ironic moment, CRA Administrator Richard Mitchell commented that Kajima won not
because of its size or expertise but its “great personal interest in Little Tokyo.”
115
The
announcement of the result produced the first open fight over the unintended
consequences of redevelopment.
Chuman took the highly unusual step of writing a letter to Mitchell and copying it
to the local Japanese American press, demanding that the right of first negotiation be
taken back from Kajima and granted to Asiamerica Inc. instead. He pointed out that
Asiamerica had more strictly followed the requirements of the CRA’s request for

114
“Revamped Little Tokyo is Nearer,” Southern California Business, May 25, 1977, 1.

115
“Kajima to build Little Tokyo hotel,” Kashu Mainichi, Dec. 21, 1972, 1.
248
proposals and had secured funding “from a multi-billion dollar United States Corporation
with additional opportunities by local residents of the Japanese American community to
participate.”
116
Chuman seemed most aggravated by Mitchell’s comment about Kajima’s
“interest” in the enclave, arguing that Japanese corporate executives move around as they
are reassigned while the Asiamerica partners “consider Los Angeles and its surrounding
communities our home with our education, families, friends, church affiliations and
community participation rooted in Little Tokyo and Southern California for the past 70
years.” Chuman had spent the previous fourteen years operating on retainer for the
Japanese Consulate, but there was no question in his mind who really had roots in Little
Tokyo – Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans, not Japanese corporations.
117

The response to Chuman’s letter was immediate and explosive; indeed,
columnists for both of the daily L.A. Japanese American papers accused him of opening a
Pandora’s box. Writing in the Kashu Mainichi, Kats Kunitsugu (wife of the CRA project
manager and thus hardly a disinterested observer) chastised Chuman for undermining the
bicultural “bridge of understanding” by raising “the spectre of an octopus-like Japanese
Zaibatsu ‘takeover’ of Little Tokyo, deliberately driving a divisive wedge between the
natives and people from Japan.”
118
Ellen Endo, the Sansei English-language editor of the
Rafu Shimpo, took the opposite tack, arguing that Chuman’s letter had brought a flood of
previously unexpressed doubts about redevelopment into the open. “Looking

116
“Protests selection of Kajima,” Kashu Mainichi, Dec. 26, 1972, 1.

117
Frank F. Chuman Papers, Box 557, folder 3, Special Collections, University of California, Los
Angeles.

118
Kats Kunitsugu, “Carrousel,” Kashu Mainichi, Jan. 16, 1973, 1.
249
retrospectively,” she wrote, “perhaps it was too good to be true. At the outset, property
owners and merchants were under the impression Little Tokyo would get a general face-
lift” that would “prevent a wholesale take-over by the Civic Center octopus.”
119
But
“today, the property owners and other small businessmen hold serious doubts as to the
merits of the plan. They fear the prospect of large corporations acquiring large parcels of
Little Tokyo land and forcing the smaller businessman out.” A former CRA community
relations specialist who quit in frustration shared Endo’s sense that the initial, more
modest vision of redevelopment had been lost with regard to the hotel project: “I think
we all thought it was going to be sort of a replacement for the old Miyako Hotel, which
was a small, five-story, community-based hotel, not this gigantic thing that dwarfs
everything. And we thought it would encompass community participation, that we could
have investors from the community.”
120
Even the Civic Center News, a downtown paper
that generally promoted development, reported that the CRA’s initial “order of priorities”
privileged the senior housing, community center, and small business mall over the hotel;
but, “[i]ntentionally or not, the CRA’s priorities have shifted. The Kajima Hotel, funded
by big money from Japan, is now first priority.”
121

119
Ellen Endo, “Open End-O – Part I: Don’t Do Me Any Favors,” Rafu Shimpo, Jan. 22, 1973.

120
Interview with Jim Matsuoka, Aug. 5, 2006.

121
“Little Tokyo Redevelopment Rekindles Fire,” Civic Center News, Nov. 27, 1973, 7.
250

Figure 3.4. The New Otani hotel, built by the East-West Development Corporation in the
mid-1970s, looms over the historic streetscape of East First Street in 2007. The large grey
building behind the hotel is the Caltrans Building, designed by Pritzker-winning architect
Thom Mayne and completed in 2006. Photograph by author.

Combined with the lack of progress on other fronts, the hotel development
generated profound waves of distrust and disillusionment among Japanese American
Angelenos that altered the terms on which redevelopment would progress. The situation
deteriorated further when the CRA sent a delegation to Japan to convince other Japanese
corporations to join Kajima in funding the hotel.
122
The result was the East West
Development Corporation, a coalition of thirty Japanese corporations including banks,
trading companies, securities firms, and real estate and engineering companies. Kango
Kunitsugu insisted that East West was a “California corporation” and that “local citizens”

122
Art Seidenbaum, “A Hotel Grows in Little Tokyo,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 20, 1977, VI 1.
251
were welcome to invest.
123
In response, redevelopment critics, including at least two
former CRA employees, formed the Little Tokyo Anti-Eviction Task Force to bring
attention to “the crucial fact that money and economic opportunities promised to the local
community are now finding their way into the hands of foreign corporations.”
124
They
pointed out that less than three percent of the East West “California” corporation
remained available for local investment after all the shares controlled by Japanese firms
(and one U.S. real estate firm which owned three percent) were calculated.
When the time came for the East West executives and CRA administrators to
gather for the hotel groundbreaking, the Anti-Eviction Task Force was ready. One
hundred people gathered to picket the ceremony – elderly Issei held up signs saying
“Housing Now – Hotel Later,” while Nisei tradesmen protested the CRA’s failure to live
up to its affirmative action promises in the granting of construction contracts.
125
Several
Sansei, who made up the majority of the protesters, climbed to the roof of a nearby
building to hang a banner reading “Defend Little Tokyo.” Asian American student
activists sensitized to the brutalizing impacts of imperialist expansion both at home and
abroad by the Vietnam War were particularly appalled at the wartime record of Kajima
founder Morinosuke Kajima, who began his construction career building railroads for the
Japanese army in Manchuria and Southeast Asia during World War II.
126
So, when the

123
“CRA defends Kajima transaction procedure,” Rafu Shimpo, Oct. 31, 1973, 1.

124
“CRA moves anti-LT citizens,” Kashu Mainichi, Nov. 17, 1973, 1.

125
Dwight Chuman, “100 picket hotel groundbreaking,” Rafu Shimpo, Sep. 27, 1974.

126
Little Tokyo Anti-Eviction Task Force, “Corporation history reviewed,” Rafu Shimpo, Oct. 1,
1974.
252
speeches began, they launched into a whistled rendition of the theme from “Bridge on the
River Kwai” to make their point about exploitative foreign occupation of the enclave.
127

For the protesters at the groundbreaking, there was no way to serve as a bridge for
Japanese capital without being drowned by it.
CRA project manager Kango Kunitsugu had claimed that redevelopment’s
secondary goal, after creating “a cohesive community,” was making “Little Tokyo a vital
link for Pacific and Asian areas with the United States.”
128
Much like the Japanese
American community, CRA redevelopment was divided between a vision of Little Tokyo
as the wellspring of local Japanese American community and one that saw the
neighborhood as a key node in the increasing flow of Pacific Rim capital. Many
merchants and property owners saw Japanese capital as the only funding available to
“save” Little Tokyo. Edwin Hiroto, a member of LTCDAC, stated that “it was accepted
as necessary from the earliest planning that the assistance, cooperation and participation
by the large Japanese corporations was required. Especially was this evident for the larger
projects where financial ability and management know-how were needed.” Furthermore,
Hiroto argued, Japanese investment should be seen as evidence of “their desire to be
‘good citizens’ of J-town” and “to improve their public image by becoming involved in
local affairs.”
129
The Chamber and the Little Tokyo Businessmen’s Association (LTBA)
thus sought to counter community outcry over the Japanese corporate presence in the

127
Ellen Endo, “Shinto rites launch construction of 21-story hotel,” Rafu Shimpo (undated), copy
provided by Jim Matsuoka; interview with Jim Matsuoka, Aug. 5, 2006.

128
“Little Tokyo Redevelopment Project Approved by U.S. Govt.”

129
Edwin C. Hiroto, “A Letter to the Editor,” Rafu Shimpo, Nov. 10, 1973.
253
hotel, and prevent the departure of any investors fearing negative publicity, by issuing a
joint public statement supporting Kajima and the CRA.
130
Mitsuhiko Shimizu, business
owner and member of both organizations, argued that “without the Japanese companies
we in Little Tokyo would never be able to obtain enough capital to rebuild the area
ourselves.”
131

The executives of the East West Development Company repeatedly presented the
hotel project as just this sort of charitable act, rather than a smart financial investment, in
their comments to the local press. At the groundbreaking ceremony, East West president
Takeo Atsumi claimed that “the hotel investment is not merely an economic and profit-
minded venture,” but “a contribution to the local community” intended to produce
“international goodwill between the United States and Japan.”
132
Although the CRA’s
own projections had claimed that a 400-room hotel should be able to operate profitably in
Little Tokyo, East West vice-president Nagahisa Ono insisted that the company did not
expect any profits for seven to ten years, “a terrible return on investment, almost
minus.”
133
H. Cooke Sunoo, an anti-redevelopment activist who later became the CRA’s
Little Tokyo project manager, came to accept this argument:
Dr. Kajima felt he owed it to the Japanese people in America to give them
something to be proud of, and Little Tokyo in its kind of shambles wasn’t

130
Ellen Endo, “Chamber Applauds Hotel Project,” Rafu Shimpo, Dec. 12, 1973, 1.

131
Endo, “Chamber Applauds Hotel Project.”

132
Endo, “Shinto rites launch construction of 21-story hotel.”

133
Real Estate Research Corporation, “Market Analysis and Projected Operating Experience,”
report prepared for CRA in Nov. 1971, Frank F. Chuman Papers, Box 560, folder 2, Special
Collections, University of California, Los Angeles; Nancy Yoshihara, “Otani: High Rise, Low
Profile,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 27, 1977, F1.
254
something to be proud of… there were a lot better investments that Kajima
could have made than Little Tokyo if he was simply looking for Japanese
corporate participation in the United States.
134

Not everyone in Little Tokyo shared this view, however. One prominent anti-
redevelopment activist noted “that’s not an uncommon M.O., to have a benevolent front
to it,” while another stated “at that time, it was hard for Japanese capital to make a
beachhead in this country, because there was still a lot of prejudice, right? So it was very
convenient for them to use Little Tokyo…They came in, it was downtown so they got
some downtown property, they had a downtown base to work from, and then eventually
they became accepted.”
135
Mike Davis, in his book City of Quartz, has pointed out that
overseas investment in downtown Los Angeles was led by Canada in the late 1970s, but
that by 1986 Japanese companies owned fourteen major properties in downtown Los

134
Interview with H. Cooke Sunoo, former Little Tokyo CRA project manager, Jul. 17, 2006.
Sunoo’s trajectory through the redevelopment process illuminates the elasticity of the borders that
separated pro-redevelopment and anti-redevelopment groups over time in Little Tokyo. A
Korean-American originally from the Bay Area, Sunoo was a recent planning graduate when he
found the Anti-Eviction Task Force in 1972 through his involvement with the Asian American
Movement and his interest in making redevelopment a citizen-controlled process. After Tom
Bradley was elected mayor of Los Angeles, Sunoo went to work for Bradley on issues of urban
development, becoming the Mayor’s liaison with LTCDAC. Finally, after two replacements for
Kango Kunitsugu only managed to increase community disaffection, Sunoo was asked to become
the new CRA project manager for Little Tokyo in 1978. Though his activist past and his genuine
sensitivity to community concerns did much to smooth the path of redevelopment in the
neighborhood through the 1980s, his understanding of what was at stake in the redevelopment
process, and who benefited most from it, remains very different from those of fellow activists
who remained outside the system.

135
Interview with Evelyn Yoshimura and Joe Iwamura (pseudonym), Jul. 21, 2006.

255
Angeles, and by 1990 twenty-five (in a downtown between 75 and 90 percent foreign-
owned).
136

Acting as the bridge for this influx of Japanese capital to the enclave was not
without its benefits, especially for those Issei and Nisei who spoke Japanese, had
relatives in Japan, or otherwise felt strongly connected to their ancestral homeland, and
yet had struggled with shame in the aftermath of the war.
137
Anti-redevelopment activist
Evelyn Yoshimura felt sympathy for the merchants who facilitated Japanese corporate
investment; as she pointed out, “Japan was really weak, and anybody who you identified
with Japan, you know, that was like shoddy products…and suddenly it was the biggest
capitalist power in the world, for a little while…And to hitch your wagon to that, there
was a certain sense of pride, especially among the business sector in the community, like
yeah, that’s us, we’re proud.”
138
A letter to the Rafu Shimpo newspaper from a local
Sansei argued with reference to the hotel that “we should be proud to have such an
establishment from our own Mother Country. After all, we are Japanese Americans, and
‘Japanese’ comes before ‘American.’”
139
This mentality mirrored the pre-World War II
situation, as one community activist noted in the early 1970s: “they’re setting up a sort of

136
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage
Books, 1992), 135-136; Dick Turpin, “The Foreign Dominance,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 6,
1986, A2.

137
For an account of Little Tokyo redevelopment that focuses on these more positive elements,
see Miya Shichinohe Suga, “Little Tokyo Reconsidered: Transformation of Japanese American
Community through the Early Redevelopment Projects,” The Japanese Journal of American
Studies 15 (2004): 238-256.

138
Interview with Evelyn Yoshimura and Joe Iwamura (pseudonym), Jul. 21, 2006.

139
Aileen Ambo, “Letters to the Editor,” Rafu Shimpo, Nov. 12, 1973.
256
social system where the Japanese Consul is becoming the social leader again, and he’s
reasserting his leadership.”
140
Indeed, the active participation of local Japanese
Americans, frequently Nisei, in Japanese companies sometimes muddied the waters of
corporate nationality. As Cooke Sunoo put it, “[w]hen it comes to Little Tokyo, to draw a
distinction between foreign capital and local money is a little misleading.”
141
George
Aratani, for example, the wealthy Nisei who founded Mikasa Chinaware and Kenwood
Electronics, was also a vice-president of Kajima.
142

Redevelopment also produced complications, likewise grounded in the enclave,
which undermined this revival of a trans-Pacific “bridge” identity for Japanese
Americans. Perhaps the primary complication was economic competition. Although some
local business owners, like Aratani, profited from their connections to the Japanese
companies involved in redevelopment, the majority found themselves faced with higher
rents and increased competition for consumers, particularly from the high-end stores
recruited for the hotel project. “Although a few local merchants will be able to cash in on
the foreign tourist trade,” journalist Ellen Endo argued, “most will not. In fact, there’s a
good chance these merchants won’t even be in Little Tokyo to complain about it.”
143

Endo’s prophecy was correct, as Japanese tourists and executives generally frequented

140
Jim H. Matsuoka, “Little Tokyo, Searching the Past and Analyzing the Future,” Roots: An
Asian American Reader, ed. Amy Tachiki (Los Angeles: Continental Graphics, 1971): 322-334,
331.

141
Howard Kim, “Little Tokyo Watches Rapid Growth Trend,” Downtown News, Feb. 22, 1983,
1.

142
Kats Kunitsugu, “Carrousel,” Kashu Mainichi, Jan. 16, 1973, 1.

143
Ellen Endo, “Little Tokyo Subplot,” Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 22, 1976.
257
upscale clubs and restaurants that catered specifically to their needs and ignored the
mom-and-pop shops that made up the cultural heart of the Japanese American enclave.
Also complicating a “bicultural” identity was the changing, fragmenting position
of Asian Americans in the racial hierarchy of the United States. Compared to other Asian
groups, post-1965 Japanese immigration to the United States was quite limited (see
footnote 92), which meant that Japanese Americans’ unquestioned leadership position
within the local Asian American community was challenged even as new cultural and
linguistic connections with Japan were limited. Simultaneously, Japan’s economic
resurgence produced a spasm of race-inflected insecurity in the white American
mainstream and a revitalization of old stereotypes of the marauding imperialist “Jap.”
144

Japan-bashing – visible, in its most extreme form, in the murder of Vincent Chin –
likewise moved many Japanese Americans to emphasize their American past and present
in an effort to intervene in this renovation of the “forever foreign” stereotype.
145

The Japanese who visited or worked in Little Tokyo, often wealthy tourists or
businessmen on temporary assignment, inadvertently produced another roadblock to the
revitalization of a bicultural identity in the form of class difference. As Rafu journalist
Dwight Chuman pointed out, “many of the ‘Shosha’ [Japanese corporate executives] in
the So. Calif. area…regard the Japanese American as the ‘trash who had to leave

144
Examples of Japan-bashing could be found in multiple media in the late 1980s and early
1990s. See, for example, Robert Neff, Paul Magnusson, and William J. Holstein, “What
Americans Think of Japan Inc.,” Business Week 8 (Aug. 1989): 51; Gung Ho, directed by Ron
Howard (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures,1986); and Michael Crichton, Rising Sun (New York:
Knopf, 1992), as well as the 1993 film version starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes.

145
Vincent Chin was a Chinese American beaten to death in 1982 by two unemployed
autoworkers in Detroit who assumed he was Japanese. The leniency with which the killers were
treated by the criminal courts motivated a wave of outrage and activism among Asian Americans.
258
Japan.’”
146
A Little Tokyo property owner complained to Ellen Endo that “the Nisei is
often looked down upon by Japanese business executives who would rather deal with
‘Hakujin’ firms.”
147
One Japanese American woman wrote a letter to Gilbert Lindsay
claiming that the Japanese staff at a Little Tokyo restaurant engaged in “discriminatory
treatment towards Japanese-Americans” and that, more generally, there were
“antagonistic feelings and resentment between Japanese-Americans and the Japanese
now doing business in your area.”
148
Another blamed the tension on the “huge expense
accounts” of Japanese businessmen, explaining “you can see it in the restaurants down
there. You can tell, the ‘natives’ eat on one side of the street and they eat on the other.”
149

Finally, the bicultural “bridge” role of Japanese Americans was undermined by
the expedient mobility of Japanese capital itself. Activist Evelyn Yoshimura argued that
Japanese corporations invested in the enclave when it was convenient to do so, but the
companies and the Japanese Consulate had moved on from that foothold upon gaining
broader acceptance and economic leverage. “The way they got mainstream, I think, was
coming through Little Tokyo,” she said, “and unfortunately the people in our community,
the leaders, I think they thought they were here for good, that they were gonna stay, and
they’re not.”
150
In other words, Little Tokyo was not “home” to these companies in the

146
Dwight Chuman, “Staffer Writes Rebuttal,” Rafu Shimpo, Nov. 18, 1973.

147
Endo, “Open End-O – Part II: Don’t Do Me Any Favors.”

148
Letter from Joyce Morita to Councilman Gilbert W. Lindsay, dated Mar. 9, 1981, Box C-1663,
“Yagura Ichiban, 1981” folder, City Archives.

149
Matsuoka, “Little Tokyo, Searching the Past and Analyzing the Future,” 331.

150
Interview with Evelyn Yoshimura and Joe Iwamura (pseudonym), Jul. 21, 2006.
259
way that it was to local Japanese Americans, whether they lived and worked in the
neighborhood or not. For Jim Matsuoka, this was the point he had tried, and failed, to
make his former boss Kango Kunitsugu understand: “In a way I felt sorry for Kango… he
saw corporate Japan as a savior, which I saw as a terrible mistake. I said, ‘You ride the
tiger, you get eaten by the tiger,’ you know?...They can leave and we get stuck with their
problems.”
151

Riding a Boom: From Public Art to the Preservation Consensus
Ironically, “riding the tiger” of Japanese-funded redevelopment did indeed gain the
enclave some protection from further Civic Center encroachment, although not
necessarily from the grand designs of a city elbowing its way into position on the world
stage. As Mike Davis has noted, Mayor Bradley was “unflagging in promotion of the
movement of free capital across the Pacific,” granting “special zoning exemptions and
development-right subsidies to foreign investors Downtown.”
152
In addition, after the
passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, redevelopment became an increasingly important
element of the city’s economic policy and, according to Davis, its cultural policy as well:
“As Los Angeles…has rushed forward to Manhattanize its skylines (increasingly with
offshore capital), it has attempted to Manhattanize its cultural superstructure as
well…single-mindedly directed toward the creation of a cultural monumentality to

151
Interview with Jim Matsuoka, Aug. 5, 2006.

152
Davis, City of Quartz, 136-137.
260
support the sale of the city to overseas investors and affluent immigrants.”
153
Given
increasingly free rein to thus reshape downtown Los Angeles and its environs,
administrator Edward Helfeld said the CRA “began to ride a boom.”
154
The agency’s
ambitions for Little Tokyo grew, the enclave becoming a canvas on which the CRA could
begin reshaping Los Angeles into a center of global finance and culture.
The Little Tokyo redevelopment plan required developers to commit one half
percent of the total project cost (eventually increased to one percent) to public art, adding
the sculptural commentary of an increasingly commodified international art market to the
architectural statements of global capital that were physically remaking the enclave.
155

Even the most community-oriented aspects of redevelopment were not immune; for
example, in the case of the Japanese American Community and Cultural Center
(JACCC), the CRA’s focus on international culture with a capital “C” directly
contravened the community’s wishes. CRA planners contacted renowned Japanese
American artist Isamu Noguchi about creating a statue for the center of the JACCC
complex. Noguchi reviewed the plans and determined that he would design a sculpture,
as well as a modernist plaza to properly display it. To create the plaza, Noguchi literally
erased a gymnasium for martial arts and Japanese American basketball leagues, part of
the site plan from the beginning and a long-standing request by many community groups.

153
Ibid., 22. Proposition 13 limited increases in assessed taxes on residential property, a major
source of income for municipal governments in California.

