University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Civic expression in Little Tokyo: how art and culture empowers communities and transforms public participation

(USC Thesis Other)

Civic expression in Little Tokyo: how art and culture empowers communities and transforms public participation

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

Civic Expression in Little Tokyo:
How Art and Culture Empowers Communities
and Transforms Public Participation

by

Jonathan Jae-an Crisman

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL at the
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in Urban Planning and Development

August 2019

Copyright 2019 by Jonathan Jae-an Crisman. All rights reserved.
2
Table of Contents

Abstract .............................................................................................................................. 4
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... 7
List of Maps, Figures, and Tables ................................................................................. 11
Maps ................................................................................................................................. 13
Chapter 1: A Theory of Civic Expression .................................................................... 18
A Primer on Participation ............................................................................................ 30
Cultures of Participation .............................................................................................. 39
Art in the City ................................................................................................................ 50
Defining Civic Expression ............................................................................................ 61
Chapter 2: Research Design and Combinatory Methodology .................................... 71
Chapter 3: A History of Challenges and Arts Activism in Little Tokyo.................. 102
Past and Present Threats to Ibasho ............................................................................ 105
Art and Culture in Little Tokyo ................................................................................... 121
A History of Arts Activism........................................................................................... 130
Protecting Ibasho in a Changing City ........................................................................ 145
Chapter 4: Welcome to Little Tokyo (Please Take Off Your Shoes) ....................... 150
Triangulating a History of Arts Activism .................................................................... 153
Holding On to Place ................................................................................................... 160
Change and Constancy in Culture .............................................................................. 174
Welcome to Little Tokyo (Please Take Off Your Shoes) ............................................. 183
Chapter 5: Surveying Little Tokyo’s Stakeholders ................................................... 190
Describing Stakeholder Responses ............................................................................. 193
What Kind of Stakeholder? ......................................................................................... 214
General Findings & Further Research ....................................................................... 231
Chapter 6: Mottainai and a Sustainable Little Tokyo ............................................... 239
Mottainai Emerging .................................................................................................... 244
SLT and Building Social Capital ................................................................................ 256
Little Tokyo’s Next Generation of Leaders ................................................................. 264
Sustainability in Transition ......................................................................................... 269
3
Art, Culture, and Implicit Participation ..................................................................... 275
Chapter 7: Conclusions, Comparisons, and Future Directions ................................ 280
Little Tokyo’s Civic Expression .................................................................................. 283
Listening to (Implicit) Participation ........................................................................... 291
A Typology of Civic Expression .................................................................................. 301
Implications for Practice ............................................................................................ 312
Future Directions ........................................................................................................ 321
Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 326

4
Abstract

Theories of public participation have only evolved at the margins since Sherry
Arnstein wrote her seminal “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” some 50 years ago and,
most notably, they fail to consider the role of culture, leading to frustrating participatory
processes even as participation now seems to be ubiquitous. In this dissertation, I develop
a theory of civic expression which integrates the role of the arts and culture into theories
of public participation and political engagement. Civic expression is found in grassroots,
place-based expressive culture which both demonstrates community political desires and
acts as a form of participation itself. Furthermore, this form of urban art provides an
alternative narrative to conventional understandings of the arts and culture — or creative
placemaking — as catalysts for economic development and, ultimately, gentrification.
Instead, arts and culture are used as mechanisms for communities to organize, build
social capital and political power, and fight for their place in the city.
I build this theory of civic expression through a multi-faceted examination of
Little Tokyo in Los Angeles including historical analysis, key informant interviews, a
survey of community stakeholders, and an in-depth case study of one innovative
community organization which integrates arts and culture with community organizing.
Little Tokyo has faced racial discrimination, the wholesale uprooting of its residents
during the WWII relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans, the seizure of
much of its land by the City of Los Angeles through the use of eminent domain, and
ongoing economic pressures, including an influx of foreign capital and urban renewal,
and current pressures of gentrification. Throughout all of these challenges, Little Tokyo
5
has improbably held on to place, largely through the resilience and strength of its shared
identity as a Japanese American and Asian American community, forging a distinct and
place-based culture over time through the practice of traditional forms of art and culture,
the establishment of arts and culture institutions, and the use of art and culture as a means
for activating and organizing the community politically. Most recently, it has used arts-
based organizing through the community arts and culture coalition Sustainable Little
Tokyo to combat gentrification, exemplifying civic expression at work. Their example
illuminates strategies for other communities, and especially ethnic and immigrant
neighborhoods, to fight pressures of gentrification and hold on to place.
I find that incorporating arts and culture into our understanding of public
participation and political engagement yields many positive results. Civic expression
helps build shared community identity and social capital, networking community
members together in a “latent” form of participation such that they can be activated in
times of political need. It interfaces with questions of property rights, transferring
neighborhood land into community non-profits and cultural institutions which are at least
partially shielded from real estate speculation. It helps to bridge across different groups,
and especially between generations, creating a solution for many communities who
struggle to build up younger leaders. It acts as a life-giving and sustainable form of
engagement in contrast to many other forms of political action which can be draining and
cause burnout. And, most of all, it is foundational for a community’s identity and sense of
belonging, acting as a grassroots form of expressive participation that is already
happening on the ground in communities everywhere — especially in ethnic and
6
immigrant communities which have long been marginalized within conventional
participatory processes.
I conclude with a new ladder of participation which is put into three-dimensional
space, placed on the foundation of a locally specific culture of participation. When
participatory processes are created that register and legitimate these diverse cultures of
participation that already occur on the ground — what I term “listening” — they will
reflect a better, more efficient, and just form of urban planning and governance. Civic
expression points toward where and how we can listen to these cultures of participation,
and suggests a role for arts and culture in contending with the seemingly ubiquitous
pressures of gentrification.

7
Acknowledgements

It takes a village to write a dissertation. The biggest thanks go to my advisor
Annette Kim. I was on a neat pathway to work as an architecture professional when,
doing coursework for my M.Arch at MIT, I took one of Annette’s classes which had the
misleading title, “Housing and Land Use in Rapidly Urbanizing Regions.” It was
misleading only insofar as it was far more dynamic and interesting than its technical title
suggested, integrating legal theory, economics, culture, political and social theory, spatial
analysis and mapping, urban planning, and more. I ended up tacking on a Master in City
Planning to my studies, and joining Annette’s “Sidewalk Lab” or SLAB, where I worked
on critical cartography projects that transformed how I thought about space. Lo and
behold, a few years later, we both ended up back in Los Angeles where we were from,
and as I considered doing a PhD, she convinced me to attend USC and study urban
planning once again. In just about the most wonderful experience of déjà vu imaginable, I
also worked with Annette’s newly branded Spatial Analysis Lab (still SLAB, though now
looking at more than sidewalks), and she has been an incredible and giving mentor,
teacher, editor, advisor, co-author, and friend. I look forward to continuing to work, eat,
and explore together in the strange and overlooked urban spaces that we so often find
ourselves gravitating toward.
Thanks are also due to my committee members Elizabeth Currid-Halkett and
Maria Rosario Jackson. They are each giants in their respective fields, and are also
sources of inspiration: each of them, in their own way, has eschewed the clinical
language of academia, writing and communicating instead for a broader audience of
readers, community members, and the public. Their public scholarship breaks through the
8
hardened walls of the university, and they have been incredibly giving of their time,
attention, and intellect during the process of writing this dissertation. I also want to thank
my two additional qualifying exam committee members who were also so generous with
their insight, and continued to provide feedback even after they were “off the hook”:
David Sloane and Francois Bar.
I was fortunate enough to have a second “committee” of mentors, advisors,
colleagues, and friends because of my previous appointment at UCLA, and they also
deserve thanks. I worked with Dana Cuff, Maite Zubiaurre, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris,
and Todd Presner over nearly four years of imagining, developing, teaching in, and
administering the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative which was hugely formational for
me in thinking about not only how to do scholarship, but more fundamentally, why we do
it. Values like spatial justice, a pragmatist “learning by doing,” and collaboration were
core in our formulation of urban humanities, and they were a guiding light for how I
tackled my PhD. They each continued to be incredibly generous and giving even after I
took off for USC, and during my regular visits for UHI workshops, events, and meetings
(including a major book project with the whole team to be published with MIT Press, and
a borderlands research project with Maite which has brought us gallivanting around the
Southwest), they never hesitated to spend extra time giving advice and feedback on
where my research was headed. Dana, especially, has been a mentor and friend since my
undergrad days, and was key in bringing me back to Los Angeles and reinvigorating me
with a love for this vast and special place.
Another group of people that deserve thanks are all of the people I engaged with
in Little Tokyo, and especially those involved with Sustainable Little Tokyo. Without
9
their enthusiasm, support, and willingness to include me as part of the community, none
of this research would have happened. Thanks are especially due to my friend and
collaborator Scott Oshima — they have been roping me into collaborative art projects for
something like five years now, and this dissertation might be our biggest and best one
yet. They always express some degree of consternation about “taking advantage of me”
but I have always felt that I was getting back far more than I was putting in. Thanks are
also due to Kristin Fukushima, Alison De La Cruz, Grant Sunoo, and Daren Mooko who
round out SLT’s executive cabinet along with Scott, and to all the members of SLT’s Art
Action Committee of which I was a part. I was privileged to have the assistance of a
“street team” with administering the survey, who tapped into their deep networks in Little
Tokyo and injected enthusiasm into the project: Carrie Morita, Joy Yamaguchi, Junko
Goda, Philip Hirose, Megan Teramoto, and Mariko Lochridge. My deepest appreciation
also goes to the numerous artists and community leaders who agreed to be interviewed.
They include: Chris Aihara, Doug Aihara, Abe Ferrer, Jerry Fukui, Brian Kito, Chris
Komai, Kathy Masaoka, David Monkawa, Johnny Mori, Mike Murase, Alan Nishio,
James Okazaki, Helen Ota, Nancy Uyemura, Bill Watanabe, Rosten Woo, and Evelyn
Yoshimura. Many of these individuals also shared their personal and institution’s
archives, much of which formed the basis for the images found in this volume — thanks
are due, in particular, to Abe and Visual Communications for giving me access to their
unparalleled archive.
I have enjoyed a wonderful and supportive constellation of people at USC,
including classmates, colleagues, teachers, and staff — too many to name. A few that I
want to shout out include fellow SLABbers Matt Miller, Wendy Chung, Julia Harten,
10
Scott Mahoy, Michael Chiang, Ayesha Mayagoitia, and Jan Chantarasompoth; my
“mentees” Thai Le, Marisa Turesky, and (unofficially) Kurt Daum; fellow art lover
Soyoon Choo; and Maria Francesca Piazzoni who I’ve worked with since our UCLA
UHI days together. Also, Tridib Banerjee has been incredibly supportive throughout my
time at USC, Julie Kim and Chris Wilson have been life savers, and classes from Holly
Willis, Suzanne Lacy, Mike Ananny, Sandra Ball-Rokeach, and Barbara Osborne gave
me critical insights, literatures, and scholarly approaches along the way.
Finally, thanks go to my family, my parents Stuart and Hae Ja, and my brother
Mark, for continually supporting me over the course of every new degree that I somehow
manage to obtain. And to Anthony Martin for making me laugh and keeping me sane.

11
List of Maps, Figures, and Tables

Map 1. Little Tokyo in context of Los Angeles ................................................................ 13
Map 2. Extents of Little Tokyo over time ......................................................................... 14
Map 3. Key community institutions and sites ................................................................... 15
Map 4. California Cultural District and legacy businesses ............................................... 17
Figure 1. Nancy Uyemura, Butterflies (2018) .................................................................. 19
Figure 2. Sherry Arnstein’s “Ladder of Citizen Participation” ......................................... 26
Figure 3. Putting Arnstein’s ladder in its place ................................................................. 27
Table 1. Research methods ............................................................................................... 72
Figure 4. Ground breaking ceremony for Nishi Hongwanji, 1925 ................................. 107
Figure 5. Japanese Americans being interned, 1942 ....................................................... 110
Figure 6. Demolition of Little Tokyo to make way for Parker Center, 1953 ................. 113
Figure 7. Little Tokyo Redevelopment Project, 1971 ..................................................... 115
Figure 8. 1949 Nisei Week Queen Terri Hokoda ........................................................... 125
Figure 9. Pack 379 at Koyasan Buddhist Temple, 1962 ................................................. 128
Figure 10. Manzanar Pilgrimage (1969) and Nisei Week demonstration (1972) ........... 132
Figure 11. Third World Storefront (1971) and anti-Bakke protest (1973) ..................... 132
Figure 12. LTPRO anti-redevelopment demonstration and sign drop in 1977 ............... 132
Figure 14. “People’s page” in Gidra from July 1971 ..................................................... 135
Figure 15. Unveiling of Home is Little Tokyo mural, 2005 ............................................ 136
Figure 16. Performance of As We Babble On at East West Players, 2018 ..................... 137
Figure 17. Activists at a landmark hearing for 800 Traction Avenue ............................ 143
Figure 18. FandangObon festival, 2014 .......................................................................... 180
Figure 19. Survey word cloud: arts and culture .............................................................. 196
Table 2. Frequency table of survey responses ................................................................ 197
Figure 20. Survey word cloud: spending habits .............................................................. 202
Figure 21. Survey word cloud: political issues ............................................................... 206
Figure 22. Survey word cloud: exciting neighborhood changes ..................................... 209
Figure 23. Survey word cloud: concerning neighborhood changes ................................ 211
Table 3. Regression table: important art forms ............................................................... 217
12
Table 4. Regression table: cultural organizations ........................................................... 220
Table 5. Regression table: money spent on .................................................................... 222
Table 6. Regression table: types of participation ............................................................ 224
Table 7. Regression table: political issues ...................................................................... 225
Table 8. Regression table: exciting neighborhood changes ............................................ 228
Table 9. Regression table: concerning neighborhood changes ....................................... 229
Figure 24. Takachizu community asset mapping installation, 2016 ............................... 248
Figure 25. SLT 2020 rendering, 2017 ............................................................................. 249
Figure 26. Nancy Uyemura, Butterflies (2018) .............................................................. 251
Figure 27. ART@341 pop-up storefront ........................................................................ 253
Figure 28. SLT Arts Action Committee meeting at 341FSN ......................................... 261
Figure 29. SLT organizational structure ......................................................................... 271
Figure 30. Final revised ladder of participation based on civic expression .................... 287
Table 10. Forms of civic expression in Little Tokyo ...................................................... 303
Table 11. Typological matrix of forms of civic expression ............................................ 305

13
Maps

Map 1. Little Tokyo in context of Los Angeles
Little Tokyo is shown at the heart of Los Angeles, with other historical and current Japanese American
communities noted. Little Tokyo, with origins dating back to 1885, remains the cultural and spiritual heart
for the JA community in Southern California. While many of the other JA neighborhoods marked in this
map still have places of worship or community centers, Japanese American residential patterns are
dispersed throughout the region. Gardena and Torrance, to the south of Los Angeles, remain as some of the
few significant JA residential centers. As of the 2010 Census, Gardena was home to 6,584 individuals of
Japanese descent (11.2% of the total population) and Torrance was home to 18,532 individuals of Japanese
descent (12.7% of the total population) while Little Tokyo was only home to 642 individuals of Japanese
descent (though this is relatively high as a portion of total population, at 19.0% of the total population).

14

Map 2. Extents of Little Tokyo over time
The unofficial extents from 1942 are intentionally “fuzzy” because the neighborhood did not have an
official boundary, and was mixed with residential, commercial, and industrial uses, including a large
community of African American Angelenos located to the west, around the Biddy Mason block owned by
the prominent Black Angeleno Biddy Mason, and south, down Central Avenue. Before the US government
imprisoned Japanese Americans in internment camps in 1942, the JA community was much larger than the
official boundaries that were later circumscribed, including up to approximately 30,000 Japanese
Americans and a number of religious institutions such as Centenary UMC founded in 1896. Various
sources indicate a significant JA presence stretching north up to Chinatown, east to the Los Angeles River,
and south down to a large produce market on 7th Street. Little Tokyo was rebuilt after internment but was
never as large, and never developed a significant residential population. Even today, many important JA
institutions are outside of its official boundaries, suggesting a larger footprint in the city than government
maps convey.

15

Map 3. Key community institutions and sites
The key non-profit, religious, and commercial sites mentioned in this volume are mapped here, all of which
can be considered a form of cultural institution within Little Tokyo. Also, the major redevelopment sites
are mapped, showing the extent to which these major parcels of land will play a role in dictating Little
Tokyo’s future. The redevelopment sites at 800 Traction and on the former LAPD headquarters (21 and 25)
are already under construction with developers sourced out. The LA Metro construction (24) is under
construction, though final decisions have not been made as to who will get access to the small amount of
commercial property on the site once the train station is complete. And the two major sites at First Street
North and Mangrove (22 and 23) are the truly make or break city-owned parcels of which have not been
assigned to developers, and are currently the subject of major community political campaigns to ensure that
they are developed by a local developer who is part of the historic community and understands what kind
of development will contribute back to the neighborhood.

1. a. Japanese American National Museum (JANM, founded in 1992, current building constructed in
1999), 100 N Central Ave (all addresses are Los Angeles, CA 90012)
1. b. Former site of Nishi Honganji Buddhist Church (built in 1925, now part of JANM with new
construction, offices, the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, and the Go For
Broke National Education Center offices), 111 N Central Ave
2. Union Center for the Arts (built in 1923, former site of Union Church, now houses East West
Players, Visual Communications, and LA Art Core), 120 N San Pedro St
3. Go For Broke Monument (built in 1999), 160 Central Ave
16
4. The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), 152 N Central Ave
5. a. Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC, built in 1980, houses numerous
other community and cultural organizations), 244 San Pedro St
5. b. Aratani Theatre (built in 1983, part of JACCC, fronts Noguchi Plaza and sculpture To the Issei
by Isamu Noguchi), 244 San Pedro St
6. Casa Heiwa (built in 1996, affordable housing developed by Little Tokyo Service Center, also
includes LTSC offices and public art by Nancy Uyemura titled Harmony), 231 E 3rd St
7. Terasaki Budokan construction site, 237-249 S Los Angeles St
8. Little Tokyo Public Library (built in 2005), 203 S Los Angeles St
9. Little Tokyo Towers (affordable housing for retirees, built in 1975), 455 E 3rd St
10. Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple (originally founded in 1905, current building constructed in
1969), 815 E 1st St
11. Zenshuji Soto Mission (founded in 1912, current building constructed in 1969), 123 S Hewitt St
12. St. Francis Xavier Church Japanese Catholic Center (originally founded in 1912, chapel built in
1939, formerly known as Maryknoll Church), 222 S Hewitt St
13. Centenary United Methodist Church (originally founded in 1896, current building constructed in
1985), 300 S Central Ave
14. Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple (originally founded in 1904, current building constructed in
1976), 505 E 3rd St
15. Jodoshu Buddhist Mission (originally founded in 1926, current building constructed in 1992), 442
E 3rd St
16. Union Church (originally founded in 1918, current building constructed in 1976), 401 E 3rd St
17. Koyasan Buddhist Temple (originally founded in 1912, current building constructed in 1940), 401
E 3rd St
18. Japanese Village Plaza (built in 1978), 335 E 2nd St
19. Little Tokyo First Street Historic District (designated locally in 1986, and as a National Historic
Landmark in 1995), 301-349 1st St, 110-120 San Pedro St, 119 Central Ave
20. Weller Court (built in 1980), 123 Astronaut Ellison S Onizuka St
21. Parker Center (former LAPD headquarters built in 1954, now demolished), 150 N Los Angeles St
22. First Street North development site
23. Mangrove development site
24. LA Metro Regional Connector site (under construction)
25. 800 Traction Ave (built in 1917, converted to artist lofts in 1980, artists evicted in 2018)

17

Map 4. California Cultural District and legacy businesses
Little Tokyo was one of the first places designated as a “California Cultural District” by the State of
California via new legislation (AB189) and the California Arts Council after the legislation passed and the
necessary process was established in 2016, and the first batch of 14 districts was named in 2017. It did not
establish official borders but, instead, named several key cultural sites including the First Street North
block and several mom and pop (or “legacy”) businesses. Note that Bunkado, a gifts and home goods store
which has existed since 1945, is in the same location as the previous Kame Restaurant which was the first
known Japanese business established in Little Tokyo in 1885.

18
Chapter 1: A Theory of Civic Expression

Urban neighborhoods around the world are now faced with the threat of
gentrification, and many see this threat as an existential battle, one sparked by the flint of
arts and culture. Over the course of 2016 and 2017, a handful of recently formed
community organizations in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights protested a
range of new cultural establishments which they saw as linked to gentrification, from art
galleries to “hipster” coffee shops. Boyle Heights has historically been an important
community for new immigrants, and today is almost entirely working class and Latinx.
These community groups broke from older, more established non-profit organizations in
the area by using tactics which matched their radical politics such as physically ushering
out “intruders” in the neighborhood (Crisman and Kim 2019). While the appropriateness
of their activities has been hotly debated within the neighborhood, they have nevertheless
permanently closed down multiple galleries and sparked an international conversation
about art and gentrification with news coverage from the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek,
and The Guardian. Interestingly, many of the participants in these radical community
groups are themselves artists, using their networks and skills to produce protests, posters,
and other public gestures that include memorable imagery and symbolism designed to
circulate widely across social and traditional forms of media.
In 2018, just across the Los Angeles River from Boyle Heights in the Little Tokyo
neighborhood of Los Angeles, another ethnic community facing forces of gentrification
approached art and culture from a different angle. Artist and longtime resident Nancy
Uyemura had just finished installing a work of art titled Butterflies in the large plate glass
19
windows of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC). The two-
dimensional graphic was part of the Windows of Little Tokyo exhibition commissioned
by Sustainable Little Tokyo, which aimed to use arts and culture to organize community
members in the long-threatened historically Japanese American neighborhood.
Uyemura’s piece included a poem which was typeset onto a digitally reproduced
painting, reflecting on the exhibition theme of “the Past, Present, and Future of Little

Figure 1. Nancy Uyemura, Butterflies (2018)
Exhibited as part of Sustainable Little Tokyo’s Windows of Little Tokyo exhibition.

Tokyo” (fig. 1). Uyemura’s artist’s statement described how she “lost [her] home and
studio” because of gentrification, and that “new developers were only looking for profits”
instead of respecting the Japanese American history of the area (Sustainable Little Tokyo
2019).
What do these two examples, so different in their attitude towards arts and
culture, have in common? They each are a form of what I term civic expression: they
demonstrate forms of political participation based in place and, critically, are driven by
artists, using artistic strategies to engage communities in new ways. They demonstrate the
way that people are both using art and reacting against art to contend with forces of
20
gentrification — forces which threaten a sense of belonging with the specter of
displacement. They show how art can be used in political contexts as an expressive form
for claiming place and self-determination, and in the struggle to live a full human
existence despite dehumanizing macroeconomic processes in the capitalist city. Not
coincidentally, these two cases are playing out in immigrant and ethnic communities
where cultural expression is distinctive.
As Boyle Heights, Little Tokyo, and so many other communities around the world
seem to be slipping through the fingers of their residents, how have these places managed
to hold on to place? The urgency of this question, especially for communities which see
this moment as an existential battle, cannot be overstated. The case of Little Tokyo is
particularly instructive because it has been able to counter many threats to belonging over
its 130-year history, stretching back to encompass urban renewal in the 1960s and 70s, or
even farther back to the extraordinary displacement of the Japanese American community
into incarceration camps during the dark history of internment from 1942–45. Due to
incredible organizing and political action by the Japanese American community over the
many years of the Redress Movement, the US government issued an official apology and
monetary reparations in 1988. Communities around the world are looking for examples
of how they can stand up against such forces, and this volume seeks to provide just that
through a deep exploration of Little Tokyo and its relationship to arts and culture.
I define civic expression as public manifestations of culture which demonstrate
the political desires of a community. This concept helps us frame new understandings of
political participation, filling several gaps in the literatures on public participation, the
culture of political engagement, and art and urban planning. These three literatures,
21
developed largely independent of one another, each only partially inform how we can
interpret and understand Little Tokyo’s remarkable history of arts and activism. And,
even in their combination, the example of Little Tokyo pushes these literatures further
both in their own rights, and also as a combined, synergistic whole that is more than the
sum of their parts.
Namely, theories of public participation generally neglect to consider the role
culture plays in how and why people participate, while literatures on art and urban
planning tend to narrowly focus on art and culture’s role in generating economic
development, as opposed to broader forms of community development such as generating
robust public engagement. Furthermore, literatures on participatory planning processes,
long a subject of scholarly interest because of their ubiquity and simultaneous lackluster
attendance and outcomes, have somehow failed to capture these explosive forms of
participation emanating from the bottom up. Sherry Arnstein wrote her seminal “A
Ladder of Citizen Participation” some 50 years ago in the context of the student and civil
rights movements of the 1960s, yet scholarly focus on public participation since has
largely focused on anodyne efforts from the top down to better solicit citizen input.
Arnstein’s theory remains as the most cited theoretical model of public participation, but
is especially ripe for reconsideration given how current gentrification debates are now
rewriting many of the long-held rules about local power, progressive urbanism, and
equity. A theory of civic expression integrates these literatures and fills in a gap on how
art and culture exist as key sites for political action that emanates outside of formal
structures for public participation. Such a theory can also highlight how such art-based
political action might be recognized and incorporated into political processes, and
22
especially urban planning processes which grapple with questions of urban change and
gentrification. In other words, civic expression suggests that art and culture have the
potential to make democracy and urban life better.
The overarching research questions which animate this research are, first: Is arts
and culture foundational to producing more meaningful and equitable political
participation, especially for marginalized groups? Our understanding of public
participation has largely ignored the role that art and culture plays in how and why people
participate. I argue in this volume that this elision is a key factor in why conventional
participatory processes have been ineffective or break down entirely. The demography of
participants skews toward those who can participate most easily, including older,
wealthier, and whiter populations, and especially homeowners — groups of people for
whom participatory processes, intentionally or not, have been constructed for on a
cultural level. If institutional cultures are inflexible or closed to new kinds of
conversations, a more diverse public will likely bypass such participatory processes based
on the valid assumption that their input will not be understood and will not have an effect
on outcomes. And beyond the question of access, even when a more representative group
of people engage in participatory processes, they can break down because of
miscommunications between participants, or between participants and the public officials
who typically frame the parameters of the meeting. These disparities become even further
exacerbated in the context of rapidly gentrifying cities where marginalized groups are
pushed out from their place in the city, disenfranchising them from a political right to
participate in communities where they no longer belong.
23
I hypothesize that by incorporating a more complete picture of art and culture’s
potential role in political participation, we can generate forms of community development
and participatory processes that are more equitable and designed to hear and respond to
the demands, needs, and insights of marginalized groups. Furthermore, we can identify
and legitimate forms of grassroots participation that too often go unnoticed by planners
and public officials. Art plays a role as the canary in the coal mine of participation: it is
often some of the first expressive forms which contain political demands, produced
organically outside of participatory processes, and is some of the first expression that
evaporates amidst a broken process. Understanding when, how, and why forms of
community and political art are produced, and incorporating this understanding into how
we understand participation may even prefigure the need for the kinds of venues that
public participation literatures have sought to implement.
A second overarching question: How has Little Tokyo managed to remain a
cohesive and political engaged community in the face of a history of challenges to its
place in the city? This volume focuses on Little Tokyo because of its unusual history in
facing a consistent thread of significant challenges to its existence, yet it has improbably
held on to its place. Not coincidentally, it also has an incredible depth of art, culture, and
activism — both historically and in the contemporary moment — within its relatively
small geographic footprint. I hypothesize that by investigating how Little Tokyo has held
on to place with and through arts and culture-based strategies, both historically and now,
this will illuminate art and culture’s role in public participation and political engagement.
Furthermore, Little Tokyo’s example, played out within the tangible space of the city,
engages questions regarding placemaking and placekeeping — political battles that are
24
facing cities around the world, and ones which would be informed by Little Tokyo’s
example. Its historical and contemporary use of arts activism demonstrates not only the
role culture plays in political participation, but also how this participation can effectively
slow, stop, or prevent the seemingly inexorable processes of gentrification that are seen
in cities of all shapes and sizes around the world, and especially within marginalized
neighborhoods and communities of color inside of those cities.
To summarize an outline of this volume, first, in the remainder of this
introductory chapter, I will review literatures on public participation, cultures of political
participation, and art in the city, concluding with a proposed definition of civic
expression which sits at their interstices. This provisional theory of civic expression helps
generate research questions which are then answered in the remainder of the volume
through grounded empirical work and analysis in Little Tokyo. Chapter 2 provides more
detail about the research design which undergirds this volume, including outlining the
research questions for each chapter and how they work together, along with the
methodological approaches I used and data I engaged to answer those questions. This
volume uses a combinatory methodology, each piece of which is designed to illuminate
the overlooked political role of arts and culture in Little Tokyo through a different lens:
historically, from community leaders at the top, from community stakeholders at the
ground level, and through an in-depth case study of one community organization which
engages with the themes and questions of this volume directly.
Chapter 3 develops a history of art and activism within Little Tokyo, deploying
archival methods and visual analysis to understand how Little Tokyo developed as a
community and, especially, how art and culture played an evolving role in the formation
25
of its identity and its ability to hold on to its place in the city. Chapter 4 hones in on the
perspectives provided by a series of key informant interviews with Little Tokyo’s
community leaders, ranging from longtime artists, to business owners, to many of the
elders who founded some of the most important non-profit and cultural organizations in
the neighborhood. These interviews triangulate and inform findings from the historical
and archival work in the previous chapter by asking actors in Little Tokyo directly about
what was observed in the historical and archival work. Chapter 5 provides a broader
picture of Little Tokyo’s stakeholders, verifying and complicating many of the answers
provided by its community leaders in Chapter 4, using a survey instrument that was
answered by some 333 respondents. Chapter 6 analyzes one case study in more detail,
that of Sustainable Little Tokyo, a coalition of several key arts, culture, and community
development organizations in the neighborhood which has focused its attention on arts-
based organizing and activism to respond to threats of gentrification. SLT demonstrates
some of the latest strategies around culturally-based coalition building and community
organizing. And Chapter 7 concludes with some comparative examples of civic
expression in other cultural milieus outside of Little Tokyo, reflecting on the volumes key
findings, including a policy recommendation of institutionalized listening and a
provisional typology of civic expression.
Why do we need a theory of civic expression? Why now? Some 50 years ago,
Sherry Arnstein wrote her seminal article, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” which put
forth a theory of public participation that has remained largely unchanged. In it, she sets
up a continuum of participation that ranges from the lowest rungs of “nonparticipation”
up through “degrees of tokenism” and, at the top, “degrees of citizen power” (Arnstein
26
1969). As Christopher Kelty has argued, this is a rather flat theorization of participation,
essentially ranging from “phony” to “optative” participation (Kelty 2017). Arnstein’s
article was written in the late 1960s as a critique of participation based on her experiences
as an urban planner in the then-newly established Department of Housing and Urban
Development where under its Model Cities Program, the US federal government had
implemented the first legislation which explicitly mandated public participation. Her
writing took place amidst the various protests around the globe in the late 1960s: student,
civil rights, antiwar, and labor movements demanded recognition by and access to the
halls of political power. These movements, too, had a critical view of participation: one
widely circulated student poster from France’s May 1968 protests which was reproduced
in Arnstein’s article read, “I participate; you participate; he participates; we participate;
you participate . . . They profit.” It is striking that despite the clear skepticism of public

Figure 2. Sherry Arnstein’s “Ladder of Citizen Participation”
French student poster from May 1968 (left) and Sherry Arnstein’s “Ladder of Citizen Participation” (right),
both reproduced in her eponymous article in 1969.