154
Marks, “Shifting Ground,” 273-4.

155
Michael Several, Little Tokyo, Public Art of Los Angeles Series (Los Angeles: Cultural Affairs
Department, 1994); Suzanne Muchnic, “CRA – A Bold New World Downtown?,” Los Angeles
Times, Oct. 6, 1985, B3.
261
But, as Cooke Sunoo, said, “This is Isamu Noguchi…he’s at that international level…
and I was thinking, this is fabulous, a Noguchi plaza right here, this is so wonderful I
can’t believe it!”
156
And so the prestige factor of Noguchi’s name trumped the
community’s wishes for their own community center. The plaza stands, a forlorn, sun-
baked space where homeless men sleep fitfully in the afternoons. The gymnasium, as
discussed in the following chapter, remains an as-yet-unrealized dream.
By the early 1980s, with several buildings completed, discontent over
redevelopment was less sharp than it had been at the height of protests over the hotel yet
also more widespread. It had become clear to activists and merchants alike that most of
the economic benefits of redevelopment had accrued to corporations outside the enclave
rather than to small business within it, and reappeared only in the form of Japanese
corporate donations to Nisei Week or the JACCC. The New Otani Hotel and its
companion Weller Court shopping mall were the anchors of a consumer playground
targeting Japanese tourists and executives at the expense of Japanese Americans’
community landmarks and sense of belonging. Spurred partly by the 1985 celebration of
Little Tokyo’s centennial and partly by the inter-generational reconciliation that arose out
of redress activism, a growing consensus for preservation developed within the Japanese
American community. Local Nisei businessmen like Bruce Kaji and Archie Miyatake,
both early members of LTRA who had long championed CRA redevelopment and
Japanese investment, joined with more politically progressive anti-redevelopment
activists to put a final stop to the city’s long-planned, long-delayed, widening of East

156
Interview with H. Cooke Sunoo, Jul. 17, 2006.
262
First Street. Kaji argued that since “[t]he rest of Little Tokyo is developing into a very
modern design complex,” the “community feels that the entire north side (of 1
st
Street)
should remain intact, and the turn-of-the-century buildings should be retained…This
would preserve what Little Tokyo used to look like, and remind us of our roots.”
157

Figure 3.5. Two of the thirteen buildings in the Little Tokyo National Historic Landmark
District along the north side of East First Street, 2007. Photograph by author.

Faced with the enclave’s “Japanization” within Little Tokyo, and Japan-bashing
without, it is not surprising that Japanese Americans should embark upon the memorial
practice of preservation, returning their attention to the concept of roots, the immigrant
struggle that marked them as American. Also, given the increasingly distant suburbs in
which Japanese Americans lived and worked, the need for the shared space of the enclave

157
Holley, “Old Temple, Church Symbolize Efforts to Preserve Little Tokyo.”
263
was felt ever more sharply. Sansei Irene Hirano noted that, “[f]or a community that’s
scattered throughout the Los Angeles and Orange County areas, having a sense of
community by actually having a physical location is part of” the foundation of
contemporary Japanese American identity.
158
In 1986, this broad coalition, with the help
of the Los Angeles Conservancy, succeeded in having the thirteen aging buildings along
the north side of East First Street between San Pedro and Central placed on the National
Register of Historic Places. Kaji and Hirano simultaneously collaborated on creating a
museum about the Japanese American experience, which eventually opened in the old
Nishi temple at the corner of First and Central. An emphasis on remembering and
retaining their shared heritage, it turned out, could go far in mending generational,
political, and class differences within the contemporary Japanese American community.
Getting the city to agree was another matter. The CRA itself converted to the idea
of preserving East First Street, in part through the leadership of project manager H.
Cooke Sunoo, whose “own personal philosophy towards preservation really took a turn”
at this time.
159
Thus the CRA’s request for development proposals of the northside block
mandated preservation of the thirteen buildings. Little Tokyo’s elected officials, however,
took quite another stand, in particular councilman Gilbert Lindsay. Lindsay responded to
community efforts to place the First Street block on the National Register by saying, “I
think they’re making a big mistake. To some degree the property there, the buildings et
cetera, do not merit retaining…I’m not going to argue that just because it was sentimental

158
Roxane Arnold, “Little Tokyo,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 26, 1984, B1.

159
Interview with H. Cooke Sunoo, Jul. 17, 2006.
264
during the war that we should keep them.”
160
Lindsay instead preferred to support a
development proposal by Jerry Snyder that called for demolishing eleven of the historic
structures and moving the old Union Church from San Pedro to Central to make room for
a parking garage. Community outcry was so heated, and so unified among both the
Japanese American and Anglo property owners on the block, that Lindsay was forced to
change his position.
Less than a year later, the community found itself having to fight Mayor Bradley
as well when he contravened the counsel of both the CRA and LTCDAC to recommend
demolition of the San Pedro Firm Building on the historic block. Little Tokyo activists
again turned to Lindsay for help, who replied more boldly this time: “[t]he whole area
should be demolished…That’s their hard luck. If they can’t convince the mayor, there’s
nothing I can do about that.”
161
Brian Kito, a third-generation merchant on the historic
block, could hardly contain his frustration. “The fight we do every year or two, it seems,”
he said. “It just repeats itself, year after year. It’s almost like waiting for our section to be
weak enough so as to not even bother.”
162

And yet the city was eventually able to unify around preservation in the same way
that the Japanese American community had, though not for the same reasons. By the
early 1990s, Japanese companies, according to Lon Kurashige, “concerned by ‘Japan-

160
Cathleen Decker, “Development Plans Refuel Old Political Fires in Little Tokyo,” Los Angeles
Times, Apr. 14, 1986, A1. During his years as redevelopment kingpin in the enclave, Lindsay had
been “promoted” from honorary Mayor to Emperor (and sometimes even Shogun) of Little
Tokyo. He did not respond well to the small community going against his wishes.

161
Cathleen Decker, “Little Tokyo Takes on City Hall Again,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 28, 1986,
A1.

162
Cathleen Decker, “Development Plans Refuel Old Political Fires in Little Tokyo.”
265
bashing’ incidents abroad and constrained by recession at home” had “developed a new
style of American investment” that projected a community-minded image.
163
Municipal
organizations such as the Cultural Affairs Department and the CRA, under new project
manager Gloria Uchida, had to find ways to sustain Little Tokyo’s cultural and artistic
distinction under these evolving conditions, while the racial strife of the 1992 civil unrest
further altered the redevelopment equation. Supporting the landscape of memory in Little
Tokyo was a solution that fit these new realities. For instance, when the Japanese
American National Museum (JANM) opened in 1992 it “attracted the same outside
sources behind Little Tokyo redevelopment” – the CRA provided the site and “Japanese
multinational corporations pledged generous financial contributions.”
164
After that, Little
Tokyo redevelopment gradually shifted in focus from a bulldozing of the existing enclave
to an almost suffocating piling-on of memory artifacts – a sidewalk historic timeline of
the enclave, the Go for Broke memorial to Japanese American veterans, a reproduction of
Toyo Miyatake’s internment camp camera – and the promotion of ethnic, historic, and
cultural venues in the neighborhood, including the Museum of Contemporary Art at the
Geffen Contemporary, right next door to JANM’s new pavilion.
Thomas Holt has pointed out that in the post-industrial global marketplace, “all
commodities are cultural, and they thrive on real and simulated differences – on
containable signs of difference, on distinction.”
165
One of these containable signs of

163
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 208.

164
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 209.

165
Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 107.
266
difference is ethnicity, and it can be a valuable commodity in our economy of symbols.
The CRA has supported ongoing historic and cultural preservation efforts in Little Tokyo
in part because the “different-ness” of its cultural landscape makes such an investment
profitable. According to the CRA, the historic buildings and ethnic flavor of Little Tokyo
help make it a “vibrant, destination neighborhood,” on the basis of both its ethnically-
defined attractions and its general association with art, culture, and museums.
166

However, in order to be, as Holt puts it, “containable,” the narratives these enclave
attractions tell must be limited to a single ethnic group, following a predictable storyline
that Ralph Story would have recognized about immigrant struggle followed by successful
assimilation in a society that has moved “beyond race.” Thus the enclave’s limited
incorporation of “Bronzeville” into the physical landscape of memory (see Chapter 2),
and the erasure of the racial diversity and leftist activism that informed prewar Issei and
Nisei life (see Chapter 1), in favor of veterans, ethnic merchants, and the civil nightmare
of internment that will never happen again. Preservation as a memorial practice unified
multiple factions, but also largely sidestepped an alternate vision of Little Tokyo that
recognized a richer and more diverse past and present. This was the vision of the enclave
embodied in the activism of the Little Tokyo Peoples’ Rights Organization (LTPRO).

166
Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles, Little Tokyo Five Year Implementation
Plan (FY2000-04), Oct. 5, 2000, 2. An excellent examination of ethnic commodification, racial
exclusion, and historic preservation in Tampa can be found in Susan D. Greenbaum’s article
“Marketing Ybor City: Race, Ethnicity, and Historic Preservation in the Sunbelt,” City & Society
4 (1990): 58-76.
267

Figure 3.6. Aerial photograph of Little Tokyo showing the changes wrought by CRA
redevelopment and Japanese investment, circa 1990. Photograph by William Reagh,
courtesy Los Angeles Public Library, Security Pacific National Bank Collection, File A-
004-167, no. 00031836.

Hearing the Shakuhachi: LTPRO and Third World Japanese Americans
As invested Japanese American interests in the 1970s felt compelled to seek out a
redevelopment financed by Japanese corporations, and then tried to deal with the
complicated questions of bicultural identity subsequently unleashed, other Japanese
Americans, often young students, were crafting a central role for the enclave in a
challenge to essentialist constructions of national and ethnic community and racial
268
difference that was informed by the radicalizing impacts of the Civil Rights Movement,
the Vietnam war, and the fight for ethnic studies on college campuses.
167
The radicalized
Sansei who led the campaign against redevelopment were not politically in sync with
most of the rest of their generation or ethnic group: as Lon Kurashige has pointed out,
“the Asian American movement and its Nisei supporters made up a small, yet critical,
mass of the ethnic community.”
168
They were particularly critical in positing not only an
alternative vision of redevelopment, but an alternative vision of Japanese American
identity itself.
Yen Le Espiritu has described Movement activists as part of the wave of suburb-
raised activist Asian American youth in the early 1970s who “descended on poor urban
Asian American communities to ‘work with the masses.’”
169
Working with the masses in
this case meant providing social services to the residents of Little Tokyo, particularly
those elderly Japanese who lived in the run-down residential hotels. In 1969, for instance,
Mo Nishida, Jim Matsuoka, and others, with help from some of the Little Tokyo
churches, renovated a room in the Sun Building on Weller Street and opened the Pioneer

167
For more on the relationship between the war in Vietnam, Asian-derived radical political
models, and Third World political ideology, see Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, “Journeys for Peace and
Liberation: Third World Internationalism and Radical Orientalism during the U.S. War in
Vietnam,” Pacific Historical Review 76.4 (2007): 575-584.

168
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 156.

169
Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992): 84.

269
Center, a safe and friendly place for elderly residents to spend their days.
170
In addition to
playing games and getting access to health information, older residents went on field trips
to the beach or into the hills during wildflower season.
The Sansei activists behind the Pioneer Center and other service organizations
such as Japanese American Community Services (JACS) initially supported
redevelopment as a means to improve living conditions in the neighborhood through new
senior housing while also strengthening their sense of ethnic heritage by means of the
cultural and community center. However, they rapidly became concerned by what they
perceived as the CRA’s broken promises with regard to relocating people within Little
Tokyo close to important services and institutions; paying prompt and appropriate
relocation benefits; and subsidizing rents both for older tenants and the mom-and-pop
shops they relied on for goods, services, and socialization. For example, one elderly
gentleman I interviewed was displaced by redevelopment five times over about thirty
years in Little Tokyo, twice to residential hotels outside the neighborhood, and he also
had to fight to get the relocation funds owed to him.
171
In another case, an elderly man
who had lived in the Alan Hotel on Second Street for twenty-five years had developed a
delusion that he owned the building – he thought his eviction was both kidnapping and
theft. Instead of receiving mental health services, he was relocated to a Skid Row area

170
Candice Ota, “Radical Awakening, Community Strength,” Nisei Week souvenir booklet
(1990), Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM; Jim Matsuoka, “Pioneer Center” (in author’s
possession).

171
Interview with Yoshiyuki “Clarence” Yamahira, San Pedro Firm Building manager, Sep. 19,
2006.
270
hotel.
172
The Anti-Eviction Task Force was most active in 1973 and 1974, protesting the
hotel project and the intrusive power of Japanese capital in the enclave; its membership
later evolved into the Little Tokyo Peoples’ Rights Organization, an activist unit
dedicated to fighting specific Weller Street evictions but also implementing a much more
expansive agenda and initiating contacts with a broad spectrum of other progressive
groups.
Both the Task Force and LTPRO did not reserve their anger for the CRA alone,
but also directed it at the Japanese corporations shaping the economics of redevelopment
in the enclave. They were particularly angered by statements, like this one from a
Japanese business magazine, that suggested companies “assist in the redevelopment of
the area…as an exhibition center for Japan.”
173
Community activists came to see the
redevelopment process as perverted by the siren song of Japanese capital, with the result
that projects increasing city tax revenues and L.A.’s Pacific Rim profile were privileged
over local working people and the modest but authentic buildings that spoke Japanese
Americans’ roots in the United States. Japanese American activists were able to produce
a film that explicitly and dramatically presented their argument. Hito Hata: Raise the

172
Interview with Bill Watanabe, Little Tokyo Service Center executive director, Apr. 7, 2005;
Naomi Hirahara, “The Alan Hotel,” Nanka Nikkei Voices III- Little Tokyo: Changing Times,
Changing Faces, ed. Brian Niiya (Los Angeles: Japanese American Historical Society of
Southern California, 2004): 42-44.

173
“Corporation History Reviewed (Letters to the Editor),” Rafu Shimpo, Oct. 7, 1974.

271
Banner (1980) focuses on the travails of an aging Issei Little Tokyo resident, Oda-san,
portrayed by veteran Japanese American actor Mako.
174

Oda-san and his friends Tatsumi-san, played by Hiroshi Kashiwagi, and Yamada-
san, played by Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, live in one of the old residential hotels in Little
Tokyo that has been threatened by redevelopment. Near the beginning of the film, they
discuss the changes that have taken place in the enclave. Tatsumi-san complains, “I miss
the Japanese school, the churches, the homes just south of here. Now it’s all big
businesses – tourists, Japanese corporations, big banks.” Oda-san replies, “The streets are
still safe, the rent is cheap.” However, the fear of eviction looms over them throughout
the film, and eventually Tatsumi-san can no longer stand the uncertainty. He takes
relocation money from the CRA and moves, but only has enough to cover the rent in a
dingy, dangerous Skid Row hotel. He is mugged there and, injured by a blow to the head,
dies. The shock causes the heretofore strong and healthy Oda-san to have a stroke.
Yamada-san reacts to these tragedies by climbing to the roof of their threatened hotel
home, where he proceeds to “evict” the pigeons that he has lovingly kept in cages there
for many years. When the hotel manager, Haruo, tearfully tries to stop him, he answers:
“You tell them about progress in Little Tokyo!...Oda-san is finished! Like us! Like this!,”
while gesturing to the modest, low-rise skyline around the hotel in the process of
succumbing to construction cranes and wrecking balls.

174
Hito Hata: Raise the Banner, VHS, directed by Robert Nakamura and Duane Kubo (Los
Angeles: Visual Communications, 1980). Visual Communications is a nonprofit founded by
several veterans of the Asian American Movement interested in preserving Asian American
visual culture and broadening the representations of Asian Americans in visual media. They have
been located in Little Tokyo since they were founded in 1970.
272
The film Hito Hata portrays the very sincere concern for their actual and
symbolic grandparents that motivated Sansei involvement in anti-redevelopment
activism. But this expressed desire to retain the enclave was as much about reclaiming
their past as about protecting the Issei’s future. One scene from the film in particular
exemplifies the way in which a reclaimed enclave was seen as central to maintaining and
renewing Japanese American ethnic identity among young Sansei engaged in the Asian
American Movement. Oda-san sits in the small Little Tokyo hotel room that has been his
humble but comfortable home for decades. He takes out his sole inheritance, a
shakuhachi, or Japanese flute – the only item his parents could afford to give him before
he left Japan as a young man. Made from the bamboo of his home country, he says, “it
will bend but never break.” As he plays a haunting melody, the camera moves out to the
street, where a young Japanese American couple on the sidewalk stops to listen, smiling
up at the open window in an idealized image of the spontaneous cultural transmission
enabled by the enclave’s inter-generational spatial concentration.
Importantly, this moment of connection is not presented as an unmediated link
with some kind of “authentic” Japan; rather, the couple on the street hears music that has
been filtered through the struggles with exploitation and discrimination in America that
shaped the musician and that are revealed throughout the film in flashbacks. Oda-san’s
fight to stay in Little Tokyo despite the threat of eviction due to redevelopment, which
culminates in his participation, post-stroke, in an LTPRO-style protest, carrying a banner
that reads “Home is Little Tokyo,” symbolizes the role of the enclave in certifying and
nourishing both the Japanese and American histories of later-generation Japanese
273
Americans. As Olivia Cadaval wrote, claiming a place as home is an act of “asserting and
negotiating one’s culture and one’s right to place and space.”
175
To lose either the old
buildings or the old men – to lose control of Little Tokyo to City Hall, tourists, or
Japanese corporations – would mean losing the resource that authorized Japanese
Americans’ self-definition and self-determination in the face of such totalizing discourses
as the “model minority” and Japan-bashing. As Issei Takeo Taiyoshi, a longtime Little
Tokyo bookseller, said, “We came this far, we struggled, we have to remember that
things were not always this easy…If we only have new buildings, new hotels, we won’t
see that symbol of those struggles.”
176

Figure 3.7. Members of the Little Tokyo Peoples’ Rights Organization at a 1977 protest.
Courtesy of Photographic Collections, Visual Communications.

175
Olivia Cadaval, “Making A Place Home: The Latino Festival,” Creative Ethnicity: Symbols
and Strategies of Contemporary Ethnic Life, ed. S. Stern and J.A. Cicada (Logan: Utah State
University Press, 1991): 204-222, 205.

176
Roxane Arnold, “Little Tokyo: Memories of Oldest Residents Enrich Poignant History of
Resilient Enclave,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 26, 1984, B1.
274

To keep their enclave home, the symbol of those struggles, activists needed to
convince the city to redefine redevelopment from a process focused on the exchange
value of abstract real estate to one focused on its use value as a place. Activists tried to
meet with Councilman Lindsay, but he had little patience for their arguments. He tried to
prevent Cooke Sunoo, as a former activist, from being named CRA project manager.
177

Jim Matsuoka recalls: “He was a disgrace… the Emperor of the 9
th
District. He didn’t
want nobody telling him what to do.”
178
Members of the Anti-Eviction Task Force even
had to bring along a fake camera and pretend to be filming the encounter to induce
Lindsay to let them in his office and present their demands. During the 1977 fight to
prevent or delay the hotel-related evictions of residents, small businesses, cultural arts
teachers, and community service organizations from Weller (now Onizuka) Street,
LTPRO activists requested in advance that Lindsay place them on the City Council
agenda. Lindsay mysteriously failed to do so, insisting that LTPRO members had not
followed required procedures despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
179
As a
result, fifty-plus activists, including Japanese American and Chinese American students
as well as Nisei cultural arts teachers and merchants, disrupted the Council meeting with
the chant, “Let us speak!” Three LTPRO members – Warren Furutani, David Monkawa,
and Erich Nakano – were arrested. Task Force and LTPRO members were unable to

177
Interview with H. Cooke Sunoo, Jul. 17, 2006.

178
Interview with Jim Matsuoka, Aug. 5, 2006.

179
Dwight Chuman, “Three arrested in City Council confrontation,” Rafu Shimpo, Feb. 9, 1977,
1.
275
expand the city’s vision of Little Tokyo as a place for residents and working people,
rather than simply a node for the influx of Japanese capital.
LTPRO envisioned Little Tokyo as a node in a rather different global matrix, one
that emphasized shared histories of labor, migration, and struggle and collective
responses to dynamic forms of capitalist and imperialist exploitation that were not
contained by borders or nationality. LTPRO, in particular, espoused an explicit Third
World ideology, a transnational identity far different from that performed by the
members of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce or the Little Tokyo Businessmen’s
Association, in that it was not based on essentialist notions of racial, national, or cultural
affinities but on the anti-colonial and anti-imperial revolutions that swept Asia, Africa,
and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.
180

LTPRO articulated its pluralistic vision for Little Tokyo along these lines:
Little Tokyo should serve the needs of all nationalities. For Japanese
Americans, Little Tokyo has a particular significance. It is a historic
center; it is a place to practice one’s own language and culture. If Little
Tokyo were to lose its character as a Japanese community, everyone
would lose. In a similar way, the dispersal of historic Black or Chicano
communities would deny everyone an opportunity to appreciate the
culture and life of those communities. Moreover, we are fighting for the
right of Japanese, Blacks and Latinos to live in the community of their
choice…In order to continue and develop Little Tokyo to serve the needs
of working people, we must unite and raise our concerns.
181

180
See Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, & Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006). Pulido focuses particularly on a group called East Wind,
and there was a fair amount of overlap between the members of East Wind and the activists in
LTPRO. One of her arguments is that Japanese American activism was not always taken
seriously in other communities of color because they were (wrongly) perceived to be an ethnic
group that had achieved success within the white system and thus did not have any problems.

181
“Statement of Community Concerns,” LTPRO Newsletter, Jun. 1977, 6.
276
The authors of these words translated their rhetoric into action. The LTPRO newsletter
printed notices and several articles in both Spanish and Japanese as well as English, and
extensively covered leftist activism in other Third World communities, whether labor
unions in Japan, striking poor white miners in Kentucky, or police brutality in East L.A.
As Evelyn Yoshimura remembered, “Chicano activists who worked with us very closely,
you know, came and helped support our picket lines, and we went to the Eastside and
supported what their issues were.”
182
LTPRO drew on the threads of the enclave’s
historic diversity and working-class politics to weave a place-based, yet not bounded or
territorial, vision for political engagement in the present.
The building of solidarity between Latinos and Japanese Americans in response to
redevelopment grew out of their shared presence in the enclave, as well as their
residential proximity in other areas of the city, their interconnected labor experiences, and
their common pasts as racialized immigrant groups. LTPRO activists drew on these
historical and contemporary connections to enact their vision of a Third World
community in the context of the Japanese American enclave. LTPRO members such as
Judy Nishimura, who grew up in Boyle Heights and was fluent in Spanish, acted as cross-
ethnic radical brokers, doing outreach and organizing among the forty-seven Latino
immigrant residents of the old Sun Hotel on Weller Street who were threatened with

182
Interview with Evelyn Yoshimura and Joe Iwamura (pseudonym), Jul. 21, 2006. The enclave
in some ways enabled this kind of shared support by providing a place for Japanese Americans to
recognize the myriad ways in which their own roots resonated with the Chicano (or African
American) experience. In the short film “Cruisin’ J-town” by Visual Communications, for
instance, it is only after exploring the physical spaces of Little Tokyo that the Japanese American
jazz fusion band Hiroshima can travel to El Teatro Campesino to perform as “brothers” with
Danny Valdez. Cruisin’ J-Town, VHS, directed by Duane Kubo (Los Angeles: Visual
Communications, 1976).
277
CRA eviction by the construction of Weller Court Mall.
183
LTPRO used their organizing
experience and their position as a recognized community voice in the enclave to lobby for
the Sun Hotel residents to receive relocation assistance and benefits from the CRA
without regard to legal status. They also invited the residents to community meetings and
City Council hearings, and contributed funds to help a deported garment worker.
184
Even
the major Spanish-language L.A. newspaper, La Opinión, covered the efforts of LTPRO,
or “la organización de los Derechos del Pueblo de Little Tokio,” though it misidentified
Erich Nakano in an accompanying photograph as a Latino organizer.
185

Jim Matsuoka later recalled the impact this cross-racial activism had on him: “I
gave them a lot of credit, because I don’t know what their legal status was, but they were
out there…And they’re sticking their butts on the line, if they’re not here legally and
something happens, we get taken in, you know, I get out on a misdemeanor, whereas
they’re gonna be deported.”
186
A Chicano radical who participated in LTPRO protests
also pointed to the importance of LTPRO’s cross-racial organizing in realizing Third
World solidarity: “nationalism was a horrific thing for us…And the same with this
LPTRO thing. This was JA [Japanese American], and we were bringing in the Chicano
community and blacks, and saying this is an important struggle for all of us, but an
important struggle for the Japanese community and we’re going to fight along with

183
Lynn Simross, “Redevelopment in Little Tokyo Stirs Conflict Among Citizens,” Los Angeles
Times, Feb. 27, 1977, VIII 1; interview with Evelyn Yoshimura and Joe Iwamura (pseudonym),
Jul. 21, 2006.

184
“Full Rights for Immigrants,” LTPRO Newsletter, Aug. 1977, 5.

185
“Protestan por desalojos en Little Tokio,” La Opinión, Feb. 7, 1977, 3.

186
Interview with Jim Matsuoka, Aug. 5, 2006.
278
them.”
187
LTPRO’s activism was a direct rebuke to those Japanese Americans who saw
their ethnic identity in nationalist or essentialist terms, such as the Chamber member who
argued that, since there were only illegal Mexicans in the hotel, rather than anyone of
Japanese ancestry, LTPRO’s “efforts could well be put to better use.”
188

The essentialist bicultural Japanese American identity predicated on Japanese
corporate investment in Little Tokyo waned somewhat with the bursting of Japan’s
bubble economy in the early 1990s. The globalized Third World conception of Japanese
American identity, however, continues as a strong undercurrent in the enclave’s political
and economic topography. For example, several Japanese American organizations
operating in Little Tokyo honored Local 11’s boycott of the New Otani Hotel, which has
dealt harshly with pro-union Latino/a workers. One activist wrote, “Many Latinos and
immigrant Asians are not aware that Japanese Americans have a history of oppression as
minorities and as working people…[C]ontinue a tradition of unity with the Mexican
American working people by supporting the workers at the New Otani.”
189
As Kathy
Masaoka, an LTPRO veteran and boycott organizer, said, “Asian-American/Latino unity
has been our conscious goal since the early days of the Sun Hotel battle.”
190
The massive
2006 immigration marches in Los Angeles that flowed to City Hall through Little

187
Interview with Roberto Flores, Aug. 23, 2006.

188
“Japanese Chamber of Commerce Opposes Community Needs,” LTPRO flyer, Box C-1657,
“Little Tokyo Peoples’ Rights Organization, 1977” folder, City Archives.

189
David Monkawa, “New Otani Struggle: Little Tokyo Workers Unite!,” Little Tokyo
Community Tour booklet, October 25, 1998, “Little Tokyo” folder, Hirasaki National Resource
Center, JANM.

190
Mike Davis, “Kajima’s Throne of Blood,” The Nation 262.6 (Feb. 12, 1996): 18(3).
279
Tokyo’s margins have once again drawn the shared immigrant histories of Japanese
Americans and Latinos to the front pages of the community’s newspapers and the
forefront of its activism and organizing (see Chapter 4).
The enclave is where these two de-localized identities, bicultural and Third
World, have been worked out precisely because it is the one place where Japanese
Americans’ right to a voice – to some power and control – has been least questioned and
contested, where they constitute a symbolic majority, where their role and right to speak
has been to some degree recognized and institutionalized by a (multi)racial state that now
seeks to incorporate ethnic groups only to manage and depoliticize their demands.
191

Little Tokyo is the only physical space where they have the freedom and opportunity to
work through these identity issues and their attendant politics, which reinforces its
importance. Arif Dirlik has pointed out the theoretical tendency to separate “the
conceptualization of Asian America…as members of grounded communities versus as
diasporic ‘Rimpeople.’”
192
By contrast, I argue that the very notion of Japanese
Americans as “diasporic Rimpeople” was considered, debated, enacted, realized, and

191
As Michael Omi and Howard Winant have themselves written, “the system of racial subjection
has been more monolithic, more absolute, at some historical periods than others.” The early-
twentieth-century American racial nationalist state that supported spatial isolation and economic
exploitation for communities of color was transformed by the civic nationalism of the World War
II era and then by “the racial minority movements of the 1960s.” These changes produced “a new
racial state” (what I call the multiracial state) that absorbs and balances the demands of multiple
politically organized minority populations while insulating crucial state operations from such
demands to maintain the status quo. See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in
the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994, 1986): 79, 106, and
Howard Winant, The World Is A Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II (New York:
Basic Books, 2001).

192
Arif Dirlik, “Asians on the Rim: Transnational Capital and Local Community in the Making of
Contemporary Asian America,” Across the Pacific: Asian Americans and Globalization, ed.
Evelyn Hu-DeHart (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999): 29-60, 31.
280
discarded within and through the context of the “grounded community” of Little Tokyo
and its redevelopment. In the same way, the notion of Japanese Americans as globalized
“ThirdWorldpeople” developed not only out of the imperatives of radical theory but out
of the lived situation on the common ground of Little Tokyo. As Stuart Hall writes, in an
era of globalized, flexible capitalism, the margin, the local, the ethnic are “another place
to stand in, another place to speak from…Enunciation comes from somewhere. It cannot
be unplaced.”
193
Little Tokyo was the concrete place from and through which these
particular transnational and cross-racial visions of Japanese American identity and
community were enunciated, enacted, and embodied at a key moment of change. Thus
the ethnic enclave, much to the surprise of the Chicago School urbanists and assimilation
theorists, survived to fulfill a critical new role in the ethnic community.

Serve the People: Little Tokyo Service Center and the San Pedro Firm Building
The main core of LTPRO’s ideology was eventually institutionalized and spatialized in
the formation of the Little Tokyo Service Center (LTSC), a non-profit umbrella service
organization that has continued to preserve both Little Tokyo’s landscape and its
population as a means to retain and renovate Japanese American ethnic identity itself.
Their efforts demonstrate the ways in which LTPRO’s vision of an enclave capable of
emplacing Japanese American community, without excluding others with shared
struggles and histories, is still bearing fruit today.

193
Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” Culture, Globalizations
and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony
D. King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 19-40, 35-36.
281
LTSC’s roots lie in the development of those social programs to serve the
community that were so central to the Asian American Movement. In 1978, preparing to
move into the new JACCC building, several of these Japanese American community
service organizations, including the Japanese American Citizens League, Japanese
Welfare Rights Organization, Union Church, Japanese American Community Services –
Asian Involvement, and the Social Services committee of the Japanese Chamber of
Commerce, met to discuss ways to integrate their planning and fundraising activities to
better “serve the people.”
194
The result, in June 1979, was the creation of a new umbrella
organization, the Little Tokyo Service Center (LTSC). As the name denotes, LTSC was
envisioned not solely as a Japanese American service organization, but as a flexible
institution that could respond to the changing needs of businesses and residents in Little
Tokyo, and the communities that were linked into it through ethnic, religious, social,
historical, and commercial networks. Beginning with a focus on serving elderly Japanese
speakers, LTSC expanded into transportation issues, family counseling, and consumer
education; as Executive Director Bill Watanabe pointed out, “it’s become more Asian
and Pacific Islander, and also because this neighborhood is not strictly Japanese
American, we have Hispanics and Caucasians and blacks who come to us, so the program
has become multicultural as well.”
195
But the program that has had the greatest spatial
impact on Little Tokyo is the Community Development Corporation (LTSC CDC).

194
Bill Watanabe, “The Little Tokyo Service Center: A Heritage of Community Service,” Nanka
Nikkei Voices III: Little Tokyo – Changing Times, Changing Faces, ed. Brian Niiya (Los
Angeles: Japanese American Historical Society of Southern California, 2004): 102-104. The
“serve the people” mandate derives from Mao Zedong.

195
Interview with Bill Watanabe, Apr. 7, 2005.
282
In 1972, the City of Los Angeles had purchased the San Pedro Firm Building at
112 N. San Pedro (now Judge John Aiso) Street in preparation for its plan to widen East
First Street by twenty feet.
196
The Firm Building, constructed in 1925, consisted of four
retail tenants and fifteen offices on the ground floor and several small apartments on the
two upper floors, primarily occupied by elderly Japanese. The City, waiting to acquire
other properties along First Street before proceeding with demolition, allowed the Firm
Building to deteriorate even as residents were forced to take cold showers and watched
the paint peel off their walls.
197

196
Kathy Nishimoto Masaoka, “Big, Bold Steps – The San Pedro Firm Building: The Legacy of
Judy Nishimoto Ota,” Nanka Nikkei Voices III: Little Tokyo – Changing Times, Changing Faces,
ed. Brian Niiya (Los Angeles: Japanese American Historical Society of Southern California,
2004), 134-136.

197
Kathy Masaoka, “Big, Bold Steps;” Cathleen Decker, “Little Tokyo Takes on City Hall
Again.”
283

Figure 3.8. The rehabilitated San Pedro Firm Building, circa 2007. This building is a
contributing structure to the National Historic Landmark District. Photograph by author.

By 1986, LTSC had in many ways taken over LTPRO’s role as advocate and
protector for the residents of Little Tokyo’s threatened hotels. As the CRA acted to clear
“Block 8,” the four acres bounded by Second, San Pedro, and Los Angeles Streets, for a
planned hotel development by Taira Investment Company, LTSC fought to get residents
relocation benefits and to find them decent affordable replacement housing within Little
Tokyo.
198
But because the single-room occupancy hotels continued to be demolished

198
Box C-1663, “Taira Investment Company, 1982-1983” folder, City Archives.
284
while only Tokyo Villas (market-rate condos) and Miyako Gardens (Section 8
apartments) were built to replace them, LTSC was forced to relocate several residents,
many of them elderly and Japanese-speaking, in the somewhat more unsafe and decrepit
environs of L.A.’s expanding Skid Row, just to the south of Little Tokyo. Watanabe was
appalled at the consequences paid by the most vulnerable members of society: “Terrible,
it was a terrible experience. So many of the ones that moved there, we found out later,
they were robbed, they were beaten up. They couldn’t adjust.”
199
In the end, the Japanese
recession derailed the project – the block became a surface parking lot, another blank
square in the abstract grid of potential real estate developments that city planners
envisioned when they looked at Little Tokyo.
Aggrieved by the harsh compromises they were forced to make in the evictions
from the Alan, Masago, Matsushima, and Tomoye hotels, LTSC’s multiracial staff
combined with veteran community activists like Dean Toji and Kathy Masaoka to
institute their own set of spatial practices in the enclave, beginning with the creation of a
Housing Advocates committee.
200
This group, along with a newly formed Little Tokyo
Tenants Association, assessed the affordable housing situation in Little Tokyo and
decided to focus on existing but underutilized resources such as the San Pedro Firm
Building. After extensive lobbying, the City Council passed a resolution in February
1987 to preserve low-income housing in the Firm Building. In November 1990, LTSC
and the Los Angeles Community Design Center, the new co-owners of the Firm Building
(purchased from the city at a nominal cost), embarked on a $4 million renovation that

199
Interview with Bill Watanabe, Apr. 7, 2005.

200
Kathy Masaoka, “Big, Bold Steps.”
285
produced a rehabilitated, seismically sound historic building with 42 units of affordable
housing by late 1991. After twenty years of trying to squeeze more units out of the CRA,
a community non-profit had provided them in just four.
The success of the Firm Building motivated LTSC to prioritize affordable
housing, which led to the 1993 incorporation of the Community Development
Corporation (LTSC CDC). By 1996, LTSC CDC had expended $10 million to build a
new affordable housing complex in Little Tokyo, the 100-unit Casa Heiwa. The name
means “House of Harmony” in a combination of Spanish and Japanese, and the two
largest groups of residents are appropriately Japanese American and Latino (at 25 percent
each), followed by Korean Americans and African Americans (each 20 percent).
201
Not
just a replacement for the lost single-room occupancy units of the old hotels, Casa Heiwa
has several two- and three-bedroom units occupied by families and an after-school
daycare program. LTSC CDC has helped to return children to the streets of Little Tokyo
for the first time since the years immediately following resettlement.
202

In addition to restoring the residential population of the enclave through its spatial
practices, LTSC has also taken a leading role in the enclave’s memorial practices,
preserving the physical and cultural places that nourish community among dispersed
Japanese Americans. LTSC was a co-founder of the Ties that Bind consortium, a
coalition of community groups that has been active in passing state legislation to fund
preservation of California’s three remaining Japantowns. It is the steward of the National

201
Email communication from Takao Suzuki, LTSC CDC Project Manager, Oct. 9, 2006.

202
A 1971 article in the Los Angeles Times features a photograph of the “last family” to live in
Little Tokyo prior to redevelopment – the manager of a small hotel, his wife, and their teenage
children. “Little Tokyo Awaiting $47 Million ‘Rebirth,’” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 18, 1971, B1.
286
Register historic block and the supporting entity behind the Little Tokyo Historical
Society. Finally, LTSC has carried forward LTPRO’s Third World understanding of
Japanese American identity by building bridges to other communities of color – for
instance, sharing expertise with the Thai Town CDC or talking to the Central Avenue
Dunbar Economic Development Corporation about developing programming on the
historic intersections between Japanese Americans and African Americans along the
length of Central Avenue.
In the early years of the post-Fordist, post-civil rights era, the (multi)racial state
abetted Japanese corporate capital in practices aimed at appropriating and dominating
enclave space, splitting the local community along lines of ethnic identification. Sansei
activists of the “small but critical” Asian American Movement challenged both ethnic
nationalism and all-Americanism by developing spatial practices that included sit-ins and
protests, gaining concessions such as subsidized rents, but also gaining control over
buildings and other physical spaces within the enclave to create affordable housing and
offices for community-based nonprofits. Memorial practices emphasizing preservation of
the enclave successfully mended the divisions within the Japanese American community
created by redevelopment, even as they simultaneously elided the significant complexity
and diversity of Little Tokyo’s past and present. These community-based spatial and
memorial practices prevented the wholesale “Japanization” of Little Tokyo, in contrast to
San Francisco’s J-town, and kept housing, history, and diversity as the embattled core of
the enclave. As Little Tokyo finally prepares to exit the period of formal redevelopment,
it faces a murky future marked by ethnic irrelevance and enclave gentrification. And yet,
287
into their fifth generation (the Gosei), Japanese Americans have remained the key
element in a Little Tokyo that has utterly changed but is still in some sense their “home.”
288
CHAPTER FOUR:
HOME IS LITTLE TOKYO

The politics of space is closely connected to the formation of collective identities that are
grounded in particular interpretations of the past.
-Lisbeth Haas
1

On October 29, 2005, nearly 200 members of Japanese American community
organizations joined Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry to unveil a sixteen by
forty foot mural at the corner of East First Street and Central Avenue in Little Tokyo (see
Figure 4.1). The mural, entitled “Home Is Little Tokyo,” was made possible by grants
from both public and private donors, including the Community Redevelopment Agency
(CRA), the city’s Office of Community Beautification, Little Tokyo Service Center
(LTSC), the Little Tokyo Community Council (LTCC), the owners of Japanese Village
Plaza, and Fugetsudo confectionary. Tony Osumi and Jorge and Sergio Diaz created the
design based on ideas gathered at public workshops in 2003. Several hundred people
contributed to the mural’s completion at public painting days; as Osumi said, “Our goal
wasn’t just to make a mural, but to build a sense of community.”
2

While the creation of the mural may have built a sense of community among
Southern California Japanese Americans, its permanent installation connected that
community indelibly to the space of Little Tokyo, a fusion of spatial and memorial

1
Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987): 13.

2
Tony Osumi, “Little Tokyo Mural Unveiling Planned,” Rafu Shimpo, Oct. 15, 2005, 3.
289
practice increasingly common in the enclave. At the ceremony, Bill Watanabe of the
Little Tokyo Service Center commented on the significance of the mural’s location,
facing an intersection shared by the Japanese American National Museum, a 300-unit
luxury condominium development, and the Gold Line Extension light rail station
expected to open in 2009: “Some day there is going to be a train station there, some day
there’s going to be people coming in. This mural is going to let them know that they’ve
entered Little Tokyo, that Little Tokyo has a history, that Little Tokyo has a people
connected to it. And it’s going to be a tremendous hello to all of them.”
3

Figure 4.1. Community mural at East First Street and Central Avenue, 2007. Photograph
by author.

As a product of a community-based planning process, the mural primarily
emphasizes elements of local Japanese American history around which there exists
positive contemporary consensus, such as redress, anti-redevelopment activism, and

3
Gwen Muranaka, “Community Welcomes Little Tokyo Mural,” Rafu Shimpo, Nov. 1, 2005, 1.
290
inter-generational bonding, rather than negative or controversial events. Its bright colors
and cartoon-like aesthetics depict a cheerful and harmonious community; even the
images that gesture to Little Tokyo’s multiracial past and present gloss over past conflict
and contemporary class inequalities. In the lower left corner, a jazz musician representing
Charlie Parker blows a saxophone, seeming to jam with the Japanese American taiko
drummers behind him. On the right-hand side of the mural a smiling figure in an apron,
intended to represent a modern-day Latino worker in one of the district’s many
restaurants, stands behind a produce cart, symbolizing the two communities’ common
immigrant and laboring roots.
These images occupy the mural’s margins, however – at the literal and figurative
center of the mural is a Japanese American grandmother lighting candles of remembrance
held by two Japanese American children. This image is emblematic of Japanese
Americans’ desire for cultural transmission to, and maintenance of ethnic identity among,
future generations of Nikkei. In particular, Little Tokyo is seen as the necessary space
through which this goal will be accomplished; the surrounding images of youth playing
basketball, participating in martial arts, and dancing odori in Little Tokyo, along with the
young woman holding a sign promoting the hoped-for Little Tokyo Recreation Center as
a location for “Bridging Generations,” further reinforce this message. The text in English
and Japanese that borders the mural makes an explicit claim on the overwhelmingly
Japanese American nature of the space: while the neighborhood might be a “bridge to
[other] downtown communities,” it is in itself a “complete living and thriving 100 year
old community” [emphasis added], a “spiritual” and “gathering place and destination for
291
Japanese American community and culture.” The Japanese text goes even further in
establishing a perennial link between Little Tokyo and the Japanese American
community, declaring that “Little Tokyo is the home sweet home of our hearts.”
4
The
sign dominating the mural declares authoritatively that Japanese Americans’ authentic
“home is Little Tokyo.”
As both the text and images of the community mural demonstrate, the issues of
ethnic identity and control over urban space that shaped the process of redevelopment in
Little Tokyo are alive and well in the contemporary enclave. However, the first decade of
the twenty-first century is not the 1970s or even the 1980s; the social and historical
context in which Japanese Americans now operate in Los Angeles has radically altered.
The question, then, becomes: why is Little Tokyo still “home” for Japanese Americans?
What factors produce and organize this continuing commitment to maintaining Little
Tokyo AS Little Tokyo, not only among Japanese Americans but also within city
government and even among private developers working in the neighborhood? And do
the different parties currently shaping the district even agree on what Little Tokyo should
be, or to whom it could be said to belong?
This chapter examines three key developments currently affecting the contours of
Little Tokyo as both an abstract space for capital investment and development and a
localized place infused with community meaning.
5
First, I describe Japanese Americans’

4
“Little Tokyo Mural to be Dedicated Saturday,” Rafu Shimpo, Oct. 27, 2005, 1.

5
I am drawing here on J. Nicholas Entrikin’s formulation of place as the fusion of abstract space
with localized experience, as well as Doreen Massey’s argument that places are not “areas with
boundaries around” them, but “articulated moments in networks of social relations and
understandings.” See J. Nicholas Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of
292
reaction to the social, cultural, and demographic changes over the past twenty years that
have altered the racial landscape of Los Angeles and their position within it. Second, I
explore the increasingly precarious existence of Little Tokyo as a Japanese American
enclave given transformations in global flows of people and capital and the production of
urban space, and the increasingly innovative spatial and memorial practices of Japanese
American activists in response to these challenges. And finally, I outline the mounting
tension between Little Tokyo’s two identities, as increasingly valuable real estate in a
revitalizing urban core and as a sacred space of “worship, contemplation, and a
suspension of ordinary activities.”
6

As the landscape of Little Tokyo has been increasingly appropriated and
dominated by the spatial and discursive practices of city planners and development
project managers over the past decade, Japanese Americans have countered these policies
with their own radical practice, reclaiming the enclave as a sacred place in the construction

Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and Doreen Massey, Space,
Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994): 154, 156. While
community efforts to retain Little Tokyo as a central location for building and protecting Japanese
American community and strengthening ethnic identity have always been focused on Little
Tokyo as “place,” I argue in this chapter that community organizations have in many ways
adopted city planning and developer discourses that reduce Little Tokyo to abstract “space” in
order to gain official approval for projects intended to reify the enclave’s ethnoracial inscription.

6
Marita Sturken, “The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero,” American Ethnologist
31.3 (2004): 311-325, 315. Sturken is building on Edward Linenthal’s description of U.S.
battlefields that, although secular, are nevertheless national “sacred patriotic spaces;” see Sacred
Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). In her
description of Ground Zero, Sturken writes that the land’s consecration as sacred space is at odds
with the desire of local residents to get back the “mundane everydayness and routine that defines
the familiar sense of a neighborhood” (Sturken, “The Aesthetics of Absence,” 315). In
surprisingly similar ways, Japanese American efforts to treat Little Tokyo as the “sacred ground”
of ethnic community is increasingly in conflict with the desire of new residents for walkable local
amenities and services, as we see later in this chapter.
293
of an alternative Los Angeles. Nevertheless, this role for the enclave is troubled by its
implication in the sociohistorical processes of racial categorization and formation through
the very acceptance by enclave communities of the terms of ethnoracial inscription and
the boundaries of symbolic separation from other enclaves and other peoples. Little
Tokyo today is balanced on the edge of yet another moment of convulsive change, one
that promises to chart the possible futures for the ethnic enclave, and the relationship
between race and space more generally, in the global cities of the twenty-first century.

Figure 4.2. Map of Little Tokyo circa 2004, courtesy Jason Mejia.