27

Figure 3. Putting Arnstein’s ladder in its place
While Sherry Arnstein’s 1969 “ladder of citizen participation” helpfully laid out a theory which defined
different “rungs” of public participation, from fake or “token” participation at the lowest rungs to real or
“citizen power” participation at the highest rungs, it remained two dimensional, an aspatial abstraction
which failed to consider culture and place. Here, the ladder is revised to incorporate the missing element of
culture, placing it on an emplaced foundation.

participation and the mistrust of participatory venues instituted from the top down held
by both Arnstein and those advocating for more access to “citizen power,” that theories
of participation seem to have not moved past an assumption that more participation is
always better with the caveat that “good” participation is real, while “bad” participation is
fake. While later in this chapter, I will explore the work being done to theorize
participation, these modifications of Arnstein’s original salvo rarely stray far from the
original in any meaningful way. Purely on the basis of Arnstein’s unfulfilled dream, we
might argue that it is high time for a new theory of participation. I provide a provisional
28
diagram of this theory here (fig. 3) which is further elaborated upon and refined in the
final chapter of this volume, incorporating the findings of this research.
Yet, as this chapter will argue, civic expression goes beyond filling a simple “gap
in the literature” or updating an outmoded theory. Arnstein’s writing and the literature
around public participation that it unleashed is instructive, but it is only one small piece
of the puzzle. If we fast-forward to today, we now see participation everywhere. With the
aid of geolocative smartphones, we can not only hail the functional equivalent of a taxi,
but also participate in the provision of such ridesharing services as a driver. After every
visit to the website of a cable provider, or phone call to your bank, there is a follow-up
survey which begs for your participation. For every new urban development or proposed
change in city policy, there are prescribed venues for allowing public participation into
the process. And collaborative governance isn’t just for the public sector: you are
expected to serve on voluntary committees in your workplace so you can ensure that the
company is agile and responsive to the latest in employee needs. Yet despite all of this
participation, its promise seems never to have materialized: we see political
disillusionment and social disintegration on every page of the newspaper. Robert Putnam
argued some 20 years ago that this was all the product of the deterioration of social
capital after the collapse of participation in voluntary and civic organizations (Putnam
2000).
It is easy to point out that perhaps people simply don’t have time to participate in
civic organizations after they finish supplementing their meager incomes with driving for
a rideshare company, filling out all of those customer surveys, going to those public
hearings, and making sure your place of work is properly governed. But while the venues
29
for participation are different, it would seem that all of this participation would do
something for building social capital, or at least would make a dent in the plummeting
levels of trust in democratic governance (see, for example, Knight Commission 2019).
Arnstein and her contemporaries might argue that all of this participation is, actually,
non-participation. That it is fake. I would venture that these circumstances are not merely
the product of “bad” participation, but rather a fundamental misreading of where and how
participation occurs. Civic expression has long occurred in cities, neighborhoods, and
communities around the world, but its illegibility had less to do with ideas of “good” or
“bad” participation but rather, on a much more fundamental level, theoretical, scholarly,
and professional ignorance as to what, exactly, participation even is. People are
participating, if only we had the eyes to see it.
My hope in undertaking this project has been to examine, analyze, and highlight
how Little Tokyo’s has managed to remain a thriving place in the face of immense
challenges — and, in doing so, help other communities do the same by way of its
example. What I have found is that the key to its ability to hold on to place has been its
dynamic of civic expression. This dynamic provides a theory for participatory and
political action not only for academic scholarship, but for the very real communities
which face threats of gentrification and displacement every day. Civic expression shows
how art, culture, politics, and participation are all intertwined. And while Little Tokyo
has largely accomplished all of this without much support from Los Angeles — and more
often than not has done so in spite of active attempts from the City to erase Little Tokyo
from the map — the insights which it provides on civic expression, cultures of political
participation, and fights around gentrification ought to inform urban planners and public
30
officials on better ways to engage communities, incorporate participatory processes, and
listen to their constituencies. Understanding civic expression helps us see anew the way
in which urban places, and especially ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods, are made up
of rich cultures and deeply engaged people that can revitalize urban politics and
democracy at large.

A Primer on Participation

What hasn’t been written about participation? The language of participation now
suffuses nearly every sphere of life, from democratic participation, to participation in the
arts (not to be confused with participatory art), to participatory culture, to digital
participation. The list goes on. Curiously, “participation studies” is a diffuse
confederation of scholars writing about vastly different subjects — and this is, in part,
why concrete language around participation remains so elusive. For the purposes of this
volume, we will focus on political participation, or the engagement of individuals and
communities with the systems of governance under which they live and exist. Literatures
of political participation largely fall under three disciplinary silos: conventionally
understood “participating as voting” or electoral politics from political science (e.g., Dahl
1961; Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002), grassroots social movement literatures around
activism and community organizing from sociology (e.g., Alinsky 1971; Boal 1979;
Castells 1983), and new public participation from urban planning and public
administration (e.g., Berry et al. 1993; Baiocchi 2017). It is the latter literature which we
will emphasize because of its outsize role in shaping current understandings of
31
participation — often referred to within this lineage as public participation or civic
engagement — and because of the way in which it has driven transformations of systems
of governance, from implementing new top-down, mandated venues for public
participation within local and national governments, to entry even into ostensibly quasi-
public or even private spheres of international development, business, and other
institutional structures (Dryzek 1990; Fischer 2009; Irvin and Stansbury 2004). It also
exists as the literature wherein an intervention regarding the role and importance of
culture would be most noticed, given its lack of attention to the relationship between
culture and participation.
Anthropologist Christopher Kelty traces our contemporary language of
participation to the countercultural movements of the 1960s: “After the term
‘participatory democracy’ was invented in 1962 by Tom Hayden and colleagues in the
Port Huron Statement, there was a flurry of efforts to rethink participation, chief among
them [political scientist Carole] Pateman’s [1970] classic Participation and Democratic
Theory.” (Kelty 2017, 2) Carole Pateman, for her part, contributed a devastating critique
to much of the accepted theory of elite and pluralist democracy, calling instead for
increased public participation which would lead toward better outcomes and strengthen
the public’s sense of civic virtue (Pateman 1970). Similarly, Benjamin Barber in his 1984
book Strong Democracy called for the primacy of democratic participation by all, even
above the classical liberal notions which are typically paired with democracies as we
know them and have moderated their participatory tendencies — with Barber arguing that
expanded participation will solve the crises of cynicism by the electorate and paralysis of
public institutions (Barber 1984).
32
Kelty, among others, point toward urban planning of the 1960s as the site where
participation moved to the interior of governance structures: the Model Cities Program
and the writing of Sherry Arnstein are seen as the moments where participation becomes
institutionalized. Arnstein authored “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” in 1969 while she
“was an advisor to H. Ralph Taylor in the newly created Department of Housing and
Urban Development (HUD), charged with implementing core aspects of the War on
Poverty, in particular the Model Cities program. . . . Around the country, hundreds of
‘City Demonstration Agencies’ applied for funds, created planning documents, and
attempted to engage local citizens in ‘maximum feasible participation’ — some
successfully, some disastrously. Daniel Moynihan published a widely read analysis of the
War on Poverty called Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, and the Model Cities
Program, along with the Office of Economic Opportunity, did not survive the transition
from the Johnson to the Nixon administration” (Kelty 2017, 5-6).
Kelty’s analysis echoes and even demonstrates that of Weber and Wallace who
find that writing on the Model Cities Program saw an initial flurry of boosterism and
optimism for the participatory potentials of the program, saw a negative turn after the
program’s demise that lasted through the 1980s and 90s, and since around 2000 there has
been a renewed interest of scholars who see the prescient ideas around participation of
the program newly relevant in contemporary society (2012). Today, we might critique
Arnstein’s use of citizenship to identify who has power, especially given the increasing
number of disenfranchised urban denizens who may not have legal status as a citizen,
both in the US and in many other places around the world. However, I would read her use
33
and certainly the use of citizenship within civic expression as relating to these more
ancient ideals of participation in a community rather than some bureaucratic legal status.
Arnstein’s article remains not only one of the most widely cited articles in any
discipline about public participation, but also one of the most cited articles from all of
urban planning throughout academic literature — yet Kelty notes that it is less of a theory
of participation, and more of a critique of how it was implemented in the Model Cities
Program (6). Indeed, as insightful as it is, its chief contribution was to layout the degrees
of public participation on her eponymous “ladder of citizen participation” that spans from
“real” participation including partnership, delegated power, and citizen control; “token”
participation including informing, consultation, and placation; down to “non-
participation” including manipulation and therapy (Arnstein 1969). The closest thing to a
theory of participation that exists is merely a continuum from “real” participation to
“fake” participation. This provocative and useful diagram has had the unfortunate side
effect of flattening our understanding of participation, leaving out other dimensions of its
character and its transformation within different contexts. So subsequent developments in
this particular literature have focused on ways to expand participation and ensure that it is
of the good, “real” kind.
Graham Smith, in his book Democratic Innovations, provides a compelling
account of several innovative institutions for citizen participation beyond the typical
competitive election which defines democracy (2009). He categorizes the innovations
into four areas: popular assemblies, mini-publics, direct legislation, and e-democracy.
The example which he explores in most depth — and one that is cited in the literature
probably more than any other — is the participatory budgeting process which first
34
developed in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He notes that it has empowered wide swaths of society
in the various cities throughout Brazil which have incorporated some version of
participatory budgeting wherein quasi-public bodies of citizens debate and deliberate
municipal priorities and ultimately decide how at least a portion of discretionary spending
is to be used (Smith 2009). On the other hand, just as is so often seen in social movement
studies, as participatory budgeting becomes more established, there is concern of
“demobilization” as it becomes less activist and more bureaucratic (54).
Josh Lerner in his 2014 book Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can
Empower Citizens and Transform Politics provides a preemptive solution for the fact that
democracy and participation are often unpleasant experiences which a general public
might prefer to avoid if possible. Instead, Lerner argues, we should try to make
democracy and participatory practices more game-like and, as a result, more fun, open,
and accessible (Lerner 2014). Gamifying democracy, while raising the specter of
cheapening democracy, also seems to have many sensible components which would be
non-controversial and would improve democracy: having clear rules for process,
transparently defined competing interests, and measurable outcomes. Similarly, Beth
Noveck explores wiki culture as a technological fix for concerns around participation,
harnessing crowdsourcing to problems of policy complexity and democratic legitimacy
(2009), while Jeff Duval maps the logic of open source software onto similar concerns
(2010).
Archon Fung’s 2003 article “Recipes for Public Spheres” explores how differing
institutional design choices can lead to better deliberation. In later writing, he lays out a
theory of “Empowered Participatory Governance” wherein centralized features of
35
professional governance (at least within his case studies of local schools and police beats)
are devolved to smaller subunits, such as geographic localities, and institutionalized
through platforms for deliberation which are participatory, empowered, and deliberative,
but also responsible to centralized command — an arrangement he terms “accountable
autonomy” (Fung 2004). And in a subsequent article, he distilled the various types of
participatory structures into a three-dimensional matrix which included three axes: more
exclusive or more inclusive with regard to participant selection; more or less intense
modes of communication and decision making; and more or less authority and power for
outcomes (Fung 2006). This “democracy cube” provides a three-dimensional space of
movement for changes or reforms which move through the cube in patterns that, for
example, might enhance legitimacy, or produce more equity. Fung’s work is important,
yet it remains beholden to the basic idea that more participation is best. His empirical
work help support this assumption more so than in other scholars’ work, yet the case
studies are typically one off, rare and unique, or at the very least, not how things are
“typically done” within actually existing democracies — which in turn casts doubt on the
generalizability and normativity of his findings.
But this lineage of participation begins from a particular disciplinary lens focused
on creating venues for participation within bureaucracies of city planning and public
administration — what Caroline Lee has termed “new public participation” (Lee 2015;
2016). She charts the transformation of this form of participation from the grassroots
activism of the 1960s into the anodyne, professionalized world of the so-called “P2” (for
public participation) industry which now not only facilitates community meetings for
local governments but also participatory events for corporations, non-profit
36
organizations, and just about anyone else who wants to “engage their community.” Yet
just as often as well-intentioned practitioners facilitating meaningful participation, as Lee
notes, they just as often provide a “feeling of participation” without the empowerment
required for these participatory contributions to have a real effect — precisely what
Arnstein termed “manipulation.”
Before there was new public participation, there existed two dominant
disciplinary perspectives on what participation is and how people participate: electoral
politics from political science, and the marches, community organizing, and other forms
of so-called “unconventional participation” by political scientists, studied instead most
heavily in social movement theory from sociology. Sociologist and communication
scholar Michael Schudson has described how public participation has gone through
several phases in American history, beginning with what he terms “trust-based public
life” where only white, landowning men were expected to participate in civic life, to “the
party era” of the mid-19th century with its machine politics, to the Progressive Era from
about 1880 to 1910 when the idea of “the informed citizen” took hold, along with an
expanded franchise and the secret ballot — with a notable assumption that participation
equals voting (2000).
The influential political theorist Robert Dahl charts a similar history to
Schudson’s, with his analysis of democracy settling on what is referred to as elite or
pluralist democracy. Even in his 1971 book Polyarchy which was released right around
the same time as Arnstein and Patemen’s work, and which explicitly lays out ideas
around public participation and dissent, it remains fixed on conventional ideas of
participation as voting, and leaders as coming from elite spaces. The book attempts to
37
analyze comparative data at the national level (rather than at the urban level) in order to
determine what characteristics (such as type of economic system, levels of inequality, and
levels of cultural diversity) are more likely to result in a nation becoming what he terms a
“polyarchy” — an organizational structure that approaches the ideal of democracy with
public contestation to dominant political powers, and inclusiveness of participation of all
those under that political power’s rule. Dahl’s work is framed as inductive rather than
idealistic, with his analysis serving as a measure of how democracy is actually
functioning rather than how it ought to function, leaving open the possibility that
alternative forms of democracy may be preferable.
Yet their historization elides the fact that public participation has long taken a
variety of forms beyond the ballot box, suppressing the variety of political actions that
have historically been taken by those excluded from formalized structures of political
participation, most often by women, workers, and people of color as historians describe.
Mary Ryan, for example, has charted the history of a chapter of the American Female
Moral Reform Society which was active from 1837 to 1845 in Utica, New York, one of
countless such women’s reform organizations which were active across the US, and
which used tours, marches, pamphlets, public speaking, media, and many other tactics to
create social and political change (1979). Susan Davis has also focused on this period of
time to note the role that parades, banners, and street performance played as a venue for
political engagement, especially by women and people of color (1986). And sociologist
Manuel Castells work on urban social movements has examined the political
participation of groups spanning from the 1500s to today, spanning geographies across
Europe and the Americas, finding similarities in the conflictual actions taken by
38
marginalized groups across time and space (1983). These actions — not to mention the
long history of workers movements, strikes, and other labor-oriented forms of political
engagement — don’t fit neatly within Schudson or Dahl’s timeline.
In urban planning, initial efforts toward participation came out of some of the
dark history of technocratic approaches toward urban renewal (Lindblom 1959; Davidoff
1965; Friendmann 1973; Mazziotti 1974). Later efforts have been made to translate ideas
of participation into Habermasian ideals of communicative action (Fainstein 2000;
Habermas 1989). This has resulted in a dizzying array of variants of participatory
planning, including communicative action planning, collaborative planning, deliberative
planning, pragmatic communicative action, agonistic planning, interactive practice,
multicultural planning, participatory community development, and so on (Flyvbjerg
2002; Forester 1989; Forester 1999; Goodspeed 2016; Healey 1992; Hillier 2003; Hoch
2007; Innes 1995; Margerum 2002; McGuirk 2001; Stein and Harper 2003; Umemoto
and Igarashi 2009; Rios and Lachapelle 2015).
Many of the lofty ideals of Habermas and the subsequent criticisms and
modifications of his theory by Fraser and others have been continually translated into
practice-oriented strategies for incorporating participatory planning processes into urban
planning and governance (Fraser 1990). As Umemoto has noted, what are often taken for
granted as good intuitive planning practices ought to be critically examined as to come to
some systematic unearthing of these best practices (Umemoto 2011). Their evolution
would be aided by further reflection and integration on the implications that culture has
for participation. Landmark texts, such as Leonie Sanderock’s Towards Cosmopolis
(1998) engaged questions of culture for planning in the multicultural city, but they were
39
not centered around the issue of participation. As Vale has creatively described,
collaborative governance can take a variety of forms in different “constellations” and we
might imagine yet another constellation that is reflective of the role of art and culture in
participatory processes (Vale 2018).
A theory of civic expression should be integrative in its incorporation of these
three lineages, electoral politics, social movements, and new public participation. To
ignore electoral politics or social movements when thinking about political participation
would ignore key ways in which people participate, even when they are not showing up
to a community meeting or a deliberative poll. But this attention would likely expand and
redefine our understanding of new public participation more than electoral politics and
social movements because of how new public participation is driven from the top down
and is subject to policy intervention. In other words, social movements, and to a lesser
degree electoral politics, exist in a complex network of institutions, grassroots actors, and
historical norms that are less responsive to policy intervention — or, in the case of
grassroots activism, perhaps should not even be subject to policy intervention. New
public participation, however, is a relatively recent development, dating to the 1960s, and
remains ripe for intervention and refinement, especially regarding an understanding of
culture. Painfully noticeable in this primer on participation is the fact that culture —
conceptualized broadly to include markers of identity such as race, ethnicity, and gender,
and conceptualized specifically to include material culture such as art and performance
— is absent, a lacuna which a theory of civic expression seeks to fill.

Cultures of Participation
40

The participatory turn toward the ubiquitous forms of public participation that we
see today first began in the late 1960s amidst the global political movements that
demanded new forms of “citizen power” by lay people left out of decision-making
processes. Whichever of these partial narratives around political participation that we
privilege, whether it by from literatures on new public participation, electoral politics, or
social movements, they all largely relegate the role that culture plays to a secondary or
even tertiary concern. For new public participation, culture is understood as little more
than particular population subcategories, like variation by race or income, which have
some bearing on rates of participation or might act as a variable in a regression formula.
And for political science, culture is most often understood as a form of “political culture”
which exists at the level of the nation-state.
The idea of a political culture was introduced by Gabriel Almond and Sidney
Verba in the 1960s when they explored the “civic culture” which, in their analysis,
stemmed from 18th and 19th century Britain, leading up to a “participation explosion” in
the 1960s (Almond and Verba 1963, 4). Their Eurocentric approach is easy to critique,
and since then much of the most recent literature on culture and political participation
comes from other places around the globe grappling with changing political regimes, the
question of participation in states with varying degrees of democratic governance, and the
impacts of globalization and urbanization. For example, Hernandez and Dilla have
considered the role of political culture in Cuba, a non-capitalist and non-democratic state
which nevertheless had a rich participatory culture based on revolutionary ideals
(Hernandez and Dilla 1991). A number of Chinese studies scholars are recently
41
attempting to understand the changing nature of participation in a rapidly urbanizing
China. Yang Zhong writes that the “role of culture in shaping political development in
China is a factor agreed upon by most China scholars,” yet he admits that such
scholarship “tends to focus on the macro (or aggregate) level of cultural traditions and
context,” and is “idiographic” in its approach, often eschewing empirical grounding
(Zhong 2017, 3). Wenqi Dang, in comparing participation in environmental politics
across China, the Netherlands, and Italy, defines culture as a “collective programming of
the mind” and groups actors by nation-state on only two cultural variables of how strong
group identification is, and the degree to which individuals follow group rules (Dang
2018, 3). Wen-Chun Chang considers a different context in Taiwan and integrates
consideration of religious cultures as impacting political culture and participation, yet
remains beholden to the nation-state as a unit of analysis (Chang 2016). In all of these
cases, the method of analysis generally takes the form of a survey taken from a
representative sample for a country to identify opinions, attitudes, and the like. This
method, while useful as one mode of understanding, flattens out difference within the
unit of the nation-state, and universalizes an aggregate public opinion across diverse
subgroups and individuals — it requires triangulation with other methods, especially
methods which are attuned to the intricacies of culture, such as qualitative research.
Further, it is backward in the sense that rather than analyzing culture and its
manifestations itself, it extracts opinions as proxies of culture, which I would argue
misreads culture solely as a form of “programming” rather than one in which agency is
possible. There are not only other elements of culture beyond opinions that ought to be
42
considered, but also tangible forms of culture such as art, which play an important role in
creating shared identity and a sense of place.
Historians and sociologists have done a much better job of identifying the
relationship between culture and social movements. As a first step in this direction, Hank
Johnston and Bert Klandermans’s volume on the subject was released during the “cultural
turn” of the social sciences and they, referencing Robert Wuthnow, identified culture as a
“symbolic expressive aspect of social behavior” (Johnson and Klandermans 1995, 3;
Wuthnow 1987). They go on to note culture’s relative stabilizing force as culture changes
but slowly, and explore the processes by which it does so, carrying along with it the
constructions of meaning, symbols, values, and language. In this arena, as well, a number
of scholars of China have been pushing the conversation forward. Bryan Ho considers
social movements in Macao, arguing that historic parochial or subject-based political
cultures (to use Almond and Verba’s typology, which he borrows) gave way to a
participant culture as an unresponsive government faced a growing labor movement (Ho
2011; Almond and Verba 1963). Dingxin Zhao speculates further, suggesting that
Chinese and Western contexts drive different cultural mechanisms of problem-solving
tool kits, ideological scripts, and habits, and their use diverges on the basis of a social
movements’ particular organizational form (Zhao 2010).
As important as this comparative international perspective is, it also flattens out
different within national contexts, such as the cultural variation we might observe in an
immigrant and ethnic enclave community such as Little Tokyo, wherein the Japanese
American formation of art and culture acts as a counter to dominant forms of culture in
the United States. And, beyond this, understandings of culture can resort to
43
generalizations and essentialization. As I will argue later in this volume, especially with
the consideration of specific neighborhoods such as Little Tokyo, distinct place-based
cultures develop and emerge over long periods of time — a “tool kit” of culture unique to
Little Tokyo and nowhere else, to use Ann Swidler’s formulation (Swidler 1986). So
even though Japanese American culture exists as a category, the culture that we find in
Little Tokyo will remain distinct from cultures in, say, Japanese American communities
in New York City.
Much of the careful attention paid to questions of race and ethnicity in the urban
space by disciplines such as sociology was given new life with critiques in the 1990s and
2000s of the so-called “spatial turn” within the social sciences and humanities which
emerged during the 1970s and 80s. Henri Lefebvre’s landmark book The Production of
Space, which was first published in French in 1974, was key in establishing an
understanding of space as a social construction unique to its context which affects social
behavior within it and is simultaneously also created by those social behaviors — often
primarily by hegemonic forces which hold social power (1991). Michel de Certeau
published The Practice of Everyday Life in French in 1980, which shared the same
understanding of space as socially constructed yet considered the agency of everyday
people outside of disciplinary structures (tactics) as compared with the practices of
hegemonic and empowered influences (strategies), and he also applied it more
specifically to urban space by reflecting on the practice of “walking in the city” (1988).
Yi-fu Tuan, writing from the American context, evaluated space from a humanistic
perspective as opposed to the structuralist and Marxist understandings of the French
critical theorists. His writing is some of the earliest which moves beyond an abstract
44
notion of space toward a specific and concrete understanding of place as formed by
personal experience and shared history (Tuan 1977).
Subsequently, most notably initiated by feminist geographer Doreen Massey, a
number of scholars built upon these theories, criticizing them for their generality and
universality which excluded considerations of the role that gender, race, and ethnicity
might play. Massey’s Space, Place, and Gender argued that place as it has been socially
constructed reproduces a problematic set of gender relations, especially given that public
and professional spaces have historically been male dominated while women were
relegated to domestic spaces, and that we might map feminist critiques of society onto the
newly emerging understanding of space and place (1994). Later, in her landmark text For
Space, Massey reasserts the original arguments of the critical theorists that space and
place are socially constructed, yet she does so in the service of a greater argument: that
this critical understanding should enable the thinking of possibilities for alternative
spaces and places that have yet to be constructed, noting the ethical responsibility which
comes with such an understanding of space (2005). Around this time, George Lipsitz
forcefully introduced the role race plays in the production of space, noting a “white
spatial imaginary, based on exclusivity and augmented exchange value, functions as a
central mechanism for skewing opportunities and life chances in the United States along
racial lines” and that planners and others should instead intentionally structure urban
places based on a “black spatial imaginary” to ensure inclusion in cities (2007, 13). And
David Kaplan’s recently published Navigating Ethnicity expands these arguments to
theories of ethnicity, considering the role of ethnicity, diversity, segregation, enclaves,
diaspora, and hybridities play in placemaking (2018).
45
Yet even here, culture remains understood as a relatively static set of influences
that play out based on subcategories of nationality, ethnicity, or gender. Culture remains a
social science construct rather than material objects and living processes which can be
analyzed. These baseline from various studies of participation require supplementation
with the rich, deep analysis of culture and its manifestations themselves as one might find
in literatures of the humanities. If you want to understand the art and culture of
participation in Little Tokyo, for example, you must not only look at the histories and
changing rates of participation. Rather, you must look at the community’s art and culture,
itself. An examination of Uyemura’s Butterflies speaks volumes that we might otherwise
not hear if we were to only consider, say, the relatively high density of non-profit
organizations in the neighborhood. Her work makes real the human impacts of
gentrification, and identifies specific harms contained within an otherwise apparent “win”
for urban progress. Perhaps most provocatively in the literature, James Jasper describes
the “art” of moral protest, pushing analysis away from broad, abstract sociological
markers of culture and towards specific manifestations of culture, like protest signs,
slogans, and rituals (Jasper 1999). Perhaps to fully comprehend and analyze culture’s role
in participation, we must expand our gaze past general ideas of culture to look upon
specific objects of culture. Recent work looking at “Latino urbanism” has started to chart
this path with regard to place and placemaking, and participation figures into these
discussions in glancing ways, but much more work remains to be done (Rios and
Vazquez 2012; Rios and Watkins 2015).
So what role does culture play, exactly? We can find the beginnings of a theory in
the literatures around social capital, one which we will fill out and build further based on
46
precisely such a humanistic and holistic analysis in Little Tokyo and elsewhere as we will
find in later chapters. Nevertheless, we can begin by noting the relationship between a
community’s art and culture and the depth of its social capital. The term “social capital”
was first used by Jane Jacobs in her magisterial The Life and Death of Great American
Cities to describe the gradual and laborious build-up of “neighborhood networks” —
relationships between geographically proximate neighbors, regardless of their potentially
diverse identities and communities — which can be wiped out in an instant of ill-
informed urban renewal (Jacobs 1961, 138). Interestingly, Jacobs describes social capital
as belonging not to individuals or even to neighborhoods, but to the city, itself. In her
view, while social capital is built up at the hyperlocal level, its positive effects drive a
feedback loop of social cohesion and healthy social life on a much larger scale.
For Jacobs, the idea of culture describes a broader set of normalized behaviors
and practices inscribed into a group of people who are cohabitating in a city. I argue that
these practices can be identified, described, and modified with an expansive
understanding of and engagement with art and culture. Jacobs is critical of Lewis
Mumford and other intellectual sources for modernist urban planning, and despite her
accusation that Mumford’s The Culture of Cities is largely a laundry list of urban
problems, she would likely agree with his assertion that, “Mind takes form in the city;
and in turn, urban forms condition mind. For space, no less than time, is artfully
reorganized in cities: in boundary lines and silhouettes, in the fixing of horizontal planes
and vertical peaks, in utilizing or denying the natural site, the city records the attitude of a
culture and an epoch to the fundamental facts of its existence. . . . With language itself, it
remains man’s greatest work of art.” (Mumford 1938) In other words, the city itself is
47
both shaped by culture, shapes culture, and ultimately is culture. Our examination of civic
expression considers forms of art and culture to be intimately interwoven with the form
and nature of the cities and places from which they emerge.
Since Jacobs first named social capital, others have taken on the term’s mantle.
Most notably, Robert Putnam has examined social capital as it has ebbed and flowed
through the history of the United States. Before his landmark book Bowling Alone
identified a worrisome trend of diminishing associational life and, in turn, social capital
across all sectors of American society, he published a 20-year study on civic life in Italy
titled Making Democracy Work where he noted that cultural geographies drove the
quality of governance (Putnam 2000; 1993). Areas that had a culture of civic engagement
had governments that were commensurately more effective, despite relatively identical
structures and laws of these regional governments on paper. In a short provocation
published prior to his book-length Bowling Alone, Putnam noted the apparent links
between diminishing forms of political participation as conventionally understood —
voting, in particular — and the decline in participation in associational life: attendance at
churches, clubs, and other such voluntary organizations (Putnam 1995). These spaces are
often cultural spaces, like the church, wherein manifestations of culture such as song and
dance mark the beginnings of the formation of a shared new language.
While membership in political organizations, like the NRA or Greenpeace, is on
the rise, Putnam notes that these associations are often abstract and members rarely, if
ever, encounter any of their fellow members in face-to-face contact — forming an
“imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson might call it (Anderson 1983). In the full-
length book, Putnam notes that one hopeful trend is increasing amounts of activism
48
where, as he describes it, “social capital is essential for social movements” and,
conversely, “social movements also create social capital” (Putnam 2000, 153). This
virtuous cycle is promising, but as many community organizers will attest, shared visions
create solidarity yet when that solidarity is only and entirely based on political organizing
and activism, it can also be a recipe for burnout and turnover. Both social capital and
social movements would be well served to rely on additional factors for social cohesion
and solidarity, and it is precisely here that art and culture might play a role. Another
worrying caveat to the trend of increased activism is that it is but one measure of
participation which collapses differences between groups: as Putnam with co-author
Thomas Sander later argue in describing “post-9/11 youth activism,” it is primarily
wealthier and whiter individuals who have the resources and capacity to participate, and
the overall trends often mask even further disenfranchisement from “have-nots” (Sander
and Putnam 2010).
Robert Sampson translates the idea of social capital into discussions around
“neighborhood effects,” or as Sampson conveys, the fact that “while the twenty-first
century has been declared spatially liberated . . . it remains place-based in much of its
character” (Sampson 2012, 31). His volume enters into the historically rich sociology
subfields of criminology and social disorganization, but one key contribution is useful for
our understanding of civic expression. Namely, his notion of “collective efficacy,” in
which social cohesion and shared expectations for control drive an understanding of
neighborhood effects rather than social disorganization — and that this phenomenon
adheres to urban logics where relationships may be “weak ties,” as Granovetter has
named them, rather than previously assumed strong ties between kith and kin
49
(Granovetter 1973). As Sampson describes, “repeated interactions, observations of
interactions, and an awareness of potential interactions that could be invoked all establish
shared norms (a sense of the “we”) beyond the strong ties among friends and kin
(Sampson 2012, 153). He draws from Portes’s definition of social capital as
“expectations for action within a collectivity,” which shifts Putnam’s unspoken
assumption that social capital is driven and held by individuals, back toward Jacobs’s
assumption that social capital is held by the urban collective (Portes and Sensenbrenner
1993).
Here I would posit that in addition to the institutional and normalization factors
described by Sampson and Portes, that art and culture can play an important role in
creating “a sense of the ‘we’” and as such can establish social capital and collective
efficacy. While it is not the only cultural formation that can do this work, ethnicity looms
large in structuring shared identities, cultures, and meaning. While #BlackLivesMatter
benefits from the solidarity found in a shared political and activist purpose, it also has
spread through digital and urban spheres like wildfire because of its internal culture and
savvy use of digital culture, but moreover because of its foundation in a Black culture of
shared experience, artistic understanding, and activist tradition. Civic expression is the
artistic and cultural practice that links this sense of the “we” to political participation and
activism. And because this fundamental role that culture plays in forming social capital
and politically activating communities is often elided, the literatures around participation
also fail to see that people are often already participating in all kinds of ways. In contrast
to the dismissiveness associated with what have long been called identity politics, these
forces can generally be used for positive social change and a shared sense of belonging as
50
long as they do not become hegemonic cultural forces that assert the supremacy of
particular identities (Calhoun 1994).
Conventional measures of political participation do not capture the varied and
culturally specific forms of political participation that are already happening on the
ground, and even worse, well-meaning new public participation advocates often theorize
and suggest new participatory venues instituted from the top down without an
appreciation of cultural specificity or preexisting forms of participation. We need an
understanding of the role culture plays in participation. And one way to observe culture is
through the forms of cultural and artistic making that unfold in spaces of participation —
and these spaces can re-inform our understanding of the relationship between art and the
city.

Art in the City

If an examination of civic expression engages with the materiality of culture, we
ought to consider first how art and culture have been implicated in urban literatures.
While the arts have long been a largely urban phenomenon, with bohemian artists
historically congregating in great cities, and the emergence of the modern gallery system
being embedded within global cities, it has largely remained absent from planning
literature. Public art emerged as a category of art which was publicly funded and situated
within public spaces, often in the context of newly developed urban plans, and even were
managed from urban-focused bureaucracies such as HUD or local arts commissions —
such as New Deal percent for art programs, or NEA-funded public art. Despite this fact,
51
the discourse on public art remained within the disciplines of art, and to a lesser degree
public policy and administration, rather than urban planning. Yet arts and culture has
recently enjoyed a resurgence as a force within urban planning theory and practice since
the emergence of ideas around the “creative city,” most notably espoused by Richard
Florida in his 2002 book Rise of the Creative Class. In particular, arts and culture have
been identified as instrumental in sparking economic development and urban
regeneration, well synthesized by the 2010 special issue of JPER on “Art, Culture, and
Economic Development” edited by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett.
Within this context and, indeed, also published in 2010, urban planner Ann
Markusen and arts consultant Anne Gadwa released a white paper commissioned by the
Mayor’s Institute and the NEA which named “creative placemaking” as a practice
wherein “partners from public, private, non-profit, and community sectors strategically
shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, city, or region around
arts and cultural activities” (Markusen and Gadwa 2010, 3). It was initially heralded as a
means to produce site-specific interventions in economically depressed areas, but it has
since come to be critiqued for its role in contributing to economic and cultural
gentrification — and it has only just started to take spatial and social justice
considerations into account. Nevertheless, with a nationwide network of practitioners and
with major funding from public and foundation sectors, the proto-field of creative
placemaking remains a potent force in urban planning. In particular, as creative
placemaking metrics move away from economic development and toward other goals of
planning, such as public participation, quality of life, and access to quality housing and
environment, it may offer the potential to prevent rather than cause gentrification.
52
Within the broad category of public art, the artistic practices which most often
find similarity with those in creative placemaking — a term which is rarely used within
the art world — might be grouped under the label of participatory art. The terms which
have been used, each with slightly different histories and emphases, include community
art, relational aesthetics, dialogical art, collaborative art, socially engaged art, and social
practice. While public art is a broad category which can refer to any kind of artistic
practice which is mean to engage a more public audience — often including publicly
funded art which may result in a mural or sculpture situated on public land —
participatory art is defined by its questioning the relationship between artist and
spectator, often setting up situations where spectators become “participants” who are
involved in the creative process (Bishop 2012, 2).
The two dominant theories of participatory art, which might be categorized as
agonistic which has primarily been developed by Claire Bishop and consensual which has
been primarily developed by Grant Kester. Bishop has argued that participatory art is
problematic when it draws in participants — often from outside the art world — for
deliberation and dialogue that is essentially meaningless. Drawing on theories of
agonistic democracy from political theorist Chantal Mouffe, she instead champions art
which draws in participants for the purposes of exposing and critiquing latent power
structures (Bishop 2004; 2012). Kester, on the other hand, drawing on theories of
communicative and deliberative democracy from Habermas and others, has lauded so-
called “dialogical art” as a consensual model of engagement which can break down the
borders of the art world, draw in new publics and participants, and act as an ameliorant in
the context of the liquidation of modernity (2004). His later work expands this idea,
53
suggesting that art projects can themselves become vehicles for political action as
collaborative spaces between artists and communities (Kester 2011).
The intellectual predecessor to creative placemaking outside of larger theories of
art and placemaking can be found in the discourse around creative cities, and art and
culture as a driver of community and economic development, coming from urban studies
writ large, including urban planning, sociology, and economics. While this largely
laudatory discourse has seen new life over the past 15 years, its origins can actually be
traced to a critical stance marked out by sociologist Sharon Zukin. In her book Loft
Living, Zukin explores the changing meaning of urban housing in the context of 1970s
and 80s New York City where artists were moving into industrial loft spaces, creating a
lifestyle with cultural and economic cache as the “artistic mode of production” went on to
be used by cities and developers to push out existing industrial uses in favor of
commercial and residential development (1982). Zukin has built on this analysis by
reflecting explicitly on this process occurring at the nexus of spatial, cultural, and
economic transformation as one of gentrification — establishing the link between culture
and urban change long before current, ubiquitous discussions regarding gentrification
(1987).
Over a decade later, Richard Florida wrote that the “creative class” — essentially
the same group as these loft livers, or what David Brooks would call “bobos” — was not
a fringe operation but in fact the primary drive for urban growth, both economically and
in terms of population (2002). His book became a bestseller and the policy prescription
du jour for urban planners and policymakers: encourage the growth of so-called creative
industries, cater urban cultural development to the creative class who worked in these
54
industries, and wait for the renaissance to bloom. The book went on to be heavily
criticized and qualified in turn by Florida as critical voices regarding the dangers of
neoliberalism became common in the wider discourse during this period. Such arguments
are well captured by geographer Jamie Peck who notes that critics on the left have
concerns with Florida’s weak prescriptions of, say, fostering a music scene given that
these creative capitals are also the sites for the worst of gentrification and wealth
inequality and much more intense intervention is needed, while those on the right have
similarly fundamental criticisms regarding the pre-existing literature around human
capital which would seem to explain most of Florida’s arguments — and that “uncool”
places such as Las Vegas actually explain much of the observable urban growth due to
low taxes and cheap housing (2005). Allen Scott has noted that these theories are not
wholly new but fit into a much longer discourse regarding a post-industrial economic
order, and that they must be considered within a broader scope of a globalized network of
cities rather than as phenomena that only play out within city limits: one city’s creative
industry may only be possibly through another’s outsourced labor (2006). Nevertheless,
Florida’s book sparked a wave of research on the issue, and has certainly become a
dominant frame for urban policymakers in understanding how to pursue “urban
regeneration.”
Against the backdrop of this debate, the role of art and culture within urban
planning emerged as a key question, especially in relation to economic development.
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s work has examined these relationships using New York as a
case study and found that, contrary to conventional understandings of planner
interventions at an infrastructural or macroeconomic scale, arts and culture
55
agglomerations rely heavily on informal milieus where social networking can occur
(2007). Her work is also notable because, in contrast to typical quantitative analyses from
afar for such economic development scholarship, she considered these questions from the
perspectives of the artists and cultural producers themselves which undoubtedly raised
findings and new questions that may have otherwise been left under the surface. Currid-
Halkett went on to edit a special issue of JPER which solidified these relationships as a
topic of study within urban planning, noting that “art is everywhere” but that it “means
different things to different cities and regions, not just in content but in its social and
economic impacts” (2010, 258). Elsewhere in the issue, Carl Grodach raises questions
about the dominant narrative of urban revitalization as best occurring through “flagship
cultural developments” such as Bilbao’s Guggenheim, noting that these success stories
only happen within a larger context of regional cultural demand, affordable space for
cultural producers, and public financing for such efforts (2010). Similarly, Stern and
Seifert provide insight into another dominant model for cultural economic development:
that of the “cultural cluster.” They find that success only occurs, again, within a regional
context which will support it and that this is most often identifiable in clusters that at least
begin organically even if they later receive public support through funding and policy
changes — urban policy which seeks to develop cultural clusters out of thin air are often
little more than a fantasy (2010).
A question which might extend the line of questioning found in this special issue
is to consider the ways in which art shapes and is shaped by urban forces beyond
economics: the participatory and community-oriented nature of creative placemaking
suggests that the political realm is an important dimension to consider. Indeed, in the
56
following issue of JPER, Chapple and Jackson raise several questions regarding the
relationship between urban planning and “community arts” — what might be described
as creative placemaking’s predecessor or cousin — including questioning (1) the
instrumental use of art as a tool for economic development, especially given its role in the
process of gentrification; (2) the assumptions built into public art’s educational role rather
than the community agency possible from bottom-up and outsider art activities; and (3)
the starting point that artists are the creative economy beneficiaries par excellence instead
of consideration of their historical vulnerability within a larger political economy (2010).
Another important lens through which to consider arts and urban development is
that of equity. Sharp et al. have noted that some public art intended to drive urban
regeneration has intentionally tried to foster inclusion in their effects, but more typically
public art has been contested within communities due to its association with “cultural
domination” (2005). In a later article by Carl Grodach, he focuses exclusively on
community art spaces to find their diversity leads to unique outcomes, some of which fit
the mold of Currid-Halkett’s informal milieus, some of which produce cultural and
economic activity, and yet many of which remain small, localized operations which do
not plug into a wider cultural network and are left out of many of the benefits which have
accrued to larger institutions (2011). And, of course, much of the discussion concerning
equity has revolved around the threat of gentrification. Grodach et al. have attempted to
isolate evidence of this widely accepted theory, finding that commercial art industries are
highly correlated with gentrification while fine arts activities have less of a connection to
neighborhood change — noting also that there is a lack of strong data on these linkages,
57
and that the diversity of arts and culture activities suggests they cannot all be lumped
together but instead have differential outcomes on urban transformation (2014).
The emergence of creative placemaking has been in part dependent on its
promotion by public and foundation arts funders, enabled by a rich series of research
projects conducted under the auspices of the Culture, Creativity and Communities
Program at the Urban Institute, directed by Maria Rosario Jackson. Spanning a period of
time which preceded Florida’s book and continued after creative placemaking “broke
ground” in 2010, this research laid an intellectual and practical foundation for
understanding the role of the arts in urban space outside of economic development,
raising questions around definitions, measurement, equity, and community development.
“Cultural vitality” was one proposed metric for the field, defined as “evidence of
creating, disseminating, validating, and supporting arts and culture as a dimension of
everyday life in communities” (Jackson et al. 2006, 4). An understanding of the wider
array of diverse arts activities, entities, and cultural frames was acknowledged as
important when using the arts for community building — similar to Grodach’s findings
— and the arts were identified as providing more than economic impacts, but also
“attachment to place, positive health outcomes, and civic engagement” (Jackson 2011, 4).
And building on this, Jackson has also noted the particular factors that come into play
when arts development occurs in marginalized communities — as it often does due to the
availability of affordable space — including concerns around equity, the duration of
commitment to the neighborhood, and the degree to which resources and agency are
directed toward community members (2012).
58
Ongoing directions for this line of research include the role that arts and culture
might play in community health outcomes, as well as in social cohesion — forms of
community development which often operated outside of conventionally understood
economic development. Numerous authors from the field of art therapy have noted the
positive community health effects which result from community-based art activities
(Timm-Bottos 2006; Kapitan et al. 2011). And following in this spirit, urban planners
Bryce Lowery, David Sloane, and others have noted the positive effect on community
health provided by farmers’ markets, which themselves are a manifestation of local food
cultures (2016). Finally, anthropological curator and researcher Alaka Wali has noted the
place-embedded nature of “informal culture” and the role that it plays in fostering social
cohesion and a sense of community identity — arts and culture are rarely introduced to a
vacuum, but typically already exist in communities in some form which should be
recognized rather than overrun (2002).
Much of the current work on creative placemaking has grappled with the
difficulty of developing meaningful metrics related to the artistic and often intangible
outcomes it produces. Two articles which have gone on to be published in peer-reviewed
journals include one by Gadwa which critiques her own creation as a “fuzzy” concept
which lacks clear definition, and which employs metrics which are similarly fuzzy such
as “vibrancy” or “livability” (2013); and another by Markusen which discusses the
potential negative political ramifications of such “fuzziness” and argues for clearly define
evaluation defined on a case-by-case basis by the undertakers of creative placemaking
themselves, and for the encouragement of collaborative relationships between creative
placemakers due to the seemingly zero sum funding game by granting entities (2013). In
59
another NEA-published report, Morley and Winkler evaluated a series of proxy data
points which are nationally available, such as election turnout to measure resident
attachment to community, or commute time to measure quality of life with the hope of
using these to measure the degree to which a creative placemaking project might impact
and change a neighborhood — and their conclusion similarly critiques the very proximate
nature of the data in relation to the actual substance of creative placemaking, and
suggests that creative placemakers be given license to select the handful of metrics which
they find most germane to the specific context and project (2014). The task of developing
a theoretically grounded definition of creative placemaking and creative placemaking
metrics using theories such as those from discourse around participatory art, space and
place, and placemaking remains an incomplete and important one.
Beyond these practical criticisms, creative placemaking has also come under
attack on a more fundamental level because of its relationship to processes of economic
and cultural gentrification — similar to criticisms of the earlier “creative city” discourse,
and indeed harkening back to Zukin’s original concerns around “loft living.” Perhaps
most strikingly, poet and arts administrator Roberto Bedoya who himself has played key
roles in enabling creative placemaking projects has called for the consideration of the
impact of any project on a community’s sense of belonging, and for the use of the term
“placekeeping” rather than placemaking to signal the fact that most, if not all, of these
places have already been made, and such creative interventions may often have the effect
of destroying an existing place rather than making one anew (2013). Cilliers and
Timmermans explicitly name the importance of ensuring such work is participatory,
rather than handed down from on high (2014). And Bonin-Rodriguez writes of these
60
concerns not only from the perspective of impacted communities, but of artists
themselves who must now also be marketers, producers, and policymakers for their work
(2015).
Indeed, a more equity-oriented version of creative placemaking has become
dominant within the grey literature which has been used to define, develop, support, and
spread creative placemaking. An NEA published guide with dozens of authors and case
studies begins with a chapter on “inclusive planning and equitable development” and
goes on to reflect on questions of “community identity and belonging,” among other
more conventional topics of economic and community development (Schupbach and Ball
2016). And in another primer published by PolicyLink, arts and culture are seen as a
mechanism for providing equity, especially considering its historical role as a means for
fostering shared identity and processing trauma within marginalized communities
(Kalima et al. 2017). Maria Rosario Jackson has also recently noted the equity-oriented
direction that creative placemaking is trying to pursue, describing a synthesis between
notions of placemaking and placekeeping: it is important to undertake both activities so
that existing places are not erased, but also that communities do not become ossified as
all forms of making are rejected (Jackson 2019).
Recent scholarship on creative placemaking has made its way out of grey
literature and into peer-reviewed journals. An article by Alexandre Frenette emphasizes
creative placemaking as a field building exercise, noting that a critical moment for the
continued legitimacy of creative placemaking will come in 2020 with the sunset of the
large-scale 10-year national creative placemaking funding coalition ArtPlace (2017). And
Eleonora Redaelli, in an interesting turn away from focusing on defining and evaluating
61
creative placemaking, has instead used the concept as a heuristic for understanding the
organizational structure of the NEA, noting its multi-level governance based on
collaboration with state and local actors (2016). She, more than any other, has also started
to consider the role that theories of art and of place may play within creative placemaking
(2018).
It is important to note that amidst all of this vibrant new literature on art and urban
planning, participatory art, and creative placemaking, that community members on the
ground rarely deploy these theoretical frames to think through or justify their actions.
From our Los Angeles examples, only Little Tokyo has undertaken work funded through
creative placemaking grants, and even then, the work has been filtered through long-
standing non-profit organizations which have written up and received the grants, but
which have used the money through activities which are described in language translated
into a locally understood context. We can think of these literatures as existing on a
parallel and reciprocal track to civic expression, each informing and being informed by
the other, though existing as essentially distinct categories.

Defining Civic Expression

Civic expression is a public manifestation of culture which demonstrates the
political desires of a community. Contained within this definition are several individual
terms which require unpacking. First of all, why civic expression? And why expression? I
use this dyad to point toward and identify the relationship between two ideas that are
typically separate from one another: first, the artistic, cultural, and political practices that
62
this term denotes and, second, the notion of citizenship or membership in a political
community. Moreover, this pair of words captures the way in which that membership is
made real through creative action and shared expression. As the theorist of democracy
and citizenship Harry Boyte and a group of his peers have described, in contrast to
commonly assumed definitions of citizenship, “Our understanding of citizenship derives
instead from a distinctive civic ideal and set of practices involving creative agency and a
form of loyalty—a commitment to a civic minded co-creation” (Boyte et al. 2014). In
other words, the “civic” points toward a version of citizenship that has little to do with a
bureaucratic designation of who is “in” or “out,” or even of a relationship of an individual
to a nation-state but, rather, the creative and expressive “co-creation” of a political
community based on shared participation and practice.
Beyond this particular definition of citizenship, the “civic” also points toward a
relationship to a place in the city. The term stretches back to the Latin language of
ancient Rome where a crown would be bequeathed upon the head of a member of the
community who saved another’s life. It has since continued to connote a relationship of
public duty to one’s peers, especially in the local and urban levels, and especially as those
duties relate to issues of politics and governance (OED). And expression specifies those
public duties to include those related to speaking out, to communicating that which ought
to be done. Civic expression, as Boyte and his peers imply, is not merely the voice of a
private individual, for the sharing of one’s feelings or someone’s personal wants, but
instead a shared expression from a community. It is a collective voice, a choral
performance, even if it is one made up from many individual tones and rhythms. Civic
63
expression creatively manifests the shared political identity and vision for the future from
a community.
Second, what is a public manifestation of culture? I use the word public to
implicate civic expression in the rich intellectual lineage around ideas of the public and
the public sphere. If civic expression is to be a collective clamor, creatively demanding
and co-producing the future of a place, then that clamor must resound within and across
public spheres. While I will delve into theories of the public sphere later on, suffice it to
say that what is public and what is civic are intimately intertwined: that which is public
moves beyond and across the individual to meet collective and political debates. The term
manifestation of culture achieves two things for us: it provides a big-tent approach to how
we understand a variety of arts and cultures and it imbrues civic expression with the
multifarious and downright magical connotations of manifestations.
Manifestations suggest something spectral come to life. Its most basic usage
describes the transformation of something “abstract or theoretical” to something concrete
(OED). This, again, is the basis for Boyte’s notion of the civic: it is not mere words
circulating in some idealize echo chamber of democracy but, instead, it manifests, it is
transformed from idea and thought into action and artifact by creative co-labor. “The
Word became flesh.” It is important that civic expression have material impacts and
effects, even though their form may be based in speech acts, or perhaps entirely
processual. But manifestations also take the hauntology of modernity and gives it
concrete form: they turn on the lights to discover that injustice and inequity are not
ghosts, difficult to pin down, but rather objects based on structures that can be changed.
Cultural theorist Mark Fisher, among others, has given new life to the idea of
64
“hauntology” first proposed by Derrida, grappling with how our modern way of knowing
seems stuck out of alignment with time: justice, disaster, and everything else is just out of
reach, not fully present, it “is no longer or not yet” (Fisher 2012). I propose that we can
find “the now” in the shared, creative labor of civic expression.
As many of the forms of civic expression that we will explore exist in connection
to but at the margins of formalized spheres and disciplines of art and culture, it is
necessary to acknowledge the roles that these power structures play, but also to create
space for forms of art and culture that may not play by their rules. For example, while
Nancy Uyemura is a professional artist who has helmed a gallery and lives off her
interaction with the “art world,” to use sociologist Howard Becker’s term, her
collaborative activism and sign making in protest of her eviction might not be called
“art,” yet it comes from the same identity and culture at the foundation of her creative
spirit (Becker 1982). Both her piece Butterflies and her feisty protest sign, reading
“PLUM your own ass!”
1
are both manifestations of culture, even if an art critic might call
one art and the other a “personal document.” Culture takes many forms, some ephemeral
and process based, others artifacts of daily life like certain foods, and still others
classified as “traditional” — often meaning that it has some connection to religion. This
theory’s role is not to classify and critique arts and culture, as one might from an art
historical disciplinary approach, but to point toward the ways in which it can play a role
in making the civic. These two ideas of manifestation, a broad notion of art and culture

1
“PLUM” is a reference to the City of Los Angeles’ “Planning and Land Use Management” Committee
who could have put a halt to the building’s conversion and at least slowed Uyemura’s eviction.
65
and making the abstract and ghostly concrete, reinforce our approach of the public as the
word’s roots lie in the Latin for “making public” (OED).
And, third, what does it mean to demonstrate the political desires of a
community? To demonstrate goes beyond communication. It communicates, yes, from a
community and to a public, but like public-making manifestations, it does so through
concretizing the abstract. Demonstrations occur through embodied action and material
engagement, by putting oneself on the street or by building a working prototype. The
political, like the civic, has its roots in the urban: its literal meaning is “the affairs of the
city,” referencing the collective concerns of a Greek polis (OED). Hannah Arendt
describes the political as a spatial category, as the exchange of words and undertaking of
shared actions between equals that can only occur in the shared space of the city (Arendt
2007). It has come to be a dirty term in our contemporary society, “political” a slur
thrown as an adjective at anything with which we want to discredit by alluding to some
supposed ulterior motive. Civic expression reclaims the political as an earnest and
aspirational category: the concerns for collective wellbeing that supersede individualistic
and self-interested wants. That civic expression demonstrates desire reminds us of the
embodied yearning for this collective wellbeing that drives us to express ourselves.
Desire also implies something out of time: it points toward a future that has not yet come
to be. And that these desires are of the community reminds us that they are not merely
hedonistic or self-indulgent, but that they are fundamentally collective in nature.
Community can be a dangerous word when used carelessly. We are quick to
decide who is in “the community” and who is not, though these definitions often remain
assumed by an individual and mismatched across the minds of those who are even part of
66
the same purported community (Hillery 1977). Exclusionary definitions of community
can drive discrimination. Benedict Anderson’s has brilliantly described how our
“imagined communities” can drive people to commit atrocities and even sacrifice
themselves in the name of a nation-state filled with members of a community, most of
whom have never met and have hardly anything in common (Anderson 1983). Iris
Marion Young calls for throwing out the term entirely because of its “logic of identity”
which “denies difference,” critiquing communitarian political theorists for their flawed
idealization of “authentic” face-to-face communication while ignoring the ways in which
miscommunication, discrimination, and oppression can occur is such venues (Young
1986). Such ideas of communitarian ideas, based on Mayberry-esque fantasies, are both
nostalgic and reactionary. I, however, believe the term can be recuperated based on new
models of collective life and kinship which are now emerging in contemporary urban life:
one such form of community becomes less a suppression of difference for some
imaginary unity and instead a type of political coalition built on shared goals and respect.
Sociologist Gerard Delanty has theorized just such a notion where “contemporary
community may be understood as a communication community based on new kinds of
belonging”: modern communities are fluid and open, where you can find belonging in
multiple communities and, despite their ostensibly “imaginary” nature, they are a means
by which social reality is constructed (Delanty 2003, 187).
Thus, civic expression is a public manifestation of culture which demonstrates the
political desires of a community. In this chapter, I have explored the existing literatures
and theories which intersect around art, public participation, and urban planning. This
exploration is both to identify the void in the literature whose shape looks something like
67
that which a theory of civic expression might fill, and to posit the potential benefit for
having such a theory in the world today. We need a theory of civic expression to inform
how we think about both administrative notions of public participation as well as broader
ideas of political participation. Specifically, theories of political participation fail to take
into account the fundamental role that culture plays and this seemingly benign lacuna has
resulted in so much of the political dissatisfaction and disengagement that we see today.
Culture drives how and why people participate, and it is key to understanding the changes
in social structures and social capital that Putnam and others have discussed. Linking
political participation, social capital, and culture demonstrates a humanist approach to
these literatures in a way that is fruitful for our understanding of civic life at large.
Given the spatial and place-based nature of the civic within the city, a theory of
civic expression reinvigorates our understanding of why and how place matters and it
provides us with a new perspective on the relationship between art and the city. Much of
the existing literature revolves around art and culture’s potential to drive economic
development, and on its links to gentrification. Civic expression exists in a parallel
universe to these ideas, demonstrating alternative pathways between art, culture, and
urban change that have less to do with economic transformations and more to do with the
nature of politics, civic engagement, and community development. While civic
expression does not change the fact that certain forms of urban art drive economic growth
and, at the extreme, can spark processes of gentrification, it nevertheless provides an
alternative narrative that suggests a role for art and culture in building up a community’s
ability to resist unwanted forces of urban change. Our understanding of a community’s
public manifestations of culture can also inform us specifically around processes of
68
cultural, as opposed to economic, gentrification, and the politics of identity and erasure in
the city, which can nuance the debate around gentrification — it is one which can
devolve into strands of miscommunication with a term like “gentrification” which is too
often casually and imprecisely used, much like the term “community.”
Throughout this volume, I explore the rich history of arts, culture, and activism in
Little Tokyo as an empirical model for civic expression. As I will argue, it has
improbably held on to place because of a complex interplay between art, culture,
activism, and community development. Little Tokyo is rare in its commitment, both
historically and in the present moment, to civic expression, forms of which have
dominated this tiny neighborhood in the core of Los Angeles for years. How do these
literatures intersect with the reality on the ground in Little Tokyo? Do literatures on
public participation and art in the city adequately reflect the way history has played out in
this quintessential example of immigrant and ethnic urbanism? Civic expression, I argue,
has been overlooked in examinations of Little Tokyo and is key for understanding how it
has developed and held on to its place in the city and, conversely, existing literatures are
incomplete in how they understand the role of arts and culture in participation and urban
development, a gap that this volume seeks to fill through the example of Little Tokyo.
Theories of public participation generally neglect to consider the role culture
plays in how and why people participate, and they also overlook grassroots practices of
participation, emphasizing instead the top down attempts to solicit public feedback.
Literatures on art and urban planning, on the other hand, tend to focus on art and culture’s
role in generating economic development, as opposed to public participation and political
engagement. Some literatures on political engagement from sociology and political
69
science have incorporated culture as a set of identity markers or variables, but even this
understanding needs to be “thickened” through a richer analysis of not only cultural
categories, but the underlying logics of culture and, especially, the way in which culture
manifests through artistic and expressive forms. A theory of civic expression is critical
for those working in urban planning, public administration, and the emergent field of
creative placemaking. It provides a much-needed framework for understanding the
cultural dimension of public participation, helping us see where and how people
participate from the grassroots, as well as for registering that engagement. It also
provides a new lens through which we can understand artistic intervention by, with, and
for communities which engages questions of public participation and political
engagement. Civic expression helps us see cultural practices on the ground in new and
powerful ways, practices which empower communities and, if recognized by those in
positions of power, can generate better governance and democratic process.
Civic expression most often emanates from the grassroots as an expressive form
based on local artistic and cultural norms, and given distinct political challenges which
give rise to these expressive forms. In this regard, civic expression offers a substantially
different understanding of the link between art and the city, especially as this link relates
to questions of gentrification, because rather than aiming to achieve goals of economic
development or “vibrancy,” civic expression manifests out of specific communal political
desires in a variety of contexts, many of which may have little or nothing to do with
urban change. Furthermore, those that do most often seek to prevent forces of economic
and cultural gentrification, as in the case of Little Tokyo. In this sense, civic expression
exists not as an ameliorative applique for equity and justice questions around urban arts,
70
but rather as a pursuit of equity and justice at its core, with art and culture manifesting as
expressive forms out of this pursuit. The intentions are reversed. These discussions also
circulate around the importance of place and placemaking as they relate to urban
belonging, a key political desire which can be aptly served by interventions in the cultural
sphere. To be urban is to be situated in place, and this fact is at the core of civic
expression.

71
Chapter 2: Research Design and Combinatory
Methodology

There is no single epistemological or methodological frame capable of
comprehensively engaging the vast and complex object we call the city — a thing which
writer Rebecca Solnit has described as “infinite” and “unfathomable.” Thus, urban
research has evolved to be interdisciplinary in nature, with myriad methods from
econometric analysis to urban ethnography to GIS mapping which each consider discrete
pieces of the whole puzzle through carefully circumscribed research questions. This
volume aims to be capacious in integrating several of these methods as to grasp at a more
holistic view, albeit one circumscribed instead by the relatively constrained geography of
Little Tokyo. It has also been refined through critique provided by collaborators both
inside and outside of the university through practices of community-engaged research. I
have used humanistic methods such as historical and archival methods; social scientific
methods such as interviews, participant observation, and quantitative regression analysis;
and engaged and community-based methods, as summarized in table 1. Each sheds light
on a particular aspect of the place, answering specific research questions. Yet used in
combination, you can begin to see a picture of the whole, and often the combinatory
methodology adds up to more than the sum of its parts. My ideas about civic expression
emerged in parallel with my action research in working with SLT, and they informed
each other in a reciprocal fashion. Similarly, my research questions and methods evolved
in a contingent and dynamic way, built out through a grounded theory approach that

72
Table 1. Research methods
Location Research Questions Methods Used
Throughout What role does art and culture play in public
participation and community development? How
has Little Tokyo managed to hold on to place,
and how can this inform other communities
facing gentrification pressures?
Grounded theory
building and
community-based
research
Chapter 3 What are the periods of threat to Little Tokyo’s
place in the city, and how did the community
respond? How has art and culture developed in
Little Tokyo, and what participation outcomes
can be traced to them? What is the connection
between the specificity of place in Little Tokyo
and its culture of participation?
Historical and
archival methods;
visual analysis of
historical photos;
interviews with 6
key informants
(artists)
Chapter 4 How has Little Tokyo managed to hold on to
place in the eyes of its leaders? How intentional
was leadership in deploying arts and cultural
resources to respond to threats of redevelopment
and gentrification? What is the relationship
between Little Tokyo’s JA heritage and its culture
of participation, and how were cultural resources
deployed to strengthen political power?
Semi-structured
interviews with 12
key informants
(community leaders)
and discourse
analysis
Chapter 5 How does the general population of stakeholders
in Little Tokyo view arts and culture? What kinds
of political participation and concerns around
gentrification are most salient for them? What
other political issues were of concern?
Survey of
stakeholders with
333 respondents;
text analysis;
regression analysis
Chapter 6 Why have current responses to gentrification
been organized around art and culture? Has this
changed activism, or the way participants engage
with each other? How are new groups organizing
themselves, and has art and culture changed
institutions and planning processes?
Case study of
Sustainable Little
Tokyo; participant
observation and
ethnography;
discourse analysis

responded to what I was observing in Little Tokyo, and realized through a jerry-rigged
methodology that used any and all evidence available with approaches tailored through a
process of problem-solving trial and error. John Gerring provides some criteria for
73
concept formulation, such as might be useful to evaluate building a theory of civic
expression, including familiarity, resonance, parsimony, coherence, differentiation, depth,
theoretical utility, and field utility (Gerring 1999). Much of this work also benefited from
reciprocal consideration between what other authors have written and what I was
observing on the ground in Little Tokyo, creating a productive tension between theory
building based on the literatures that I have explored, and grounded theory building based
on my empirical observations in Little Tokyo, highlighting overlaps between the two, and
strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in each.
Another way of looking at the variety of methods that I used is to consider the
way in which each of them provides a look at Little Tokyo through a distinct lens. In
chapter 3, we see Little Tokyo through a historical lens, in chapter 4 we see Little Tokyo
through “a view from the top” in the eyes of its community leaders, in chapter 5 we see
the community through the eyes of its stakeholders at the ground level, and in chapter 5
we see what is happening in Little Tokyo through a case study look at one key arts and
community development organization. Because I am theory building, I want to be
thorough in creating multiple opportunities to falsify hypotheses and assumptions through
triangulation and looking through these myriad lenses checks for blind spots. In the
remainder of this chapter, I will present my research design including a general overall
introduction and then methods, data, and research questions for each of the chapters
throughout the volume.
A couple of additional notes regarding this volume and the work that lead up to it:
First, I attempted to use and incorporate the language provided by my collaborators in
Little Tokyo, especially as it relates to the history of Japanese Americans and JA culture.
74
I believe this language should be presented as a normalized and integrated part of the
lexicon and, as such, I avoid use of italics which tend to other culturally specific terms.
Instead, I provide a definition with these terms’ first use, and use the term regularly from
that point forward. Similarly, there is an “alphabet soup” of the many projects and
organizations in Little Tokyo, and I provide the full name of such entities with their first
use and again occasionally in new sections or chapters, but otherwise refer to their
acronym, reflecting how these organizations are commonly discussed and referred to
within the neighborhood. I also generally avoided referring to individuals by name, even
when they were well recognized pillars of the community, as to avoid telling the story of
this community through specific heroes and villains — a common trope, especially in
historical work. If there was a single person to credit for something, such as for an
artwork, they were named, but were otherwise left anonymous, especially if they were an
interview source. This is sometimes awkward, and still not always ideal, especially given
the degree to which many of the people that I interviewed do, in fact, rightly hold a great
deal of responsibility and credit for making Little Tokyo what it is today.
Furthermore, this project must be acknowledged as a collaborative and co-created
object with my many friends and collaborators both at USC and in Little Tokyo. Through
the course of this work, I became increasingly engaged in the organizations and issues
within Little Tokyo, volunteering, participating, and being employed by various non-
profit organizations. I will discuss the cloud of issues which this presents at the
conclusion of this chapter under the auspices of engaged scholarship. Also, the bias that
this depth of engagement presents makes me unreliable in some aspects long held dear to
objective, academic work, yet in others I would argue gives me particular insight into the
75
issues Little Tokyo faces, and how and why it is responding to those issues. Nothing is
ever done in a vacuum, and this reality has implications for both authorship, bias, and
how that bias is represented or hidden — in both so-called engaged scholarship, as well
as its opposite. The voice I use is authoritative and largely positive because I believe in
what Little Tokyo has accomplished and in the actions being taken today by its activists,
institutions, and stakeholders. Only time will tell if this optimistic bias of “a believer” is
warranted as Little Tokyo is sustained into the future — or not.
The overarching question for this volume remains: What role does art and culture
play in public participation and community development? Throughout this volume, I
interrogate this question through an extended study of one specific community which has
had a rich history of urban development intertwined with arts and culture, and also one
which is responding to current threats of gentrification through arts and culture-based
organizing and activism. This is especially germane in refining my overarching research
question as much of the literature around art, culture, and the city, from Zukin on, has
emphasized the way in which these can drive gentrification, yet in Little Tokyo we see art
and culture being used to prevent gentrification. So, another animating question
throughout this volume is: How has Little Tokyo managed to hold on to place, especially
considering the role of art and culture, and how can this inform other communities facing
gentrification pressures?
In chapter 3, in order to investigate whether arts and culture has been critical to its
success, I first ask: What are the key periods of political challenge, engagement, and
community development in Little Tokyo’s history that it had to surmount in order to
survive and hold on to its place? This chapter provides history and context for Little
76
Tokyo, identifying how and why it is germane to my overall research questions, as well
as beginning to answer those questions. As such, this historical dive into Little Tokyo by
way of published materials, and a range of archival materials found in the community
through individuals and institutions, provided an initial frame for understanding this
neighborhood, its culture, and its history. I then investigate how art and culture manifest
during these periods. I ask: What was the nature of this art and culture, and how did it
change over time? What specifically were the participation outcomes in Little Tokyo that
can be traced to arts and culture activities? To what extent does the specificity of place
play a role in its cultures of participation, especially around the politics of gentrification?
These were the research questions that I held as I dove into the historical archive. This
work was some of the first systematic research work I did as part of this project,
alongside my time engaging with Sustainable Little Tokyo and collecting notes through
participant observation, and set up subsequent research questions and methodological
design through framing a broad understanding of Little Tokyo and its history as it related
to arts, culture, community development, and activism.
Archival sources for this work included a range of original and secondary
materials: a curated set of images, videos, and clippings selected from archives of
Japanese American history and culture, local cultural institutions in Little Tokyo,
newspapers;
2
public documents and meeting minutes filed by or from the key extant
community organizations in Little Tokyo which played a significant role in its urban