294

The Last of the Mohicans: The Evolving Japanese American Community
As outlined in the previous chapter, the Japanese American National Museum (JANM)
developed out of a grassroots effort among Japanese American veterans and business
people to document Japanese American history and heal political and generational rifts
within the community. Support of the planned museum by both state and municipal
government – state senator Art Torres secured $750,000 in state funding, while the
Community Redevelopment Agency donated a million dollars and provided the old Nishi
temple that became the museum’s initial home for a lease of one dollar a year – resulted
from many factors, including a desire to raise L.A.’s (and by extension California’s)
cultural distinction on the global stage and a need to redirect Little Tokyo’s
redevelopment in the face of Japan’s economic recession and decreased overseas
spending. This support also demonstrated Japanese Americans’ growing political, social,
and economic power within American society. Unlike many other U.S. ethnic minority
groups, Japanese Americans could draw on the support of Japanese American politicians
such as Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga, as well as Japanese corporations and an
increasingly affluent domestic population, to publicize and finance the museum.
7

Museum backers also benefited from the more positive racialization of Japanese
Americans that had accompanied (and in many ways been a response to) the rise of the

7
Irene Y. Hirano, “Introduction: Commitment to Community,” Common Ground: The Japanese
American National Museum and the Culture of Collaborations (Boulder: University of Colorado
Press, 2005): 1-12. The support of Latino politician Art Torres, four decades after Little Tokyo’s
merchants relied on Councilman Roybal for aid, again demonstrates the viability and longevity of
multiracial political coalitions in California. Indeed, Roybal’s daughter Lucille Roybal-Allard is
herself now serving California in the U.S. House of Representatives and continues to successfully
seek funding for Japanese American community projects in Little Tokyo.
295
Civil Rights Movement in post-WWII America. As Jan Lin has written, “the putative
reclamation of Asian American places mollifies the interests of local political contenders
in a municipal discourse of multiculturalism, while simultaneously legitimizing and
enhancing broader state projects of economic globalization.”
8
Particularly during the late
1980s and early 1990s, when a globalized “corporate multiculturalism” was
institutionalized in municipally funded arts and cultural programming in Los Angeles, a
museum dedicated to the history of Japanese Americans burnished the image of an
inclusive cultural mosaic the city sought to create for itself.
9
This image went up in
smoke – literally – in the spring of 1992, when the museum’s opening reception was
postponed by protests at City Hall, just three blocks to the west, over the outcome of the
Rodney King police brutality trial. Those protests rapidly mushroomed into a civil
insurrection in which more than fifty people died, thousands were injured, and hundreds
of buildings were destroyed.
The Japanese American National Museum responded to the tragedy by expanding
the scope of its institutional role: not only ensuring “that Japanese Americans’ heritage
and cultural identity were preserved” but also “work[ing] with community institutions to

8
Jan Lin, “The Reclaiming of Asian Places in Downtown Los Angeles,” Hitting Critical Mass: A
Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 5.1 (spring 1998): 65-87.

9
See for example Mike Davis’ discussion of the “globe-trotting pretensions” and “corporate
multiculturalism” of the Los Angeles Festival, which “display[ed] Los Angeles as a bazaar of
ethnic (although not necessarily indigenous) cultures.” Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating
the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992): 80-81. While the cultural displays
at JANM were certainly “indigenous,” some of the exhibits played into the imperatives of
“corporate multiculturalism,” especially given the new waves of Asian and Central and South
American immigrants entering Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, by producing a pedagogical
narrative of success and assimilation in line with Japanese Americans’ image as the “model
minority.” See Takashi Fujitani, “National Narratives and Minority Politics: The Japanese
American National Museum’s War Stories,” Museum Anthropology 21.1 (spring/summer 1997):
99-112.
296
promote human understanding through education” and “building bridges among ethnic
and cultural groups for the future.”
10
In other words, the Japanese American experience
would serve, not as an exceptional model for other minority groups to follow, but as a
representative lens through which lessons in tolerance, civil rights, and solidarity could
be learned. The violence of 1992 pushed Japanese Americans to remember their
connections with other oppressed and racialized communities through the vehicle of
JANM, even as the museum simultaneously embodied the affluence and access to power
they had so rapidly achieved in the years following internment. This ambivalence
increasingly marked Japanese Americans’ position in both the politics of Asian America
and the shifting U.S. racial landscape, with consequences for Little Tokyo’s future as a
Japanese American enclave.
The implosion of Japan’s “bubble economy” in the early 1990s had an enormous
impact on Little Tokyo, as corporate donations shriveled and the flow of Japanese tourists
and businessmen pouring money into the neighborhood’s upscale venues slowed to a
trickle. More generally, however, the Japanese recession eased America’s economic
anxieties, producing a marked lessening in the prevalence of Japan-bashing and
diminished expressions of the resurgent “forever foreign” stereotypes that had shaped
Japanese American politics during the 1970s and 1980s. In her book, Forever Foreigners
or Honorary Whites?, Mia Tuan investigated the resulting in-between status of
contemporary Asian Americans; her subjects reported a complex variety of context-
dependent racial and ethnic identifications: Japanese, Japanese American, Asian

10
Hirano, “Introduction,” 2-3.
297
American. While many of her respondents felt free to discard and alter cultural,
linguistic, and culinary traditions, none felt that it was possible for them to self-identify
as “American” without an ethnic or racial modifier as members of so-called “white
ethnic” groups often do. As one man said, “I still persist that I’m an American, but I’m
not going to deny that I’m Asian because first thing they’re not going to let me do
it…You see, Caucasians must understand that they put that on us.”
11
The tenuousness of
even this hyphenated identity was demonstrated by the strong anti-immigrant sentiments
expressed by many of those interviewed; the new Asian immigrants, respondents insisted,
“complicate the status of Asian ethnics in this society by reinforcing the very stereotypes
they struggle so hard to avoid.”
12
The experiences of Tuan’s subjects make clear that
whatever acceptance or success Asian Americans have achieved in mainstream American
society has been accompanied by renovated stereotypes and a continuing awareness of
difference.
Certainly the term “honorary white” captures the marginal position of Asian
Americans on the post-civil rights U.S. racial landscape. On the one hand, indicators of
economic and educational success for Asian Americans mirror and in some cases exceed
those of Anglos (see Table 4.1). For instance, the 1989 median household income for
Japanese Americans in Los Angeles was a very comfortable $51,067, and for all Asians it
was $48,221. By comparison, the median household income for whites was $43,220; for
U.S.-born Latinos, $35,107; and for blacks, $26,386. For foreign-born Asians, median

11
Mia Tuan, Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Asian Ethnic Experience Today (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998): 135.

12
Ibid., 148.
298
income was $40,449, while for foreign-born Latinos it was only $26,494. According to
the 2000 census, however, the median household income (not broken down by nativity)
was $37,186 for Asians, $51,516 for whites, $28,759 for Latinos, and $27,310 for
African Americans, reflecting the convergence of low-wage (and often racialized) jobs
and unskilled immigrant labor.
13
Yet the median household income for Japanese
American Angelenos, while not increasing to the same degree as that for whites, had
reached $51,736 in 2000.
14

Table 4.1. Occupational Data for Los Angeles County, 1970-1990
Japanese
Americans
Anglos Latinos African
Americans
Foreign-
Born
Japanese

High-
Skill
Jobs
Low-
Skill
Jobs
High-
Skill
Jobs
Low-
Skill
Jobs
High-
Skill
Jobs
Low-
Skill
Jobs
High-
Skill
Jobs
Low-
Skill
Jobs
High-
Skill
Jobs
Low-
Skill
Jobs
1970 36% 29% 34% 23% 13% 49% 16% 49% 22% 56%
1990 51% 12% 44% 15% 25% 31% 31% 28% 41% 24%
Source: See Lucie Cheng and Philip Q. Yang, “The ‘Model Minority’ Deconstructed,”
Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, ed. Min Zhou and James V.
Gatewood (New York: Yew York University Press, 2000): 459-482, 468-470.

Yet Asian Americans also continue to be the subject of stereotypes (both positive
and negative), hate crimes, and death threats. Asian Americans are still victims of
racially-motivated violence – in Southern California alone, Joseph Ileto, Kenny Chiu,
Charlotte Colton, and Ze Fairchild have all been murdered because of their race since

13
See Lucie Cheng and Philip Q. Yang, “The ‘Model Minority’ Deconstructed,” Contemporary
Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, ed. Min Zhou and James V. Gatewood (New York:
Yew York University Press, 2000): 459-482, and Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, “Los
Angeles in Focus: A Profile from Census 2000,” Living Cities: The National Community
Development Initiative (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2003): 55-62. As these figures
suggest, the median income for the city as a whole dropped almost twelve percent between 1990
and 2000, from $41,459 to $36,687.

14
United States Census Bureau, Demographic Profile Fact Sheet, Japanese in Los Angeles
County, 2000, available at http://factfinder.census.gov (accessed Jun. 16, 2008).
299
1999.
15
Following the February 2005 Day of Remembrance, which commemorates and
mourns the signing of Executive Order 9066, a memorial statue on Second Street in Little
Tokyo was vandalized and hate mail containing hypodermic syringes with needles was
sent to Asian American organizations, including the Little Tokyo Service Center.
16
A
state study that same year found that, while the number of hate crimes in California had
dropped 5.5 percent compared to 2003, crimes against Asians/Pacific Islanders had
actually increased 4.6 percent.
17
In addition to instances of intimidation and violence that
recall the open anti-Asian hostility of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
racialized narratives relying on “forever foreign” and “yellow peril” rhetorics – such as
the 1996 campaign finance scandal over improper donations made by Asian immigrants
and the Wen Ho Lee espionage case – have recurred in the media. Over the past decade
the subject of these racial projects has shifted from Japanese Americans to Chinese
immigrants and Chinese Americans, in line with China’s rising power in the global
economy and on the world political stage. This fact has not escaped the notice of
Japanese American commentators. Nisei columnist W.T. “Wimpy” Hiroto pointed out
that “we are now officially in the era of ‘China Bashing.’” While Hiroto felt some

15
Michiko Tamura, “API Leaders Pay Tribute to Joseph Ileto,” Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 30, 2005, 1;
“Racism Looked at as Motive in Postal Killings,” Rafu Shimpo, Feb. 3, 2006, 1.

16
“Man Arrested for Sending Hate Letters to APAs, Other Groups,” Rafu Shimpo, Jun. 15, 2005,
1. One member of Nikkei Civil Rights and Redress commented that there tended to be a jump in
such incidents following publicity for events like the Day of Remembrance, and that while some
of the response mail was positive there had also been plenty of hate mail. Kay Ochi, LTCC
Planning and Cultural Preservation Committee Meeting, Japanese American National Museum,
Mar. 15, 2005.

17
“Hate Crimes Against Asians Higher: Study,” Rafu Shimpo, Jul. 27, 2005, 1.
300
sympathy for Chinese Americans based on his own experiences with “Japan bashing,” he
nevertheless admitted “I’d rather China be bashed than Japan.”
18

As Japan has ceded its role as primary Asian bogeyman in American social and
cultural narratives, Japanese Americans have likewise come to occupy an increasingly
marginal position even within the Asian American population of Los Angeles. Japanese
Americans dropped from the largest Asian American group in Los Angeles County in
1970 to the fourth largest in 2000 (see Table 4.2).
19
These demographic changes, largely
the result of immigration flows opened up by the Immigration and Nationality Act of
1965, hint at the increasing diversity of ethnicity, nativity, language, and more in Asian
America. In 1990, for instance, 35 percent of the ethnic Japanese population in the United
States was foreign-born, while 80 percent of the ethnic Vietnamese population was.
20
In
Los Angeles, the percentage of foreign-born in the overall ethnic Asian population
increased from 34 percent in 1970 to 72 percent in 1990.
21
If the focus is limited to
immigrants from Asian nations, rather than all people of Asian descent in the United
States, the contrasts between new Asian immigrants and Japanese Americans become
evident, with immigrant households tending to have more family members in the

18
W.T. “Wimpy” Hiroto, “Who Is This Roue Hsu?,” Rafu Shimpo, Oct. 12, 2007, 3.

19
Most recent estimates indicate that Japanese Americans are the sixth largest Asian American
group in the United States, behind Chinese, Filipinos, Asian Indians, Koreans, and Vietnamese.
See U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C.: United
States Department of Commerce, 2006).

20
Min Zhou and James V. Gatewood, eds, Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary
Reader (New York: Yew York University Press, 2000), 15.

21
Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng, The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and
Global Restructuring (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 105.
301
workforce and higher levels of poverty.
22
A 2006 study showed that more than 20 percent
of Asian Pacific Islanders (mainly from more recent immigrant and refugee groups such
as Laotians, Cambodians, Hmong, and Samoans) live below the poverty line.
23

Table 4.2. Population Change in Los Angeles County By Ethnic Group, 1980-2000
Chinese Koreans Filipinos Japanese
1980-1990 +159% +141% N/A +10%
1990-2000 +34% +28% 18% -14%
2000 Pop. 329,352 186,350 260,158 111,349
Sources: For 1980 and 1990 data, see Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng, The
New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1994), 104. For 2000, see Korean American Coalition – Census
Information Center, “Population Change by Race and Ethnicity, 1990-2000” (Los
Angeles: California State University, Los Angeles Center for Korean and Korean
American Studies, 2003).

This complicated picture has only grown more complex with additional changes
to immigration law and the global economy. Following the 1986 Immigration Reform
and Control Act and the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993,
immigration (both legal and illegal) from Mexico and the nations of Central and South
America has increased, altering the cultural and linguistic landscape of Los Angeles. In
addition, while the number of foreign-born among Asian Americans over the age of
eighteen remains much higher for ethnic Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese in Los
Angeles County (82 percent, 87 percent, and 95 percent in 2000, respectively) than for
ethnic Japanese (38 percent), the picture is quite different among youth. The percentage
of foreign-born under eighteen years of age ranged only between 20 and 24 percent for

22
Ong, Bonacich, and Cheng, The New Asian Immigration, 117.

23
“Report: Many Asian Americans Living Below Poverty Line,” Rafu Shimpo, Mar. 25, 2006, 1.
302
all four of these ethnic groups.
24
Citizenship is another fault line: twice as many foreign-
born Vietnamese (66 percent) have become naturalized U.S. citizens as foreign-born
Japanese (30 percent), reflecting the different experiences of the Vietnamese as political
refugees compared to the large percentage of Japanese residents who are temporarily
working in the United States, often for Japanese corporations.
25
The growth in
educational and economic opportunities in many Asian countries, along with U.S. visa
regulations that favor skilled workers and wealthier immigrants seeking investment
prospects, have also fueled an increasingly mobile transnational community of Asians in
America.
These trans-Pacific flows of people and capital have produced a resurgence of
Asian residential and commercial “ethnic enclaves,” such as Koreatown in the mid-
Wilshire district and the Chinese “ethnoburb” that spans large areas of the San Gabriel
Valley. According to the 1970 census, two-thirds of Asian Americans in Los Angeles (of
which Japanese Americans made up the largest single ethnic group) lived in
predominantly non-Asian census tracts where they constituted less than 10 percent of the
population. By 1990, however, less than one-third of ethnic Asians lived in such
predominantly non-Asian neighborhoods. New immigrant and refugee populations have
reinvigorated old enclaves and formed new ones: “What has emerged is not a single

24
Korean American Coalition – Census Information Center, “Nativity and Citizenship for
Selected Asian Groups by Adulthood and State” (Los Angeles: California State University, Los
Angeles Center for Korean and Korean American Studies, 2003).

25
Ibid.
303
contiguous Asian ghetto, but rather a collection of Asian clusters that are geographically
dispersed throughout much of the highly urbanized portions of Los Angeles.”
26

Wei Li has argued that the formation of these clusters in suburban areas such as
Monterey Park constitutes a different process than the ethnic enclave formation of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, claiming that the ethnoburb (or ethnic suburb) is
marked by international economic ties and a multiethnic community. Li quotes Monterey
Park councilwoman Judy Chu as saying, “This community is a much-mixed one. This is
not your traditional ethnic enclave, like you think in terms of Chinatown or Little
Tokyo.”
27
Yet as this dissertation has demonstrated, Little Tokyo was never an isolated or
mono-ethnic “traditional” enclave either. Indeed, the “new” Asian enclaves, like the
“old” ones, are spaces shaped by state power, both at the federal level through regulation
of immigration and economic policy and the local level through land use policy and the
unequal provision of services; global and regional economic flows; and the spatial and
memorial practices of those who claim space as place, as a shared refuge and center for
community institutions and networks.
28

Unlike the Koreatowns, Chinatowns, Little Saigons, or even Monterey Park, Little
Tokyo lacks an influx of new immigrants; however, the new Asian immigration has
certainly had an impact on the old enclave. Indeed, Korean immigrants are increasingly

26
Ong, Bonacich, and Cheng, The New Asian Immigration, 118-119.

27
Wei Li, “Building Ethnoburbia: The Emergence and Manifestation of the Chinese Ethnoburb in
Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley,” Journal of Asian American Studies 2.1 (1999): 1-28, 20.

28
See Jan Lin, Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998) for an examination of Manhattan’s Chinatown that takes
into account the intertwined impacts of economic change, cultural symbolism, and community
agency in the evolution of an enclave remade by post-1965 immigration.
304
signing leases for both retail and residential space in Little Tokyo – at the March 21,
2006 meeting of the Little Tokyo Community Council, it was announced that 80 to 90
percent of the buyers at the new Savoy condominium complex were “Asian.” The
residents’ association later determined that this specifically meant “Korean.”
29
In a
discussion following the Savoy announcement, one community worker expressed the
ambivalence shared by many Japanese Americans when he noted that a Little Tokyo
filled with Koreans might “look right,” but would really just be an extension of
Koreatown. At another community meeting, the “aggressive advertising” for Little Tokyo
housing in the Korean-language press as compared to the limited advertising in local
Japanese American papers was noted with disapproval.
30
Responding to the new realities,
the Little Tokyo Service Center has attempted to fulfill its mission as both a Japanese
American and a Little Tokyo organization by organizing a Japanese/Korean film series in
the neighborhood.
31

While Japanese Americans still retain the ethnic-specific organizations so
fundamental to Nisei and Sansei social life, they also reflect these new demographic

29
LTCC Meeting Notes, Japanese American National Museum, Mar. 21, 2006; Ellen Endo,
“Little Tokyo Housing Boom Triggers Identity Crisis,” Rafu Shimpo, Mar. 18, 2006, 1; Valentina
Cardenas and Gayle Pollard-Terry, “The Face of Little Tokyo is Changing,” Los Angeles Times,
Sep. 3, 2006, K2. The influx of Korean condo purchasers in Little Tokyo may be related to
changes in the South Korean tax code. The government approved a 50 percent tax on profits from
the transfer of real estate by those owning more than one home, effective in 2007, but waived the
tax when the real estate was bought and sold overseas. As a result, many wealthy South Koreans
sold their additional properties in Korea and instead invested in property in the United States,
Canada, and Australia. See “Looming Real Estate Taxes Send Homebuyers Overseas,” The
Chosun Ilbo, Jun. 8, 2006.

30
LTCC Planning and Cultural Preservation Committee Meeting, Japanese American Cultural
and Community Center, Jul. 12, 2006.

31
Teresa Watanabe, “Clinging to a Culture,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 28, 2007, B1.
305
realities via their participation in pan-Asian groups. The Civil Rights Movement
produced a revision of policy by the racial state that focused on a more equitable
distribution of political and economic resources among multiple groups formed by
lumping people of color together under umbrella categories such as “African American”
and “Hispanic” – for example, the category of “Asian Pacific Islander” was introduced
with the 1980 census. As Yen Le Espiritu has documented, a pan-Asian political
movement first coalesced in the late 1960s, among members of the second and third U.S.
generations that shared similar experiences of racialization and discrimination in the
American context. That initial “Asian American” identity has been altered and
reimagined by the new generations of immigrants that arrived after 1965, yet Japanese
Americans have continued to take a leading role in Asian American institutions despite
their dwindling relative numbers. Espiritu has described how “new Asian immigrants and
refugees often have to rely on the technical expertise and experience of the more
established Asian American groups,...making it difficult for newcomers to pursue their
interests outside the pan-Asian framework.”
32
Or, as a Rafu columnist wrote more
bluntly: “The days when Japanese Americans were tops in numbers among Asian
Americans is long gone, although the case could be made that quality presently offsets
quantity in terms of influence in business, politics and the like.”
33
Thus Japanese
Americans have retained a key role in framing the parameters and politics of Asian
American identity based on their hard-won economic and educational success and their

32
Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992): 91.

33
George Toshio Johnston, “Opportunity, Pitfalls and Facing the Digital Divide,” Rafu Shimpo,
Nov. 25, 2006, 5.
306
political access to the post-Civil Rights Movement (multi)racial state. Nevertheless, it is
likely that their dominance in this sphere will also come to a close soon as the second
generation of post-1965 Asian immigrants gains greater incorporation into professional
and political networks.
Japanese Americans’ increasingly marginal position within both Asian America
and the U.S. racial imaginary has produced questions about the meaning of contemporary
Nikkei identity and the future of the Japanese American community – questions
amplified by the prevalence of intermarriage. Even as early as 1980, 25 percent of Asian
Americans had married outside their ethnic or racial group (32 percent among women, 17
percent among men), and fully 77 percent of those marriages were to white spouses.
34

According to the Supplemental Survey to the 2000 census, 67 percent of Japanese
American men are married to ethnically Japanese women, while 14 percent are married to
whites, 16 percent to women of other Asian ethnicities, and 3 percent are married to
Latinas. Among Japanese American women, 50 percent are married to ethnic Japanese
men, 33 percent to whites, 13 percent to men of other Asian ethnicities, and
approximately one and a half percent each to Latinos and African Americans.
35
These
marriages have naturally produced children of mixed ethnicity and race. Since the 2000

34
S.M. Lee and K. Yamanaka, “Patterns of Asian American Intermarriage and Marital
Assimilation,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 21 (1990): 287-305.

35
C.N. Le, “By the Numbers: Dating, Marriage, and Race in Asian America,” IMDiversity.com
at http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/asian/family_lifestyle_traditions/le_interracial_dating.asp
(accessed Oct. 28, 2007).
307
census for the first time allowed people of mixed race to identify themselves, it found that
fully 31 percent of Japanese Americans were of mixed race, or hapa.
36

The collective impact of these developments is a sense of fragmentation, loss, and
creeping irrelevance within the Japanese American community of Los Angeles; in a
recent grant application, LTSC described the “once relatively cohesive” ethnic group as
having “splintered into five subgroups…: monolingual Japanese-speaking seniors,
traditional Japanese-American families, young adults, hapas (mixed ethnicity) and
transpacifics (immigrants living both in the U.S. and Japan).”
37
A Japanese American
group opened a new bank in Little Tokyo in an effort to, as a Los Angeles Times reporter
put it, “help revitalize a Japanese American community struggling to maintain its
relevancy in an increasingly multiethnic world.”
38
As if to prove the reporter’s assertion,
the bank manager noted that they had one Japanese-speaking teller but planned to hire
another who spoke Spanish. Even culinary traditions, which often seem to outlast other
symbols of ethnic heritage as part of people’s daily lives, seem for Japanese American
Angelenos to have been outsourced to other ethnic groups: only two of the eight finalists
in a 2005 statewide sushi master competition (held to honor Little Tokyo’s first sushi

36
Wei Ming Dariotis, “The Emerging Hapa Community,” AsianWeek, Nov. 1, 2002. The term
hapa derives from the Hawaiian term hapa haole, which meant “half white” and referred to the
children of unions between whites and native Hawaiians. Long a derogatory term for mixed-race
Asians, hapa has been reclaimed over the past few decades by growing numbers of mixed-race
people of Asian descent as a proud and direct way to identify self and community.
37
Little Tokyo Service Center, “Planning for a New Little Tokyo: Strengthening Culture and
Community through Historic Cultural Neighborhood Preservation and Revitalization,” UCLA
Grant Application, 2003.