2
The specific archives included: the Densho Digital Repository (Manzanar National Historic Site, Kango
Takamura Collection, Jack Matsuoka Collection), East West Players, Visual Communications, Gidra,
Tuesday Night Project, Nancy Uyemura, Go Little Tokyo, Takachizu, Sustainable Little Tokyo; newspaper
clippings selected from Pacific Citizen, Rafu Shimpo, and the Los Angeles Times.
77
development;
3
and interviews with six artists with deep ties to Little Tokyo through either
their historical or contemporary work, selected in collaboration with the advice of my
community partner, Sustainable Little Tokyo. These sources were selected because of the
breadth and depth of materials that they provide with insight into specifically art and
culture in Little Tokyo, as opposed to more general sources on Japanese American
history, and especially because of their archival quality — i.e., they have already been
organized and made accessible to researchers in a comprehensive way. They include
most of the major cultural institutions within Little Tokyo, and include both institutional
and personal archives, though as I describe in chapter 3, Little Tokyo is home to a wide
range of informal archives kept in basements and garages, which are for the most part not
tapped into for this research. The archives I used are primarily associated with the entity
who created the contents in the archive, as opposed to many archives which are held by
research institutions which organize and protect them. Accordingly, the archives that I
used likely hold some degree of bias making their source appear more favorable than not,
and required me to triangulate between them to verify findings — a task that is typically
easier to do between multiple archives held by the same disinterested research institution.
Much of this material was visual, and so I used methods of visual analysis to
unpack and interpret both what was contained within these images, as well as the context
(historical, social, and technological) in which these images were produced. Penny
Tinkler provides an exhaustive set of considerations for how photography and image
analysis can be used within art historical and social scientific research, and she notes the

3
These including the Little Tokyo Community Council, the Little Tokyo Service Center, Sustainable Little
Tokyo, and the Little Tokyo Business Association.
78
importance of reading these images, especially through interpretation, and considering
the context in which they were produced — as both Becker and Berger have also noted
(Tinkler 2014; Becker 1979; Berger 1972). Visual Communications (VC), in particular,
was formative for this work, as one of the key cultural institutions in Little Tokyo who
has been active since the 1960s in engaging with media arts and politics, as well as one of
the institutions with an especially robust archive. They were generous in providing me
unfettered access to their extensive photographic archive which was unique in several
ways: it was both the product of artistic production and civic expression in Little Tokyo,
with many of its leaders and photographers actively participating in various political
campaigns and using their work as a mode of activism, but also it documents Little
Tokyo’s history of arts and activism as a subject of interest. Its photographers have been
on the ground and embedded into Little Tokyo, present for most of its key historical
moments since the 1960s. This synchronicity between subject, object, and documentation
was fruitful for how I conceptualized civic expression. The values held by the
photographer shown in how the image was capture, the subject and their political
activities, and the institution in terms of how it has determined how to archive its
materials, all point toward a changing understanding of art and politics in Little Tokyo.
The breadth of VC’s archive allowed me to use it as a “temporal base” for
understanding my archival and visual materials, and I curated and culled materials down
from there, so I could reasonably see the totality of Little Tokyo’s arc of history through
these materials. I selected materials based upon, first, ensuring that there were items
representing all of the various sources and major events over time, such as Japanese
American internment, and then making sure that there were not redundancies, and that
79
the remaining items were rich materials that gave insight into Little Tokyo with regard to
my research questions. It was a difficult process of elimination because the materials
were so fertile, and there were some wonderful images that were culled because of
concerns around length, redundancy, and focus. And there was almost certainly some
degree of unconscious bias in how I was identifying what seemed “rich,” though I
attempted to control for this through systematic selection on the basis of some objective
variables such as time period and medium, as well as running my selections and
interpretations past peers and other well-informed sources, especially those from the
community of Little Tokyo itself, as I will describe below. Many of the materials that I
did not use, incidentally, were incredible, and might serve for a range of future research
projects looking into a more expansive history of community development in Little
Tokyo that deal with research questions apart from mine.
Additionally, I constructed and analyzed a “place-based archive” including works
of architecture and design, key individuals, websites, and physical archives contained in a
range of the key buildings and sites in Little Tokyo.
4
These places were selected after a
first pass of examining other historical sources which pointed toward these places as key
sites of interest. Religious institutions, for example, were noted as key sites of community
development in Little Tokyo’s early formation and ongoing hold on place, hence their
presence in this archive. The formation of this place-based archive and its analysis

4
These include: Saint Francis Xavier Japanese Catholic Church (Maryknoll Church), Koyasan Buddhist
Temple, Zenshuji Soto Mission Temple, Hompa Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, Higashi Honganji Buddhist
Temple, Union Church of Los Angeles, Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, Senzo by Jerry
Matsukuma (1981), Centenary United Methodist Church, LTSC and Casa Heiwa, Omoide no Shotokyo by
Sheila Levrant De Bretteville with Sonya Ishii (1996), Union Center for the Arts (East West Players, Visual
Communications, LA Artcore, and Tuesday Night Project), Japanese American National Museum, Go For
Broke Monument, Little Tokyo Branch Library, Home is Little Tokyo by Tony Osumi, Jorge Diaz & Sergio
Diaz (2005).
80
borrows many of its methods from architecture and urban design methods which explore
the histories, sociocultural meanings, and technologies found within the materiality of the
built environment, itself. These “archival objects” exist as material objects in urban
space, and analysis involved in-person site visits, documentation, and interpretive
analysis. These sites were considered as sites of development over time, reflecting the
changing boundaries and meanings of Little Tokyo, contextually understanding how
these tangible pieces of the city arose, what they mean, and how they operate today.
Urban design was considered: how do these sites fit together in the context of a
neighborhood, and what were the design decisions that drove where they were located,
and how they were spatially organized to fit into a larger whole (Lynch and Hack 1985;
Jacobs 1993; Whyte 1980)? This work also reiterated and demonstrated the degree to
which, in the matter of civic expression, place matters.
All of these archival, historical, and visual materials were placed in relation to one
another to identify a common thread — with appropriate interpretive methods used based
on type of material, such as Tinkler’s visual analysis with photographs — and to compare
this thread with published histories and descriptions of Little Tokyo’s development.
Much of the preliminary work in chapter 3 was also refined through a publicly engaged
process of curation and exhibition. I curated an exhibition for an art space on the historic
First Street within Little Tokyo, sponsored by Sustainable Little Tokyo titled Ibasho: A
History of Arts Activism in Little Tokyo which was shown during September and October
of 2018. The curated set of 100 images were displayed along a timeline, including
descriptions, and overall descriptions of histories and archives used, as a kind of “archive
of archives.” The work was well received, and served as a contextual backdrop for a
81
range of other arts, culture, and political events held in the space, giving me confidence in
this form of “community peer review.” The work in chapter 3 has benefited from the
comments and feedback received from the exhibition. Ananya Roy has spoken of
“research justice” and the need for new forms of peer review and IRB review which are
based on community ethics, knowledge, and standards of evidence as a part of
decolonizing scholarly work, and I hope that this was one small step toward that aim
(Roy 2019).
In chapter 4, I turn my focus to “the view from the top,” considering the
perspectives and institutional knowledge held by community leaders in Little Tokyo. By
interviewing a range of community elders and leaders who hold or have held key posts at
the range of cultural and community institutions in Little Tokyo, we can triangulate our
findings from the historical archives with the institutional memory and insights held by
these key informants. Additional research questions included, first and foremost, how has
the role of arts and culture changed over time within Little Tokyo, especially in terms of
their link to its sense of place, in the eyes of its leaders? And to what extent was the arts
and culture focus of past and current community organizing and activism activities an
intentional decision on behalf of leaders? Sub-questions to these primary questions
include: What is the relationship between Little Tokyo’s Japanese American heritage and
its connection to arts and culture, and how has this relationship changed over time? And
what are the evolving ways that Little Tokyo deployed cultural resources and strategies
for strengthening political representation and participation in Los Angeles? These
questions were developed to refine and specify interests from chapter 3 especially based
on findings, triangulating and verifying my analyses.
82
A second set of research questions for this chapter asks: How has Little Tokyo
managed to hold on to place despite its history of challenges and gentrification pressures?
While this question is one of the overarching questions which drives this entire project,
the answer to this question in the context of chapter 4 emphasizes the understanding and
perspective of today’s community leaders in Little Tokyo, focusing on identifying the
degree to which the history of arts and culture driven placekeeping in the community was
based on intentional decisions by leaders. Sub-questions related to this question include:
What are the forms of neighborhood change that community leaders are concerned or
excited by? To what extent did the arts and culture play a role in its resilience? In posing
these questions to key informants, an unexpected finding was that the theme of property
rights came up — an important element of urban development in the theories of planning
literature, but not necessarily one that we might have expected to come up in
conversation about arts and gentrification. Accordingly, an additional sub-question that I
pose is: What is the relationship between arts and culture and property rights in Little
Tokyo?
To answer these questions, I developed a semi-structured interview instrument
and conducted 12 in-person interviews over the course of one month, each of which
lasted between one and three hours. Combined with the six open-ended artist interviews
— all of which were with artists who would also qualify as “community leaders” —
conducted through the course of my historical and archival research in the eight months
prior, this totals 18 interviews that I synthesized and analyzed for common trends,
themes, and insights. These new interviews were also used to triangulate with my
historical and archival research, verifying the veracity of my findings and claims. I
83
developed my list of interview subjects and was introduced to them through my working
partners at Sustainable Little Tokyo who have ties to many of the other major institutions
in Little Tokyo (see the list in the next paragraph), so my findings can be said to represent
the views of Little Tokyo’s institutional leadership. I was known as “the PhD student”
who was working with Sustainable Little Tokyo (SLT), and so my questions were seen as
both furthering SLT’s mission, as well as my own doctoral work, so I was able elicit
frank conversation from interviewees. I was careful to explain how their responses would
be used and shared, getting their consent before moving forward — though these leaders
were very used to sharing their experiences and opinions in venues far more public than
my work, and the problematics of academic research did not present any concerns for
them.
The interviewees represented a diverse selection of key stakeholders from Little
Tokyo, and ranging in age, position, and gender. Interviewees were all Japanese
American or Asian American, and did not include any of the younger stakeholders and
community leaders coming up in Little Tokyo which, as I discuss later in this volume,
represent an important development in the community and an area ripe for further
research. About half of the interviewees identified as artists, including visual artists,
performing artists and musicians, and writers. This alone is surprising and likely not
typical with a random sample of community leaders, and is likely at least in part because
of my reaching out to these particular key informants based on their connections with
local cultural organizations. Though it may also speak to the unique degree of
engagement with arts and culture in Little Tokyo. All of the interviewees could rightly be
considered activists, although only about one third of them explicitly identified as such.
84
Interviewees represented all of the major Little Tokyo institutions, including the Japanese
American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC), Little Tokyo Service Center
(LTSC), Japanese American National Museum (JANM), East West Players (EWP),
Visual Communications (VC), Rafu Shimpo (the primary Japanese and English language
newspaper for Japanese Americans in the US based in Little Tokyo), and Little Tokyo
Community Council (LTCC). A range of additional projects, coalitions, and past
organizations which were historically significant were also represented, including Gidra,
the community asset mapping project Takachizu, Sustainable Little Tokyo (SLT), 800
Traction, LA City and County planning and transportation departments, the Little Tokyo
People’s Rights Organization (LTPRO), the Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress (NCRR,
the national organization which led to redress in 1988, many of whom have gone on to
found the political organizing group Nikkei Progressives), Asian American studies
departments at UCLA and Cal State Long Beach, and a range of legacy and cultural
businesses in Little Tokyo.
The interview instrument itself was constructed in a way which attempted to only
provoke responses when needed through optional probes, and leave open ended space for
subjects to bring up issues that they felt were most germane to the research questions. I
attempted to engage “reciprocity and reflexivity” in my interactions, as recommended by
Galleta in her comprehensive look at semi-structured interview methodology, both for
ethical reasons, and also to nimbly pick up on threads offered by interview subjects
(Galletta 2012). Interview questions included the following:
1. How and why are you connected to Little Tokyo, specifically, as a place, as
opposed to other areas? Probes: How would you characterize Little Tokyo as a
85
place? What are some of the characteristics that are unique to Little Tokyo, as
compared to other spaces and places in Los Angeles, or elsewhere?
2. What are some of the ways that art and culture has historically played a role in
Little Tokyo? Probes: How are you defining art and culture? What if we include
things like the mom and pop businesses? Or churches and temples? How were
these traditions passed on to younger generations — or were they?
3. Has this changed? What role does art and culture play in Little Tokyo today?
Probes: What about the way art and culture and helped shape Japanese American
identity and culture? What about the relationship between arts and culture with all
of the businesses in Little Tokyo? How is art and culture distinct in Little Tokyo
versus in society more generally? Do you see any changes in who is using or
participating in arts and culture — are there any specific groups of people that are
left out?
4. Little Tokyo has gone through many periods of upheaval and change over the
decades. What are some of the characteristics that you think have allowed it to
hold on to its identity as a place? Probes: What is the role of city government?
How has the relationship between the city and Little Tokyo evolved? Or what
about when you think of how it has managed to hold on to place in comparison to
other LA neighborhoods?
5. What do you see in terms of collaboration between the different stakeholders in
Little Tokyo? For example, do you see particular businesses, non-profits,
residents, and arts organizations working together in any kind of unique way?
Probes: Are there any organizations or activities that you think are central to these
86
collaborations? Or any that seem to be left out? What are the impacts of this
collaboration?
6. How do you see arts and culture playing a role in maintaining Little Tokyo as a
community? Do you see them helping in terms of community and economic
development of the neighborhood? Probes: Have they been useful in raising
awareness about issues, or in generating public engagement and participation that
you are aware of? Or what about playing a role in bringing people to the
community to spend money at mom and pop businesses? How about helping to
build community networks and relationships?
7. Some people have been concerned about how fast their communities are
changing, while others see changes that are positive and exciting. What kind of
thoughts do you have about changes happening in Little Tokyo? Probes: Do you
see local businesses, or arts and culture as connected to these changes in either a
positive or negative way, and how so? What suggestions would you have for
improving Little Tokyo?
8. Open response: are there any other thoughts you would like to share related to the
topics we’ve discussed?
And based on these questions, it was not unusual for the interviewee to launch from the
initial question reflecting on their own person connection to Little Tokyo, into most or all
of the other interview subjects and questions without prompting, especially if the subject
was an artist themselves, and especially if they were more prone to sharing their opinions.
In other cases, I had to go through each of the questions, and use probes to draw out
thoughts and opinions from respondents.
87
These interviewees also hold an immense deal of institutional and community
history and knowledge within their own personal experiences, and much of the history
that I pieced together in chapter 3 was verified and even expanded through histories
shared by many of the interviewees. Incidentally, I use the terms “respondent” and
“interviewee” interchangeably throughout the text.
I took hand written notes during each interview because I found that this generally
made subjects feel more comfortable and converse with me in a more open fashion. I then
typed these notes up so they were searchable, and used this document to code themes
throughout the responses and aggregate quotes and discussions that were relevant to a
particular theme, citing them in my analytical text. Many of the interviewee subjects were
thankful for the work I was doing, feeling that the depth of history and culture within
Little Tokyo was only partially captured and that more and more of it disappeared every
day, as people are displaced and move away, or as they age, forget, and pass on.
Incidentally, this sentiment was also expressed during the informal conversations that
came up during my historical and archival work, with people mentioning the unofficial
archives that families held in their attics and garages, photographs, papers, and ephemera
waiting to be catalogued or else thrown away. While my project only writes a history and
takes in these interviews in a provisional fashion, as it is relevant to my research
questions, not attempting to construct a comprehensive or definitive history for the
community, it brings forth the fact that this important work remains to be done — even in
spite of the great deal of strong work that already exists on Little Tokyo. There seems to
be no end to the depth of its history and culture, especially given its status as one of, if
88
not the, centers for Japanese American and Asian American history, life, art, and culture
in the United States.
In chapter 5, I move my focus outward from the leaders of Little Tokyo to its
wider population of stakeholders. Research questions that drove this chapter included: To
what extent do the broader set of stakeholders in Little Tokyo value and engage in arts
and culture in the community? Leaders can think one thing, but what about everyone
else? And this question, along with the following sub-questions, reorient us back to the
volume’s primary research questions by considering stakeholders beliefs and actions
regarding art and culture, political action, and gentrification. Sub-questions include: Do
the stakeholders vary in their engagement in arts and culture in Little Tokyo? What is the
basis of this variation? And what forms of art or cultural organizations are most
embedded within the community? An understanding of what particular art forms are
embedded into the community will help illuminate how, exactly, civic expression
interfaces with the art and urban planning discourse, which generally relies on
understandings of creative placemaking and public art. But these art forms have often
been criticized as just producing “big sculptures” that aren’t necessarily integrated into
the community. Part of this research is to interrogate an expanded field of artistic
production, including cultural forms such as performance and food, within an
understanding of civic expression.
Another set of research question that this chapter engages includes: In what forms
of political participation are stakeholders in Little Tokyo engaged? Which issues compel
them the most to take action? What changes in Little Tokyo concern its stakeholders the
most? These questions begin to link ideas around art and culture with question of political
89
participation and neighborhood change. If we can begin to identify how people are
participating from the bottom up, especially as those forms of participation concern
gentrification, and connect all of this to forms of art and culture, we can construct a
different narrative about art’s role in the city that is related to notions of political
participation and engagement rather than economic development.
I answered these questions through constructing and administering a survey
instrument to 333 stakeholders who self-identified as having “lived, worked, or spent a
lot of time in Little Tokyo.” I benefited from collaboration with SLT who needed an arts
and economic impact report written as part of one of their grant requirements. I
volunteered to provide this service which both gave me access and resources to conduct
this survey, and them the needed expertise and labor to develop interview and survey
instruments, and to produce their needed report. The report covers much of the same
ground as this volume, including what kind of impact the arts and culture have had on
Little Tokyo and its development, conveyed in easy to break down bullet points and
infographics to be shared with community members and institutions which might find the
data a useful resource in explaining Little Tokyo to newcomers, or in writing grants. My
collaborators wanted a survey question on where people spend their money in Little
Tokyo, hence the inclusion of this topic in the text and regression analysis in chapter 5.
Part of the resources provided by this collaboration included a “field team” of
four community members who were paid on an hourly basis to go out into their various
networks and collect survey responses, and we did so through a variety of means: tabling
in public or at cultural institutions and events, in businesses and non-profit organizations,
in residential complexes, and snowball sampling initiated with field team members’
90
personal connections. Their connections included relationships with the Japanese
American National Museum, Little Tokyo Service Center and especially their cultural
services for retirees, performance groups such as East West Players, Japanese American
Cultural and Community Center, and Cold Tofu, St. Francis Xavier Church, and family
connections with a number of mom and pop businesses. This method allowed us to
ensure that the diverse array of stakeholders found in Little Tokyo were sampled, most of
whom are not residents, however it is also possible that while efforts were taken to ensure
that these specific points of entry were not oversampled, that they may nevertheless have
an outsize influence on the results. The field team was also diverse with regard to age,
gender, language spoken, and sexual orientation, though all were Japanese American.
Accordingly, through their connections and efforts, we were able to collect responses
from the wide range of populations present in Little Tokyo: second, third, fourth, and
fifth generation Japanese Americans, recent Japanese immigrants, elderly Japanese
Americans who primarily spoke Japanese, business owners and commuting employees,
residents including both low-income renters in affordable or retirement housing and
relatively young and affluent condo owners and market rate renters, and those who
commute in to partake in the wide range of cultural life in Little Tokyo such as those
affiliated with the community’s many churches and cultural institutions.
We collected a total of 333 survey responses, which amounts to, based on Little
Tokyo’s population of 3,386 residents (2010 Census) and 2,743 employees (ACS 2014),
a representative sample with a 95% confidence level and a confidence interval of 5.
Because the collection method may not be entirely random, and because of the high
confidence interval, results should not be interpreted as precise in absolute terms, but
91
rather viewed in relation to one another to see patterns and trends. Because of the
outreach methods of our field team — we were careful to sample stakeholders from the
wide range of cultural institutions, businesses, community organizations, religious
institutions, housing facilities, and so on, especially as they related to the specific field
team member’s connections — our stakeholder sample should be viewed as strong
stakeholders with a connection to Little Tokyo rather than a general survey of a random,
public population, and our results and analysis should be interpreted as reflecting this
particular stakeholder population. Surveys were, for the most part, conducted in person
which allowed our trained field team to ensure a high degree of response quality, though
there were a few surveys completed and submitted digitally based on specific outreach
efforts from field team members when they knew a particular respondent and permitted
them to follow up and complete the survey online. There was no random and publicly
accessible means to submit survey responses online, however.
The survey construction and plan for administration was based on best practices
gleaned from several texts, and done over four rounds of editing and revision in
collaboration with community partners and the field team (Groves et al. 2009; Blair 2015;
Converse and Presser 1986). It was designed to be as short as possible while also
producing a rich set of data to ensure a high rate of quality and completion by
respondents, so most of the questions allowed for respondents to check multiple answers,
or to answer open-ended questions. The questions thus also attempted to respond to both
my research questions as well as the desired insight for the community organizations
needed report, and they can be seen as largely grouped into four categories: first,
description of the respondent including how they are connected to Little Tokyo and how
92
they view its Japanese American heritage; second, how they view art and culture in Little
Tokyo including important art forms, institutions, and where they spend their money in
the neighborhood; third, their political activity including their familiarity with anti-
gentrification campaigns, what kinds of political activities they have engaged in, and
what specific issues bring them to engage; and fourth, their views on neighborhood
change, including how concerned they are about it, and what specific changes excite or
concern them. Questions were ordered as to avoid as much influence or bias on the
respondent as possible, including framing gentrification in neutral terms, and specifically
included:
1. How are you connected to Little Tokyo? (Check all that apply, options include:
renter, homeowner, business or commercial property owner, employee, volunteer,
regular patron of business or organization, attend church/temple, other/fill in the
blank.)
2. Which kinds of arts and culture do you think make an important contribution to
Little Tokyo? (Check all that apply, options include: festivals, music concerts,
film screenings, stage performances, art exhibits, food related, books and
literature, religious ceremonies, and other/fill in the blank.)
3. Can you name any specific arts and culture organizations or events that you think
make an important contribution? (Open ended.)
4. When you spend time in Little Tokyo, what kinds of things do you spend money
on? (Open ended.)
5. How familiar are you with the First Street North campaign or the activities of
Sustainable Little Tokyo? (Circle one, options include: (a) Have not heard of
93
them. (b) Heard about but not too involved. (c) Have participated in a few
activities. (d) Very involved and supportive of activities.)
6. Have you participated in any of the following in or related to Little Tokyo over
the past year? (Check all that apply, options include: community meeting,
march/protest/rally, door to door canvassing, making a donation, signing a
petition, contacting an elected official, fundraising, volunteering, other/fill in the
blank.)
7. What specific kinds of issues or causes were your activities related to? (Open
ended.)
8. Do you personally feel a strong connection to Little Tokyo’s Japanese American
history? (Circle one, options include: (a) No, and I don’t see it as important. (b)
It’s great, but I don’t personally feel a strong connection. (c) Yes, even though I
am not Japanese American myself. (d) Yes, but it doesn’t play a huge role in my
identity. (e) Yes, it is fundamental to my identity.)
9. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “never or rarely” and 10 being “often or daily”
how often do you think about the changes that Little Tokyo is undergoing as a
neighborhood? (Circle one, 1-10 listed as options.)
10. Can you name any specific changes you see in the neighborhood that concern
you? (Open ended.)
11. Can you name any specific changes you see in the neighborhood that you are
excited about? (Open ended.)
12. Optional open response: any additional quick thoughts you would like to share
about the topics we discussed? (Open ended.)
94
These questions fit on a single sheet of paper which was used to administer the survey by
a member of the field team, and these were collected and kept in a safe space, and logged
into a database which was then used to generate a spreadsheet used for analysis.
Forms of survey analysis included two primary methods. First, text analysis was
administered using Voyant Tools and Excel to identify word and response frequency,
generating word clouds and a basic set of descriptive statistics contained in frequency
tables. This provided a first-pass look at how people were responding and what “direct”
answers to the questions looked like across the sample. And second, regression analysis
was administered using Stata to identify correlations between the different stakeholder
types (i.e., responses to question one) and each of the other possible question responses.
In other words, because respondents were able to check more than one box for many of
the answers, this data was cleaned re-coded as a series of independent dummy variables
which could be regressed against each other — multiplying this relatively short survey
into a large and rich dataset.
I use regression analysis to test my hypothesis that there is a relationship between
the type of connection that a stakeholder has to Little Tokyo — e.g., whether they are a
residential stakeholder like a renter versus a commercial stakeholder like an employee —
and the particular types of art, political participation, and concerns about gentrification
that are especially salient. By verifying this hypothesis and tracking the correlations
across these different stakeholder types and their other survey responses, we can evaluate
if the arts and culture-based strategies used by community organizations are working in
the same way across the wide variety of stakeholders who hold a connection to Little
Tokyo. The research questions that drive this chapter ask what kinds of art, political
95
participation, and concerns about gentrification are most important for stakeholders, but
we cannot assume that stakeholders are a homogenous community and need to test for
variance across these different types of stakeholder.
In chapter 6, I use a case study methodology to focus on and build theory from the
unique case of Sustainable Little Tokyo (George and Bennett 2005; Yin 2018). This
organization, as I have mentioned, surfaced in each of the previous chapters in some way,
though it was also my entry point into this entire project, and in many ways into the very
neighborhood of Little Tokyo itself. I have consistently observed how SLT demonstrates
a unique and culturally distinct form of arts-based community organizing and activism,
and how this example is both borne out of Little Tokyo’s particular history and is
demonstrative of the possibility of a theory and method of civic expression. SLT fits
within a handful of provocative new organizations which blend urban planning, art, and
community development, such as Project Row Houses in Houston and Rebuild
Foundation in Chicago. Unlike these other examples, however, SLT is not authored by a
“genius” artist, nor is it engaged in on-the-ground property development. Furthermore,
many of the examples studied in the literature which intersect art and urban planning,
such as these, come out of Black geographies of culture and place, or at times Latinx
geographies (especially in Los Angeles, with examples such as the Chicano arts
movement emanating out of Boyle Heights; see, for example, Gonzales et al. 2019; Lin
2019), and SLT stands as an example coming out of an Asian American lineage, a
lineage that is less studied in the literature.
5
Beyond analyzing the organizational form of

5
Willow Lung-Amam’s great book Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia (Berkeley:
UC Press, 2017) is one of the few to take a comprehensive look at Asian American urban placemaking, but
it does not emphasize the role that art and culture play (Lung-Amam 2017).
96
SLT, this case study builds upon the archival, survey, and interview based work in
previous chapters by illuminating a different aspect of place: the way in which people
interact with each other in space, a phenomenon that is best analyzed through participant
observation.
Accordingly, I ask the following questions: Why have SLT’s sponsors decided to
use art and culture as an organizing tactic, and how has the use of art and culture changed
outcomes for its sponsors’ political organizing activities? How does art and culture
transform the way that participants engage with each other in space and place? This
question, in particular, is one that can only be answered through participant observation.
At its current stage of transition, what has SLT learned from its activities and how might
it need to evolve to best accomplish its goals? In particular, how has SLT organized
itself, how has this organizational form changed over time? The relatively novel creation
of arts-based planning organizations, such as Project Row Houses, Rebuild Foundation,
and Sustainable Little Tokyo, but also the Center for Urban Pedagogy in New York City
and the numerous individual projects undertaken under the auspices of creative
placemaking, require examination. By incorporating art and culture into a participatory
planning process, are these organizations modeling a new kind of planning? If so, how is
this different from conventional models of planning and participatory process? How does
the introduction of art and culture impact outcomes? The answers to these questions will
provide valuable insight not only for those undertaking this kind of work, but for urban
planners writ large who are constantly trying to refine and perfect equitable, participatory
processes that are seen as legitimate in the eyes of those who must live and work in
planned spaces.
97
To answer these questions, I use a variety of methods to describe and analyze
SLT, including participant observation, discourse analysis, community-based research
practices, and grounded theory building. Over the course of about 17 months, I attended
some 23 different community meetings, artist convenings, workshops, planning board
sessions, and arts and culture events related to Sustainable Little Tokyo, and was careful
to take notes and photographs at all of these meetings and events, as well as collect
printed matter that was distributed. These artifacts, along with a range of other published
and internal documents were analyzed, including through the use of discourse analysis to
understand what SLT, its partners, and its participants were doing through their eyes, and
how they were talking about and thinking about SLT, Little Tokyo, and the various issues
that it now faces. These materials were also supplemented by the historical, archival,
interview, and survey data collected at other points during this project. My analysis
emphasized the organizational model of SLT and its use of arts and culture as a driving
force for organizing and activism, considering the implications that these elements might
have for other communities and organizations who are grappling with similar issues.
In chapter 7, I provide summary conclusions for the volume, but also posit two
“tests” of additional methods that might lead to future directions for this work. First, I
return to literature-based theory building, intersected with grounded theory based on all
of my work in Little Tokyo, on the topic of “listening” from public spheres theory to
develop a policy intervention within the realm of public participation and civic
expression. Namely, I demonstrate the way in which existing structures for public
participation require an active and additional commitment beyond all of the ways people
are already participating: through community engagement, activism, and artistic and
98
cultural production, not to mention associational life and electoral politics. The problem
is not a lack of participatory structures from the top down, but rather the lack of listening
structures for state and government entities to register the forms of participation that are
already happening from the bottom up. The onus for ensuring that urban development
and policy is aligned with democratic desires in this model shifts from the free labor of
the participant to its rightful place with elected officials. This provisional theory also
posits some additional research that might go a long way toward building out this policy
recommendation and turning it into something tangible. Second, I use comparative case
studies and typological classification to identify some defining characteristics of civic
expression, testing the degree to which this theoretical formulation borne out of my
experience in Little Tokyo is applicable or can be found in other settings. This
provisional typology of civic expression is, more than anything, produced to demonstrate
a garden of forking paths for further research into this topic, a new way of organizing and
thinking about research into public participation and political engagement.
Throughout this volume, I have also engaged in community-based research
practices, embedding myself in the organization as a member of its Arts Action
Committee, helping out to produce and engaging with many of its events, such as the
exhibition that I curated and installed, and also serving to provide research and analysis
to the organization, including the arts and economic impact report. The exhibition formed
the first pieces of chapter 3, the interviews and survey for chapters 4 and 5 were done in
collaboration with Sustainable Little Tokyo to produce data for their arts impact report,
and my experiences working with SLT and other groups has been documented in chapter
6. As such, my observations and analysis may not be entirely unbiased as I have made
99
friendships through this process and have been able to see the aspirations of the
organization through the eyes of those most committed to it.
Yet because of my positionality, I also remain external to many of the most
fundamental aspects of the entity’s identity and mission. I was known as “the urban
planning PhD student” in most of my interactions, setting up a particular kind of
relationship with my engagement and priming particular kinds of behaviors and
responses of people around me. I am also a mixed race Korean American who shares in
feeling some of the Asian American connection to Little Tokyo as a place, but not
sharing in the core Japanese American identity, history, and heritage that make this
neighborhood what it is — and so picking up on language, culture, and custom required a
bit of intentionality and effort, and of course was unlikely to be ever fully achieved
because of my outsider positionality. It was not uncommon for my interactions to begin
with an assumption that I had some JA heritage, only for me to have to explain that I was
not Japanese American but Korean, at times to the consternation or well-intended
overcompensation (“that’s SO wonderful!”) by people I was talking to. To be clear,
however, and as described elsewhere in this volume, leaders and stakeholders in Little
Tokyo are well accustomed to both the increase in mixed race and pan-Asian American
people taking on increasingly important roles in the community, and my identity was
never explicitly made to be an issue.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, my entry point to much of this work was through my
friend Scott Oshima with whom I’ve collaborated with on many art projects, and who has
since become the main organizer responsible for SLT, giving me a unique degree of
access but also biasing my views of the work. They brought me into participating in
100
many of SLT’s projects, and as my interest grew, so did the depth and intensity of my
engagement. Interestingly, however, because of my closeness with SLT’s leaders, they
were also casually open and unguarded in their conversations, not feeling as though they
had to “sell” the work and what it was trying to accomplish to this probing researcher. As
such, I feel confident in my ability to grasp what SLT is trying to do and analyze its
activities and outcomes with clear eyes.
Furthermore, the specific model of community-based participatory research
(CBPR) enables more ethical forms of engagement between researcher and so-called
“subject,” transforming that subject into a collaborative partner who improves and
tangibly benefits from the research process. This practice has a long lineage, first
emerging in the 1970s along with Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and is well
summarized by Karen Hacker (Freire 2018; Hacker 2013). Yet as Hacker and others who
publish on CBPR demonstrate, it is often coming from and laden with the particular
disciplinary baggage of public health. Other formulations of engaged research, such as
public sociology, provide parallel methods that can be more specific to urban planning
social science research, yet they often remain more limited than the active partnership
found in CBPR (Holland et al. 2010).
This wide array of methods for urban study which I have grouped as a
combinatory methodology paint a full picture of the history of arts and community
development in Little Tokyo, as well as give insight in a range of fundamental planning
questions — most notably, how arts and culture intersect with participatory planning
processes. This project aims to produce knowledge that will be a resource for Little
Tokyo in its ongoing endeavors to hold on to place, as well as for other communities of
101
color who are facing similar threats of neighborhood change and gentrification. But, also,
because these insights emanate out of a historic immigrant community of color, and
especially because they place art and culture at the fore, they can help expand our
consciousness when it comes to the unspoken and assumed cultural biases of urban
planning as a discipline. Spatial justice, at the end of the day, manifests in real places
with real people and it demands consideration of the cultural forms which animate these
spaces of everyday life.