38
Evelyn Iritani, “Japanese American Group Opens Bank in Little Tokyo,” Los Angeles Times,
Nov. 11, 2002, D2.
308
chefs) were ethnic Japanese, and most of the crew making mochi at the historic
Fugetsudo confectionary in Little Tokyo are Latino.
39

The question of how much longer it will even be possible to speak of “the”
Japanese American community increasingly haunts the conversations of Japanese
American activists in Little Tokyo. Columnists in the Rafu Shimpo worry about the
future, unable to avoid the demographic reality that, as one writer put it, “[p]reserving the
community requires the one thing it doesn’t have, a steady population inflow to maintain
its cultural traditions.”
40
“Wimpy” Hiroto broke the issue out by generation, pointing out
that for the Issei, the question that determined community was “What ken were you from
in Japan?,” for the Nisei, “What camp were you in?,” and for the Sansei, perhaps, “Where
are your folks?” (One can also imagine the Sansei question being “What are your
politics?” or “What do you do for a living?”) For the Yonsei, however, the question
becomes “Who is Japanese?” The Nisei, Hiroto argued, never had to ask such a question,
as they were “ALL brothers and sisters, born of a huge wartime family,” but this glue
holding the Japanese American community together was breaking down. “I’m no James
Fenimore Cooper,” he joked ruefully, “but someone will soon write ‘The Last of the

39
Elizabeth Horan, “Eight Chefs to Compete in Sushi Masters First Annual California State Sushi
Competition,” California Rice Commission Press Release, Sep. 9, 2005; Julie Tamaki, “New
Year’s Delicacy is Bittersweet for Family,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 30, 2002, B1. The
increasing numerical and political dominance of Latinos in Los Angeles, and California more
generally, has been much on the mind of Japanese American community organizers in Little
Tokyo as they have sought to participate actively in multiracial coalitions supporting Latino
politicians, such as Lucille Roybal-Allard and Antonio Villaraigosa, and shared issues such as
immigration and citizenship.

40
Joe Soong, “A Future for Little Tokyo,” Rafu Shimpo, May 24, 2006, 3.
309
Nisei.’”
41
Not coincidentally, two Sansei activists repurposed that cultural reference in a
Little Tokyo community meeting on the same day Hiroto’s column appeared: one
gentleman lamented that “People think that Japanese Americans are an endangered
species, especially in Los Angeles, compared to Koreans and the Chinese,” and another
nodded, saying, “Like we’re the last of the Mohicans!”
42

Unlike Cooper’s Mohicans, Japanese Americans are facing, not liquidation by a
colonizing power, but the loss through assimilation and intermarriage of a unique ethnic
identity, its communal institutions, and the symbolic and material resources those
institutions access, organize, and deploy. These issues echoed through the community
meeting mentioned above, as participants wrestled with Japanese Americans’ diminishing
demographic presence. One man noted that “Other communities are growing, but we’re
not. We’ve already established a strong role and resources, and we need to make use of
that. This is why we need to build a stronger sense of Nikkei identity.” Another man
whose work focuses on Japanese American youth agreed, adding that the “Asian TV
station is reducing Japanese programming because we have more spending money, but are
dispersed and harder to market to. [We need] to show our strength and numbers for
political, economic, and social purposes and benefits.” A representative from a west side
Japanese American community center responded, “Yeah, Latinos are the biggest growth
group, but we don’t want to become invisible and lose out on resources.”

41
W.T. “Wimpy” Hiroto, “Siblings All (Sort Of),” Rafu Shimpo, Jan. 6, 2007, 3.

42
Nikkei Community Day Planning Meeting, Japanese American Cultural and Community
Center, Jan. 6, 2007.
310
Clearly, these community activists recognized that intangible concepts such as
identity, culture, and community rely on the decidedly tangible programming and
organizational practices of community institutions, institutions that require access to
political power and public and private funding streams for their survival. In order to
ensure the continued existence of the Japanese American community, then, division and
fragmentation must be smoothed over into a unified and active constituency that
community organizations can be said to represent. The pressing nature of this imperative
became clear during a discussion about bilingual meetings and the “separate parallel
universes” of Japanese speakers and English speakers. At one point, when it was
suggested that it “may be best to separate out an event for Japanese speakers,” a Sansei
member of LTSC’s board exclaimed, “No, everybody’s gotta be together. If it’s difficult,
then that’s the community!”
43
Defining, connecting, and sustaining that “difficult”
community has become a key goal for Japanese American organizations, and Little
Tokyo, as Japanese Americans’ initial and authentic home, the place to do it.
44

43
Ibid.

44
Little Tokyo is far from the only location where Japanese Americans engage in ethnic
community; given their predominantly suburban residential locations, many Japanese Americans
are now far more active in temples and community centers throughout Orange County, West Los
Angeles, and the San Gabriel Valley. However, unlike with Little Tokyo, the discourse of
historical authenticity cannot be effectively deployed around these sites of more recent and
regionally specific origin. As Dell Upton has written, we often assume that material artifacts are
the bearers of culture; thus, only Little Tokyo’s authentically old buildings and historical
connections offer stabilizing access to “real” community heritage for later-generation Japanese
Americans. See Dell Upton, “Ethnicity, Authenticity, and Invented Traditions.” Historical
Archeology 30.2 (1996): 1-7.
311

We Want to Create New Memories: Remaking Japanese America in Little Tokyo
In April 1998, a loose confederation of organizations and individuals devoted to the
preservation of Japanese American community and identity calling itself Ties that Bind
held its first conference in Little Tokyo. Four hundred participants from Northern and
Southern California, as well as national Japanese American organizations, produced at
that meeting a Declaration for the Nikkei Community. The first point boldly announced
“there will be a Japanese American community in the 21
st
century and we have an
opportunity to decide the direction and shape that our community will take.”
45
The
directives that followed advised Japanese Americans to be “inclusive in our
understanding of who is a member of the Japanese American community,” to mentor and
engage Japanese American youth, to share with others the lessons of the Japanese
American experience, and “to support Nikkei cultural and community institutions which
help to foster and strengthen ethnic American identity.”
These directives have guided Japanese American community organizations in
Little Tokyo as they have adopted innovative spatial and memorial practices aimed at
expanding and revitalizing Japanese American community and identity. For instance, in
line with the directive to be “inclusive in our understanding of who is a member of the
Japanese American community,” JANM opened an exhibit in the summer of 2006
entitled “kip fulbeck: part asian, 100% hapa.” The exhibit was composed of eighty
photographs, taken by artist Kip Fulbeck, of people of partial Asian descent posed against

45
Declaration of the Nikkei Community, 1998 Ties that Bind Conference, drafted Jun. 24, 1998
and ratified Jun. 28, 1998.
312
plain white backgrounds, recalling identification photographs in government documents.
Accompanying the photographs were handwritten responses the subjects wrote to the oft-
asked question, “What are you?” One man’s response was “I am 100% Black and 100%
Japanese.” A woman, who identified herself as Chinese and black, wrote, “What am I?
Shouldn’t you be asking my name first?” Another woman’s answer reflected that the
“race” imposed on her by others changed with the context of her surroundings: “I’m a
mestiza. I joke that my mother is Japanese, my father is Anglo + I’m Mexican – that’s
how the world has identified me since I came to California from Pakistan at age 8.”
46

Upon exiting, visitors found a space where they could take Polaroid photographs of
themselves and write their own answers to the question, “What are you?,” enabling their
commentary to become an extension of the official exhibition. In conjunction with “kip
fulbeck: part asian, 100% hapa,” the museum offered a bibliography of books and videos
on multi-racial identity and experience, as well as a series of photography workshops
with the artist and films and seminars on mixed-race identity in America.

46
Japanese American National Museum (hereafter JANM) Member Magazine, Summer Issue
2006.
313

Figure 4.3. The Japanese American National Museum, located at the intersection of East
First Street and Central Avenue, 2008. Photograph by author.

Chris Komai, JANM spokesman, said that the museum chose to host the exhibit
as a way to reach out to future generations of Japanese Americans: “Our community is
changing and we need to recognize that…The definition of what it means to be Japanese
American has to be different than it was 60 years ago, if it wants to perpetuate itself…It’s
a history and culture we want to perpetuate, not a bunch of people of the same race.”
47

This type of programming allows Japanese American community organizations to reach
out from the ethnic specificity of the enclave and claim a more numerous and diverse
constituency. Yet as a spatial practice the hapa exhibit, situated in the heart of Little

47
Teresa Watanabe, “Mixed-Race Asians Find Pride as Hapas,” Los Angeles Times, Jun. 11,
2006, B3. Although in some ways Komai’s statement might seem to echo contemporary
neoliberal arguments that the United States has moved “beyond race” into a “colorblind” society,
the exhibit itself seemed less interested in denying the ongoing salience of race than in disrupting
any essentialist conflation of race, identity, and politics. See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism
Without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
314
Tokyo, also welcomed multiracial individuals into the Japanese American community
through the mediating place of the enclave. Such practices make the enclave “home” for
hapas, even those who may not look traditionally “Japanese,” and reinscribe the enclave
as a more broadly inclusive, though still Japanese American, landscape of belonging.
48

Several organizations have taken up the challenge to mentor and encourage
Japanese American youth; for example, the Intercollegiate Nikkei Council held a
conference in Little Tokyo in April 2005 “to examine and redefine the Nikkei community
of today in order to form a cohesive vision for the future of the community” – workshop
topics included community activism, hapa issues, and civil rights.
49
The California
Japanese American Community Leadership Council created a Nikkei Community
Internship Program in 2002, placing a dozen Asian American college students with non-
profit Japanese American service organizations for eight-week internships.
50
Also in
2002, the Ties that Bind consortium initiated a weeklong summer camp in Little Tokyo
for Japanese American middle schoolers, Camp Musubi, which combines spatial and
memorial practice. Each day of the camp focuses on a theme, such as “Getting to Know

48
Such a welcoming attitude toward hapas has not always been in evidence in the Japanese
American community; indeed, Lon Kurashige has documented the controversies related to
Japanese ancestry requirements and hapa winners of the annual Nisei Week beauty pageant in the
1970s and 1980s, and Rebecca Chiyoko King has likewise described how contemporary Japanese
American beauty pageants can reinforce race as much as they attempt to deconstruct it. See Lon
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and
Festival in Los Angeles, 1934-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and Rebecca
Chiyoko King-O-Riain, Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

49
“Nikkei Youth to Hold Conference in Little Tokyo,” Rafu Shimpo, Apr. 13, 2005, 1.

50
Lynn Nakamura and Kenyon Mayeda, California Japanese American Community Leadership
Council Fundraising Letter, Apr. 26, 2006; “Nikkei Community Internships Now Available,”
Rafu Shimpo, Feb. 23, 2007, 1.
315
J-Town” and “Nikkei Heritage,” and the campers participate in activities like the Little
Tokyo Scavenger Hunt and sushi making, and take field trips to JANM, a tofu factory,
East West Players, and the Keiro nursing home.
51
The purpose of the camp, obviously, is
to “spark an interest and gain awareness of the Japanese American culture and
community through hands-on experiences and interaction within the community” – in
other words, to define Japanese American culture for the kids and secure their investment
in its continuation by spatializing memory in enclave-dependent activities and stories.
52

Camp Musubi is representative of the primary strategy driving youth
programming at Japanese American organizations in Little Tokyo: building an
attachment between Japanese American youth and Little Tokyo by making the enclave
part of their lives through the creation of new memories. The most ambitious project in
this effort is the campaign to build a youth recreation center in Little Tokyo. The rec
center has been a dream of community groups since the early days of redevelopment (see
the discussion of Noguchi Plaza in Chapter 3); the enduring demands for its construction
in a neighborhood with so few resident children demonstrates the concern of suburban
Japanese American parents with creating a venue that draws their children to the urban
enclave to interact with the “authentic” physical remnants of their ethnic roots, and with
each other.

51
Janna Abo, “Camp Musubi 2005 Ends in Success,” Rafu Shimpo, Sep. 17, 2005, 5; “Camp
Musubi to Return to Little Tokyo on Aug. 21-25,” Rafu Shimpo, May 6, 2006, 1; Janna Abo and
Joey Furutani, “Summer Camp with a Cultural Twist,” Rafu Shimpo, Sep. 9, 2006, 1.

52
“Applications Now Being Accepted for Camp Musubi, Aug. 22-26,” Rafu Shimpo, Jun. 28,
2005, 1.
316
The publicity and fundraising materials for the rec center emphasize participation
in sports, particularly in Japanese American youth basketball leagues, as a means of
building ethnic community across multiple generations; indeed, the fundraising
campaign’s slogan is “Recreation for the Generations.”
53
The center’s focus on basketball
is at the heart of its community outreach; so many Japanese Americans have shared the
experience of playing or coaching that participation in sports bridges divisions beyond
generation within the local Nikkei community. As Ellen Endo put it:
Among Japanese Americans, there are more basketball, baseball, and
softball leagues, scout troops, martial arts classes, and church youth
groups per capita than in any other community…basketball to me is a
euphemism for family. It’s the bonding, the unity, the carpooling. It
requires time and commitment from the parent in addition to a willingness
to bring snacks for the whole team.
54

In the case of the rec center, this notion of basketball as a euphemism for family is
extended to sports as a signifier for ethnic community.
A video produced by the volunteers working with Little Tokyo Service Center to
build the gym demonstrates this conviction that sports can revitalize the enclave while
simultaneously strengthening, and even enlarging, community. In the video, “Till There’s
a Rec Center,” Japanese American and hapa children are shown playing basketball on a
closed-off street in Little Tokyo during the annual San Tai San tournament, which revives
claims to the space of Little Tokyo for ethnic youth each spring. In interviews, parents of
the players make various statement supporting the rec center: one says it will bring the
community together, another that it will create common ground between the generations

53
For more information on the planned Little Tokyo Recreation Center, see www.gym.ltsc.org
(accessed Apr. 20, 2008).

54
Ellen Endo, “The Elevator Encounter,” Rafu Shimpo, Au. 8, 2007, 3 (emphasis in the original).
317
by providing his kids with similar experiences to the ones he had growing up. A third
group jokes that the rec center will give them an excuse to get together to eat and drink in
Little Tokyo while their kids play. A hapa girl points out how her participation in
basketball keeps her connected to the Japanese American community: “I go to a different
school than most of the people on my team, so otherwise we wouldn’t get to hang out that
much.”
55
Clearly the spatial practice of playing basketball on the streets and envisioning a
completed recreation center unites shared claims to the enclave with the continuation and
regeneration of Japanese American identity and community.
However, a downtown gymnasium could not serve Japanese Americans alone, as
supporters of the rec center realize. A project fact sheet handed out at community
meetings states that “the facility will be open to the general public with a particular
emphasis in serving the multi-ethnic neighborhoods in and around Little Tokyo, as well
as the broader Southern California Japanese American community.”
56
While this
conception of the rec center opens a promising door to bringing suburban Japanese
American youth into renewed encounters with urban immigrant and racialized
communities (one of many ways the desire for the center echoes the lessons of Nisei
sports clubs like the Olivers), it also reveals the nature of Japanese American outreach in
Little Tokyo, which proceeds from a position of symbolic (and in some cases, actual)
ownership of the enclave. Japanese American community organizations have explicitly
drawn on a rhetoric of ownership previously denied or discounted, of communal place

55
The video was screened at a Little Tokyo Community Council meeting on Mar. 29, 2005.

56
“Rec Center Fact Sheet,” handed out at Mar. 29, 2005 LTCC meeting.
318
invaded and obliterated by the spatial practices of city planners and developers, to justify
its demands on the local state for access to land.
57

The Little Tokyo Service Center has emphasized the long tradition of Japanese
American participation in competitive sports in the enclave to build support for the rec
center, including organizing an exhibit on the pre-war Oliver sports clubs.
58

57
The search for a site for the rec center is an ongoing odyssey. In the late 1990s, the Little
Tokyo Service Center believed it had the city’s support for a location on the First Street North
block in the vicinity of the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), the Geffen
Contemporary, and East West Players. However, these three entities, along with supporters of the
veterans memorial on the same block, felt a gymnasium was an incompatible use with their
cultural and memorial facilities, and pushed for a reflective art and sculpture park on the site
instead (which is still in the planning stages). This request opened up a rift between Japanese
American community organizations that has yet to fully heal, as well as causing then-
Councilwoman Rita Walters, who supported the art park, to lose support within the Japanese
American community. Her successor, Jan Perry, has worked diligently to find another site for the
rec center; currently, the Service Center is attempting to finalize plans to build on a lot south of
Tom Gilmore’s Vibiana project on Main, although there are also plans to put a police parking
garage in that location. The fact that the gymnasium was an original and unfulfilled promise of
the redevelopment period has lent moral weight to rec center supporters’ demands of the city, and
the extensive knowledge of city bureaucracy that LTSC has gained over its years participating in
redevelopment projects has helped them to keep the project alive in the minds of elected officials
and city planners. See K. Connie Kang, “Plans for Gym Splits Groups in Little Tokyo,” Los
Angeles Times, Jun. 22, 2002, B3; and interview with Bill Watanabe, Apr. 7, 2005.

58
I served as the grant writer and humanities expert on this project for the Little Tokyo Service
Center. As further proof of the importance that athletics have played in constituting Japanese
American community, the prewar Olivers reconvened as a club in 1961 and for forty years
annually handed out an award, named after Nellie Oliver, to their choice for the outstanding
Japanese American student athlete in greater Los Angeles. In this practice they mirrored – for a
much greater length of time – the activities of other Nisei in the postwar years, who sought to
ease the psychological consequences of internment and discrimination and prevent juvenile
delinquency among Japanese American youth through participation in the same athletic
competitions so important in their own childhoods. See Daniel Kawahara, interviewed by Sojin
Kim and Darcie Ike, Dec. 18, 2000; Cedrick Shimo, interviewed by Sojin Kim, Mar. 19, 2001;
and Kenji Taniguchi, interviewed by Sojin Kim, John Esaki, and Florence Ochi, May 15, 2002;
all for the Boyle Heights Oral History Project, Hirasaki National Resource Center, JANM.
319

Figure 4.4. Olivers reunion in Little Tokyo, May 19, 2007. Jack Kunitomi is second from
the left in the back row, and Ed Wada stands behind him on the right. Joe Suski stands
next to Frank Fukuzawa at the opposite end of the back row; Joe’s younger brother Elmer
is seated at front on the far left. Next to Elmer in the front row, left to right, are Ets
Yoshiyama, Harry Yamamoto, and Jim Yamaguchi. Photograph courtesy Takao Suzuki.

For the Olivers, playing sports was a way to undermine Orientalist assumptions about
Asian masculinity while both extending connections with distant Japanese American
communities and strengthening their territorial claim to the enclave. Contemporary
Japanese American community groups see the rec center as providing similar benefits: a
physical site that further cements (literally, as another community-built and –oriented
building) Japanese American claims on the enclave while also fostering ethnic identity
and community. As Jim Matsuoka put it, “that’s why LTSC is going so strong for the
gym, is to get the young people to come down here, and sort of reclaim this place as a
320
center of activity. I tell everybody that if we don’t have this, we’re so dispersed, and at
the rate we’re assimilating, we’ll have nothing left.”
59
Instead of just preserving the past,
the key spatial and memorial practice pursued by community organizations in the 1980s
and ‘90s, Japanese Americans now attempt to transform the enclave into a generator of
new memories and connections that younger generations will carry forward into the
future.
60

A prime example of how Little Tokyo’s community organizations have moved
beyond preservation as a community-building strategy is the rehabilitation of the Far East
building on East First Street. The Far East, so named for the old-style Chinese restaurant
on its ground floor, was badly damaged by the Northridge earthquake that devastated Los
Angeles on January 17, 1994, and the restaurant closed. The Far East had been a Little
Tokyo institution since 1935; as one LTSC grant application put it, “details of life at the
Café are well-known to virtually every member of Los Angeles’ Japanese-American
community whose relatives lived through relocation.”
61
The Chinese American Mar
family, operators of the restaurant and owners of the building, eventually donated it to the

59
Interview with Jim Matsuoka, Aug. 5, 2006.

60
These practices walk the line between what Svetlana Boym has termed restorative and
reflective nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia, based on tradition and the longing for restoration of a
lost home, is a reactionary mode of deploying the past to shape the future, while reflective
nostalgia “thrives on the longing itself…and delays the homecoming.” Boym, The Future of
Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001): xviii. Reflective nostalgia, at its best, mounts a
creative and progressive challenge to the accepted status quo. While some aspects of Japanese
American spatial and memorial practice in Little Tokyo qualify as reflective nostalgia,
particularly the emphasis on shared histories with other racialized communities, the specter of a
more reactionary nostalgia for an exclusively Japanese American past and future also haunts the
activism of ethnic organizations in the enclave.

61
Little Tokyo Service Center, National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) Grant
Application, Feb. 25, 2002, 2.
321
Little Tokyo Service Center, which cobbled together preservation and affordable housing
grants, along with other funding, to pay for the $3.8 million rehabilitation.
62
The
renovated space houses sixteen affordable studio apartments and a community computer
education center in addition to the highly anticipated new Chop Suey Café and Lounge,
which finally opened in 2006.

62
Julie Tamaki, “New Lease on Life for Little Tokyo Landmark,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 11,
2004, B1.
322

Figure 4.5. Rehabilitated Far East Building on East First Street, 2007. Photograph by
author.

323
Bill Watanabe, LTSC executive director, joked that the restaurant was completely
authentic, right down to the “historic gum” underneath the tables. “You don’t want to get
rid of that history because you can’t get it back,” he said. “So I think people who come
here will remember that and have those memories. But at this point we want to create
new memories and start new traditions.”
63
Many Japanese American Angelenos joined
him in that wish. One woman’s letter to the Los Angeles Times supporting the
rehabilitation project recalled Sunday dinners at the restaurant and her grandfather’s
wake in the banquet room; she could not wait “to return with [her] family to share more
Sunday dinners, retell all the old stories.”
64
Jenny Kuida wrote an article in the Rafu
about her own memories of going to the Far East with her family while growing up, and
then projected those memories into the future:
I dream about a future in Little Tokyo that includes Tony and I taking our
future kids to basketball games at the Little Tokyo Recreation Center.
Then afterwards, we’ll walk down First Street, stop in to get manju and a
snowcone at Fugetsudo, and then take our family for chinameshi at the
recently renovated Far East Café. That’s my dream.
65

Jenny and Tony don’t live in Little Tokyo, yet it is the old enclave, not
contemporary Japanese American ethnoburbs, that is represented as supplying the
necessary emotional resonance – the aura of historical authenticity, or as Bill Watanabe
has said, “the place where your roots are” – that will educate the next generation on what

63
“Audrey Shiomi, “Chop Suey Café Officially Opens,” Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 12, 2006, 1.

64
Kaz Baba, “Far East Café’s Timeless Memories,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 23, 2002, B22.

65
Jennifer “Emiko” Kuida, “Valley Girl’s Memories of Far East Café,” Nanka Nikkei Voices III:
Little Tokyo – Changing Times, Changing Faces, ed. Brian Niiya (Los Angeles: Japanese
American Historical Society of Southern California, 2004), 131-133.
324
it means to be part of the Japanese American community.
66
This imaginary walk through
Little Tokyo clearly links past and future generations of Japanese Americans to shared
encounters with specific, historically-significant enclave locations; inhabiting and
claiming the enclave and connecting past memory to present experience are presented as
key elements in the maintenance of ethnic identity and community.
The directive that Japanese Americans must share the lessons of their experience
with others is perhaps the most completely fulfilled edict of the Nikkei Declaration –
certainly it is the most visible motif in Little Tokyo’s physical landscape. The primary
vehicle through which these lessons are shared is of course the Japanese American
National Museum. Its permanent exhibit, “Common Ground: The Heart of Community,”
details the entire history of the Japanese in America, complete with artifacts, home
videos, and a rebuilt barracks from the Heart Mountain, Wyoming internment camp. The
museum’s National Center for the Preservation of Democracy (NCPD), which has taken
over the old Nishi temple space, focuses entirely on the challenges and promise of
democracy in light of the experience of internment. World War II Japanese American
draft resisters have staged readings from a play about their experiences by Frank Chin,
“A Divided Community,” at both JANM and Little Tokyo’s Centenary Church.
67

In addition to JANM and the NCPD, the Go for Broke National Educational
Center, which collects and archives oral histories of Japanese American veterans, plans to
construct its new building, complete with interactive exhibit space, in 2010 just behind

66
Interview with Bill Watanabe, Apr. 7, 2005.

67
“Wartime Resisters to Stage Reading at JANM on Saturday,” Rafu Shimpo, March 9, 2006: 1.
325
JANM.
68
Since 1999, the Go for Broke monument in Little Tokyo has listed the names of
all those who served in the 442
nd
Regimental Combat Team, 100
th
Infantry Battalion, and
Military Intelligence Services during World War II. Every weekend and sometimes
weekdays, now-elderly Japanese American veterans – some missing fingers, others
missing part of an arm or foot, wearing their regimental pins and “Go for Broke” hats –
come down to Little Tokyo and sit at the monument, sharing their stories of rescuing the
“Lost Battalion” and liberating Dachau with anyone who approaches. The Japanese
American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC) is also the location of a Court of
Honor, where the names of Japanese Americans who died in America’s wars have been
carved into the walls. Taken together, these pedagogical, commemorative, and
performative sites express the patriotic legacy of both Japanese Americans’ military
service and their resistance in the face of American hypocrisy and racism.
The final directive of the Declaration for the Nikkei Community, “to support
Nikkei cultural and community institutions which help to foster and strengthen ethnic
American identity,” has been realized most effectively in a renewed commitment to
holding new events and festivals in Little Tokyo while also revitalizing old ones. The all-
volunteer Cherry Blossom Festival of Southern California, which had previously taken
place in Pasadena, moved to Little Tokyo in 2007, bringing 14,000 people to the enclave
to watch and participate in taiko, kabuki, ondo dancing, a martial arts arena, a kimono

68
Nao Gunji, “Go for Broke Secures Land Lease for National Education Center,” Rafu Shimpo,
May 13, 2006, 1. “Go for Broke” was the regimental motto of the 442
nd
Regimental Combat
Team, the all-Japanese American unit that was the most decorated in U.S. military history for its
size.
326
fashion show, hula, lei making, and a craft and food court.
69
The order and focus of the
performances demonstrated that Little Tokyo was not a mere backdrop to the events, but
a central element in the presentation of Japanese American culture: the opening night
evening performance was entitled “Hello Little Tokyo” and “spotlight[ed] the history of
the Little Tokyo district through stories, song, and dance.”
70

The annual Nisei Week festival was also reinvigorated in 2007 with additions that
nostalgically recalled moments in Little Tokyo’s past. With the help of Japanese
corporations, festival organizers raised $300,000 to bring an enormous nebuta float from
Aomori, Japan as part of the festival’s Grand Parade. The return of major Japanese
corporate funding coincided with an increase in the number of Japanese visa holders
entering the United States and of Japanese corporations doing business in Southern
California that year, causing festival organizers to reflect on the previous era of Japanese
corporate influence in the 1980s. While Japanese investment had fueled redevelopment
and kept Little Tokyo bustling, it had been tied to the negative impacts of Japan-bashing
and tensions between newcomers from Japan and Japanese Americans who saw Little
Tokyo as “home.” The nebuta float represented a possible new rapprochement between
the two communities, as well as an opportunity to reclaim ties to a Japan now viewed in a
friendlier light within the United States. As Little Tokyo businesswoman and Nisei Week
board member Frances Hashimoto put it, “What I’m hoping the nebuta project will do is
reinvigorate support of Japanese companies in Little Tokyo and show the American

69
Gwen Muranaka, “Little Tokyo Welcomes Cherry Blossom Fest,” Rafu Shimpo, Apr. 3, 2007,
1.

70
“Cherry Blossom Fest Makes J-Town Debut,” Rafu Shimpo, Mar. 30, 2007, 1.
327
public something really traditional from Japan.”
71
Rafu columnist Ellen Endo felt that the
float had “re-ignite[d] the flame of Japanese pride” among Japanese American
Angelenos.
72

The festival’s very next weekend, however, focused not on Japanese pride but on
the specifically Japanese American history of Nisei Week, with the return of the Nisei
Week carnival. The carnival, a key element of the festival during the 1950s, ‘60s, and
‘70s, brought together Japanese American churches, youth groups, and community
organizations to raise money with a combination of typical American carnival games
such as the ring toss and dunking booth and particularly Japanese American “fusion”
foods like chicken teriyaki, Okinawan dango, chili rice, and shave ice. The Nisei Week
carnival is the subject of warm childhood memories among many of the Sansei; as Mike
Hagiwara put it, “You had to be there. Something was wrong if you weren’t there. And it
was all about who had the best this, the best that. It was almost like a big competition.”
73

For the Sansei, the carnival was the Little Tokyo tradition that strengthened their sense of
ethnic identity and now that, as Hagiwara said, they “have kids who are the same age
when we used to go,” bringing the carnival back to Nisei Week demonstrates a desire
shared among many Sansei to sustain that experience for the next generation.
The first annual Nikkei Community Day in 2007, again initiated by Ties that Bind
and taking place in Little Tokyo, addressed many of the ongoing issues first pointed out

71
Teresa Watanabe, “Float Carries Little Tokyo’s Hopes,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 18, 2007,
B1.

72
Ellen Endo, “A Nisei Week to Remember,” Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 22, 2007, 3.

73
Soji Kashiwagi, “The Carnival Makes a Comeback,” Rafu Shimpo, May 18, 2007, 1.
328
in the 1998 Declaration. Anxiety over the future of the Japanese American community,
and the directive to engage Japanese American youth in sustaining that community, were
evident in the theme chosen for the day – kodomo no tame ni (for the sake of the
children) – and the date for which it was planned, May 12
th
, which coincided with the
JACCC celebration of the Japanese Children’s Day holiday. The event further overlapped
with the San Tai San youth basketball tournament and the “Chibi-K” Kids for Kids Fun
Run, both of which took place on the streets of Little Tokyo, as well as workshops for
children in taiko and making manju. Meanwhile, the desire to build a more inclusive
Japanese American community animated a symposium on “The State and Future of the
Nikkei Community” at JACCC. Keynote speaker Alan Nishio, president of LTSC’s
governing board, reiterated that “People have questions about whether our community in
fact has a future…I think yes, if we choose to define Nikkei as [an identity] that embraces
diversity and inclusion.”
74
Nishio pointed out that his own two grandchildren were both
hapa, and that a person’s last name could no longer be taken as a clear indicator of their
Japanese American heritage. “If we embrace the diversity,” he said, “we will see a
growing, dynamic community.”
75

74
Teresa Watanabe, “Reclaiming Cultural Ties,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2007, B1.

75
Nao Gunji, “A Future for Little Tokyo,” Rafu Shimpo, May 17, 2007, 1.
329

Figure 4.6. Generational and ethnic diversity among participants in Nikkei Community
Day, May 12, 2007. Photograph by author.

An Asian Pacific American book festival at JANM, along with performances by
music and dance groups and an Asian Pacific arts and crafts fair, actualized Nishio’s call
for a more inclusive definition of Japanese America while also sharing Japanese
American history and culture with all those in attendance. The cultural and community
institutions raised awareness for their projects by passing out literature from booths at the
JACCC plaza, as well as holding a health forum for the elderly residents of the enclave.
These organizations also collaborated in supporting each other’s events: while sponsors
for the day included both Asian-oriented businesses such as Umeya Rice Cakes and
corporate giants such as UPS and American Airlines, as well as the city’s Department of
Cultural Affairs and the Historic Cultural Neighborhood Council, community groups
330
such as the JACCC, the JACL, the Little Tokyo Service Center, and the Nikkei Student
Union at UCLA also cross-sponsored each other’s programs.
These festivals, events, and projects cumulatively act as the “invented traditions”
that now bind the contemporary Japanese American community together.
76
Unlike the
memorials and artworks that passively mark the space of Little Tokyo, these new and
renewed rituals are participatory and performative, requiring Japanese Americans to
physically move through old spaces in new ways, to encounter each other anew and
repair fraying connections. Even in the case of the community mural described at the
beginning of this chapter, the mural itself is meant to mark Little Tokyo as Japanese
American space for those who enter the enclave without knowing its history; it was the
act of creating the mural that was seen as building community among Japanese
Americans. The key point for this study is that these invented traditions require space in
order to be performed, and not just any space – they derive their significance and
symbolic power from taking place on the ground in Little Tokyo.
Indeed, the strongest message broadcast by the events of Nikkei Community Day
was less that the Japanese American community would have a future than that its future
was dependent on the survival of Little Tokyo as a Japanese American place. Lane
Hirabayashi, a professor at UCLA, called Little Tokyo “the context of Japanese
Americans” in Los Angeles. “What’s really essential is to have a place we can go when

76
The key work theorizing “invented traditions” is Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds.,
The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1983). While Hobsbawm
and Ranger are primarily interested in the development of traditions that cemented national
identities in modern and colonial contexts, their insight that rituals linking past and future could
establish social cohesion among real or artificial communities and socialize participants into a set
of values and behavioral conventions holds true for Japanese Americans in Little Tokyo as well.
331
we want to hook up, when we want to make a contribution, when we want to get
involved. That’s what the physical nature of communities are about.”
77
Mickie Okamoto,
head of UCLA’s large and active Nikkei Student Union, said that her sense of
community grew out of the hands-on experiences shared in Little Tokyo, connections
she had taken for granted until she realized how much work it took to keep the enclave
alive.
78

Henri Lefebvre recognized that social relations are produced through the use and
organization of space. Lefebvre’s main concern was to unearth the manner in which
spatial processes are “tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those
relations impose” – the practices of the racial state and global capital as documented in
this dissertation.
79
Nevertheless, his work also lends itself to the insight that place (or
what he would have called representational space) is not merely a field for capital
accumulation and exploitation but a resource – indeed, a requirement – for marginalized
or subaltern communities to reproduce themselves. For the many Japanese American
Angelenos who visit JANM, eat at the Far East, pay their respects at the Go for Broke
monument, donate to the rec center, and enroll their children in Camp Musubi or the San
Tai San basketball tournament, Little Tokyo must continue as a Japanese American
enclave because it is the sole physical location where they can reinvent the very contours
of Japanese American identity and regenerate the ethnic community that has proven such

77
Nao Gunji, “A Future for Little Tokyo,” Rafu Shimpo, May 17, 2007, 1.

78
Mickie Okamoto, Remarks at Nikkei Community Day Symposium, Japanese American
Cultural and Community Center, May 12, 2007.

79
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London:
Blackwell, 1991): 33.
332
an important resource and protection against the vagaries of shifting U.S. racial logics.
80

But the inscription of Little Tokyo as a Japanese American place can by no means be
taken for granted, as urban real estate is forever on the verge of convulsive disruptions
brought about by the capitalist land market and the interventions of urban policy
produced at multiple levels of government.
81
Thus, Japanese American organizations in
Little Tokyo over the past two decades have had to find ways to shape, control, and
direct the enclave’s physical evolution in the face of an increasingly complex set of
development pressures.

80
The performative aspects of reproducing ethnic identity on the ground in Little Tokyo extend
beyond the invented traditions of family itineraries and community festivals. The memorial
landscape provides “a grammar for possible performances of self,” in the words of Greg
Dickinson, organized into a set of narratives that “teach” Japanese Americans the nature and
boundaries of ethnic community. One element of this grammar is the consumption and display of
markers of “JA-ness,” such as purchasing a sumo car magnet or a “mochi is nice, mochi is rice” t-
shirt at the JANM gift shop. This commodification of ethnic identity can take on added layers of
meaning within the symbolical setting of the enclave. See Greg Dickinson, “Memories for Sale:
Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech
83.1 (Feb. 1997): 1-27, and M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical
Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), especially chapter
8.

81
My understanding of “urban time” has been strongly influenced by Dana Cuff, The Provisional
City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000), as
well as Lefebvre’s theory of “representations of space” and Logan and Molotch’s concept of the
“exchange value” of land versus its use value. See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, and John
R. Logan and Harvey M. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987).

333
The Battle Still Goes On: The Gentrification of Little Tokyo
The aftermath of the riots and the Japanese recession of the early 1990s brought a period
of relative calm to Little Tokyo.
82
Real estate values dropped, a nascent downtown
residential revival was halted in its tracks, and plans for large corporate developments
relying on Japanese funding or patronage failed to make it off the drawing boards. A
Community Redevelopment Agency report reflected on the situation in the early 1990s:
“Little Tokyo was abuzz with anticipation for 2,234 market rate apartments and
condominiums planned by private developers. The developers subsequently went
bankrupt, canceled or indefinitely postponed all the units due to economic
infeasibility.”
83
Throughout much of the 1990s, the CRA essentially oversaw Little
Tokyo with neglect that varied from benign to malicious, as when the Agency’s board of
commissioners slashed $700,000 from the neighborhood’s redevelopment funding in
order to cover debts related to the Convention Center and Central Library.
84

Despite such financial difficulties, the temporary removal of development
pressures allowed Japanese American community organizations and Little Tokyo
residents to participate in planning charettes where they were finally able to discuss their
shared desires for Little Tokyo’s future. A process favored by urban planners and

82
According to one article, 1998 was the worst year for Little Tokyo merchants since 1992, due
largely to that year’s Asian economic crisis and its impact on tourism from Asian countries to Los
Angeles. K. Connie Kang, “Little Tokyo Feeling Pinch of Japan’s Economic Woes,” Los Angeles
Times, Aug. 20, 1998, B1.

83
Undated report on Far East Building rehabilitation project, Community Redevelopment Agency
(in author’s possession).

84
Ungyo Lynn Sugiyama, “The Place-Making of Little Tokyo: A Cultural and Historical
Appraisal of the Urban Landscape” (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 1996): 101.
334
developers to aid in envisioning radical redesigns of abstract space, the charettes were
repurposed by Little Tokyo groups as opportunities to articulate spatial and memorial
practices that would enhance the enclave’s inscription and value as ethnic place. These
charettes produced many ideas (planting cherry trees, installing a mural, starting a
farmers market, creating a public safety patrol) that have been realized in Little Tokyo
over the past decade.
85
At the same time, community organizations like LTSC and JANM
took advantage of this interlude to expand their actual ownership or control over key
parcels of Little Tokyo property and consolidate their symbolic ownership of the
enclave’s historic core, with projects like Casa Heiwa (see Chapter Three) and the
museum’s new multi-million dollar pavilion that tripled its original space.
86
Community
and cultural groups also collaborated to rehabilitate the old Union Church, which had
been vacant for over a decade, using a combination of private, municipal, and federal
(FEMA) funds; the renovated sanctuary became home to Visual Communications, the
L.A. ArtCore gallery, and the East West Players theater group, all Asian American arts
organizations.
87
Rafu columnist Ellen Endo has estimated that non-profit organizations
such as LTSC, JANM, and the JACCC, along with the churches and temples, collectively
own or control about 25 percent of Little Tokyo’s land.
88

85
Ibid., 115-127.

86
Todd S. Purdum, “L.A.’s Little Tokyo Perseveres,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 7, 1999, B3.

87
Author interview with Bill Watanabe, Apr. 7, 2005; “Cultural Center Opens at Site of Historic
Church,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 5, 1998, B4.

88
Ellen Endo, “Understanding Our Past,” Rafu Shimpo, Sep. 26, 2007, 5.
335
However, as the Southern California economy recovered, the undervalued
downtown real estate of Little Tokyo again captured the interest of outside investors. In
1999, the Office Depot chain decided to move its store on Alameda a few blocks closer to
downtown businesses, choosing a corner of Second and Central occupied by an old
railroad switching station that had become a homeless encampment. The lot was large
enough to accommodate the big-box retailer and a large surface parking lot, a rarity in the
downtown area. The arrival of Office Depot in Little Tokyo, followed as it was over the
next few years by not one but two Starbucks and other chains such as Quizno’s, Kinko’s,
and American Apparel, produced new concerns for Little Tokyo merchants.
89
As former
CRA project manager Cooke Sunoo put it, the chains were the newest iteration of a
problem that had begun with Japanese corporate investment in the enclave’s
redevelopment: “the money is still leaving the community, it’s just going to a different
place.”
90

The lack of opportunities for input from the community on Office Depot’s move,
despite the project being located within the CRA redevelopment boundaries, surprised
community groups in Little Tokyo and served as a reminder that symbolic spatial
inscription was no substitute for an organized response to potential development.
91

Building on the dialogue among Japanese American associations initiated by the 1998

89
The Starbucks on Central Avenue opened in 2002 and soon became one of the company’s
highest-grossing stores west of the Rockies. See Ellen Endo, “The New Adventures of Danrene,”
Rafu Shimpo, Feb. 6, 2008, 3.

90
H. Cooke Sunoo, Little Tokyo Historical Society Meeting, Japanese American National
Museum, Feb. 10, 2007.

91
I am indebted to Takao Suzuko of the Little Tokyo Service Center for this timeline of events.
336
Ties that Bind conference, dozens of Japanese American organizations (including several
not specifically associated with Little Tokyo, such as Japan America TV) joined together
with local businesses, residents, churches, and neighborhood-based institutions like the
Geffen Contemporary Museum to create a new information and advocacy forum, the
Little Tokyo Community Council (see Appendix C for 2006-2007 list of member
organizations). The Council (LTCC) meets monthly (except August) at the Japanese
American National Museum, elects new officers annually from the member
organizations, and also has several subcommittees that meet regularly on issues such as
parking, planning and community preservation, public safety, and beautification.
92
Since
its inception, LTCC has become the central information clearinghouse for the Little
Tokyo community, as evidenced by the parade of speakers at each meeting: developers
presenting renderings of proposed buildings, local politicians dropping by to campaign,
community groups announcing fundraisers, and police officers reporting on crime
statistics. In addition, LTCC has become the unofficial voice of Little Tokyo; anyone
addressing the Council generally faces a public question-and-answer period and the
members frequently vote on recommendations and endorsements that are taken seriously
by the enclave’s current city councilwoman, Jan Perry, and by municipal planning and
zoning officials.
The new level of organized activism in Little Tokyo in the aftermath of the Ties

92
LTCC should not be confused with the neighborhood councils created by the 2000 reform of
the Los Angeles City Charter. Little Tokyo is actually situated within the Historic Cultural
Neighborhood Council that includes Chinatown, Olvera Street, and the older areas of downtown
Los Angeles. Although LTCC has no power to legislate, the number and breadth of organizations
who participate (helped along by the neighborhood’s location adjacent to the Civic Center) has
resulted in the Council achieving a kind of quasi-official political status.
337
that Bind conference was mirrored at the statewide level, as the California Japanese
American Leadership Council hired a lobbyist to seek state funding for preservation of
not just Little Tokyo, but the other two remaining California Japantowns in San
Francisco and San Jose.
93
These efforts eventually paid off with the passage of Senate Bill
307 in 2001, which provided $150,000 to each enclave to develop a preservation plan.
Governor Gray Davis earmarked additional funds for historic and cultural preservation
projects from the passage of Proposition 40 the following year. These funds produced
multiple memory projects, including a renovation of the Japanese garden at JACCC,
interactive kiosks installed throughout the district to provide information for visitors on
enclave businesses and community events, and a series of plaques commemorating
locations throughout the enclave (generally no longer extant) that had been significant in
Little Tokyo’s history, including the Amelia Street School and Bronzeville’s Cobra
Club.
94
Three copies of a nine-foot, 1,000-pound bronze and stone Japantowns landmark
were also commissioned and installed in San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles.
95

These projects are all intended to physically mark and claim Little Tokyo as a Japanese
American place. They are not directed towards those who already participate in the

93
Chris Aihara, Little Tokyo Community Council Meeting, Japanese American National
Museum, Jun. 20, 2006.

94
Takao Suzuki, LTCC Planning and Cultural Preservation Committee Meeting, Japanese
American National Museum, Apr. 21, 2005.