102
Chapter 3: A History of Challenges and Arts Activism
in Little Tokyo

The current flurry of arts and culture activity centered in Little Tokyo, ranging
from its locus as a site for Asian American performing arts to the community
development organizations which are using arts and culture to combat gentrification, did
not materialize from thin air. Little Tokyo has long been a site for Japanese American and
Asian American arts and culture, and this history is intertwined with the community’s
urban development and political engagement. To understand this context, and to analyze
its change over time, we must first delve into the history of Little Tokyo. And, as we will
explore later on, this community’s distinct culture of organizing and archiving have
ensured a rich collection of historical and archival materials which demonstrate this
history — so rich, in fact, that this volume will only touch upon the tip of the proverbial
iceberg. With more scholarly attention to tap into the depths of this historical and archival
iceberg, these materials would provide important insight into a range of issues from the
history of Japanese Americans in the United States to the development of ethnic and
immigrant urbanisms in Los Angeles to the workings of diasporic communities around
the globe. The US government sent photographers into the internment camps for press
coverage, including notable artists such as Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange (who ended
up being censored), and these kinds of images are productive in transforming the visual
imaginary of the public for who “looks American” (for similar work, consider Hayden
1995). Here, I use images and archives collected directly from the community rather than
103
ones produced outside of it, an important consideration for countering forms of
representational bias. Thus, this chapter is a condensed and focused history of the history
of arts and culture in Little Tokyo, especially as it relates to political participation and
urban development found in visual sources.
In particular, as described in chapter 2, the research questions that this chapter
aims to answer relate to one driving question: What are the key periods of political
challenge, engagement, and community development in Little Tokyo’s history and how
does art and culture intersect with these periods? I hypothesize that art and culture play a
key role both in how Little Tokyo has developed as a place, as well as in the ways that
this community has responded to challenges through political action — and that this role
has evolved over time. A number of related sub-questions arise from this primary
question, especially as it links to the overarching goals and questions of this volume on
the relationship between art and culture with meaningful and equitable political
participation: How did art and culture manifest during these periods? What was the
nature of this art and culture (indeed, how do we even begin to define these terms?), and
how did it change over time? What specifically were the participation outcomes in Little
Tokyo that can be placed within a context of arts and culture activity? To what extent
does the specificity of place play a role in cultures of participation, especially around the
politics of gentrification? To answer these questions, I will be using historical, visual, and
archival methods on a range of original and secondary materials, as described in chapter
2.
This chapter is organized into four sections which organize historical and archival
materials and analysis into themes related to these research questions. First, the key
104
periods of political challenge and threats to Little Tokyo’s place in Los Angeles will be
described. Second, the nature of arts and culture in Little Tokyo will be explored broadly,
including how it has changed over time. Third, I will provide a history of arts activism in
Little Tokyo — that is, the particular forms of art and culture which have manifested in
relation to political participation in the community — and periodize them as they have
changed over time. And fourth, I will explore the specific ways in which Little Tokyo has
historically risen to the political challenge of gentrification (called by other names, such
as “urban redevelopment” in the past), especially through arts and culture, and track how
this history leads us into its contemporary context in a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles.
As I have alluded to earlier, this history is not meant to be comprehensive,
exhaustive, or even definitive. It is a provisional and propositional history that is meant to
posit the distinct ways in which Little Tokyo, as a Japanese American and Asian
American community with its own bounded place in the city of Los Angeles, has
historically risen to numerous existential challenges over time, and how this action and
agency is specifically tied to its rich history of arts and culture — one which is tied to
both ethnicity and place. This provisional history sets the stage for the following chapters
which explore these themes through other means and different sets of data, chapters
which crucially depend on an understanding of history, spatial context, and culture —
knowledge formations which have often been sidelined in dominant strains of social
science research. But beyond merely setting the stage, this history also speaks
independently, and with a loud voice, to the staggering resilience — constructed in large
part on the basis of its distinct culture — of Little Tokyo as a place and as a community
in the face of numerous challenges to its place in the city. As processes of gentrification
105
churn in cities around the globe, many other communities, and especially marginalized
communities of color, are facing similar threats to their place in the city, and some are
actively looking toward the example of Little Tokyo to learn how they can stake a claim
on the future of their place. This history seeks to be a tool for these communities,
providing historical insight into how Little Tokyo held on to place.

Past and Present Threats to Ibasho

What are the key periods of political challenge, engagement, and community
development in Little Tokyo’s history? A useful term for understanding the challenges to
this community over the years and its response to those challenges is ibasho: a Japanese
word that describes a place where one has a sense of comfort and psychological well-
being associated with being at home. Ibasho is a home place, a place of your own, a place
where you can be yourself, a place with a sense of belonging — and threats to ibasho are
associated with direct negative effects to mental health and psychological well-being
(Kunikata et al. 2011). Ibasho perfectly encapsulates the importance of having a place in
the city to call your own, and the dramatic effects that can unfold with cultural
gentrification or even what the philosopher Glenn Albrecht has described as solastalgia,
the mental distress associated with dramatic environmental change (Crisman and Kim
2019; Albrecht et al. 2007). The challenges that Little Tokyo has faced are associated
with threats to ibasho, and these threats are both to physical space in the city, but also due
to a changing cultural context, threats to its “placeness” which generate harm to
psychological wellbeing. One perspective on how to periodize Little Tokyo’s history can
106
be seen through external structures and challenges — an approach not unusual for how
historians understand marginalized places.
6
However, another way of periodizing Little
Tokyo’s history are based on the resistance, agency, and activism found in its key
political fights — which are also explicitly or implicitly tied to protecting ibasho, as I will
describe in a later section. The combination of these two approaches demonstrates a form
of community development largely driven through agonistic political processes of threat,
political organizing and response through cultural means, and subsequent development of
the community’s physical, social, and economic landscape.
Little Tokyo has a history of challenges — and “challenges” is a relatively polite,
anodyne word to describe the at-times shocking and disruptive violence this community
has faced over the years. The periods described here are, again, not meant to be a
comprehensive or exhaustive history, but one which focuses on the particular challenges
which have threatened Little Tokyo’s ibasho — numerous other challenges are not
explored here, ranging from labor abuses and responding political movements, to the
complexities of Los Angeles’s economic decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to the
national politics of racism found in the 1924 Asian Exclusion Act. The specific periods
that I will focus on include (1) redlining and racial discrimination in space since the
neighborhood’s founding; (2) Japanese internment during WWII, (3) the City of Los
Angeles’s use of eminent domain in 1940-50s; (4) the rise of urban redevelopment in the
1960s; (5) an influx of foreign corporate capital in 1970-80s; and (6) the current period of
gentrification and displacement. And, indeed, even for these periods, I will only provide a

6
This goes back as far as early urban reform literatures which focused on problems to be solved, such as
Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, or Sinclair’s Urban Jungle.
107

Figure 4. Ground breaking ceremony for Nishi Hongwanji, 1925
The reverend can be seen seated just behind the grandstand, while the majority of the crowd in the back is
Japanese American. It is unclear why those doing the groundbreaking are white, along with a “VIP” section
of white spectators in the front, but it is likely that they are local Los Angeles leaders and boosters who
offered a sheen of pro-American sentiment (also demonstrated by the numerous flags). These guests were
honored likely because they made some financial contribution to construction within a Los Angeles of the
1920s where there was widespread interest in alternative spiritualities by white Angelenos, often from other
cultural contexts, yet simultaneously there was also a great deal of suspicion and racist attitudes towards
people of color in everyday contexts. Additionally, it was difficult if not impossible for non-white and
especially immigrant people to own land, likely necessitating some kind of trust organization to set up the
temple. https://tessa.lapl.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/photos/id/78315/rec/16

simplified history which highlights the key processes by which Little Tokyo and its place
in the city has been spatially threatened. My goal here is primarily to set up a
periodization of these spatial challenges to Little Tokyo’s ibasho and, in the following
section the community’s responses to those challenges.
(1) Redlining and racial discrimination
108
While there is no clear marker for the beginning of Little Tokyo — its emergence
as a community grew organically as Japanese first-generation immigrants, Issei, began to
settle just to the east of Los Angeles’s downtown core and increasingly co-located at this
site over time — it has been around at least as long as the formation of its religious
institutions which are often some of the first markers of a cohesive community. An article
from 1888 claimed that Los Angeles was home to around 40 Japanese immigrants,
mostly men, who were forming their own YMCA chapter (“Good People” 1888).
Centenary United Methodist Church, as conveyed through its self-described history,
began in 1896 as the Japanese Methodist Episcopal Mission of Los Angeles where Issei
met in a house at 252 Winston Street in what was then considered part of Little Tokyo, as
the neighborhood extended farther south, to around what is now 7th Street (see map 2 at
the beginning of this volume; Nakagawa 2016). The Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple
and the Hompa Hongwanji Buddhist Temple were formed in 1904 and 1905,
respectively, with several additional Japanese American Christian, Catholic, and
Buddhist congregations forming during the 1910s and 20s.
Many of these congregations formed within Little Tokyo because it was the locus
of Japanese American life in Los Angeles, with the population swelling to around 7,000
residents by 1915, and around 30,000 residents before Executive Order 9066 in 1942
(Little Tokyo CDO District 2013). Despite this growth, Little Tokyo was still located in
an area where realtors sought to implement racial covenants on much of the land which
prohibited ownership by people of color, an insidious process that grew coincident with
the rise of white supremacy during the 1920s. Accordingly, many of the important
religious institutions in the community had to move when they had trouble securing space
109
or continuing leases, including Centenary and Higashi Honganji who moved to Boyle
Heights where racial covenants were less prevalent. Many of the institutions that were
able to stay only managed to do so through deft maneuvering by sympathetic clergy who
were able to use their white status to purchase property and assign it to fictitious
corporate entities. While Little Tokyo was not redlined in HOLC and subsequent bank
maps in the same way that other predominantly residential communities were, much like
the neighboring African-American Central Avenue neighborhood to the south, it was
designated as a “commercial district” excluding it entirely from typical landscapes of
mortgage and finance access for residential purposes (Rothstein 2017). Like many ethnic
and immigrant communities, and especially Asian immigrant communities, Japanese
immigrants in Little Tokyo and elsewhere were required to find loans and financing for
everything from buying property, establishing a home, or starting a business through
mutual aid associations where community members would chip in resources for a
marginal return or often even just the expectation that those resources would be available
to them in the future should they be needed.
This history of racial covenants, redlining, and other forms of racially motivated
spatial discrimination is one that is common and ubiquitous in American cities, and Little
Tokyo was no exception. It was a fact of life in Little Tokyo since its origins, and is one
that continued in varied ways even beyond the point at which many of these strategies
became illegal, in the 1948 Supreme Court ruling Shelley v. Kraemer which outlawed
racial covenants, or the Fair Housing Act of 1968 which banned housing discrimination.
For Little Tokyo, ibasho was threatened before it even had the time to fully take root,
both through these legal and financial mechanisms, and through the psychological impact
110
that these mechanisms created through, for example, inhibiting even a cultural resource
like a Japanese American Buddhist temple from being built without white access to
money and land. But even these forces paled in comparison to the wholesale uprooting of
Little Tokyo in 1942.
(2) Japanese internment during WWII
So-called “Japanese internment” euphemistically refers to the forced relocation
and resettlement of Japanese Americans into concentration camps during World War II

Figure 5. Japanese Americans being interned, 1942
Japanese Americans were relocated from Little Tokyo during internment, boarding busses in this image at
Maryknoll Church in 1942. People were only able to bring an amount of belongings that they could carry,
shown in bags and suitcases to the right, and the coats and hats worn in the photo suggest this was an early
and cold morning. Women and younger children were gathered in the back of the courtyard, largely
separated by gender and age for the move.
https://tessa.lapl.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/photos/id/14662/rec/2

111
upon Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 issued on February 19, 1942.
7
Japanese
Americans were forced to give up their homes and belongings, allowed only to take a
couple of suitcases, and often having to abandon successful businesses and properties.
During this period of time, Little Tokyo came to be known as Bronzeville for a period of
about three years because African Americans in the neighboring Central Avenue
neighborhood moved into the area, setting up businesses and a thriving community,
including an active nightlife scene with Jazz bars and other music establishments. This
transformation was facilitated by the landowners in the area who were largely white and
saw all of their Japanese American renters disappear overnight. Because of a large influx
of African Americans during the Great Migration, they were seen as an easy clientele to
repopulate the neighborhood. While the exact cost of internment to the Japanese
American community is impossible to quantify, it would be difficult to underestimate it.
It is certainly more than the $20,000 in reparations given to incarcerated Japanese
Americans in 1988 after a well-organized Redress Movement sought an official apology
from the US government.
It is, in fact, implausible that Little Tokyo would continue to exist at all after its
complete destruction and dislocation during internment, the ultimate challenge to ibasho.
Yet there are a handful of reasons why it managed to repopulate, albeit in a diminished
form, upon the release of Japanese Americans from camp around the end of 1945. First
and foremost, as I will discuss in more detail later in this chapter, is the cultural resilience
and political organizing of the Japanese American community in Southern California

7
The degree to which internment disrupted Little Tokyo is difficult to convey in this short section, and
further reading is recommended (Reeves 2015; Inada 2000).
112
who saw Little Tokyo as a spiritual home. This “spiritual home” is not metaphorical:
many of the religious institutions acted as sites for storing belongings during internment,
and served as resettlement and aid organizations during the return of Japanese Americans
to the neighborhood — and these religious institutions’ property was not seized or
vandalized only because of sympathetic clergy who protected the land which was owned
by the organizations themselves rather than the Japanese Americans who were sent off to
concentration camps. Even so, in many cases, purportedly sympathetic clergy turned out
to be not so sympathetic upon the return of Japanese Americans to Little Tokyo and
several lawsuits had to be filed in order to reclaim church properties (Nakagawa 2006).
And, second, on a less positive note, the white landowners welcomed back the Japanese
Americans who were only slightly less discriminated against compared to African
Americans who have long faced the most severe forms of racism in the US, and whose
“overcrowding” into abandoned Little Tokyo properties alarmed city officials and
landowners. African American tenants were either bought out of their leases and forced
to move elsewhere, or evicted outright, creating tensions between Japanese Americans
and African Americans in the area during this time.
(3) Eminent domain in 1940-50s
To add insult to injury, almost immediately upon Japanese Americans’ return to
Little Tokyo, a large swath of its western land, most notably the vibrant block of
buildings and residences bounded by Temple, Los Angeles, First, and San Pedro, was
seized by the City of Los Angeles through eminent domain so that it could build
additional municipal buildings. The largest and most notorious of these buildings was the
now demolished LAPD Headquarters, the Parker Center, which has long been a symbol
113
of violence and racism for people of color in Los Angeles. Between the shadows of City
Hall and the Parker Center, ibasho was threatened through the physical seizure of land,
but also through the psychological impact of this reminder of state and police power. The
land was seized through eminent domain in the late 1940s and the Parker Center building
was constructed in the early 1950s. Little Tokyo as an area of contiguous land has
continued to shrink with pressures on all sides from manufacturing business to the east
and south, and from public buildings and the city center to the west and north. And

Figure 6. Demolition of Little Tokyo to make way for Parker Center, 1953
The last remaining buildings still have signs posted of sales, indicated the rapid process by which business
owners had to unload their wares and relocate, especially from prime corner real estate adjacent to the
streetcar, with street car electric lines visibly hanging in the air. The Hellenistic style architecture of Los
Angeles City Hall hovers over the block being demolished, an ominous reminder to Japanese Americans
where power is located in the city, especially given that it was intentionally developed as the tallest
building in Los Angeles and remained as such until 1962, well after this image was taken. Courtesy of the
Seaver Center (P-011-3ov).
114

landowners who were compensated for the land seizure were largely white property
owners who did not have to think about how or where to relocate businesses and
institutions important to Little Tokyo, such as Rafu Shimpo one of the longest running
and most significant Japanese American newspapers in the nation which was originally
located in this area and had to find space elsewhere. Such considerations were especially
difficult, considering the fact that the community was still reeling from internment and
did not have the time or energy to organize politically or protest the eminent land
decision: Little Tokyo was struggling for mere survival.
(4) Urban redevelopment in the 1960s
The next major wave of challenges was more of a mixed bag, in the form of urban
renewal and redevelopment. California authorized the creation of semi-autonomous
community redevelopment agencies (CRAs) with the passage of the Community
Redevelopment Act in 1945, and subsequently created generous funding mechanisms
through Proposition 18’s tax-increment financing in 1952 and SB 90 in 1972 where the
state took on more of the funding burden for local schools, freeing up resources for
redevelopment agencies (Marks 2004; Blount et al. 2014). California ultimately
dismantled the CRAs through a series of legislative and court actions under the direction
of Governor Jerry Brown in 2011. The Community Redevelopment Agency of Los
Angeles (CRA/LA) received authorization by the City Council to undertake the “Little
Tokyo Redevelopment Project” on February 24, 1970, and subsequently received
reauthorizations, modifications, and extensions for the project in 1986, 1994, 1999, 2003,
and 2006. The final projected end date for the project was in 2013, a date that may have
itself also been extended, though the CRAs were dismantled before that date would ever
115
arrive (Suga 2004). In this case, ibasho was threatened in a complex way which, on the
one hand, provided power and resources to Japanese and Japanese American business
leaders to modernize and reshape the community, yet on the other hand, in doing so they
also displaced both physical shops and homes, as well as rapidly transformed the sense of
place and belonging in Little Tokyo from what it had long been for its residents, leading
to tensions within the community that lingered for years to come.

Figure 7. Little Tokyo Redevelopment Project, 1971
The map from the CRA/LA shows the “official boundary” of Little Tokyo as defined in conjunction with
the redevelopment project, a boundary that has largely remained the same to this day, despite the fact that
the historical extents of Little Tokyo, especially prior to internment, stretched out farther in all directions.

The Little Tokyo Redevelopment Project (LTRP) was actually a series of projects
contained within a master plan framework based on a CRA/LA overlay map for the entire
neighborhood. The map both clearly delineated the territory for the community of Little
Tokyo, but also reified its diminished size based on these circumscribed boundaries. Two
116
of the earlier major projects included Little Tokyo Towers, a 300-unit senior housing
building completed in 1975, and the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center
(JACCC) completed in 1980. While each of these projects had their own voices of
discontent, including a lack of sufficient transparency, communication, and community
participation in Little Tokyo Towers, and concerns about the dominance of Japanese
government and business influence in JACCC, both projects were generally accepted and
welcomed as important and necessary pieces of Little Tokyo and its future. JACCC, in
particular, was hotly debated from its initial inception as a proposed “Japanese Cultural
Center,” and had both “American” and “Community” added to its name in response to
activist organizing and demands. There was a strong desire for JACCC to be reflective of
Japanese American culture, rather than only Japanese culture, and also to be a grassroots
organization with footing in the community and space and resources provided to non-
profit organizations and other small entities, rather than a singular dominating cultural
institution.
Other CRA projects, however, were either hotly contested or widely derided by
community members and activists in Little Tokyo. The advisory committee for the LTRP
largely consisted of business owners and individuals with a connection to the
development process, with 1-2 voices that had to speak loudly to convey positions held
by those outside of the advisory committee. The most significant redevelopment project
that drew the ire of the community included the construction of the New Otani Hotel and
Weller Court which required the demolition of the Sun Building, an important site for
traditional arts and cultural practices as well as many community organizations and non-
profits, and the Sun Hotel, an SRO building that housed many low-income and elderly
117
residents. Furthermore, much of this development was driven by the Kajima Corporation,
a Japanese company which had already built an office tower in the neighborhood, had
received the construction contract for JACCC, and also one which had a reputation as
being complicit in war crimes during WWII.
(5) Foreign corporate capital in 1970-80s
The next challenge to face Little Tokyo was intertwined with CRA/LA and
LTRP, and this was the influx of foreign capital during the 1970s and 80s. Money was
largely coming from the Japanese government and from Japanese corporations,
coincident with the so-called Japanese economic miracle where the nation’s economy
grew substantially from the postwar period through around 1970, and continue to grow at
a slightly reduced rate until around 1990 where growth tapered off. As mentioned, either
significant funding came from this influx of capital or construction outlaws flowed to
sources of this capital through construction contracts, including in CRA projects like
Little Tokyo Towers, JACCC, the New Otani Hotel, and Weller Court. But additional
foreign direct investment came in the form of land acquisitions, opening branch locations
of chain and other businesses, and redevelopment projects not tied to CRA funding.
These corporate interventions into the Little Tokyo landscape were a stark change to the
mom and pop businesses and religious institutions that had long formed the backbone of
ibasho in the neighborhood.
While no particular project or new business was on its own as disruptive or
transformative as, for example, the development of Weller Court and the New Otani
Hotel, the cumulative effect was disconcerting for community members who could feel
their neighborhood undergoing a transformation. These newcomers sometimes failed to
118
communicate or integrate into the community in expected ways, leading to tensions
between Japanese Americans who at times could not speak Japanese, and Japanese
business owners or managers who did not appreciate how Japanese American culture was
distinct from their own. The complexity of this situation was compounded by the fact that
non-Japanese individuals, including those at planning and redevelopment agencies, often
conflated the two distinct populations, assuming that they were all of a singular,
homogenous community. Here too, the complexity of ibasho presented itself in tensions
between longtime Japanese American residents and newcomers who also had Japanese
heritage but lacked much of the distinct culture that arose out of the Japanese American
experience over the past several decades, not least of which included the experience of
internment.
Japan was the leading source of foreign direct investment in Los Angeles through
the 1980s, notably acquiring nearly 50% of the premium Downtown LA office real estate
and several high-profile properties such as the ARCO Plaza, the Biltmore Hotel, and the
Columbia studios. After the Japanese economy’s bubble burst at the beginning of the
1990s, much of this investment was liquidated as corporations sold off their holdings, and
have largely avoided large purchases and investments at that scale ever since — though
even this rapid shift was problematic for Little Tokyo on the ground as property
ownership became scattered among other global corporate interests very quickly, and
property held within the community lost much of its value as large parcels were traded at
a loss. This was compounded by the widespread economic downturn of Los Angeles in
the early 1990s as aerospace left Southern California. The effects of this head-spinning
transformation of property ownership in Little Tokyo is difficult to measure, but it
119
certainly points toward the problematics of corporate investment in community property
which is not held to any kind of ethical consideration of effects of corporate actions on
the ground and, as dictated by law, is only answerable to shareholders and maximizing
economic returns. Material pieces of the neighborhood are transformed into liquid
capital, as “all that is solid melts into air” (Berman 1982).
(6) Current period of gentrification and displacement
The final chapter of transformational challenge in Little Tokyo’s hold on place
can be found in our current period of gentrification. The term “gentrification” is itself
fraught with multiple meanings and interpretations that are highly dependent on context.
For Little Tokyo, which since the postwar period has been primarily a commercial and
institutional district with very few residential units, many of which are institutionally
owned and geared toward senior residents, the term is not associated with its most
common meaning as a process by which lower income residents are pushed out and
displaced by increasingly higher income residents (Hung et al. 2013). Rather, Little
Tokyo is experiencing a combination of a variety of gentrification pressures, given its
prime real estate location at the heart of Downtown Los Angeles, just to the east of the
Civic Center and to the west of the trendy Arts District. Some of these pressures include
the psychological impact of seeing waves of gentrification and displacement play out in
neighboring communities, soaring real estate prices, and ongoing large-scale
redevelopment on behalf of the City of Los Angeles and the LA County Metro authority.
Much of the privately owned property in Little Tokyo is passing into the hands of
younger generations who may not be as connected to the community, or are sold off to
non-Japanese American interests who see the property solely as a business investment
120
rather than part of a distinct community — and these transfers are often out of public
view, with ownership changing hands without any immediate effects such as the
displacement of renting business owners. But the most evident process of gentrification
has been that of cultural gentrification, where generic businesses and often chain retail
businesses have leased spaces at high prices in Little Tokyo, displacing a handful of
Japanese American and Asian American businesses which may not provide as high a
return for property owners. The overall effect has not been significant from a quantifiable
perspective with regard to number of businesses or square footage leased and, indeed,
several new businesses have also recently started that have been an active part of the
Little Tokyo community. Nevertheless, the psychological impact of these changes is
strong because of the symbolic threat to ibasho as the visible culture of Little Tokyo
drifts farther away from its roots as a locus of Japanese American life. Ibasho has
changed over time and across generations in the community, from its roots as a fledgling
immigrant community in the early part of the century shaped by religious institutions, to
one that was shaped by the experience of internment and rebuilding, to one reshaped by
structural forces of corporate capital and urban renewal, to one that is now being
reinvented by a younger generation. Yet throughout this history, ibasho in Little Tokyo
has been governed by a shared culture based in the Japanese American experience, even
as that culture evolves over time.
How has Little Tokyo managed to remain a cohesive and politically engaged
community in the face of these challenges? This question is one which threads its way
throughout this volume, and it is one which is informative not only for understanding
Little Tokyo’s history, contemporary context, and future challenges, but also for similar
121
threats related to urban change and gentrification which are facing communities, and
especially economically, socially, and ethnically marginalized communities, in cities
around the world. In the United States, we might often call many of these places
communities of color, but in global cities outside of the US, there are also neighborhoods
populated with immigrants or ethnic minorities which face similar challenges, and certain
elements of Little Tokyo’s story can be instructive for tactics on how these communities
can protect their ibasho. This study posits that answering the question above, we must
first understand the role of art and culture in Little Tokyo as it has changed and
developed over time.