95
“New Landmark in Little Tokyo,” Downtown News, Aug. 21, 2006, 2. The Little Tokyo
landmark was installed in front of the Union Center for the Arts, but will be moved to the plaza
atop the Aiso Street parking garage when that facility is completed.
338
Japanese American community or know Japanese American history, but rather lay out a
pedagogical trajectory for those outside the community who do not yet know Little
Tokyo’s story. The various plaques, landmarks, and kiosks educate these “outsiders” and
seek to convince them of the authority of Japanese Americans’ claim to the enclave. This
landscape is reminiscent of Pierra Nora’s description of “sites of memory,” or lieux de
mémoire:
The defense, by certain minorities, of a privileged memory that has
retreated to zealously protected enclaves in this sense intensely illuminates
the truth of lieux de mémoire – that without commemorative vigilance,
history would soon sweep them away. We buttress our identities upon
such bastions, but if what they defended were not threatened, there would
be no need to build them.
96

While these projects institutionalize Japanese American memory on the enclave’s
landscape, they are less concerned with reminding Japanese Americans of their
past than with protecting that past from the spatial designs of others in the future.
Another product of the SB 307/Prop 40 funds was a series of consultant-led
public workshops in Little Tokyo during 2003, culminating in a final report defining
cultural preservation for Japantowns. The report stated that cultural preservation

96
Pierre Nora, trans. Marc Roudebush, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,”
Representations 0 (spring 1989): 7-24, 12. Nora has argued that modern society requires “sites of
memory” – memorials, battlefields, political symbols, songs, and images that embody and
transmit knowledge about the past outside the realms of official, abstract history – in order to
maintain coherent communal and national identities given the loss of organic, pre-modern
memory sustained by oral transmission and tradition. While I disagree with Nora about such an
organic pre-modern memory ever existing as he describes it, his assertion that key sites and
symbols are invested with communally shared interpretations of the past as a way to knit together
contemporary communities under strain is certainly borne out by events on the ground in Little
Tokyo.
339
combines political, economic, and social elements that protect Japanese
Americans’ rich and dynamic traditions, associations, and heritage within
the context of the physical and cultural landscapes of their neighborhoods.
The objective of cultural preservation as a planning mechanism is to ensure
that both significant physical (tangible) properties and the transmission of
intangible aspects of the culture, such as oral traditions, arts, music, and
the community’s essence, are given protection and priority in the future
development of Little Tokyo.
97

By framing cultural preservation as a planning mechanism, Little Tokyo community
groups attempted to connect the manipulations of space conducted by urban planers and
real estate developers to enclave-based memory projects and spatial practices of
resistance; in other words, to contain official abstractions about space as urban real estate
within the rich particularities of local place that make Little Tokyo “home” to Japanese
Americans.
Aided by the authority granted to Japantown preservation as a priority backed by
state funding, Japanese American organizations in Little Tokyo gained valuable influence
over the future direction of the neighborhood just as redevelopment again moved into
high gear. As Donna Graves, a preservationist working on the state’s follow-up
Japantowns project, noted: “What’s different about Japantowns is that there is a lot of
political energy, activism and clout to support thinking about how and what you can do to
save these communities.”
98
Thus, while the Japanese American community struggles to
cohere amidst geographic dispersal and cultural assimilation, it also puts its economic
and political power to work on behalf of Little Tokyo, the place that draws the

97
TBA West, Inc., “Defining Cultural Preservation,” Report to Little Tokyo Community Council,
Dec. 10, 2004, iii.

98
Teresa Watanabe, “Clinging to a Culture,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 28, 2007, B1.
340
community together again. Nevertheless, participation in the planning process by
Japanese American community groups has not produced assured protection for the
enclave.
In spite of the successes that Japanese American community organizations have
achieved over the past decade by organizing politically to consolidate their claim to Little
Tokyo, both public and private developments have continued to threaten the
neighborhood’s tangible and intangible Japanese American resources. The first major
challenge following the formation of the Little Tokyo Community Council was an eerie
replay of the Parker Center “land grab” by the local state in the late 1940s; in 2003, the
city announced plans to build an enormous public safety complex, including a new police
headquarters, 500-bed jail, and emergency services center, on East First Street between
JANM and the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist temple.
99
Not surprisingly, the announcement
produced immediate and unified community opposition; at a May 12, 2003 meeting with
city officials, almost every person in attendance raised their hands when asked if they
opposed the project. Organizations with a strong tradition of progressive political
activism, such as Nikkei Civil Rights and Redress and J-Town Voice, collaborated with
LTCC to produce a petition against the jail that quickly garnered over 13,000 signatures;
in a visual echo of the anti-redevelopment protests of the 1970s, Japanese Americans
appeared at community meetings bearing signs that read “Save Little Tokyo!”
100
Former

99
Julie Tamaki, “Activists Persuade City to Drop Plan for Jail in Little Tokyo,” Los Angeles
Times, Aug. 1, 2003, B1; Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress, “Stop the Erosion of Little
Tokyo,” Rafu Shimpo, Jul. 25, 2003.

100
Ibid. Indeed, the community mural mentioned at the beginning of this chapter depicts one
activist holding a sign proclaiming “No Jail” right next to the image of another sign-bearing
341
activists saw a clear link between the activism of the Anti-Eviction Task Force and
LTPRO in the 1970s and the contemporary fight against the jail, saying “The battle still
goes on – we still had to fight…to keep the jail out of the First and Alameda block. But
we did keep them out.”
101

The City Council eventually voted to build the police headquarters at the old
Caltrans site outside Little Tokyo, while putting only a few emergency services buildings
on a small corner of the parcel at East First Street and Alameda.
102
The success with
which Japanese Americans were able to protect their vision of Little Tokyo demonstrated
their increased political savvy and strong institutional collaborations (legacies of both
1970s anti-redevelopment activism and the 1980s redress movement), as well as their
economic influence as a relatively wealthy ethnic group – all elements that had changed
significantly since 1949. In particular, however, Japanese Americans were unified in their
desire to prevent any changes in Little Tokyo that would interfere with their intent to
claim and use the enclave as their own. Former LTCC chair Howard Nishimura said that
“there are so few issues we can get united behind,” but another Community Council
member noted “from young activists to the business community, nobody wanted a

activist captured in a well-known photograph from a 1970s-era protest, explicitly equating the
powerful community responses of the two eras.

101
H. Cooke Sunoo, Little Tokyo Historical Society meeting, Japanese American National
Museum, Feb. 10, 2007.

102
Noam N. Levey, “Site Near City Hall OKd for New Police Headquarters,” Los Angeles Times,
Jun. 24, 2004, B1; Jason Mandell, “Police Get Surprise Home,” Downtown News, Jun. 28, 2004,
1.

342
jail.”
103
City politicians learned the lesson well; when Mayor James Hahn was
campaigning for re-election, he visited LTCC and assured them that the plan for the jail
had originated with the previous administration and that he supported affordable housing
and small business in the district, not a jail. His adversary, Antonio Villaraigosa, also
spoke to LTCC and reminded them that he had opposed the jail project while on the City
Council.
104
The very fact that both mayoral candidates visited LTCC demonstrates
Japanese Americans’ political clout and their success at claiming the key stakeholder
position in the neighborhood, despite only being about one-fifth of the enclave’s
residential population.
105
In addition, the (multi)racial state’s support for community
spatial practices in Little Tokyo that reinscribe the enclave with Japanese American
ethnicity meshes with the needs of real estate investment capital for distinctive urban
spaces to commodify and exploit.
Even as Little Tokyo community organizations blocked this latest plan to
expand the Civic Center into the enclave, they faced another challenge in the form of
renewed private sector interest in downtown residential development. Initially, plans for
new residential construction in and around Little Tokyo were welcomed; after so many
years of fighting for more housing in the neighborhood, the arrival of major developers
seemed to ensure the enclave’s survival. Indeed, the safety of future residents of a large

103
Tamaki, “Activists Persuade City to Drop Plan for Jail.”

104
Little Tokyo Community Council meeting, Japanese American National Museum, Apr. 26,
2005.

105
According to the 2000 census, the tract (2062) encompassing Little Tokyo was approximately
one-third African American, one-quarter Latino, and about one-fifth Japanese or Japanese-
American. See http://www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html (accessed Apr. 20, 2008).
343
apartment complex planned for East First Street was one of the arguments raised against
the jail proposal. However, unlike the affordable units brought online in the 1980s and
‘90s through the efforts of non-profits like the Little Tokyo Service Center, the housing
constructed in Little Tokyo after 2000 was primarily market rate and directed to potential
residents outside the ethnic community or the city’s working class.
The return of “urban pioneers” to central city areas suffering from depopulation
and even abandonment was a phenomenon first described by scholars in key global cities
like New York in the 1970s and 1980s.
106
As Neil Smith has pointed out, this process of
gentrification results from the “creative destruction” of the capitalist market in property,
particularly differentiation between spaces that have already been developed; in other
words, an area of land that produced profit in its initial development can, after a period of
disinvestment and falling values, be reclaimed and redeveloped by private entities to
produce a second round of profit.
107
Gentrification is often accompanied by a process of
both physical and aesthetic renovation that attracts a residential population with a more
homogenous and upscale socioeconomic profile than that of the previous residents; as
Robyne Turner put it, gentrification “produces a cultural reference of urbanity that can
only be sold to one class of consumers: clean, friendly, beautiful, hip, accessible, and

106
See for instance Shirley Laska and Daphne Spain, eds., Back to the City: Issues in
Neighborhood Renovation (New York: Pergamon Press, 1979), and Sharon Zukin, Loft Living:
Culture and Capital in Urban Change (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

107
Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London:
Routledge, 1996).

344
safe.”
108
In addition, these new residents and the businesses that cater to them are valued
by city governments and courted (through means such as zoning variances, tax breaks,
and so forth) as a strategy to improve the overall municipal tax base.
109

In Los Angeles, with its expansive and relatively low-cost opportunities for
suburban homeownership, the attractions of living downtown were initially limited to a
group of artists who congregated in the warehouses on the industrial southeastern edge of
Little Tokyo, an area later rechristened the “Artists District” (and now commonly termed
the “Arts District”).
110
By the late 1980s, however, efforts to rehabilitate historic
buildings and create upscale “lofts” decidedly beyond the means of most artists had
begun to coalesce, only to be scuttled in the early 1990s by civil unrest and a severe

108
Robyne S. Turner, “The Politics of Design and Development in the Postmodern Downtown,”
Journal of Urban Affairs 24.5 (2002): 533-548, 547.

109
After federal subsidies to cities were vastly curtailed by the Reagan administration – for more
on the restrictions under which cities operate in a federalist system, see Paul E. Peterson, City
Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) – city governments were forced to seek out
new revenue streams. The political and economic processes which motivated cities to pursue
opportunities for cultural tourism, festival marketplaces, and themed entertainment districts (see
Chapter Three, especially footnote 81) likewise produced support for residential gentrification of
certain neighborhoods with marketable qualities (heritage, “walkable” streets, industrial buildings
for loft units, etc). See Dennis R. Judd, “Constructing the Tourist Bubble,” The Tourist City, ed.
Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999): 35-53. More
importantly, the residents attracted to heritage districts and cultural amenities have come to be
seen as a “creative class” capable of attracting and producing the capital investment and
technological innovation required to promote urban growth, motivating cities to compete with
each other to subsidize such facilities and services at the expense of redistributive programs. See
Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

110
Vanessa Hua, “Artists’ District Poised for Lofty Rebound,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 23, 1998,
B1. Artists have frequently been the forerunners of gentrification, as their cultural capital is
appropriated by market forces and attracts economic capital. See David Ley, “Artists,
Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification,” Urban Studies 40.12 (Nov. 2003): 2527-2544.
345
regional economic recession.
111
A true downtown residential revival was thus postponed
by a decade, until economic growth, rising housing prices, and municipal legislation
favoring so-called “adaptive reuse” again made the downtown Los Angeles area a
potentially profitable venue for private housing developers. The rehabilitation in 2001-02
of three historic buildings in the area of Main and Third Streets by Tom Gilmore, creating
the so-called Old Bank District, kicked off what would become a financial bonanza of
development.
112

111
Karl Schoenberger, “Bringing Life Back to City’s Heart,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 14, 1993,
A1.

112
Kevin Roderick, “Intrepid Urban Pioneers Are Rediscovering the Lost City,” Los Angeles
Times Magazine, Sep. 30, 2001, 14.
346

Figure 4.7. Hikari apartment building at East Second Street and Central Avenue, 2007.
Photograph by author.

Little Tokyo, located between the hot spots of the Arts District and the downtown
Historic Core (location of the Old Bank District), became the focus of new construction
(unlike the renovations of existing buildings that initially predominated in the Historic
Core and Arts District). Within the boundaries of the CRA redevelopment project, mega-
347
developer The Related Companies and MacFarlane Partners broke ground in 2004 on the
128-unit Hikari apartment building with ground-floor retail at the corner of Second Street
and Central Avenue. The land had been purchased by the CRA in 1984 and used as a
parking lot; the CRA provided Related with the land, valued at $1 million, and a $3.2
million loan, and in return Related agreed to reserve 26 of the apartments for low-income
tenants.
113
When the complex opened in early 2007, the market-rate units were leasing
for as much as $3 per square foot, or one-bedrooms for more than $1800 a month.
114

Beyond the boundaries of the redevelopment district, the CRA could provide no subsidies
and make no demands for affordable housing concessions. The 303-unit Savoy complex
at the corner of East First Street and Alameda was planned as market-rate apartments
when ground was broken in 2003.
115
Developer Trammel Crow responded to
skyrocketing housing prices in Southern California during the early 2000s by converting
the units to condominiums; when the complex opened in early 2006, prices ranged from
the $400,000s to over $800,000.
116
Although the Savoy included no affordable housing, it
also lacked ground-floor retail chains (such as the Kinko’s and Pastagina at Hikari) to
compete with Little Tokyo merchants.
117

Indeed, the developers stressed the existing business and institutional
infrastructure in Little Tokyo, which Japanese Americans had fought diligently to retain

113
Jocelyn V. Stewart, “Little Tokyo Project to Rise,” Los Angeles Times, Jul. 21, 2004, B3.

114
Evan George, “Hikari’s Winter Heat,” Downtown News, Jan. 29, 2007, 1.

115
Jon Regardie, “Jazzing Up Downtown,” Downtown News, May 23, 2005, 6.

116
Savoy advertisement, New Homes section, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 7, 2006.

117
“Editorial,” Downtown News, Jun. 20, 2005, 4.
348
throughout the redevelopment period, as a selling point for their projects. Little Tokyo
was one of the few areas of downtown that retained the feel and many of the amenities of
a residential neighborhood, including an actual supermarket, a place to mail packages,
even a nail salon. Alex Wong, Managing Director at the Savoy, said “If there is a
neighborhood in Downtown with a true neighborhood feeling, then it is in this area. You
already have people living here, you already have services for people.”
118
Gino Canori,
project manager for Related, agreed, noting that “Little Tokyo is the only neighborhood-
friendly area Downtown where you have walkable streets.”
119
Related felt so strongly
about the attractions of Little Tokyo that it followed up Hikari with plans for a 750-unit,
four-building complex of market-rate apartments and condos on the “Block 8” parcel
north of Casa Heiwa and west of the JACCC.
120
Rick Westerberg, project manager for
the Block 8 development, echoed other developers’ assessment of the area: “We like
Little Tokyo because it’s got a base of people and shops and walkable areas where people
live currently.”
121
Ironically, the very qualities that Japanese Americans had fostered and

118
Regardie, “Jazzing Up Downtown.”

119
Jason Mandell, “Little Tokyo Living,” Downtown News, Jun. 28, 2004, 1.

120
This enormous parcel had been assembled by the CRA in the 1980s for a proposed Japanese
corporate office complex. When that fell through in the aftermath of the Japanese recession, the
parcel had become, as so often happened in Little Tokyo, a parking lot. Although a CRA property
like the Second and Central parcel, Related did not accept CRA funds or request any variances
for the Block 8 project; thus, they did not have to include any affordable units at Block 8, as the
CRA had mandated at Hikari.

121
Kathryn Maese, “Little Tokyo Blockbuster,” Downtown News, Jun. 27, 2005, 1. Despite the
developers’ emphasis on Little Tokyo’s walkable streets, architecture critic Sam Hall Kaplan has
pointed out that the link between new residents and a revitalized street life has so far been
somewhat tenuous in downtown Los Angeles: “[M]ost apparently stay rooted to their buildings,
to perhaps socialize with neighbors…In effect they are living in a high-rise suburbia.” Sam Hall
Kaplan, “Desperately Seeking Street Life,” Downtown News, Jan. 30, 2006, 5.
349
treasured in Little Tokyo as the source of ethnic community were now attracting
developers and new residents who threatened to overwhelm or simply disregard the social
and institutional networks that made Little Tokyo a Japanese American place.
With potentially 3,000 new residents expected in the more than 1500 units
planned for completion by the end of 2008, Japanese American community activists
increasingly wondered whether Little Tokyo, despite the community’s “deeply planted”
roots, could “hold onto its Japanese identity.”
122
One Rafu columnist declared that “we
really are at a crossroads with Little Tokyo. We have the choice to just let Little Tokyo
fade away under the shadows of those new sky-high lofts in possibly the next two
decades or so, or we have the choice (and this is the one I highly suggest you take) to
contribute in expanding and preserving what once was a place of refuge and still is a
place of rich history and unique culture.”
123
Bill Watanabe, Executive Director of the
Little Tokyo Service Center, expressed the ambivalent stance of many Japanese
American organizations to the coming residential revolution:
I am concerned about how Little Tokyo’s going to be changed by the
influx of a lot of…just a lot of apartments that may end up being occupied
by non-Japanese. And I feel, you know, as a person who believes in
fairness and justice and everything, that I would never say a person
couldn’t live here because they weren’t Japanese. But, so how do you
balance this area called Little Tokyo, which has this ethnic flavor, to keep
that ethnic flavor and at the same time to make anybody who wants to live
here to feel welcome? And I think that’s what we have to try to do. So if a
person wants to try to move into one of these apartments, well, if they’re
not Japanese American, fine. Hopefully they’ll support the heritage of the
area. But at the same time, maybe we could do some affirmative

122
Endo, “Little Tokyo Housing Boom Triggers Identity Crisis.”

123
Mari Nakano, “Your Attention Please,” Rafu Shimpo, Nov. 2, 2005, 3.
350
marketing or outreach to encourage Japanese [and] Japanese Americans to
live here.
124

Watanabe’s idea to do “outreach” has been taken up by the Little Tokyo
Community Council. The Planning and Cultural Preservation Committee provided a list
of Japanese American media sources to Related, Pulte Homes, and Trammel Crow, and
also sought out realtors specializing in the Japanese American market as potential
“ambassadors” for Little Tokyo.
125
An even more forceful attempt to maintain a Japanese
American residential population in the enclave is the 127-unit Teramachi, an upscale
condominium complex targeted at Japanese American seniors. Initiated by the Senshin
Buddhist temple, the project has been heavily advertised in Japanese American media
and developers Ronald Ohata, Ernest Fukumoto, and Thomas Wong have visited
churches and community meetings to build support. After two years of construction, the
building was 90 percent sold out.
126

In addition to rebuilding the Japanese American residential population,
community activists have focused on the need to support existing Japanese American
businesses in Little Tokyo and attract new ones. While the roster of the enclave’s
Business Improvement District has grown over the past few years from 480 to 570, a
welcome sign of growth after so many years of stagnation for the area’s small merchants,

124
Interview with Bill Watanabe, Apr. 7, 2005.

125
Chris Aihara, LTCC Planning and Cultural Preservation Committee meeting, Japanese
American Cultural and Community Center, Jul. 12, 2006.

126
Endo, “Little Tokyo Housing Boom Triggers Identity Crisis”; Kathleen Nye Flynn,
“Downtown’s New ‘Temple District,’” Downtown News, Oct. 9, 2006, 1.
351
“most of the new business owners are non-Japanese.”
127
As Rafu columnist Ellen Endo
pointed out, “it’s great to have a large number of non-profit organizations headquartered
in Little Tokyo, [but] we need more Japanese American owned and operated businesses,
plain and simple.”
128
As with the homeowners moving into the Teramachi, Japanese
American merchants in Little Tokyo make a financial, rather than merely symbolic,
investment in sustaining the enclave. In addition, long-term family businesses in Little
Tokyo seem to have taken on the role of unofficial bearers of community memory. For
example, a musical production staged at the JACCC in March 2007, “Nihonmachi: The
Place to Be,” focused on four generations of a single family operating a manju-ya, or
Japanese confectionary, in a semi-fictionalized Japantown (loosely based on the Kito
family, proprietors of Fugetsudo in Little Tokyo for over one hundred years). When the
Sansei proprietor, Alan, thinks about retiring and closing down the store, the ghost of his
Issei grandfather appears to guide him through the family’s history, demonstrating to
Alan in the process the importance of the store to both the family and the community.
129

In the production’s denouement, Alan’s daughter announces that she will leave her
lucrative professional career to take over the store, because if it dies then so does

127
Endo, “Little Tokyo Housing Boom Triggers Identity Crisis.”

128
Ellen Endo, “Understanding Our Past,” Downtown News, Sep. 26, 2007, 3.

129
The show included the story of a bride who asked permission for her wedding photos to be
taken at the manju-ya because the shop reminded her of her grandmother, an event that actually
happened at Fugetsudo.
352
Japantown. The playwright, Soji Kashiwagi, said, “J-Town for Japanese Americans was
and still is the place to be, physically, and the place to be, spiritually and emotionally.”
130

Japanese American organizations have also tried to unite with their neighbors in
the Arts District in order to create a broader, more inclusive community response to
development. The two neighborhoods overlap along Little Tokyo’s eastern and southern
boundaries; indeed key Japanese American community institutions such as the Nishi
Hongwanji temple and Maryknoll Japanese Catholic Center are now considered to lie
within the Arts District rather than Little Tokyo proper. Relations between the two
communities have not always been amicable; in the 1980s, the CRA attempted to expand
the Little Tokyo redevelopment project east and met with angry resistance from resident
artists who felt the CRA was “ignor[ing] the other [non-Japanese] aspects of the
community already there.”
131
Over the last several years, however, institutional
relationships were created between the Little Tokyo Community Council and LARABA
(the Los Angeles River Artists and Business Association), with unofficial Arts District
mayor and LARABA representative Joel Bloom holding a voting seat at LTCC. The two
neighborhoods have also collaborated on a joint weekly farmers market.
132

Nevertheless, tensions remain. At a 2007 meeting of the Little Tokyo Historical
Society that reflected on redevelopment in Little Tokyo, discussion turned to

130
Soji Kashiwagi, “Nihonmachi: The Place to Be,” Discover Nikkei website, Mar. 14, 2007,
www.discovernikkei.org/forum/en/node/1564 (accessed Apr. 12, 2007).

131
H. Cooke Sunoo, Little Tokyo Historical Society meeting, Japanese American National
Museum, Feb. 10, 2007.

132
Andrew Moyle, “Turning Away from Starving Artists,” Downtown News, Sep. 25, 2006, 1.
Bloom’s untimely death from cancer in 2007 was a blow to both neighborhoods.
353
contemporary projects. One Japanese American man scoffed at the idea that Arts District
residents should have a voice in new development, since “Japanese Americans have been
here the longest. We’re the ones with the roots.” An LTSC staff member who works on
residential issues pointed out that many of the artists had lived in the area for a long time,
at least one “for twenty years. So he’s not a newcomer.” The first man replied, “He’s a
relative newcomer. Twenty years is nothing.” The LTSC worker pragmatically
responded, “Well, we could fight it out for sole ownership and see who wins, or we could
recognize what’s on the ground now and work in partnership for what’s best for the
area,” the exact strategy that Japanese American community organizations have
followed.
133

Besides these somewhat informal and voluntary efforts to recruit Japanese
American bodies to Little Tokyo, community organizations have taken formal steps to
codify Japanese American claims on the physical landscape of the enclave. Building on
the idea laid out in the cultural preservation report that the planning process could be a
tool to protect Little Tokyo as a resource for Japanese American heritage and community,
the Little Tokyo Community Council collaborated with non-profit organizations and the
CRA to develop planning and design guidelines shaping further development in the
neighborhood. Approved by the CRA and the City Council in 2006, the guidelines called
for the promotion of a multigenerational and multicultural environment that would

133
George Takahashi and Evelyn Yoshimura, Little Tokyo Historical Society meeting, Japanese
American National Museum, Feb. 10, 2007.