Art and Culture in Little Tokyo

How did art and culture manifest during these historical periods of challenge and
threat to ibasho in Little Tokyo? What was the nature of this art and culture, and how did
it change over time? Indeed, how do we even begin to define “art and culture,” especially
within the context of a place like Little Tokyo? As a starting point, I would posit that we
begin with a very different understanding of art and culture than the professionalized
network of artists and artistic production found in MFA programs, commercial galleries,
and global museums and auction houses — what Howard Becker would call “the art
world” (Becker 1982). Art and culture take many forms in Little Tokyo, though few of
them exist as the sole professional occupation of artists and culture bearers in the
community, and fewer still circulate within the global networks of the art world. Instead,
art takes the form of a diverse array of performing arts, of writing by poets and journalists
122
who hold second and third jobs, of traditional forms of Japanese art and culture such as
ikebana flower arranging, calligraphy, or shigin, a type of sung poetry, performed and
taught by elders who practice out of a commitment to the craft rather than an expectation
of fame or money. And culture takes the form of distinct Japanese American foodways,
of daily practices of caring for family, community, or environment, of shared beliefs,
values, and language. So, for the purposes of this volume, we will take an expansive and
big tent approach to defining art and culture, and approach that includes professional
artists, part time performers, hobbyists and outsider artists, forms of culture beyond the
fine arts such as food, communally shared practices, and celebratory rituals and public
festivals. This approach is not merely one used for convenience or for the purposes of
loosening the terms of art and culture, but in fact is one which informs and expands how
we understand more professionalized art worlds as well. This is especially true in
examining the ways in which this expanded sphere of art and culture manifests in
increasingly popular art funding and urban planning regimes under the auspices of public
art, creative placemaking, and historic preservation.
Given this broader understanding of art and culture, we can chart its emergence in
Little Tokyo with the formation of a distinct, Japanese-American identity in Los Angeles
as first-generation Issei immigrants arrived and formed community. It first emerged from
traditional Japanese forms of culture and often through religious institutions, but evolved
with younger generations who incorporated American culture and sensibilities to produce
a distinct Japanese American “third culture” and it continues to evolve with each
subsequent generation. This evolution is at least an implicit part of why generational
identity for Japanese American immigrants and their descendants plays a role in marking
123
one’s identity and place in a larger diasporic community: Issei for first generation, Nisei
for second, Sansei, Yonsei, and so on.
8
Different generations have changing relationships
to both Japanese and American identities which are dependent on the strength of their
connection to Japan and family in Japan, the extent to which there is a desire to retain
one’s culture and stand apart from a dominant white culture, and continuity with attitudes
of their parents’ generation — or, conversely, the distance felt with Japanese language
and culture, a desire to fit in and assimilate within a dominant white culture, and a
rejection of the attitudes of their parents’ generation. These three binaries do not operate
in lockstep and are a simplification of a complex set of relationships in identity
formation, and individuals often stand at some point on a continuum rather than at one
extreme or another, or may change their attitudes over time due to personal evolution or
changing social norms, and many other such factors may also exist. Furthermore, it
should be noted that these underlying processes are not unique to Japanese Americans in
Little Tokyo, but manifest in myriad ways and culturally distinct forms in all immigrant
and diasporic communities (Zhou 1997).
Throughout the development of Little Tokyo as a place, both before and after
internment, there existed a wide array of practicing Japanese and Japanese American
artists who exemplified this process of “third culture” production. As the late art curator
Karin Higa noted, “the artistic activity centered in Little Tokyo presents tantalizing
evidence of a dynamic nexus of artists, art, audiences, and intellectual exchange” (Higa

8
See, for example, Bill Hosokawa’s Nisei: The Quiet Americans (New York: Morrow, 1969) for an
example of this, especially as it relates to Issei and Nisei culture through the history of internment. Another
volume which explores this question through the lens of Little Tokyo’s Nisei Week festival is Lon
Kurashige’s Japanese American Celebration and Conflict a History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934-
1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
124
2009, 31). She describes how the renowned photographer and documentarian of life in
Little Tokyo, Toyo Miyatake, got started by taking photography lessons from fellow JA
photographer Harry Shigeta who was living and working in Little Tokyo in the late
1910s. Miyatake opened his own studio in 1923 which then became a mixing ground for
artists such as actor Sessue Hayakawa, opera singer Yoshie Fujiwara, cinematographer
James Wong Howe, poet T. B. Okamura, and painters Takehisa Yumeji, Tokio Ueyama,
Hojin Miyoshi, and Sekishun Masuzo Uyeno. Prefiguring Union Center for the Arts, an
exhibition showing much of these artists’ work was installed at the newly constructed
Union Church in 1923.
These artists, many of whom associated with the Shaku-do-sha, a modern art
collective, established a self-reflexive criticality, not content to laud each other’s work
merely for being Japanese American or from Little Tokyo, but providing frank and
insightful critique to push the work and community further. Photographer Taizo Kato and
Ueyama both reviewed the exhibition, and the Shaku-do-sha went on to produce several
more notable exhibitions over the years, intersecting with global art figures such as
Edward Weston and Diego Rivera. Another important figure was the renowned
choreographer Michio Ito who settled in Little Tokyo in 1929 and intersected with Ezra
Pound, Y. B. Yeats, and brought in Isamu Noguchi to work on designing set elements.
Around this time, a number of young Japanese Americans enrolled in Los Angeles art
schools Otis, Chouinard (later to become CalArts), and Art Center, producing an
explosion of Japanese American work such as that by Hideo Date and Benji Okubo who
went on to exhibit together in Little Tokyo in 1933. And in the late 1930s and just into
the 1940s, a number of Japanese Americans associated with Little Tokyo life began to
125

Figure 8. 1949 Nisei Week Queen Terri Hokoda
Terri Hokoda, Queen of the Nisei Week pageant from 1949, appears in the Grand Parade. This image was
taken by notable Little Tokyo photographer Toyo Miyatake, and is also remarkable for demonstrating how
Japanese Americans put their culture out in public so soon after the experience of internment. We also see
the distinct culture that has formed in Little Tokyo as one that is fully Japanese American: no longer
Japanese but also not conforming to dominant culture in the US, the Nisei Week festival combines
traditional cultural forms with American beauty pageant culture to create a new third culture.

work for the major motion picture studios, extending intersections between Little
Tokyo’s art scene and the global production of culture even further.
To break apart some of the complexities of this process of identity formation
within the context of a community culture in Little Tokyo, we can consider the ways in
which a handful of historical images fall within these combinatorial factors using both art
historical methods and contextual image analysis, as described in chapter 2. In figure 8
above, we can see a promotional photograph from the 1949 Nisei Week festival in Little
Tokyo taken by the Toyo Miyatake Studio, the professional photography studio and
126
practice helmed by the Japanese American photographer Toyo Miyatake who had his
studio on 1st Street in Little Tokyo. Nisei Week was first celebrated from August 12-18,
1934, as a festival organized to spark new life into flagging Little Tokyo businesses. The
businesses were largely owned and run by Issei immigrants and the younger generation
of Nisei children wanted to reinvigorate Little Tokyo with an event that would cater to
new tastes and bring in new business to the community. This particular festival in 1949
was the ninth edition yet the first one to be held since internment of Japanese Americans
during WWII, and stands out as a striking example of Japanese American willingness to
celebrate their identity in the public spaces of Little Tokyo despite widespread
persecution only a few years prior. Culture, itself, was seen as the key to creating a
district identity for Japanese Americans and a shared set of meanings in Little Tokyo, as
well as a means for negotiating through a web of dominant white culture, hostile political
attitudes, and continued marginalization in American society at large. Indeed, many of
the particular forms of art and culture which emerged in Little Tokyo were themselves
partially disguised political responses to the challenges and threats to ibasho that the
community faced.
The photograph demonstrates the intentional way that a distinct Japanese
American identity was forged through hybridizing Japanese and American cultures,
represented in the use of traditional forms of Japanese culture found in street dance and
clothing of the ondo and contemporary American culture found in the beauty pageant
competition, automobile procession, and perhaps most of all, the celebration of consumer
culture promoted by local businesses. Pageant queen winner Terri Hokoda smiles at she
sits, elevated, in a convertible automobile that leads the way for the dancers. Many of the
127
dancers in the procession are children as their Nisei parents pass on the cultural legacy
which they are constructing. Scores of spectators look on, crowding around a massive
spotlight which shines a beam of light into the sky, announcing to greater Los Angeles
that Nisei Week is underway. The street has been completely shut down, though
businesses, such as the visible Miyako Hotel, Far East Cafe with its “chop suey” signage,
and variety of other drug, liquor, and department stores are likely more inundated than
normal given the massive crowds. The pageant queen is wrapped in luxurious fabrics,
much like the vehicles themselves, representing success in American commercial life, the
radiant power of flags, and the beauty of a confident culture that has arrived. The Los
Angeles Times building is just out of sight, its sign barely peeking through the evening
light, and we wonder how much coverage this celebratory and universally attended event
for Japanese Americans in Los Angeles is receiving from its namesake newspaper.
As Lon Kurashige has noted, the use of the ondo was a creative appropriation
from Japan where it was there also somewhat invented by recreating ancient dance
practices in the interest of constructing a modern Japanese identity, and Nisei Week
represented something of a watered down identity that could be appreciated by a broader
white culture and would be useful to promote the festival’s ultimate goal of getting more
customers to buy from shops in Little Tokyo (Kurashige 2000). Nevertheless, it
represented a herculean effort of community organizing and savvy appropriation of a
range of cultures which walked a fine line between legitimate, shared forms of Japanese
American identity with political and cultural palatability not only for a broader white
audience, but even for Japanese Americans who wanted to assimilate and seem like
“good Americans.” Nisei Week represents the most significant tangible demonstration of
128

Figure 9. Pack 379 at Koyasan Buddhist Temple, 1962
Group photo of Pack 379 of the Cub Scouts at the Koyasan Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles, 1962. This
photo also demonstrates the unique third culture hybridity of being Japanese American in Little Tokyo,
combining the ubiquitous Boy and Cub Scouting traditions from the United States, traditionally steeped in
Judeo-Christian philosophies, but here translated and hybridized with Japanese Buddhist traditions. Cub
and Boy Scouting was incredibly popular among Japanese American families in the United States since the
first troop was formed by the Japanese American community in Fresno, California. Photo from the LAPL
Shades of LA Collection.

a Japanese American identity forged in Little Tokyo which is neither Japanese nor
conventionally American, but as a “third culture” — but should also be recognized as but
one outcome in a complex process of cultural negotiation which cannot be seen as
monolithic or singular.
Another image worth exploring is figure 9, of Cub Scout Pack 379, associated
with Boy Scout Troop 379 at the Koyasan Buddhist Temple in Little Tokyo. Troop 379 is
a Japanese American troop first established at Koyasan in 1931 (then called Troop 79)
and running through the present. The first Buddhist Boy Scout troop ever established,
129
Troop 4, was created by Japanese Americans in 1920 at the Fresno Buddhist Church only
a few hours north of Little Tokyo, and the practice spread to other Buddhist temples,
including Koyasan. Koyasan, itself, began in 1912 with services out of the reverend’s
room at the Miyako Hotel in Little Tokyo, later moving to a building where the present-
day Japanese National American Museum is located in 1920, also the site of the original
troop formation. Its current location, shown in the photograph taken in 1962 above, was
built in 1940 just before internment in 1942, and the temple was a critical site for
maintaining and rebuilding Little Tokyo upon the return of Japanese Americans in 1946,
like other religious institutions in the area. The troop demonstrates another manifestation
of a distinct third culture where Japanese religion, values, and culture was combined with
the American culture and practices found in Boy Scouts. The smiling faces of the Cub
Scouts in the image are joined by young men and women who are part of the Boy and
Girl Scout troops, all of whom are Japanese American, in contrast to the troop today
which has become more diverse as the demographics of Little Tokyo and Koyasan have
shifted. They stand on the steps of a building that was completed some 22 years prior,
and some 28 years after when the troop visited Washington DC on an invitation from
President Roosevelt in 1935, only to later be served by Executive Order 9066.
The earliest forms of what could be called arts activism in Little Tokyo came out
of the arts and culture produced by religious institutions in the neighborhood like
Koyasan. These institutions provide continuity to the neighborhood as rituals, festivals,
and traditions sustain it from generation to generation, and they were also sites for
constructing a new Japanese American culture. Centenary United Methodist Church was
first formed in 1896, and has long been supportive of arts and culture in Little Tokyo. It
130
was notably the site of a community library started in 1977 which, after organizing and
activism led by a group called Friends of the Little Tokyo Library, eventually grew into
the official Little Tokyo Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library as of 2005, supported
by public funding and housing important community documents. Hompa Hongwanji
Buddhist Temple was first established in 1905, and has long supported a range of cultural
practices, such as an annual Obon festival and Bon Odori, and the commissioning and
display of murals and sculptures related to Buddhism. Both these and many other
religious institutions have also supported public architecture, commissioning buildings
for worship, community spaces, and schools, with Centenary’s current building opened in
1995, and Hongwanji’s current building dedicated in 1969. These forms of activism
focused on community building and maintaining cultural traditions, rather than more
antagonistic and politically oriented forms of activism which we might commonly
recognize today, which we will delve into in the next section.

A History of Arts Activism

What specifically were the participation outcomes in Little Tokyo that can be
traced to arts and culture activities? Because of the culture of Little Tokyo described in
the previous section, the arts and cultural activities became intertwined with identity,
place, and politics from the community’s genesis. While this link was not always
designed as such or intentionally deployed in an instrumental fashion, art and culture has
nevertheless been a key contextual factor in how and why the community has responded
to its various challenges and threats to ibasho. A key reason why artists and activists in
131
Little Tokyo understand the importance of intervening in the structural drivers of social
and urban change is due to its long history of arts activism. The particular forms of art
and activism used in the community today are aligned with and borne out of the
culturally and contextually specific forms of cultural action used in its past. Community
elders pass down forms of knowledge which were themselves learned through cultural
traditions, survival in the face of historical trauma, and explicitly understood theories of
social movement organizing and political participation.
Little Tokyo has seen four periods of political engagement through culture, the
nature of this relationship shifting over time based on changes in culture, generational
shifts, and differences in the types of challenge that the community has had to face. The
first period is the one described in the previous section as the community was established,
was uprooted through internment, and then had to rebuild, with religious institutions and
Nisei Week playing a key role, and I will not revisit it in this section. After this initial
period, however, three additional historical periods of cultural-based activism and
collective response to challenges emerge: first, as a new generation of arts activists came
of age from 1963-1979; second, as institution building with a maturing community
responding to foreign direct investment from 1980-1999; and third, during our current
period of increased urban land values and arts organizing from 2000 to the present.
(1) A new generation of arts activists, 1963-1979
The first wave of arts activism that explicitly engaged systems of power more
directly than past organizing efforts which focused on building community arose with the
coming of age of a younger generation of Japanese Americans, and the broader climate of
the countercultural 1960s, from about 1963 to 1979. During this period, several important
132

Figure 10. Manzanar Pilgrimage (1969) and Nisei Week demonstration (1972)
Dance at the newly instituted Manzanar Pilgrimage in 1969 to remember history of Japanese American
incarceration (left) and the Van Troi Anti-imperialist Brigade in demonstration against Vietnam War during
the 1972 Nisei Week with effigy of Nixon (right). Courtesy of the Visual Communications Photographic
Archive.

Figure 11. Third World Storefront (1971) and anti-Bakke protest (1973)
Artist Bob Miyamoto tutors a local youth during a screen-printing workshop at the Third World Storefront
in 1971 (left) and a multi-ethnic coalition advocates its support for affirmative action programs in education
at the foot of the Downtown Federal Building with protest signs in 1973 (right). Courtesy of the Visual
Communications Photographic Archive.

Figure 12. LTPRO anti-redevelopment demonstration and sign drop in 1977
An intergenerational rally of the Little Tokyo Peoples Rights Organization (LTPRO) in front of the then-
Sumitomo Bank Building in Little Tokyo (left) and a LTPRO sign drop against development in Little
Tokyo at the former Sun Building which housed arts and activist organizations (right), both in 1977.
Courtesy of the Visual Communications Photographic Archive.
133
Asian American arts and media organizations were established either within Little Tokyo,
or in relationship to the neighborhood which served as the de facto spiritual home for
Japanese Americans and, increasingly a broader pan-Asian American identity. The term
Asian American emerged during this time as various ethnic groups banded together as a
political strategy, forming radical groups under the auspices of Yellow Power movements
inspired by Black Power movements, and Third World solidarity movements (Ishizuka
2016; Umemoto 1989). Events, protests, meetings, offices, political actions, and the like
often occurred in the heart of Little Tokyo. Two organizations in particular are
demonstrative of the potential of art and culture in intervening in and changing society
during this period: Visual Communications and Gidra.
Visual Communications was founded by Duane Kubo, Robert Nakamura, Alan
Ohashi, and Eddie Wong in 1970 as an organization which would use visual media and
the arts to redefine the perception of Asian Americans in society, photographing
everyday life and community events in Little Tokyo and elsewhere, producing films and
film festivals, and engaging in political campaigns. Their members used art and media as
a direct form of activism, but their extensive visual archive also documents a variety of
cultural practices used in activist work of the time, recording the transition of
community-engaged cultural work from an older generation of Japanese Americans to the
younger generation who used more direct-action approaches to activism. The Visual
Communications photographs show a cultural of arts activism which was intentionally
multigenerational, drawing on culturally specific practices such as the street performance
of protests drawing on odori (fig. 10) and the “calligraphy” of sign making. Their
activities represented the lateral interaction, community building, and solidarity across
134

Figure 13. Cover of Gidra from August 1973
Artist David Monkawa, a key Gidra staff member, critiques the influx of corporate capital into the Los
Angeles neighborhood of Little Tokyo through his cover art for the August 1973 issue. Courtesy of Gidra
and Densho Digital Repository.

ethnic groups which often even spanned beyond the new Asian American movement, to
include Black political movements, engagement with youth from different socioeconomic
backgrounds, and in educational spaces (fig. 11). Additionally, while major campaigns
included anti-war and anti-apartheid sentiments, or labor and antiracist educational
spaces, concerns regarding urban development were also common (fig. 12).
Gidra was a monthly newspaper started by a group of Japanese American and
Asian American students from UCLA that ran from 1969 to 1974 with a politically
135

Figure 14. “People’s page” in Gidra from July 1971
Theme showing a different take on Asian American masculinity and femininity from dominant media
narratives through poetry and image.

activist bent, advocating for anti-war and anti-capitalist positions, and for an Asian
American political consciousness. While it was first based at UCLA, then in the
Crenshaw neighborhood (which was then a heavily Japanese American area), Gidra
sustained a focus on Little Tokyo’s politics, development, and history (fig. 13). The
newspaper also grappled with everyday issues which were presented in an unfiltered way
unusual for media, let alone the often-conservative tilt of ethnic media organizations of
the day, such as the intimate nature of conversations around friends lost to drugs, or
interracial romance and ongoing stereotypes of both Asian American men and women
136

Figure 15. Unveiling of Home is Little Tokyo mural, 2005
Home is Little Tokyo mural by artists Tony Osumi, Jorge Diaz, and Sergio Diaz. Courtesy LTSC.

(fig. 14). The rhetoric used regarding political stances, race relations, and other social
concerns remains surprisingly contemporary nearly 50 years later, from its
condemnations of white supremacy, to its concerns about the representation (or lack
thereof) of Asian Americans in popular media, to its strongly anti-capitalist positions. Its
“People’s Page” was included in every issue as a space for submissions of poetry and art,
reflecting the intertwined nature of art and politics which was often taken for granted as a
given in this era (fig. 14).
More than just a newspaper, Gidra was a community of artist-activists, and staff
went on to found and work in community and activist organizations, such as the Little
Tokyo Service Center (LTSC), which have made Little Tokyo into what it is today.
LTSC has continued to support the arts through projects such as the public art installation
Harmony by local artist Nancy Uyemura at their Casa Heiwa housing development in
137

Figure 16. Performance of As We Babble On at East West Players, 2018
Filipino/Black actor Jiavani Linayao in As We Babble On, a play performed at East West Players in Little
Tokyo in 2018. The play was written by Nathan Ramos-Park who won East West Players’ 2042: See
Change Playwriting Competition for young playwrights of color and was directed by Alison De La Cruz.

1996, or the community-driven Home is Little Tokyo mural by Tony Osumi, Jorge Diaz
& Sergio Diaz in 2005 (fig. 15). Murals, in particular, are a distinctly Angeleno form of
public art based in its Latinx history, from David Alfaro Siqueiros América Tropical
(1932), to Judy Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles (1974-78) which included hundreds of
high school students co-creating the mural over several years. The 16x40’ Home in Little
Tokyo mural, situated on an exterior wall of the Japanese Village Plaza, fits within this
muralist tradition not necessarily through its visual aesthetic, which uses Japanese icons
such as cherry blossoms, kanji, and hiragana, but through the aesthetics of its production,
which brought together some 500 participants to collaborate on envisioning and
producing the mural. While relatively short lived, Gidra continues to loom large in the
political imaginary of the community, with two attempts at reviving its publication, and
its repeated use as a primary source for scholarly investigation.
138
Other organizations in Little Tokyo have emphasized live performance-based arts
and culture. Just a few years prior to Gidra and Visual Communications, East West
Players was founded in 1965 by nine Los Angeles-based Asian American artists who
realized that they would have to create their own space if they wanted to explore roles
apart from the stereotypical typecasting by studios and theaters. While East West Players
was not established as an explicitly activist or political organization, its intervention into
the American cultural landscape of the time was profound. Its archive holds
documentation from some 225 performances and thousands of workshops, readings, and
other forms of creative work since its founding, all of which chart changing notions of
Asian American identity, politics, and performance. It has long championed a diversity of
genres, from experimental and politically charged theater to American musicals, recasting
Asian American representation in the process. It has also been instrumental in changing
perceptions of LGBTQ people in the Asian American community, has provided support
and a home to young artists, and initiated community-building educational opportunities
(fig. 16). The organization has been a locus for community building and the construction
of an Asian American identity in which art, theater, and performance play an important
and public role.
(2) Institution building and capital investment, 1980-1999
During the 1970s, as art and culture matured in Little Tokyo, and as foreign direct
investment and as the CRA’s urban redevelopment began to transform the landscape,
these factors coalesced with community organizing and activism to channel these
resources into public cultural institutions which would provide some stability and
continuity for the community. This second period of arts activism existed from 1980 with
139
the creation of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center to 1999 with the
construction of the new Japanese American National Museum. These institutions would
be more resistant to the rapid pace of change brought on by commercial development
which could change hands at an instant, and would also be a material manifestation of the
neighborhood’s Japanese American and Asian American identity. The Japanese
government in collaboration with several large Japanese corporations had an interest in
establishing a center for Japanese culture in Little Tokyo, and after a long political battle
involving fundraising, activist actions, and negotiations between the community, the
CRA, and Japanese funders, the center was planned as not just a Japanese cultural center
but as a Japanese American cultural center, and as a community center for Little Tokyo,
in what ultimately became the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center
(JACCC) completed in 1980 — though, to this day, the Japanese transliteration of the
Center’s name remains the “Japan-US Culture Center,” perhaps as a means to placate
Japanese funders. Beyond a cultural center for housing classes and performances for
traditional forms of Japanese culture such as ikebana and calligraphy, there would also be
public space, a state-of-the-art theater for live stage performances, and perhaps most
importantly, offices for a range of cultural organizations and community non-profits.
JACCC would be the primary destination for the relocation of the numerous
organizations that were being evicted from the Sun Building redevelopment (see location
of Weller Court on map 3 at the beginning of this volume), and the CRA agreement
dictated that they would receive rent subsidies for the first five years of their new lease at
the JACCC building. The plaza in front of JACCC would go on to be designed by the
140
noted Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi as an abstract, modernist shrine to
honor the Issei.
Another major development was the creation of the Japanese American National
Museum (JANM) in 1992 which was first housed in the historic Hompa Hongwanji
Temple where Japanese Americans were processed to be sent away to camp during
WWII. The temple had moved to its current location down the street in 1969 because of
concerns about redevelopment and the City’s use of eminent domain. The idea for JANM
emerged during the 1980s just as Japanese Americans won their right to redress and
reparations from internment in 1988, and Japanese American businesses along with
public funding and JA veterans’ organizations saw fit to invest in Little Tokyo. With a
landmark exhibition in 1994 that described internment camps as “concentration camps,”
the museum has played an important role in opening up space for Japanese Americans to
discuss this painful history and also to create a space of acknowledgement and
remembrance within broader American society. JANM later moved into a new building
just across the temple in 1999 designed by Gyo Obata, a Japanese American architect
who narrowly avoided being sent to camp with his family by attending architecture
school in St. Louis and who went on to found the global design firm HOK. The old
temple building was at first used for offices and then later was established as the
permanent site for the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, a project of the
museum. JANM has been an important player on the national scene, partnering with the
Smithsonian and seen as a site of symbolic importance for Japanese American politicians,
as it houses a unique archive of materials including Issei oral histories, documents on
141
internment, and other artifacts of Japanese American heritage that might otherwise be lost
to history.
Another final development to note was the conversion of the old Union Church
building which had housed a historic Japanese American Christian church and was built
in 1923, into the Union Center for the Arts. Union Church moved into a new location in
1978 over worries that their building would be seized through eminent domain and
redeveloped, and the City of Los Angeles bought the property which ended up lying
dormant through the 1994 Northridge earthquake which severely damaged the decaying
building. The City agreed to lease the building to the Little Tokyo Service Center, an
important community development corporation in Little Tokyo founded by many of the
artists and activist who came of age during the 1960s in the neighborhood, for one dollar
a year if they would spend the $5 million necessary to repair and renovate the building.
The newly christened Union Center for the Arts became the home to East West Players,
Visual Communications, and LA Art Core, a visual arts gallery and non-profit
organization. This transformed the long-vacated space into a hotbed of Asian American
arts and culture in Little Tokyo, but it also saved the building from demolition — a
historic structure which was the locus for a great deal of Japanese American life in Little
Tokyo, including processing for internment, and rebuilding efforts, like other religious
institutions in the neighborhood.
Tuesday Night Cafe, an Asian American bimonthly performance and open mic
night held since 1998 showing music, stand-up comedy, spoken word, and other forms of
performance art, is in many ways the product of a culture produced and nurtured by East
West Players, and it has also taken place at the Union Center for the Arts. It also acts as a
142
site of community organizing and consciousness building for Asian Americans artists and
Little Tokyo-based organizations through arts and culture, creative expression, and social
engagement. It has been an especially important site for Asian American youth and
young adults who have historically had few public platforms for creative expression
through performance, and has acted as a means to sustain commitment to and interest in
the Little Tokyo community by a younger generation of artists and activists. While there
are numerous other arts and culture organizations and institutions in Little Tokyo,
JACCC, JANM, and the Union Center for the Arts stand out as icons in the community’s
effort to channel investment into organizations that are the have shared responsibility and
ownership, creating a bulwark against rapid urban change (see map 3 at beginning of this
volume). Beyond the issue of control and, especially, control of land in Little Tokyo,
these institutions have the multiplying effect of culture, each standing out as a
paradigmatic space for Japanese American and Asian American culture in the national
scene. They establish Little Tokyo as the preeminent cultural space for Japanese
Americans and Asian Americans not only within Southern California but around the
world, and this “soft power” enables political power as these institutions secure a space in
national histories, in spaces of artistic and cultural circulation, and within a shared,
collective identity within the community.
(3) Current period of gentrification and arts organizing, 2000-present
The final period of arts activism arose in tandem with what Alan Ehrenhalt has
termed “the great inversion” as longtime processes of suburbanization are reversed and
urban land close to city centers becomes increasingly valuable, from about 2000 onward
(Ehrenhalt 2013). Little Tokyo, at the heart of Los Angeles, and nestled between the
143

Figure 17. Activists at a landmark hearing for 800 Traction Avenue
The activists, photographed here in 2018, include many longtime residents from 800 Traction, including
Nancy Uyemura who had lived in the building since it was first converted from industrial to residential use
in 1980. 800 Traction was one of the first such conversions in the Arts District, with live-work artists
spaces being created in a neighborhood that, at that point, was largely abandoned and vacant. Now, after
their building was purchased by a developer, they were all evicted and likely could not have afforded the
exorbitant rents to stay regardless. They used every tool available to them to protest the eviction, including
media strategies, community organizing, protesting, showing up to public hearings, and attempting to use
the historic preservation process, but ultimately all of the residents were evicted in 2018, many of whom
had to leave Los Angeles altogether because of the high rental prices. Uyemura’s sign reads “PLUM your
own ass!!” which references the Los Angeles Planning and Land Use Management committee. Photo
courtesy Jennifer Swann.

Civic Center and the trendy Arts District, has seen some of the greatest of these
pressures. This process began around the turn of the millennium, and increased rapidly
with the first bubble which popped in the financial crisis of 2008, but contrary to
expectations, came roaring back only a few years later with current land values higher
than they have ever been before. One key narrative of arts activism within this period is
144
the example of 800 Traction, a building adjacent to Little Tokyo which has strong
connections with the community because of its former use as live-work artists’ lofts with
a strong Japanese American presence (see map 3 at the beginning of this volume). The
building was first converted into live-work artists’ lofts in 1980 with several important
Japanese American artists moving in including Matsumi “Mike” Kanemitsu, Bruce and
Norman Yonemoto, and Nancy Uyemura. Uyemura lived in 800 Traction up until 2018
when it was purchased by a development company who promptly filed redevelopment
plans for the building and sent out eviction notices to tenants. The tenants organized
rallies, attended hearings, and produced activist art events such as an “eviction gallery
show” in which many works of arts and belongings were sold off.
The artists were ultimately not successful in their attempt to thwart the
development. Their efforts involved using every tool available, from media campaigns, to
direct action, to using planning tools such as historic designation to slow development.
But few things can slow development guaranteed through entitlements claimed through
property ownership in the American property rights regime — and property developers
have become savvy to many of these techniques, deploying high-powered lawyers, and
weaponizing processes such as historic designation as well. The tenants had to relocate
with many moving to other areas in Los Angeles with lower rents and more available
space, and some leaving Los Angeles altogether. Uyemura, for her part, remained in
Little Tokyo because of her connections to the community — it was not only her literal,
but also her spiritual home. Her work since this effort has taken on issues of
gentrification, with engagement in other activist campaigns, and one can even consider
the artistry of the tenant’s organizing and sign making as Uyemura implored the City’s
145
Planning and Land Use Management committee to “PLUM your own ass!!” Their efforts
are the direct product of a culture of activism and political engagement borne out of Little
Tokyo, and though their efforts may have appeared in vain, with Uyemura now having to
commute to Gardena for studio space, they were a public and visible reminder of the
power found in collective organizing and action amidst the seemingly unstopping forces
of gentrification and urban change in the capitalist city. As the artists proclaimed in one
of their public statements, “We are looking at a possibility of a Little Tokyo without
Japanese, and an Arts District without artists.”
This history of arts and activism in Little Tokyo is an active one which continues
to this day, informing the culture and practice of politics in the community. A culturally
specific Asian American aesthetics of activism suffuses the various forms of visual and
performance-based art, creating a signaling mechanism for art practices which are of the
community. It is one that is based in time-based and process-oriented work driven
through the interests of an Asian American identity and the long-term sustainability of
Little Tokyo as a spiritual home for that identity, rather than commercial or monetary
interests often found in the contemporary art market. All of these elements add up to
produce ibasho in Little Tokyo, as well as construct a set of practices which can sustain
and protect it.

Protecting Ibasho in a Changing City

Little Tokyo stands as one of the last three remaining Japantowns in the United
States, along with the Japantowns in San Francisco and San Jose, as defined by California
146
state resolution (Preserving California Japantowns 2010). Because of its status as the
location of so many of the major Japanese American and Asian American cultural
institutions, it has become not only the primary Japantown for Southern California, but
even the United States. It is, in the words of one of the community leaders that I
interview in the next chapter, “the mother ship.” Because of this, the community has
rallied around protecting Little Tokyo from forces of eminent domain, urban renewal, and
now gentrification, ensuring that it will continue to exist for generations to come. It is the
spatialized manifestation of Japanese American identity and because of its cultural status
and history of arts and activism, it has seen success that many other communities look to,
even in spite of the great challenges it has faced over the years. Indeed, even Japantowns
that were once thought to be fading have reasserted their Japanese American identity,
such as in the case of Sawtelle Japantown on Los Angeles’s Westside, which successfully
secured an official neighborhood name and sign from the City of Los Angeles declaring it
as a Japantown — perhaps bringing the number of official Japantowns up to four, but
also potentially becoming a historical marker rather than a sign for an active Japantown,
depending on if it can keep its hold onto place as successfully as Little Tokyo (Kim et al.
forthcoming). Given Little Tokyo’s history of arts and activism, what are some of the
historical and cultural themes that have allowed it to hold on to place and protect ibasho?
Important themes in Little Tokyo’s activist art and culture that have become part
of the Japanese American and Asian American community in this neighborhood include
(1) the politics of Asian American representation (coincident with the emergence of the
term Asian American itself); (2) a local, place-based culture that engaged with global
political struggles; (3) inter-ethnic and intersectional solidarity; (4) and inter-generational
147
continuity. These themes have been critical in how and way activists in Little Tokyo have
taken political action and engaged public participation through and with the use of art and
culture. The Gidra and Visual Communications images included in this chapter
demonstrate these themes, with the image above, for example, showing a direct and
symbolic intervention into the politics of Asian American representation at a moment
where a political identity and consciousness for Asian Americans was itself being
constructed. In images earlier in this chapter, we see activists in Little Tokyo engaging
with the redevelopment of their community in relation to global processes such as flows
of capital (fig. 13) or anti-war efforts (fig. 10). Activists and artists were careful to
collaborate and engage with those from other cultural backgrounds (fig. 11), with
language around “yellow power” and white supremacy borrowed from the Black Power
Movement, Asian American youth brought to see Black artists in South LA, and Black
youth invited into arts and culture workshops in Little Tokyo.
One of the most significant cultural aspects of Little Tokyo which was both
constructed by and manifested in arts and culture was intergenerational continuity made
possible through cultural values of respect for elders. Many of the young activists got
their start through organizations such as the Pioneer Center which provided services to
elderly Issei immigrants. Shared cultural events were created specifically to engage older
Japanese Americans and to continue on cultural traditions and reclaim history for
younger generations, such as the Manzanar Pilgrimage which began in 1969 and the
Wildflower Trip started also around the same time.
9
These were opportunities to build

9
The Manzanar Pilgrimage began in 1969 as a group of Sansei students who had also been agitating for the
establishment of Asian American studies departments around California brought their parents and
grandparents to visit and remember the history of Japanese American internment, planting the seeds for the
redress movement and more open acknowledgement of this painful history (Manzanar Committee 2011).
148
links between generations and ensure that activism and culture would continue on from
one generation to the next, unlike many communities which suffer from a loss of youth
participation until there are fewer leaders and participants in organizations, and there is
no shared culture to speak of. Elders, for their part, have also needed to respond to and
respect a changing culture to ensure this generational transfer, empowering and enabling
younger leaders who may have different ideas on how to run things.
To what extent does the specificity of place play a role in cultures of participation,
especially around the politics of gentrification? This theme has driven numerous forms of
political participation in Little Tokyo, and the politics of gentrification are on the one
hand subject to this specific culture, but on the other are distinct in that they are also
intertwined with the nature of place as it changes. As gentrification transforms Little
Tokyo, its culture is also changed, which can strengthen or weaken the community’s
ability to respond. One key effort which has emerged at the nexus of the specificity of
Little Tokyo’s shared culture, the leadership of three community organizations (JACCC,
LTSC, and the Little Tokyo Community Council or LTCC), and a number of artists and
activists is the coalition Sustainable Little Tokyo (SLT) which has arisen to respond to
the challenge of a changing Little Tokyo. It fits squarely into the final period of arts
activism, demonstrating, in many ways, the clearest example of the product of Little
Tokyo’s long history of art, culture, and politics. It is also unique in that, in contrast to
dominant discussions around the role of art in gentrification, it exists as a model wherein
art and culture are explicitly used for community organizing to activate against

The Wildflower Trip was initiated by the Pioneer Center, giving an opportunity for younger Japanese
Americans to escort their elders on a trip to view flowers blossoming, most notably occurring in 1971, and
it is unclear how often this trip recurred or when it stopped happening (Jeung et al. 2019).
149
gentrification. This case will be explored further in Chapter 6. A number of community
elders have also seen the transformation of Little Tokyo, including both its culture over
generational shifts, along with its material landscape as gentrification has threatened the
community’s continuity. In the next chapter, I will discuss findings from a series of key
informant interviews with these community leaders which triangulate, inform, and extend
many of the findings from this chapter. Across the histories of community development,
art and culture, and political engagement in Little Tokyo, we can see how they changed
over time, as well as some preliminary threads on how they are interrelated. But through
deeper interrogation with the community leaders of today who lived through many of
these transformations, as we will do in the next chapter, we can begin to paint a fuller
picture of how these changes intersected with one another.

150
Chapter 4: Welcome to Little Tokyo (Please Take Off
Your Shoes)

In the previous chapter, we explored the transformation of Little Tokyo over time,
especially as it underwent multiple significant challenges to its continuity and longevity
as a place. Little Tokyo has faced racial discrimination, the wholesale uprooting of its
residents during the WWII relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans, the
seizure of much of its land by the City of Los Angeles through the use of eminent
domain, and ongoing economic pressures, including an influx of foreign capital and
urban renewal, and current pressures of gentrification. Throughout all of these challenges,
Little Tokyo has improbably held on to place, largely through the resilience and strength
of its shared identity as a Japanese American and Asian American community, forging a
distinct and place-based culture over time through the practice of traditional forms of art
and culture, the establishment of arts and culture institutions, and the use of art and
culture as a means for activating and organizing the community politically.
In this chapter, we will explore additional data collected from 18 face-to-face key
informant interviews conducted with important figures in Little Tokyo’s current
landscape of activists, organizers, and institutional leaders. The interviewees represented
a diverse selection of key stakeholders from Little Tokyo, and ranged in age, position,
and gender, though interviewees were all Japanese American or Asian American. About
half of the interviewees identified as artists, including visual artists, performing artists
and musicians, and writers. Many interviewees have connections to multiple
151
organizations, and they represent a wide range of affiliations, institutional knowledge,
and perspectives. These key informants have lived through much of the history described
in the previous chapter and can provide us with firsthand knowledge and insider
perspectives on the questions this volume addresses. Namely, in the case of Little Tokyo,
how does culture intersect with political participation? Have art and culture been a part of
producing meaningful participation for the Japanese American community in Little
Tokyo? The wide range of topics that these interviewees discussed also touch on a wider
constellation of research questions that this chapter addresses.
These interviews give us insight into the thinking behind Little Tokyo’s
community leaders, and color our understanding of its history, relationship to art and
culture, and culture of participation by informing us of how its leaders see these things.
For example, how intentional were Little Tokyo’s leaders in using culture as a political
tool? Are we defining culture in the same way as these leaders? What kind of political
participation is important — and can we see changes over time in different generations of
leadership? And these interviews provide a window into the thinking and process behind
many of the important institutional decisions made by cultural and community
organizations that have grounded and constructed Little Tokyo, such as JACCC and
JANM, because of the positionality of the interviewees and their relationship to these
institutions in staff and leadership positions. The Japanese American Cultural and
Community Center (JACCC) plays an especially strong role at the intersection of arts,
culture, and political engagement in Little Tokyo, and is frequently discussed in this
chapter. Beyond these particular insights, of course, these interviews are useful in
triangulating and verifying the findings from our previous chapter. In particular, they
152
highlight the ways in which the histories of community development, threats to place,
arts and culture, and political engagement — often historicized separately, especially
with regard to arts and culture, within narratives of specific places — are actually
intertwined (cf. Fallon and Fox 2014; Pulido 2006).
The complete set of interview questions is reproduced within chapter 2 of this
volume, contextualized within this project’s larger research design, and as such will not
be duplicated here. But some of the underlying research questions driving the interview
questions and direction of the research project are worth some additional reflection. The
first question was to ask how and why the respondent was connected to Little Tokyo as a
place. Often, this question would elicit a lengthy response which included the
respondents’ family and personal history, their connection to some kind of institution or
organization in Little Tokyo and that organizations history and current status, and current
concerns that the respondent has about what is going on in Little Tokyo today. Factors
involving Little Tokyo’s role in the city, grounded in a specific place, and its culture both
historically and contemporaneously often arose without having to directly probe. From
here, only a few probes were necessary to direct the narrative into themes, topics, and
issues relevant to this volume’s research questions. This was especially true for
respondents who were artists and for whom art and culture played a big role in their
connection to Little Tokyo, for example by being a staff member at JACCC. In other
instances, additional specific questions were necessary to glean insight into the
respondents’ views on issues related to this volume’s research questions regarding art,
culture, and urban change. In these instances, key questions included asking the
respondent, first: what the role of art and culture was in Little Tokyo historically, what it
153
is today, and how that has changed over time? Second: how has Little Tokyo managed to
hold on to its place, especially given its historical challenges, and what role has arts and
culture played in this? A handful of additional specific questions and probes were used to
ascertain the respondents’ views on community organizing, social networks within Little
Tokyo, and urban change and gentrification currently faced by Little Tokyo.

Triangulating a History of Arts Activism

To summarize the history of Little Tokyo as it relates to its community
development, threats to ibasho, and arts and cultural landscape, first we can describe
Little Tokyo as having a history of challenges, including (1) redlining and racial
discrimination in space since the neighborhood’s founding; (2) Japanese internment
during WWII, (3) the City of Los Angeles’s use of eminent domain in 1940-50s; (4) the
rise of urban redevelopment in the 1960s; (5) an influx of foreign corporate capital in
1970-80s; and (6) the current period of gentrification and displacement. We can describe
the culture of Little Tokyo as one which first emerged from the traditional Japanese art
and culture brought by Issei immigrants, and one which was often reproduced through
religious institutions, but also as one which evolved with younger generations who
hybridized it with strains of American culture to produce a distinct Japanese American
“third culture” — and it continues to evolve with each subsequent generation. Little
Tokyo has seen four periods of political engagement through culture, each of which
responds to particular challenges to its development: (1) community and identity building
through forging a shared culture up through 1962; (2) the rise of new generation of arts
154
activists who were responding to redevelopment from 1962-1979; (3) channeling capital
investment into cultural institutions from 1980-1999; and (4) the current period of
gentrification and arts organizing, 2000-present. Important themes in Little Tokyo’s art
and culture include: (1) the politics of Asian American representation (coincident with
the emergence of the term Asian American itself); (2) a local, place-based culture that
engaged with global political struggles; (3) inter-ethnic and intersectional solidarity; and
(4) intergenerational continuity. Do these findings hold up in the responses of our
interviewees?
Largely, yes, though respondents did not describe redlining and racial
discrimination in general terms, and at times did not bring up religious institutions
without probing. This may have been, in part, due to these histories playing out often
before their lifetimes, and current leaders having a more tenuous relationship to religious
institutions — which are, themselves, losing parishioners and playing a smaller role in
community affairs today (Twenge 2016; Greenberg 2000). For most of the respondents,
while they at times shared family histories which predated WWII, that period of time and
Japanese American internment served as a symbolic starting point for Little Tokyo’s
history in terms of its community development, and in terms of a mental touchstone or
shared Japanese American identity. As one respondent described, the shared history of
incarceration during WWII has instilled a sense that everything can be taken away, and it
produced a culture of activism and engagement. The community needs to have activists
who respond to threats to ibasho and who manage changings to the neighborhood and so-
called gentrifiers, as one respondent explained, because, “We can’t stay silent, and we
need to let people know we won’t stand for it — we will welcome you, but you need to
155
know what you’re coming into.” Internment serves as a breaking point in the
development of Japanese American identity and for Little Tokyo after which nothing was
taken for granted, trust from outsiders had to be earned, and the community had to stick
together. Another respondent described the fact that, like all communities, we “still will
have feuds and rivalries, but when push comes to shove, when it comes to Little Tokyo,
people do what they can to be helpful.”
It was this newfound activist culture which emerged as the Parker Center
development, CRA plans, and the use of eminent domain riled up the community. But
Japanese Americans in Little Tokyo walked a fine line between outright antagonistic
activism and maintaining a healthy enough relationship with public agencies as to take
advantage of their resources. One respondent described how they were “still pissed” by
the Parker Center development, but they still were able to work with the city to get funds
for relocated their business, which ended up being a locus of activity for community
organizing and discussions around how to combat redevelopment in the 70s. Many of the
interviewees were actively involved in the generation of up and coming activists in the
70s, with respondents being active in civil rights and antiwar movements, and the
burgeoning Asian American political consciousness that led the interviewees to take
direct actions that led to the formation of Asian American studies programs and centers in
California universities — and some even took jobs in them. Others remained active
through the redress movement, forming Nikkei Civil Rights and Redress (NCRR). And
many were active in the collective of artists who created Gidra.
Almost all of the respondents described the importance of Nisei Week in forging
a sense of identity in the 1930s, reclaiming pride in that identity during the 1950s after
156
internment, and how it was a key event which organized the community and brought it
together up to the present day — and it was through walking this fine line between
antagonistic activism and collaboration with city officials that ensured a permanent
budget line from public funding for Nisei Week planning and programming. Many of the
respondents, ranging from some who were connected through cultural ties such as
employment at JACCC, to those who were more activist in nature, to those who had
businesses, to those who now stay connected to Little Tokyo for a sense of personal
belonging and history all described how they had participated in planning committees,
donated their time and money, and remained connected to a wide range of friends and
fellow Little Tokyo stakeholders through the process of planning and executing this
annual event. Respondents also described how it wasn’t just people that connected
through Nisei Week, but also institutions: all of the cultural organizations play a part in
making the event happen, and it is remarkable that it even brings together different
religious groups, as both Christian and Buddhist churches work together to host various
events during the Week.
Nisei Week may have played a bigger role in the past, as multiple respondents
described a “heyday” in the 1970s when it took over a larger geography within Little
Tokyo, such as the carnival which was located in Weller Court, allowing dozens of non-
profit organizations, volunteer associations, and community groups to set up booths, ask
their members to come, and raise money for their various causes. Now that Japanese
Americans don’t necessarily need to commute into Little Tokyo for grocery items and
other goods that they can now get in other locations, Nisei Week remains as an annual
traditional that brings in the broader Japanese American community to the neighborhood
157
as a “homecoming.” As one respondent described, its original purpose in producing
business for the local mom and pop shops still stands, but now there is also a broader
understanding of its role in promoting Japanese American arts and culture. Another
described it as a way for a broader multicultural population, and a younger generation of
Japanese Americans to plug into Little Tokyo, noting that many new activities have been
instituted to attract a younger audience. Yet, at the same time, this need to constantly
reinvent Nisei Week to continue drawing a crowd points toward difficulties in keeping
this legacy institution going at the scale it has historically been used to.
Many of the interviewees saw a direct line from the arts-based activism
responding to urban renewal and redevelopment of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s to the
gentrification and community organizing of today. While building owners, “Japan, Inc.”
and LA city officials each had their own motives and pet projects, they all worked
together in a way that is strikingly similar to today’s gentrification concerns revolving
around LA Metro, corporate investment, and building owners who cannot be controlled
by the community nor have Little Tokyo’s interests at heart — or any interests apart from
a return on investment. The most iconic places and organizations threatened by urban
redevelopment and gentrification both then and now were arts-related, including the Sun
Building in the 1970s and 800 Traction today, and each saw arts-based forms of activism
such as the symbolic production of protest sign drops at the Sun Building or the
production of an “Eviction Gallery Show” at 800 Traction. Arts and activism revolved
around each other, at times being synonymous, and at other times operating separately
but remaining connected through specific sites and people.
158
Consider this narrative, shared with me from an interviewee: The Japanese
American Community Services-Asian Involvement (JACS-AI) was formed during the
1960s and 70s as a Japanese American welfare rights organization who focused
especially on the elderly in Little Tokyo. This organization along with LTPRO and many
others provided a network of services and activism. But because there were so many
existing associations, churches, non-profit organizations, and service providers, there was
a lot of overlap — 14 of these joined to form the Little Tokyo Service Center (LTSC) in
1979, and this increased strength gave the community more power to respond to concerns
around redevelopment. This cooperative approach is evident today, as well, in things like
the Sustainable Little Tokyo coalition. But the formulation of LTSC was something of a
fluke: one community leader received a community development block grant for the city
to help displaced tenants (many of them arts and culture organizations) of the Sun
Building with rent subsidies, but discovered that the funds could only be used for direct
services. So, instead, LTSC formed to take these funds and use them, while shared
activism saw to it that the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC)
development had a stipulation providing five years of rent subsidies, where many of these
displaced cultural and community organizations would be relocated. Arts and activism
were not synonymous in this case, but were inextricably connected through the nature of
the actors in Little Tokyo, the kinds of funding and development that were unfolding,
and, ultimately, a set of happenstance circumstances.
Respondents also had an ambivalent view toward Japanese corporate investment
and CRA funding from the 1970s and 80s and while the overall effect of organizing and
activism did indeed channel many of these resources into community cultural institutions,
159
not all of these efforts were seen as successful. Much of the development and urban
renewal went into commercial projects, and even JACCC was seen as somewhat
beholden to Japanese interests with a sense that Japanese funders looked down on Little
Tokyo and Japanese Americans as provincial. Many of the commercial projects were
thought to be intentionally developed for and catered to Japanese tourists, which led to
problems in the 1990s after the bubble burst, leaving Little Tokyo in the lurch. Important
political figures such as California State Assemblymember Warren Furutani and US
Senator Daniel Inouye both fought against their clout to establish ties with foreign
entities that would lead to funding, and also to protect public funding in the US for
institutions like JACCC and JANM. But beyond foreign investment and CRA funding,
much of the funding for these organizations must also be attributed to Japanese
Americans who prodigiously raised money from small donors, many of whom gave a
portion of their redress money, to establish these institutions as a Nisei and Sansei legacy.
Coincident with these institutions being established, many of the religious
institutions which had left Little Tokyo because of redevelopment, losing property during
internment, or concerns about Little Tokyo fading into blight, ended up returning to the
neighborhood, providing more institutional depth and density to the geographically small
area (see map 2 at the beginning of this volume). Furthermore, as JANM held a landmark
exhibition which acknowledge internment as a form of “concentration camp” and with an
official visit from the Emperor and Empress of Japan to Little Tokyo, the area was seen
as back on a track to vitality and importance to the Japanese American community. This,
like so many other narratives around the revitalization of ethnic communities, plays a fine
line between wanted revitalization and unwanted gentrification, a line that was crossed as
160
chain stores, market rate condos, and LA Metro development arrived into the community
during the 2000s. And even as the community continues on its trajectory of red-hot
economic development, institutions like JANM are still seen as somewhat financially
unstable. There is a sense among the interviewees that for all their successes over the
years, Little Tokyo could still evaporate overnight if, like dominos, some of the
community institutions fail, or if community leaders make poor decisions about what
changes are good and which ought to be fought — a sense that is in part driven by the
memory of internment. And this sense is only more active today as the dramatic increases
in property values have stunned interviewees, a reality that was unimaginable in the
1990s when Little Tokyo looked like it was destined to be abandoned and boarded up.
Many of these interviewees have been active in a range of contemporary fights against
gentrification, such as the ongoing Sustainable Little Tokyo coalition, and against
developments that portent urban redevelopment, such as previous LA Metro alignments
that would have razed large portions of the community.

Holding On to Place

An overarching question for this volume, and one that was raised again by the
findings from the previous chapter, is how Little Tokyo managed to hold on to its place
in the city, especially given the range of challenges that they have faced historically and
with threats of gentrification today. This question is a germane one not only for the case
of Little Tokyo, but also for all ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods in cities which are
facing the threat of gentrification — which, in 2019, is nearly every city, including many
161
cities that are not global centers such as Los Angeles, including rustbelt cities and smaller
cities. Little Tokyo provides a unique case of a community which has, though not always,
staved off forces of redevelopment, gentrification, and displacement, despite a long
history of unparalleled challenges such as internment. In a way, as described in the
previous section, the experience of internment transformed a community which was eager
to assimilate into and assume the best of dominant, white, capitalized American culture
into one which was more politically activated, organized, and savvy to threats to their
place. If Little Tokyo can provide even a handful of tactics for stopping or slowing
gentrification that are generalizable to communities that may not have the same
circumstances or Japanese American heritage, they will be welcome in the limited toolkit
of resistance in communities that are facing similar challenges. In analyzing the
responses from interviewees, we can make a few claims regarding at least how leaders in
Little Tokyo understand their own ability to hold on to place. Beyond a number of
historical and contextual factors which I will discuss, major themes to emerge include the
organizing culture of the community, its understanding of structural factors of
gentrification, and its history of arts and culture which have both inoculated it to some
degree from arts-based gentrification as well as provided important tools for stemming or
slowing gentrification.
The first set of factors that have allowed Little Tokyo to hold on to place are
historical and contextual and, for the most part, are not transferable to other
neighborhoods who face similar challenges. One key contextual factor is that Little
Tokyo is primarily a community with commercial and institutional property and a
relatively small amount of residential property. In some ways this has been a hindrance
162
because the low number of residents has historically been problematic for local
businesses in finding a stable clientele, and also the community has not been able to form
the kind of homeowners’ associations which have often been politically powerful in
staking a claim over territory (though not without concerns regarding race, class, and
equity). Prior to internment, Little Tokyo was a thriving residential community of almost
30,000 people, but after the postwar rebuilding of the community, little housing was
available and Japanese Americans largely settled in other communities of Los Angeles or
even farther out in suburbs like Gardena. Respondents all described varying degrees of
connection to Little Tokyo in their youth, with some having a regular presence through a
family business, but most only stopping in on weekends or for events, and some having
little to no connection at all, with their families having settled in far-flung suburban
communities in Orange County or Imperial County. Only during redevelopment of the
1970s did a large population of elderly and retired Japanese Americans move back into
the community as major housing projects were built, and only after the 2000s were a
large number of market rate condominium buildings constructed — many residents of
which were not Japanese American and did not have strong ties to the community.
Despite the problems that this low residential quality presented for Little Tokyo,
in other ways, it made the community much more manageable with regard to the threat of
gentrification. The high density of property owned by religious institutions, community
organizations, and cultural entities ensured that land was held in trust for a non-profit
motive, taking it out of the realm of land speculation. And while commercial property is
in many ways more prone to real estate price inflation and speculation, there were a
number of long-time Japanese American property owners who held at least a partial
163
interest in the community and ensuring that their land would not go to uses which were
detrimental to Little Tokyo’s long-term viability. Finally, there has been some capacity
for community control over many of these commercial properties through organizing,
socialization of property owners through entities such as the Little Tokyo Business
Association, and the use of city planning and land use regulation to ensure that
commercial uses completely out of sync with the community were not allowed. A
community campaign to designate the historical preservation of First Street North, for
example, was one way to ensure that this key block of small businesses in the heart of
Little Tokyo would not be demolished to make way for larger buildings and retail spaces
for corporate lessees.
The other major historical factor which has allowed Little Tokyo to hold on to
place has been the economic history and timing of the neighborhood’s development.
Many of the institutions which were built in Little Tokyo during the 1980s and 90s did so
at a time when Los Angeles as a whole was experiencing a dramatic economic downturn
in contrast to much of the rest of the US. Aerospace was leaving, many of the Cold War
government contracts which ensured a steady flow of investment into LA were drying up,
and investors were also jittery about the 1994 Northridge earthquake and race relations in
the city after the 1992 LA Uprising. This, while also creating problems for Little Tokyo
in the form of underinvestment, many businesses closing, and a problem with public
safety and cleanliness, nevertheless allowed these organizations to buy land at low prices.
The same organizations would find similar land acquisitions nearly impossible at today’s
inflated prices, and a case in point is the Budokan development whose trajectory took
some 30 years to raise money, acquire land, and proceed with construction in contrast to
164
the much shorter time horizons for other projects like JANM’s new building or JACCC.
Then, as respondents described, revitalization — or gentrification, to use the term’s evil
twin — began in the community just in time after this economic downturn before all of
the mom and pop businesses went out of business. Strategies for anti-gentrification in
2019 do not have the historical luxury of such good timing and, instead, must contend
with dramatically inflated property prices and an unclear future for economic growth. I
will discuss the issue of property rights in more detail later on, however this strategy of
creating a spatial distribution of land within a community that is not beholden to the real
estate speculation of private owners remains an overlooked and promising strategy for
other communities which are facing threats of gentrification.
Beyond these historical and contextual factors, the single most important factor
that has allowed Little Tokyo to hold on to place is one that was described as cultural by
respondents: the community of people with ties to Little Tokyo has a propensity to
organize. Here the term culture is used more broadly than the specific manifestations of
art and other expressive forms but, rather, is used as it is in the social sciences to describe
the values, practices, and norms which define a community, a “collective programming
of the mind” (Hofstede 2001). Stakeholders in Little Tokyo, owing to their shared
Japanese American identity forged in the immigrant ethos of Isseis and in the injustice of
internment, have a strong sense of community and the importance of collective
wellbeing. One respondent told me a joke: “What happens when three Isseis walk into a
room? They start a newspaper!” Other respondents variously described the community as
“uber organized,” “super organized” or even “over-organized.” Some respondents griped
about how many meetings everyone was always having, but their importance was
165
acknowledged: “Who meets more than we do? But it’s the only way you can have
exchanges.” And this culture of organizing was not solely political or in opposition to
various postwar challenges, but was embedded into the community’s DNA from its
inception when nearly all of the Issei immigrants formed their kenjinkai associations,
mutual aid groups based on their prefecture of origin in Japan.
This particular culture of organizing was associated by many respondents with
Japanese American identity. Cultural tropes that supported an organizing and activist
mindset were baked into Japanese American upbringing through a number of sayings.
“Kodomo no tame ni” translates to something like “for the sake of the children,” and
refers to self-sacrifice that ensures a healthy future for a community. “Ganbaru” is a
command that means “give it your all” and suggests that community members shouldn’t
half-commit to things, but should fight for what they believe in. “Issho-kenmei” is
another phrase that suggests if something is worth doing, then it is only worth doing with
all your strength — and etymologically has its roots in keeping one’s land at the risk of
one’s own life, an apt term for thinking about gentrification. Other cultural factors which
contribute to the organization of the community proposed by interviewees include
notions of perseverance, valuing learning and education, putting the community above
the individual, and communicating in an indirect way. As one respondent described, these
traits have allowed Little Tokyo to organize and activate without some of the “ego
tripping” that can often occur in politics and activism — not that it never happens here at
times too, however. And, of course, many of these traits have a flipside: one respondent
noted how people in Little Tokyo often have an indirect mode of communicating, which
166
can be useful in avoiding conflict but can also create miscommunications or prevent
situations where conflict may be needed.
But this culture cannot only be chalked up to a shared family origin, as many of
the interviewees suggested, especially given the fact that many of these respondents are
third and even fourth generation Americans. A culture of organizing comes out of a
shared identity forged in opposition to threats to that identity, along with a practice of
political engagement honed over several decades. The work of establishing this culture
has been cited as one of the most difficult parts of community organizing and activism
(cf. Castells 1983). The long history of threats to ibasho and responses to those threats, as
described in the previous chapter, is almost certainly part of how Little Tokyo,
specifically, has developed this propensity to organize. Respondents described the ways
in which the community in Little Tokyo had to change its behaviors and speak out about
uncomfortable topics, such as the history of internment, in order to organize and achieve
political aims. And, moreover, the development of this culture was aided through actual
artistic practice and production, such as in the 2019 performance Tales of Clamor,
sponsored by JACCC and Nikkei Civil Rights and Redress (NCRR), to engage the
specific questions of cultural propensities for staying quiet or speaking out. The explicit
backdrop in the performance was the history of people who, over time, built the courage
to speak out about their experiences in internment camps under the auspices of the
redress movement, but, implicitly, the performance also pointed toward the myriad social
injustices of today, from family separations at the border to Islamophobia, which demand
people to speak out. So Little Tokyo’s propensity for organizing may, indeed, be culture,
but not in the sense of being some part of an essentialized part of ethnicity. Instead, this
167
culture of organizing is specific to the people and place of Little Tokyo, perhaps initially
made possible through a shared ethnic identity, but cultivated over a long period of time
through collective responses to threats to ibasho, and a practice of politically engaged arts
and culture.
Many of these cultural factors have also been useful in the community’s ability to
“infiltrate” city political and planning processes, as several respondents described.
Historically, Japanese Americans and Asian Americans have managed to take on jobs
within the City of Los Angeles or the CRA, and have moved up the ranks to where they
can nudge the needle on projects to ensure that the community is being served.
Community members have also actively joined advisory committees that ensured their
voices would be heard throughout planning processes. Leaders of non-profit
organizations and institutions also became savvy to funding mechanisms and exploited
programs like the CRA’s percent for art program to ensure that funding continued to
benefit the community. The Little Tokyo Business Association was one organization that
was mentioned as savvy to the political machinations of LA City Council, and early
leaders of JACCC knew how to tap into local and national funding for the arts, sharing
these skills and knowhow with community members in other spaces. As one respondent
described, “We’ve gotten smarter, we’ve gotten better at demanding stuff — you learn as
you go along, you get more savvy and aggressive.”
Another factor that has allowed Little Tokyo to hold on to its place is that the
community is very savvy to the role of property rights and land ownership in the process
of redevelopment and gentrification. The community organized and pushed institutions to
re-centralize in Little Tokyo during the 1990s — conveniently though only in part
168
intentionally at a moment when property values were low. Many churches and temples
that had relocated outside of Little Tokyo were compelled to return, and organizations
such as LTSC, East West Players, and Visual Communications established permanent
new homes in newly developed buildings. A common trend for with immigrant enclaves
is that as second, third, and forth generations assimilate, they also move into more
spatially diffuse patterns, often draining life out of what was once an important ethnic
hub (Ellis and Wright 2005; Li 2006; Toji and Umemoto 2003). By intentionally
organizing around bringing these cultural institutions — which draw people in across a
much larger geography, despite where their home is located — back into a centralized
location, it ensures the longevity and vitality of Little Tokyo to continue on long past a
community dependent on localized residential and commercial activity alone. Beyond the
material concern of land ownership and property rights, Little Tokyo has also gained
symbolic centrality and importance through this process much in the same way that
nation-states imbued their capital cities with symbolic power as urban design scholars
such as Lawrence Vale have discussed (Vale 1992). This phenomenon emphasizes the
“civic” aspect of civic expression, pointing toward material, collective, and public means
by which Little Tokyo has managed to build symbolic power that has, in turn, enabled its
ability to hold on to place.
Many respondents noted the importance of land ownership, with one joking that
the activist art he wants to do is a 50-foot-tall Godzilla statue that will scare away land
speculators. There is a general awareness of the importance of securing title, especially as
property is passed down to younger generations who may not have a connection to Little
Tokyo, and efforts to track these changes are underway. One respondent described how
169
many people just see the surface, but they think of “the layer underneath” that is
invisible, but is even more important because it is about ownership and control of land.
The difficulty, however, is real, as respondents described how time after time, a building
might appear the same without any changes in tenants, but they will discover that a large
land transaction occurred and, sure enough, years later, visible changes will start to
emerge. Other ways in which community members have been savvy to the importance of
land ownership have been through getting onto land use committees who at least have
some say in how property is used, and in another case, the community was able to get the
city to vacate an unused and ill-maintained street and turn it over to a community
institution free of charge.
The development of the Little Tokyo Community Council (LTCC) was
intertwined with the history of unwanted development in Little Tokyo, formed when two
community leaders called each other in a panic when they noticed that a key parcel of
land was developed into an Office Max. They realized that the community, despite
having such a rich culture of organizing and non-profit organizations, needed a venue
where they could represent the entire community and speak with a singular voice when it
came to issues of urban development and property rights. Otherwise, they would not have
the political power to combat unwanted gentrification. LTCC has grown as a unique
community council that gives voice to all of Little Tokyo’s diverse stakeholders,
including residents, owners, business owners, non-profit organizations, cultural
institutions, religious institutions, and so on. The organization, respondents noted, was
also one that is become a locus of knowledge with regard to urban development and city
planning processes. It has become a site where the community can not only create and
170
voice political power, but can proactively using planning techniques to make sure that the
development of the community is headed in the direction that they want. This has also
been an important venue for internal community discussions where interests of more pro-
development stakeholders can be balanced with activist concerns around equity, because
all of the stakeholders are represented. As one interviewee described, “We’re between
two concepts of Little Tokyo: how do we get there? Everybody’s checking each other.
We need transparency but also ownership of community.”
Two recent initiatives also point toward the general awareness of property rights
and their importance. The Sustainable Little Tokyo (SLT) coalition, which will be
described in much greater detail in a later chapter as a notable and unique case study,
began as an effort to exert control over three large publicly owned parcels in the
neighborhood. The First Street North parcel, currently a large city-owned parking lot, the
LA Metro Regional Connector site which is under construction, and the Mangrove parcel
which is currently being used as a construction staging site for LA Metro were all
identified as publicly owned and, as such, susceptible to community organizing and
public demands. The community sees these three large parcels as ones which are not
subject to the same kind of independence as privately held land and, as such, are sites
where the community can stake a claim over its future and are described as “make or
break” for the long-term viability of Little Tokyo. SLT has intentionally deployed arts
and culture as a means of organizing the community around these goals, demonstrating
yet another development in Little Tokyo’s long lineage of arts-based activism. Moreover,
as discussed in the previous chapter, the long history of arts and cultural activity in Little
Tokyo has been key in shaping a coherent community with a shared identity and
171
language. This foundation, often cited as one of the most difficult pieces of community
organizing and an important prerequisite to activist work (Castells 1983), led to SLT’s
ability to activate and organize the community around the land development related
goals.
Another initiative related to land and property rights is an innovative “community
investment fund” spearheaded by Bill Watanabe, the community leader who was a
founder of LTSC some 40 years earlier, and the intention behind the fund is to tap into
the financial reserves of Japanese Americans who can pool their resources and purchase
land in Little Tokyo. The fund would provide a modest return commensurate with
investment funds, but baked into the fund’s mission would also be providing community
benefits through its land ownership. This dual-purpose mission is a novel approach to
ensuring community ownership over land and property in a neighborhood, and is one that
is likely especially viable given the symbolic and spiritual importance of Little Tokyo to
the Japanese American community not only in Southern California but the nation at large.
The fund is only just beginning, so time will tell if this innovative approach to combating
gentrification will be successful. Nevertheless, all of these efforts to engage with property
rights demonstrate a savviness to technical, legal, and theoretical terms which have been
demonstrated to be critical, and are often overlooked by many activists concerned about
gentrification (Kim 2011; 2012). Little Tokyo demonstrates a unique case where, because
of the recentralization of community and cultural institutions in a relatively small, dense
area, the overall mix of property owners includes a baseline percentage of those who are
excluded from the temptation of maximizing land value return. Further analysis of this
spatial distribution of types of property rights holders may lend insight into a new
172
strategy for communities to “inoculate” themselves from the vagaries of real estate
speculation and subsequent gentrification.
A final factor in Little Tokyo’s ability to hold onto place has been its history of
arts and activism which has transformed arts and culture — used here specifically to refer
to the material manifestations of expression — in this community from ones which
associate with economic development and circulation of capital as is their identity in
most places, to ones which are associated with activism, participation, and community
agency. The distinct history of arts and culture in Little Tokyo, as described in the
previous chapter, is one which has led to solidarity and intersectional partnerships in Los
Angeles (Pulido 2006), to the ability to sustain leadership and community through
generations, and to a globally aware and politically savvy population. Art is seen as
something that is useful for community organizing, building a shared sense of identity
that can be activated in times of need — this important finding is discussed in more detail
later in this volume as an idea of “implicit political participation.” Furthermore, that the
art and culture of Little Tokyo, found in the programming of JACCC and JANM, to the
performances of Tuesday Night Cafe and East West Players, are such that they respect
but also go beyond a Japanese American identity to include a broadly Asian American
and, especially, a politically engaged Asian American identity.
Art has long been seen as a fundamental part of Little Tokyo that was formative
in its identity, and in the community’s sense of place and livability. Respondents listed a
litany of arts-related projects that have unfolded in the past, and major funding is being
allocated today to anti-gentrification placemaking efforts — a paradoxical term if one
looks at creative placemaking efforts elsewhere — in something like LTSC’s +LAB
173
program which brings in artists to engage with the community, or even in something like
Sustainable Little Tokyo which is largely predicated on the use of art as a means of
organizing the community. This culture of art and its appreciation for community
building comes out of a practice which privileges the collective over the individual
author, and can be found in the structures of artistic practice for traditional Japanese arts
and culture, along with more activist-oriented arts organizations that arose in the 1970s
such as Gidra and the Little Tokyo Arts Workshop which worked with LTPRO and was
part of Asian American Voluntary Action Committee, creating protest banners and giving
workshops to youth. The traditional arts, for their part, are not explicitly activist, but
many respondents described how they became vehicles for voluntary association, for
creating classes which passed on knowledge, and ultimately as structures which
organized the community in a subtle way — which could then be counted upon when a
political need arose.
Later arts organizations, cultural institutions, and even individual artists have
played an important role in creating the built environment of Little Tokyo. The
community seized upon percent for art funding, producing a dizzying array of public art
and sculpture at a far greater density than other Los Angeles neighborhoods. Public
funding was also secured for JACCC, Nisei Week, and other cultural institutions in the
community, a unique win for such funding which so often flows exclusively to marquee
public museums, symphonies, and operas. Michele Bogart, for example, has written on
the history of the development of the arts and culture in New York City, identifying its
reliance on “civic collaboration” between public agencies and largely upper-class
socialites who organized to ensure their beloved artists and art institutions received
174
sustained funding (Bogart 2018). For ethnic and immigrant cultural organizations, even
ones as well connected and established as JACCC and Nisei Week, to receive such funds,
speaks to the degree of organizing and insider savvy that Japanese Americans in Little
Tokyo had to successfully navigate.
Finally, arts and culture are also seen as a critical element that can bring together
incoming non-Japanese American residents, as well as ensure a sustained interest in the
community by younger generations who might otherwise check out. The arts can bring in
people who might not see themselves as activists, but can develop a connection to a
community culture. The enduring concern of community leaders in Little Tokyo is the
sustainability of its leadership as current leaders are reaching an age where the mantle
must be passed on — and many would-be stakeholders don’t necessarily fit into the same
kind of culturally specific Japanese American community member of Little Tokyo’s past,
with many more people with mixed ethnicity and perhaps only partial Japanese American
heritage, with many new Asian Americans, and even non-Asian Americans who have
moved into the community, or perhaps have found a cultural home in Little Tokyo and its
rich array of arts, culture, and organizations. And while this transformation is seen with
some amount of nostalgia and regret, it is also looked upon as a necessary transformation
and one that can also be a source of hope for the future of Little Tokyo.