354
prioritize community input, public gathering places, and affordable housing.
134
Much of
the document focused on specifications for design elements that “reflect the Japanese
tradition and are culturally sensitive,” including appropriate signage, landscaping, and
street furniture.
135
The guidelines were provided in draft form to Related as they worked
on plans for the Block 8 parcel, in hopes that the large project could be developed in line
with the priorities of the Japanese American community.
These efforts to formalize Japanese American institutional control over Little
Tokyo’s physical development by working within the existing system of spatial practices
pursued by private investment and municipal planners took shape most fully in the
development process surrounding the so-called Mangrove property. Initially the site of
the proposed jail and police headquarters, Mangrove was yet another of Little Tokyo’s
surface parking lots located at the northeast corner of East First Street and Alameda
(outside the CRA project boundaries). Following the city’s capitulation to community
protests against the jail, the site was chosen for a station in the planned extension of the
Gold Line light rail route. Since the station would only take up a section of the parcel, the
question of what sort of development would be allowed on the rest of the site arose. The
Little Tokyo Community Council, with support from the CRA and Councilwoman
Perry’s office, swung into action, convening a public workshop soliciting community
input on possible development. Speaking broadly, the number one land use preference
was “community space,” followed by retail, housing (especially affordable and mixed-

134
“Little Tokyo Receives Initial OK on Preservation Guidelines,” Rafu Shimpo, Apr. 12, 2006,
1.

135
Little Tokyo Planning and Design Guidelines Joint Task Force, “Little Tokyo Planning and
Design Guidelines,” Draft Version 5.1, Oct. 2005 (in author’s possession).
355
income housing), parking, and institutional space (with a particular desire for the
Japanese Consulate to return to Little Tokyo from downtown Los Angeles).
136

While the community’s concerns to some degree shaped the request for proposals
that the city eventually issued for the Mangrove site, Japanese American organizations in
Little Tokyo had achieved the expertise and professional connections to go beyond
making requests of other developers. The Little Tokyo Service Center Community
Development Corporation, which had acted as a non-profit developer on several projects
since the early 1990s, decided to submit its own proposal for a for-profit development at
Mangrove involving retail and residential space, including affording housing, and office
space for the non-profit L.A. Care Health Plan. LTSC put together a team representing
key players in Little Tokyo’s initial and contemporary redevelopment periods: the firm of
Bruce Kaji, a real estate investor and long-time advocate for Little Tokyo’s business
community; Ted Tanaka, the Japanese American architect in charge of Block 8’s
streetscape and landscaping; and the Urban Partners and Related Co. development firms.
Recognizing the need for “star” power, LTSC also brought in the Jerde Partnership, a
globally recognized architecture firm behind such high-profile projects as Universal
CityWalk. The LTCC submitted an endorsement of this proposal to the city, after a
meeting at which Jonathan Kaji, son of original redevelopment supporter Bruce Kaji,
said, “I think all of us know what’s been happening to this community. It’s been chopped
up, diced up, parceled off, sold off. This is our last chance.”
137
Although Kaji’s words

136
Mangrove Community Visioning Workshop Summary, Centenary United Methodist Church,
Nov. 3, 2005.

137
Gwen Muranaka, “LTCC Endorses JA Team for Mangrove,” Rafu Shimpo, Oct. 27, 2007, 1.
356
captured the violence of past manipulations of abstract space in Little Tokyo by city
planners and private developers, LTSC’s plans were ironically no less constrained by the
financial logic of the urban real estate market nor less abstract in their own visions for the
site. LTSC, having accepted the premise that the site’s market value determined the
degree to which it could serve the community’s desires, became one of three finalists for
the opportunity to redevelop the site.
138

Japanese Americans have responded innovatively to challenges to their symbolic
identification with, and authority over, Little Tokyo by reclaiming the enclave’s physical
spaces with markers and festivals, maximizing their political and economic influence,
and developing new methods to shape, direct, and even lead development. However,
community organizations working through private developers and municipal bureaucratic
procedures for recognition and institutionalization of their history in, and contemporary
rights to, Little Tokyo have found that the strategy does not comfortably ensure the
realization of their goals. Rather, expressing ethnic claims in space can be a profoundly
uncomfortable exercise, opening the door to an appropriation of Japanese American
spatial and memorial practices for purposes other than sustaining Japanese American
community.

Quaint Oriental Motifs: Representing and Marketing Ethnic Identity
At a 2005 meeting of the LTCC’s Planning and Cultural Preservation Committee
(PCPC), representatives of various community organizations reviewed proposed

138
Gwen Muranaka, “Mangrove Plans Unveiled,” Rafu Shimpo, Mar. 15, 2008, 1; Anna Scott,
“Big Plans for ‘Mangrove’ Property,” Downtown News, Mar. 17, 2008, 1.
357
streetscape improvements along East First Street. Discussing the designs of an Anglo
urban planner, a Japanese American businessman noted that “he has a very definite idea
of what First Street, and Little Tokyo, should look like. We had to really work with him
before the December [community] workshop to open him up to other opinions.” The
committee chair cautioned, “I know he has a particular vision that we may or may not
want to buy into,” and the LTSC representative added, “I like him and I like his ideas, I
just don’t want him running off with the process when it’s our process.”
139
As
demonstrated by this exchange, many Little Tokyo community activists felt that the
development of an organized political voice through the Little Tokyo Community
Council had guaranteed a role for Japanese Americans in shaping future development in
the enclave around the dual goals of performing ethnic identity and sustaining ethnic
community. However, as development pressures in Little Tokyo accelerated, the
differences between participating in the process and controlling it gradually became clear.
Japanese American requests to incorporate markers of culture and community in new
development projects often resulted in “themed” designs that erased Little Tokyo’s
complex history in favor of an essentialist visual and linguistic shorthand.
For instance, architect Ted Tanaka attended the July 2006 PCPC meeting to
present his designs for a “pedestrian linkages” project that would visually connect the
planned Gold Line station at First and Alameda with key pedestrian pathways through
Little Tokyo. Tanaka’s plans showed a stylized Japanese fan stamped into the pavement
along both sides of Central Avenue, heading south from the station, and an origami-style

139
LTCC Planning and Cultural Preservation Committee meeting, Japanese American National
Museum, Apr. 21, 2005.
358
image of a Japanese crane decorating public benches along the street. The fan, not
coincidentally, is the same iconography with which Little Tokyo is identified in signs
placed throughout the enclave as part of the city’s “wayfinding” project, the local state
visually signifying the enclave through a single ethnic “brand.” The presentation sparked
a debate among committee members over the best way to symbolically represent Little
Tokyo. The committee chair appreciated the somewhat abstract nature of the symbols –
“insiders,” she said (presumably referring to Japanese Americans), would recognize the
significance of the crane image while “outsiders” probably would not. A JACCC staff
member expressed concern that the symbols were “quaint Oriental motifs” that failed to
express the aesthetic principles of Japanese design. He tried to explain: “You know the
difference between sitting in a Japanese-designed car and an American-designed car
without seeing a fan or a crane.” The committee chair responded, “What you’re really
talking about is a Japanese sensibility, and that’s much harder to evoke.” An LTSC
representative approved of the crane image, calling it “arty and kind of cultural.” The
JACCC employee remained unconvinced: “the design should really move [Little Tokyo]
forward, and not in a cheesy way.”
140

140
LTCC Planning and Cultural Preservation Committee meeting, Japanese American Cultural
and Community Center, Jul. 12, 2006.
359

Figure 4.8. Municipal “wayfinding” sign in Little Tokyo, 2007. Photograph by author.

Dell Upton has argued that in the American context “ethnic groups form
themselves by choosing to commodify their identities and to attach them to equally
consciously chosen material signs.”
141
Japanese Americans have certainly adopted
elements of such commodification in their strategies for building ethnic community,
linking identity to particular sites, events, and actions in Little Tokyo. In terms of
ethnically inscribing the enclave through urban planning and design processes, however,
the complexities of Japanese American identity are morphed into legible, repetitive
material symbols that rely on essentialist images of Japan. The naming and design
protocols adopted by architects and designers working on development and planning
projects in Little Tokyo narrow and simplify expressions of Japanese American

141
Upton, “Ethnicity, Authenticity, and Invented Traditions.”
360
community even as Little Tokyo organizations remain focused on becoming more
inclusive, diverse, and dynamic.
Both private developers and municipal planners coming before the PCPC
repeatedly pointed to Japanese-influenced designs and landscaping in their plans as proof
of their sensitivity to Japanese American claims to Little Tokyo. Related’s early plans for
Block 8, for instance, included a row of cherry trees down the interior paseo and an inlaid
pavement design based on the Japanese obi to symbolize tying the community
together.
142
The planned Gold Line station (designed, like Block 8’s landscaping and the
pedestrian linkages, by Japanese American architect Ted Tanaka) will be covered by
“Zen-inspired canopies,” while its floor is scored to look like tatami mats.
143
These
efforts extended to the names of the various projects: the name Hikari means “light” in
Japanese and was chosen to refer to the neon art project on the building’s exterior, while
another condominium project on the border between Little Tokyo and the Arts District
was christened Mura (indicating “village” in Japanese).
After Related sold off a portion of the Block 8 parcel to K. Hovnanian Homes in
response to a softening housing market in 2006, a Hovnanian project manager came to
the PCPC to solicit feedback on the potential name of Matsu (meaning “pine tree” but
also the new year in Japanese). Although the developer claimed to be seeking
community approval for the choice, he had requested no suggestions from LTCC
members and needed to finalize the name within two weeks of the PCPC meeting.

142
LTCC Planning and Cultural Preservation Committee meeting, Japanese American National
Museum, Dec. 13, 2005.

143
Little Tokyo Community Council meeting, Japanese American National Museum, May 31,
2005.
361
Several committee members found the abrupt, “rubber-stamp” nature of the request
troubling; the committee chair commented that “we’re doing this ass backwards, since
we’re being asked to consider the name of a part of it before we know what the whole of
it will be.” The project manager was asked if there was any deeper meaning he hoped to
convey with the name, but he demurred: “when you go to the Mura sales office, you see
materials that are pictures of people drinking martinis and such. It’s only when you read
the brochure that you find out it’s Japanese for village. So the same thing, it would just be
‘Matsu’ and then you’d read the brochure and see it means pine tree.” A JACCC staff
member reacted with irritation to this casual pronouncement, declaring, “I just feel that
using Japanese terms out of context, like matsu, is very vulgar to me. I would rather have
an English word than these disconnected [Japanese] words.”
144
However, when reminded
that LTCC had no right of refusal over the name, the committee decided to tentatively
endorse the “Matsu” idea. At least it was Japanese.
Experiences such as the encounter with the Hovnanian project manager
demonstrate that developer support for Japanese American claims in Little Tokyo do not
extend beyond an exoticized surface level; indeed, their actions show that Orientalism
continues to be a selectively applied, Anglo-driven dimension of classifying and
commodifying real estate.
145
More importantly, it indicates that Japanese American

144
LTCC Planning and Cultural Preservation meeting, Japanese American Cultural and
Community Center, Sep. 13, 2006.

145
This is in telling contrast to the situation in Monterey Park in the 1970s and ‘80s documented
by Leland Saito. In that case, a rapid increase in the immigrant Chinese residential population,
and the resulting growth in Chinese-oriented businesses, made the aesthetics of new
developments a controversial political issue. In one case described by Saito, the City Council
mandated that a new strip mall be designed in a presumably neutral “Mediterranean” style which
362
control over the enclave could be limited to the symbolic arena alone. The possible
repercussions of accepting such superficial concessions to Japanese American claims on
Little Tokyo as names and landscaping were raised at an earlier PCPC meeting, during a
discussion of the twenty-story residential tower that Related proposed for part of the
Block 8 parcel. A representative from Nikkei Civil Rights and Redress, a progressive
organization, asked: “But, you know, we’re against this 20-story tower that they’re
planning, so does helping them name it – does that mean Related gets to co-opt the
community, and make it seem like the community is happy with this?”
146

By incorporating Japanese names and symbols into their project designs,
developers not only sought to “co-opt” the Japanese American community but also to
market their properties. The value of ethnically inscribed spaces in terms of attracting
tourists and shoppers seeking a unique experience has long been recognized by private
and public entities in Los Angeles. Almost every ethnic group in the region has its
designated “enclave,” in most cases a business district for first- and second-generation
immigrant populations rather than residential concentrations. For instance, Thai Town
and Little Armenia share overlapping blocks in Hollywood, while Cambodian
immigrants have finally succeeded in gaining official approval for naming an area of

masked the Chinese management and clientele of its businesses, while simultaneously drawing on
and Europeanizing the region’s Hispanic history in order to naturalize the building in the
landscape without explicitly sanctioning a Mexican presence. See Saito, Race and Politics: Asian
Americans, Latinos, and Whites in a Los Angeles Suburb (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1998): 39-48.

146
LTCC Planning and Cultural Preservation meeting, Japanese American National Museum,
Mar. 15, 2005.
363
Long Beach “Cambodia Town.”
147
The districts that have been most successful in
expanding beyond the ethnic market into cultural tourism, not coincidentally, are
associated with more positively racialized ethnic groups, like Indian Americans. In Little
Tokyo, ethnic identity has been a tourist attraction for decades; now it has become a
marketing tool to convince the tourists to move in.
The potential residents envisioned by Little Tokyo developers were not Japanese
Americans as such, but a “sophisticated person going to school or…involved in design”
and “fairly young professionals working in Downtown.”
148
This intended market –
“young, hip, and single…from creative and legal fields, including the motion picture
industry, the fashion world, architecture and law practices” – were courted with
brochures and advertisements highlighting the generalized combination of exotic and
domestic embodied in the notion of living in Little Tokyo.
149
An early description of
downtown’s residential revival pitched Little Tokyo this way: “East West Players, the
Japanese American National Museum, MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary, an Office Depot,
a spa, a public library…and all the sushi you can eat. What more do you want?”
150
A
January 2007 Downtown News ad for the Hikari apartments proclaimed “Little Tokyo is

147
Teresa Watanabe, “Artesia Thinks the World of Itself,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 26, 2005, B1;
Anna Gorman, “Cambodia Town is Now on the Map,” Los Angeles Times, Jul. 18, 2007, B2.
Uncommon L.A., a project funded by the UCLA Center for Community Partnerships, is
exploring the possibilities of cultural tourism for ethnic neighborhoods saddled with less positive
connotations, such as the Latino neighborhood of Highland Park and the black business district in
Leimert Park. Teresa Watanabe, “Untapped Tourism Gems?,” Los Angeles Times, Jun. 9, 2007,
B1.

148
George, “Hikari’s Winter Heat,” and Regardie, “Jazzing Up Downtown.”

149
Paul Young, “Downtown L.A.: The Next New York?,” Variety, Sep. 19, 2003, A16.

150
“The Nine Neighborhoods,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 16, 2003, F2.
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now downtown’s hottest place to live,” and touted the building’s proximity to art at the
Geffen Contemporary and sushi at A Thousand Cranes. The Los Angeles Times
announced that “Little Tokyo, considered by many outsiders only a destination for food
and festivals, is also becoming a hot place to call home.”
151
The concept of “home” used
in this article – a temporary abode chosen to enable a contemporary urban lifestyle and
support a commodified self-presentation – was far removed from the manner in which
most Japanese Americans saw Little Tokyo as home.
The deployment of Japanese American (or, more specifically, Japanese) culture in
marketing Little Tokyo is not a new phenomenon; as Jan Lin wrote nearly a decade ago,
“the reclamation of ‘local’ culture in Little Tokyo within the mastertrope of globalization
could be interpreted as a postcolonial strategy,” in which “subaltern cultures are
appropriated rather than the labor and raw materials which were expropriated under the
high stage of imperialism in the late nineteenth century.”
152
However, the new residential
units are not being sold or rented solely on the basis of their link to exotic or subaltern
cultures; rather, the unique attraction of Little Tokyo living is its conflation of the exotic
and the familiar, the different and the safe. Little Tokyo developers repeatedly
highlighted the “walkable” (read “safe”) streets of the enclave that residents could
traverse on their way to buy sushi or sukiyaki, in contrast to the “edgier” downtown
residential projects in the Historic Core and even the Arts District, where the filtering of
homeless people and drug dealing from Skid Row remains extensive on certain blocks.
The view of Little Tokyo as a particularly secure area of downtown Los Angeles seemed

151
Cardenas and Pollard-Terry, “The Face of Little Tokyo is Changing.”

152
Lin, “The Reclaiming of Asian Places in Downtown Los Angeles,” 19.
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to extend beyond marketing materials: a poster on the real estate blog Curbed L.A. said
of the Hikari, “Plus it’s in J-town, which is oddly the safest little place in all of
downtown. It’s like there’s a forcefield around that area.”
153
This image of Little Tokyo
corresponds neatly with U.S. racial stereotypes of Japanese Americans, and Asian
Americans in general, as economically secure and physically non-threatening. Thus
developers can take advantage of the positive contemporary racialization of Japanese
Americans to market their projects.
Little Tokyo developers also benefit from a current cultural vogue for all things
Asian: Hong Kong and Bollywood films, Japanese manga and anime. Indeed, even
traditional Japanese festivals in Little Tokyo, such as the Oshogatsu New Year’s
celebration sponsored by the Japanese Chamber of Commerce, have seen increased
attendance by non-Japanese Americans even with limited English-language marketing
efforts.
154
The Linda Lea, a run-down theater on the edge of Little Tokyo that showed
samurai movies and yakuza thrillers from Japan during the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, was
recently demolished to make way for an ImaginAsian Center, a theater and cultural venue
that includes a 300-seat theater screening Asian Pacific American films, a pan-Asian
café, and special event rooms that can be used for everything from karaoke to cross-

153
Comment by Alice B., “Bustling Little Tokyo,” Curbed L.A., May 14, 2007,
www.la.curbed.com (accessed May 15, 2007). Interestingly, most Japanese Americans living in
Little Tokyo (perhaps because several are senior citizens) repeatedly express concerns about the
safety of Little Tokyo, given its proximity to Skid Row, at LTCC meetings.

154
I am indebted to LTCC Chairman Tom Kamei for pointing this out to me.

366
Pacific videoconferencing.
155
While the project, a joint effort of Southern California’s
Cinema Properties Group and New York’s ImaginAsian Entertainment, “came as a
welcome surprise to many community members who have grown used to the negative
effects of gentrification in their already disappearing ethnic enclaves,” it also put an end
to efforts by the Little Tokyo Service Center to operate the building as a community
visual arts and film center.
156
While the president of Cinema Properties insisted that the
final product would be a “community building,” she also described the new glass-and-
steel theater’s target market as the future, rather than past, population of Little Tokyo:
“We saw the condominium projects and the apartments and we felt that there were
amenities that were missing – somewhere to go in the evening.”
157
Thus the theater is
intended for an audience of local residents with global (or at least pan-Asian) artistic and
cultural affinities, which may or may not include the local Japanese American
community.
158

155
Nao Gunji, “Linda Lea Theater Construction Underway,” Rafu Shimpo, Feb. 23, 2007, 1;
David Pierson, “Curtain Rises Again in Little Tokyo,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 3, 2007, B1.

156
Lynda Lin, “Little Tokyo Had Nearly Three Decades to Forget About the Linda Lea,” Pacific
Citizen Online, Apr. 5, 2006, www.pacificcitizen.org (accessed Apr. 15, 2006); Evan George,
“The Linda Lea Sequel,” Downtown News, Apr. 30, 2007, 1.

157
George, “The Linda Lea Sequel.”

158
Matthew Rofe has argued that those residents attracted to gentrifying areas are part of an
emergent elite global community, and that the latest iteration of difference which marks their
social distinction are communities which link two or more global spaces. Thus a proposed luxury
apartment development in Newcastle, Australia sells itself as a “mini-Paris,” and new
developments in Little Tokyo link the world cities of Los Angeles and Tokyo (or, in the case of
the ImaginAsian Center, Los Angeles and Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Shanghai, etc). Matthew
W. Rofe, “’I Want to be Global’: Theorising the Gentrifying Class as an Emergent Elite Global
Community,” Urban Studies 40.12 (Nov. 2003): 2511-2526.
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Indeed, while a Japanese American or generically Asian “flavor” might be part of
Little Tokyo’s initial attraction for prospective residents, successful gentrification often
results over the long term in greater homogenization as new residents seek easy access to
more upscale facilities or the more predictable retail experience of chain stores. The retail
spaces in the Hikari (a Robek’s Juice, a FedEd/Kinko’s, even an express version of the
retro Johnny Rocket’s diner) and the Block 8 project demonstrate the leading edge of this
trend. Downtown entrepreneur Cedd Moses, owner of three successful bars in the
Historic Core, saw a market among the “young professionals” occupying the new
residential units for another amenity typical of gentrifying urban neighborhoods, the
stylish rooftop bar. Moses made plans in late 2005 to open the Neptune Club, a bar and
lounge situated on the roof of the historic Neptune Building at Third Street and
Alameda.
159
Not only did the Neptune lack an Asian-related theme, its planned design
was determinedly in line with the slightly whimsical take on mid-century modernism that
generically connotes “hipness” in the first decade of the twenty-first century:
shuffleboard courts, a video projection system, low-key lounge music, and a waterfall.
160

While LARABA overwhelmingly voiced support for the project, Moses had a quite
different experience when he presented his plans to the Little Tokyo Community Council.
Residents of the Tokyo Villas, condominiums overlooking the Neptune that had
been built in the 1980s as part of the redevelopment project and which housed primarily
Japanese Americans, voiced strong opposition to the proposed bar. The president of the
Little Tokyo Public Safety Association, a resident of Tokyo Villas, admitted that he

159
Ellen Endo, “LTCC Postpones Decision on Neptune Club,” Rafu Shimpo, Jan. 20, 2006, 1.

160
Ellen Endo, “Residents Sound Off After Neptune Test,” Rafu Shimpo, Jan. 28, 2006, 1.
368
“would like to have a nice bar to walk to,” but declared the project a “no-go” unless
Moses took extensive sound abatement and security precautions.
161
The Villa residents
deployed a rhetoric emphasizing the longevity of Japanese American residence in Little
Tokyo and their actual (as homeowners) and symbolic (as Japanese Americans)
ownership of the enclave in voicing their objections; in a letter presented to the Council,
the resid