Change and Constancy in Culture

Another key theme that cropped up repeatedly during interviews was the nature of
Little Tokyo’s culture, and how it has changed over time, especially with generational
175
shifts, and transformations in the relationship between Little Tokyo and Japanese
Americans with a broader culture in Los Angeles and society at large. These findings also
triangulate the historical narrative described in the previous chapter regarding how
Japanese American identity emerged in Little Tokyo, and how it has changed over time.
One respondent generalized the generational shifts by describing how the first generation
Issei “had no choice” but to look, sound, act, and be Japanese because of who they were
and the culture they brought with them, Nisei often were “caught in the middle” of a
shifting relationship to the US where there was a desire to assimilate but not a full
capacity to do so, and Sansei “didn’t want to be Japanese” and reinvented their culture as
Japanese American. Even these attitudes, however, have shifted as national Japanese
American leaders like Norman Mineda and Daniel Inouye receive recognition from both
the US and Japanese governments, freeing Japanese Americans to embrace more of their
Japanese side without fear of repercussion. Additionally, as every generation reaches
older age, there is a repeated history wherein the issues of legacy and heritage are more
deeply considered. One respondent described how they and their friends — Sansei
entering retirement age — have started to visit Japan for the first time in years, have a
desire to make a mark by contributing to Little Tokyo’s institutions, and have a newfound
appreciation for the relationship between Japan and Little Tokyo. As one respondent put
it, “efforts to acculturate, fit in, be American, yet also preserve and maintain daily life:
that is what Japanese-American is! That tension.”
A structural factor that may have driven this changing relationship between
different generations and a shifting Japanese American identity is the changing nature of
the various associational forms of life in Little Tokyo. Many respondents mentioned the
176
kenjinkai, or mutual aid associations form by Issei immigrants based on which prefecture
in Japan they were from. These organizations were widely joined and meant a lot to their
members, but this meaning rapidly dropped off for subsequent generations who did not
have a connection to the prefecture. Other kinds of organizations and associations were
formed, such as connections with those who were sent to the same camp during WWII
which also formed a very strong and meaningful bond forged in shared oppression. After
this, groups formed based on religious institutions, schools, volunteer and non-profit
organizations, and sports teams. Many of these later groups were much more voluntary in
nature, leaving the strength of these bonds dependent on whim, interest, and availability
of time and resources for members who would participate. This is not to suggest that
these associations were not strong. As I will describe in the next section, the strength of
organizational life in Little Tokyo is a key piece of its culture, but nevertheless, the
nature of collective life shifted as these associations became more diverse, diffuse, and
voluntary. Indeed, many parents even intentionally wanted this for their children: then did
not want to pass on the trauma of internment camps, and wanted their children to be
educated and find jobs that fulfilled them, rather than the often-menial enclave businesses
which had supported families in the past.
In terms of practices of art and culture that manifested more specifically and
materially than a general sense of collective identity, respondents also described the
change over time as one where traditional forms of culture from Japan like ikebana and
calligraphy were transformed by younger generations of Japanese American artists and
culture bearers. As one respondent described, “For Sanseis, we went to Japanese school,
but traditional arts didn’t reflect who we were. During the 1970s, we began to explore
177
mixing of traditional motifs with new experiences to make something new and uniquely
Japanese American, not Japanese, not American.” Hiroshima, a popular Japanese
American band with ties to Little Tokyo, was lauded as an example where taiko
drumming, koto, and other traditional Japanese instruments were combined with jazz,
rock, and American forms of music. In additional to the intentional reinvention of
Japanese American culture, there was also the practical fact that many of the practitioners
of these traditional forms of culture did so as a hobby, may have had their space disrupted
with the demolition of the Sun Building, and also were reaching old age and becoming
unable to practice.
Respondents were not accusatory: if anything, they took responsibility because of
their own past attitudes toward assimilation and the lack of Japanese language skills.
Also, the fact that many of these traditional forms of culture were practiced as hobbies by
older generations meant that there has been little support infrastructure developed for
younger generations who may have an interest in them but don’t have the time to invest
because of the increasing speed and intensity of work and life demands in contemporary
society. One respondent said that “in the past, you just did these things with your family
organically, but now you have to be more intentional to raise money and ensure that they
still happen.” These comments point toward a transformation in both thought and practice
with regard to these leaders’ Japanese American culture and heritage. Commonly
accepted practices of assimilation, such as avoiding Japanese language learning or the
practices of traditional forms of culture, enabled through both unintentional and
intentional mental frames of career success and “fitting in,” have since been modified —
if not yet entirely in practice, at least through new frames of appreciation of heritage and
178
pride of a distinct, non-normative culture. There was much ambivalence among
respondents about these traditional forms of culture disappearing, and many implored to
“not dismiss the old” and for more attention to be paid to this issue and to the few
teachers and practitioners that remain.
Yet as respondents went on to describe, this might also be a particular aspect of
spatial colocation of more publicly-oriented “activist” types within the symbolic center of
Little Tokyo, as others who have been content to continue their traditional forms of
practice outside of the public eye in more suburban areas. As one leader put it, many of
these practitioners don’t necessarily interface with activists and community organizers,
making it incumbent on organizations to reach out: “we need to listen more.” And others
mentioned that this is also an issue for Little Tokyo specifically, because many of these
traditional forms of culture haven’t disappeared entirely but, like many Japanese
Americans in general, have just moved to other areas like Gardena or elsewhere.
The question of how to bring these traditional forms of culture and audiences for
them is very much alive, and the issue of Japanese language comprehension and
communication is recognized as at least one thing that has prevented a more widespread
adoption and reinterpretation of some of these traditional forms of culture. Respondents
noted that because of the past attitudes toward assimilation, many people in Little Tokyo
no longer speak Japanese, making them unable to communicate with older generations
who might only speak Japanese, and also new, younger immigrants who have a
completely different culture from contemporary Japan but also may not be comfortable
speaking in English. There is a widespread desire to incorporate these Japanese-language
179
speakers into Little Tokyo’s community, and art and culture is seen as a wonderful way
to accomplish this.
Nevertheless, the transformation of culture into new forms that excited younger
audiences was also appreciated and seen as a necessary means for keeping some forms of
culture alive, even if in a “diluted” form. One respondent quoted their temple minister in
describing how traditional holiday meals have changed but that the “most important part
is not the food but the sentiment: it’s spending time together, and coming up with new
traditions.” Indeed, not only the culture is changing through generations, but the very
ethnicity of Japanese Americans is shifting as there are increasing numbers of mixed
ethnicity families with children who may interpret what it means to be Japanese
American in a very different way. Respondents described how they were increasingly
seeing a diverse audience at Little Tokyo’s cultural festivals, such as Nisei Week, or in
membership at the various religious institutions. And while this was seen as something
that sparked a bit of nostalgia and remorse for seeing one’s culture change and become
unfamiliar, it was also seen as something necessary and even hopeful for the future, as at
least these institutions and practices would continue to exist in some, albeit changed,
form, rather that disappear entirely. Indeed, there have even been efforts to intentionally
construct multi-ethnic festivals which honor and respect the unique forms, histories, and
differences between cultures while simultaneously combining them. Many respondents
spoke positively of the “FandangObon” festival which was dreamt up by the Little Tokyo
artist Nobuko Miyamoto, and which combines “Fandango of Vera Cruz, Mexico rooted
in African, Mexican and indigenous music; Japanese Buddhist Obon circle dances in

180

Figure 18. FandangObon festival, 2014
Artistic director Nobuko Miyamoto performing at FandangObon in 2014, in the JACCC Plaza. Miyamoto
is a longtime Little Tokyo artist who founded the non-profit arts organization Great Leap which created and
hosts FandangObon among many other projects. Photo by Mike Murase, a longtime community activist
and photographer in Little Tokyo.

remembrance of ancestors; and West African dance and drums of Nigeria and New
Guinea” (Great Leap 2019).
There is a widespread sense that there is no space for being “pollyannaish” about
the future of Little Tokyo and its culture. Perhaps due to the many challenges Little
Tokyo has faced over the years, its leaders are realists when it comes to what needs to
happen to maintain Little Tokyo, and the limitations of what is possible. Nearly all of the
Japanese American respondents described a family history in and relationship to Little
Tokyo where, even if they lived in other neighborhoods like Boyle Heights or Crenshaw,
they would visit on at least a weekly basis to go to temple and buy groceries. Because
181
Little Tokyo used to be a unique destination as the only place where Japanese Americans
could buy specific goods and services, it had a stable population and clientele. As
increasing numbers of Japanese American settled elsewhere, such as in Gardena, and as
Asian American markets, Buddhist temples, and other pieces of family life became
available in other parts of town, the need for Little Tokyo became secondary, with
families visiting less and less — perhaps only for a funeral or a wedding, or annually
during Nisei Week. As Little Tokyo had to begin fighting for customers, community
members, and other stakeholders, it has also had to be inventive about how it would set
itself apart — and the formation of the various large institutions were a key part of this
process. More recently, many respondents described how ubiquitous Japanese American
amateur league basketball is, and have cited this as a possible cultural formation that can
bring in new generations of Japanese Americans to Little Tokyo. One of main community
development projects in Little Tokyo right now is the Budokan, a community recreation
center which aspires to host league games and tournaments. As one savvy respondent
noted, one of the only things that would get any tired, stressed parent into their car to
drive into Little Tokyo, a place with bad traffic and difficult parking, would be their kid’s
basketball game.
Another major change, and one which is intertwined with concerns around
gentrification, was the introduction of new market-rate housing in the 2000s which
revitalized many of the businesses in the community by providing a residential
population which frequented them. This was seen as positive, but also disconcerting
given how most of the new residents were not Japanese American, often not even Asian
American, and had little sense of the history or culture of Little Tokyo — and apparently
182
little desire to plug into and participate in the community. The importance of both
maintaining a visible culture in Little Tokyo tied to its unique history, while also creating
an inviting space where these newcomers can engage and participate is a challenge at the
front of the minds of respondents and community leaders. Again, arts and culture are seen
as a promising way to do this, by drawing in these newcomers with “honey” rather than
preaching at them. Art and culture are also seen as something that is necessary to have a
livable community, so the goal is to create an inviting aesthetic that respects Little
Tokyo’s history and culture but also creates opportunities for inter-ethnic engagement.
Like the minister quoted earlier, respondents felt that it was more important to create “a
neighborhood where people count” and that is “multicultural by design,” allows people to
express themselves, than to create a fixed or static Little Tokyo that is situated entirely in
the past — which, for respondents, would truly be the death of the community.
Intentionally or not, this process is unfolding with new programming from cultural
institutions, and the creation of new institutions like Tuesday Night Cafe and
FandangObon. As one respondent described these new cultural formations, “young
people are coming back to Little Tokyo, and I don’t always get it, but I’m glad that it
exists.”
This section has illuminated a complex process by which culture changes in Little
Tokyo, dependent in part on a theory put forth by respondents of generational shifts, and
different generations changing relationship to a dominant culture in society. This shifts
unfold on a number of dimensions: spatial, as families move into more disperse
residential patterns; ethnicity, as families mix and introduce different cultural traditions;
social, as ethnic identity finds different meanings in the context of a dominant society
183
that accepts or rejects groups in different ways over time; familial, as internal processes
of development play out with children reacting against different parental beliefs and
practices; and so on. This theme came as something of a surprise, and was not one for
which I specifically asked respondents about, apart from asking about how culture has
changed over time. In this sense, it is a set of findings that relates to our sub-questions of
how culture has changed over time. Yet it also partially responds to our asking how Little
Tokyo has held on to place: it has done so, in part, by being culturally flexible enough to
allow for change and to incorporate changing visions held by younger generations, as to
give them a role in and responsibility over the community’s future. This changing culture
has also meant a changing culture of participation, suggesting some new insights into our
overarching research question, as well, of what the relationship is between culture and
political participation.

Welcome to Little Tokyo (Please Take Off Your Shoes)

Nearly every interviewee felt that one phrase in particular really captured the
essence of the spirit of the community in the neighborhood today: “Welcome to Little
Tokyo, please take off your shoes.” The phrase was attributed to Evelyn Yoshimura, a
community activist who help start Asian American studies at Cal State Long Beach, co-
founded Amerasian Bookstore, was part of Gidra and the redress movement, and is now
on staff at LTSC. The phrase captures the tension felt in the community between wanting
to be an open, welcoming, inviting place that can move into the future while newcomers
move in and a younger generation of people “discover” Little Tokyo, yet also wanting to
184
protect and preserve the community’s heritage and ensure that it doesn’t get overrun with
land speculators and corporate businesses who don’t respect where the community has
come from and what it has been through to get where it is today. It also cleverly
references Japanese American and Asian American culture by mapping the respectful
practice of removing one’s shoes before entering a house — your own, but especially a
home where you are a guest — onto the urban scale of the Little Tokyo neighborhood.
The phrase captures the essence of what the community organizers and activists are
ultimately trying to achieve. I will conclude this chapter with a section on some of the
themes that represent the ways in which Little Tokyo’s leaders are thinking tomorrow,
their concerns, hopes, and expectations for how this community will transform and hold
on to place in its future.
The most commonly discussed topic by interviewees was both concern about and
hope in the next generation to come up as leaders. Invariably, when asked about what
things happening in Little Tokyo give them hope or excite them, respondents would bring
up how excited and proud they are of the handful of young leaders that have stepped up
to the plate. Primary leaders for Sustainable Little Tokyo, Little Tokyo Community
Council, and Kizuna, a newer organization which intentionally reaches out to youth to
build community leaders, are all helmed by staff younger than 35 years old. These
younger leaders are often a spark of energy in the room at community meetings, events,
and direct actions, yet there is also a great deal of concern about burnout because while
there are a number of younger leaders — and a number of staff in LTSC, East West
Players, JACCC, and other organizations who are also younger — there is not the same
kind of breadth as in the past where there was just a larger number of people involved in
185
activities in Little Tokyo. Many past leaders also came up through family businesses in
Little Tokyo, and many of these businesses are having trouble planning for the future as
children and heirs have new professional educations and are often pursuing fulfilling
careers outside of family businesses in Little Tokyo — to parents’ simultaneous relief
and consternation.
Community leaders are very aware of the need to train and empower new leaders
and the issue is not one of older leaders holding on to power longer than is healthy, but
really is an issue of a lack of younger bodies in the room. Some chalk it up to the
busyness and demands of daily life for the younger generation who face bleak and lower
paying jobs, and who must also jump through a greater number of hoops to achieve
education, housing, and starting a family in comparison to the past. Others feel that it is
the product of assimilationist tendencies where younger people do not hold the same
strength of connection to their Japanese American heritage or to Little Tokyo as a place.
Whatever the cause, leaders are excited by those younger people who do engage and
participate, and are quick to encourage and empower them to take on more roles and
responsibilities in the community — a healthy sign for the community’s longevity in
contrast to some neighborhoods where youth is dismissed, and almost certainly a healthy
cultural byproduct of the long tradition of intergenerational continuity in Little Tokyo.
Even non-Japanese Americans are supported and encouraged, especially if they
are Asian American, or if they respect the community’s Japanese American history, and
as long as they engage with the community toward the end of making it an equitable,
livable place where stakeholders are treated with dignity and respect. Many interviewees
pointed toward several new businesses, such as the hip coffee shop and bakery Cafe
186
Dulce, started by young, often Asian American entrepreneurs who were not necessarily
Japanese American, but who fit into the community’s culture, participate in community
meetings and events, and have contributed positively to its health and cultural landscape.
There is a sense of awareness that to bring in a younger generation of leaders, the
community must create space for them, and encourage a “sense of belonging” for them,
even if that means the culture of Little Tokyo must evolve. There is also a sense that arts
and culture is a great way to explore how to do this and ultimately bring in younger
people, with new festivals, events that blend community with hip bars, venues like
Tuesday Night Cafe, and other similar undertakings that respect Little Tokyo’s heritage
while making it more contemporary. As one interviewee explained, “the vision is that in
20 years, Little Tokyo will still be a historic Japanese American community, but not just
defined by your last name or looking JA.” There is a sense that the culture must evolve,
and the community must be open to newcomers — that if the community is “closed off,
like Boyle Heights” (cf. Crisman and Kim 2019) then it might dissolve and die, that it
cannot turn into a “museum” but must remain a “living community.” Indeed, even many
of the more traditional activities such as Obon festivals are now seen as family friendly
events for a diverse array of visitors, including a majority who are not Japanese
American, but people can nevertheless appreciate and participate in public dance and
celebration together — a fact that repeatedly bemused and surprised interviewees. This
notion of seeing Little Tokyo as a “living community” is a critical factor that sets this
particular neighborhood apart from many communities which are fighting gentrification.
Often, these fights are demoralizing and seen as life and death war, with battle lines
clearly drawn. While understandable, this fear-based strategy has rarely stemmed the tide
187
of gentrification, and while Little Tokyo’s more optimistic strategy is no silver bullet, it
has certainly borne fruit over the years. The community’s adaptability represents the way
in which both placemaking and placekeeping must be pursued in tandem, balancing the
struggle to maintain a coherent community and a sense of belonging for its members with
controlling the inexorable processes of urban change in an intentional way.
Another common point of pride which connects Little Tokyo’s rich history into
the future is its density of arts and culture events and organizations. As described earlier,
Little Tokyo has a long history of arts, culture, and arts activism which has served it well
in building community, Japanese American identity, and political participation. But the
leaders I interviewed went beyond acknowledging the important role that art and culture
has played in Little Tokyo for Little Tokyo to note how its art and culture was important
on the national stage. The cultural organizations that were started in and have an ongoing
connection to Little Tokyo such as East West Players and Visual Communications, along
the with the dizzying array of smaller performing troupes, artist collectives, and
initiatives that also hold a connection to Little Tokyo have played in outsized role in
creating space for Asian American artists and performers throughout the world.
Interviewees wanted to hold this history up, seeing it as a feature of Little Tokyo that is
worth protecting and supporting and, in turn, this would also protect Little Tokyo as a
space of unique cultural heritage. As Asian Americans become increasingly visible in the
transforming arts and media landscape, Little Tokyo will grow importance as the
premiere site for Asian American arts and culture in the United States.
As Little Tokyo changes over time, its leaders see the need for the community to
be dynamic and resilient accepting and responding to these changes. There is not a desire
188
to be too fixed in the past, or to hold on to something that Little Tokyo may have once
been but is no longer. Nevertheless, there is also a concern for maintaining Little Tokyo’s
singular role as ground zero for Japanese Americans in Southern California, and for
respecting the elders who are aging in place and may feel left behind as the neighborhood
changes. LTSC, for example, has undertaken many efforts to create space for these
residents, creating a community center where mahjong nights, arts and culture classes,
and other events are held so that these elderly neighbors, many at home primarily speak
Japanese, have a place where they can interact with others and be sociable. One
respondent noted the scientific research that demonstrated how mental and physical
health decline faster when one is aging alone, trapped in a single-occupancy unit
watching TV, as is too often the case. By creating spaces where these residents can
interact with one another, and even where they can teach each other by taking on roles as
class and workshop facilitators, these residents can find new life and energy in their
interactions with others. Furthermore, arts and culture are the thing that is most often
used as the reason for stepping out into the world, be it through classes, events, or
participatory performances. Art and culture provide a space for participation, and in this
case, it plays an important, if implicit, political role. As one respondent described these
residents, some of whom had long practiced some form of traditional art, while others
were picking up things for the first time, “artist is a loaded term — who is to say who is
an artist, or what is art?” Respondents, I believe, share my big tent interpretation of arts
and culture, and appreciate the instrumental value in declaring oneself an artist, especially
in cases where it can literally be a life-saving tactic for these individuals, and collectively
for the community at large.
189
I’ll close out this chapter by noting one last story shared with me by an
interviewee who pointed to the quintessential architectural icon of Little Tokyo: the
yagura, a traditional tower architectural form in Japan. In this case, the yagura is situated
at the entrance to Japanese Village Plaza, a themed outdoor shopping arcade built in the
1970s, and a central commercial space of Little Tokyo. This yagura was modeled after a
fire tower, historically a slender, tall, open wooden frame structure where townspeople
would take turns at the top looking out for fire, an especially damaging threat for the
largely wooden architecture of the time. If the watchperson saw signs of fire, they would
ring a bell and the townspeople would form a bucket brigade to collectively put out the
fire, a practice that went on 24 hours a day. As this interviewee shared this story with me,
they described how the yagura is an especially important symbol for Little Tokyo both
historically and in the present moment of gentrification because “we all have to take turns
being the sentry.” And the community needs to come together when the bell is rung,
when a threat arrives that can only be addressed through collective action. As this
interviewee and many others noted with urgency, Little Tokyo would only survive if they
stuck together, and if newcomers understood this history — exemplified through the
symbolism of the yagura — and participated in community. And art and culture are the
primary vectors, especially in a place with such a rich cultural history as Little Tokyo, for
building community and, in times of need, taking action.

190
Chapter 5: Surveying Little Tokyo’s Stakeholders

In the previous chapter, we explored the perspectives of leaders in Little Tokyo
through their responses in several key informant interviews. We learned about how they
view Little Tokyo’s historical and contemporary relationship to arts and culture, and how
they believe Little Tokyo has held on to its place. The process of generational change was
seen as especially important, with it playing a role in how culture has changed over time,
and it also being a key concern for the future as older leaders step down and new younger
leaders take their place. Urban development, both within Little Tokyo and throughout
Southern California in relation to Little Tokyo, has captivated the attention of Japanese
American leaders in the community, creating a drive to centralize many cultural aspects
of Japanese American life in Little Tokyo as to sustain it over the long term. To this end,
land and property rights have been identified as a major concern, along with the potential
of major cultural institutions. And perhaps most important has been the community’s
propensity for organizing, borne out of Little Tokyo’s history of arts activism, which has
aided in its efforts to generate enough political power and financial resources to hold on
to its place.
In this chapter, we will consider the degree to which these insights and views hold
up with a broader population of stakeholders in Little Tokyo. Leaders can think one
thing, but what about everyone else? Also, stakeholders were asked questions that
connected back to my primary research questions: what arts and culture are important in
Little Tokyo and why? How does art and culture connect to political engagement or
gentrification in Little Tokyo? I conducted a survey of stakeholders which queried them
191
about how they were connected to Little Tokyo and its Japanese American heritage,
along with three sets of questions: The first focuses on art and culture, asking what forms
of art and culture are important and which cultural institutions are most recognizable. The
second focuses of political participation, asking what kinds of political activity (e.g.,
marches, signing petitions, etc.) the respondent has engaged in, and what specific issues
compelled them to do so. The third focuses on issues of neighborhood change, asking
about changes that they see which concern them or excite them. Incidentally, because of
the focus on surveying those with a connection to Little Tokyo (we used a simple
screening question that asked respondents to self-identify as having a connection), many
of the respondents were community leaders in their own right, and most others felt very
strongly about the responses, in contrast to purely random surveys which often include a
large sample with individuals who typically have a weaker intensity of response. As such,
these results capture explicitly stakeholder views rather than a random sample of the
public. We collected a total of 333 surveys which, based on Little Tokyo’s population of
3,386 residents (2010 Census) and 2,743 employees (ACS 2014), produces a
representative sample with a 95% confidence level and a confidence interval of 5.
Because the collection method may not be entirely random, and because of the high
confidence interval, results should not be interpreted as precise quantitatively, but rather
viewed in relation to one another to see patterns and trends.
As will be discussed further, many of the questions were open ended, allowing a
great deal of rich data and insight to be collected from this relatively short (11 questions)
and small (333 responses) survey. I will first provide some general descriptive analysis
based on the various questions and responses, and then will use regression analysis to
192
identity correlations between the type of stakeholder (e.g., renter vs. employee) and the
patterns in their responses. I provide a range of explanatory hypotheses for these patterns.
Respondents were allowed to check multiple boxes, or to merely list responses
unprompted, for most of the questions, creating a data set that is both more rich than
typical, but also messier and more difficult to work with. Thus, while the analysis
performed in this chapter focuses on the type of stakeholder, one could also imagine a
range of additional forms of regression analysis used to identify more specific
quantitative findings, or to consider correlations between other responses, such as
whether respondents with a higher degree of connection to their Japanese American
heritage had different kinds of responses to the sorts of gentrification concerns that were
most salient.
Some of the research questions that this chapter contends with include: Do
stakeholders vary in the degree of their engagement with arts, culture, and political
participation? Which issues compel them the most? What forms of art and culture, and
which cultural organizations are most embedded within the community as viewed by the
stakeholders and why? How big of a concern is gentrification for stakeholders, and what
changes in the neighborhood are either most exciting or most concerning for them? This
survey data, while ostensibly small, includes depth through the interconnectedness of all
of the questions, and if anything, this chapter sets up a range of new questions beyond
those answered within this chapter, and establishes a trajectory for future potential
directions for research. As I will describe, this survey reinforced many of the findings
from previous chapters. It provided more nuanced detail about specific forms of art and
culture, stakeholder, political participation, and gentrification concerns at the present
193
moment in the community rather than the relatively broad strokes found through archival,
historical, and interview methodologies. The survey provides more actionable insight
such as which types of stakeholders may not be as included in discussions, or that the
types of urban change that are most alarming for community leaders may not be as
disconcerting for a wider population of stakeholders. Perhaps the most profound finding
has been the enthusiastic response to questions about which forms of arts and culture are
important to Little Tokyo, along with which organizations and forms of political
participation are integral to the community, reinforcing previous findings that art and
culture have played a historically important and continue to play an important role in the
development of Little Tokyo, especially in its politically organized and engaged
capacities, setting the stage for the following chapter focusing on the case study of
Sustainable Little Tokyo.

Describing Stakeholder Responses

This section will analyze the survey responses based on some simple descriptive
statistics, especially the frequency of particular responses as a percentage out of the total
number of responses, providing a first look into the trends present in the data. For a
breakdown of all of the responses to various questions, see Table 2 later in this chapter. A
response had to be mentioned at least 10 times, or meet 3% of the 333 responses, to be
considered a significant response and included in the frequency tables, though
homeowners were also included with only a 2% response because the stakeholder identity
was used as an independent variable in subsequent regression analysis. For an
194
explanation of all of the questions contained in the survey, as well as the reasoning and
methodology behind the construction of the survey instrument, see chapter 2.
Additionally, included in this section are a series of word clouds produced using text
analysis in Voyant. Word clouds are a useful if impressionistic visualization which
provides a “cloud” of a number of the most frequently appearing words in responses, in
this case set to the most frequent 125 words found. The words are clustered with the size
of the word relative to the number of times the word appears, showing a quick impression
of the relative frequency and importance of words to one another. Word clouds were only
produced for questions that were open ended — questions that provided a list of options,
even if there was an “other/fill in the blank” option, typically had responses so heavily
skewed to provided options that word clouds would have only represented those provided
options.
After passing a screening question asking whether the respondent lives, works, or
spends a lot of time in Little Tokyo to ensure that the respondent was, indeed, a
stakeholder, the first questions set up the relationship between the respondent and Little
Tokyo. The first question asks what their relationship to Little Tokyo is, providing a list
of options as well as an “other” option to fill in the blank, and respondents were able to
check multiple boxes — if they were both an employee in the neighborhood as well as a
renter, for example. The survey had a diverse mix of responses with about 12% of
respondents as renters or homeowners, 4% as business owners, 32% as local employees,
36% as volunteers in the community, 47% as regular patrons or visitors, and 14% as
members at a religious institution (respondents could identify as more than one category,
so total percentage is more than 100 points). These responses are reflective of the fact
195
that Little Tokyo is predominantly a community with commercial and cultural entities,
creating a large number of patrons, volunteers, and employees who are stakeholders with
a strong connection to the community, and relatively few renters and homeowners in
comparison to other neighborhoods. These self-identified categories form the basis for
the correlation analysis in the next section which considers the response patterns to other
questions on the basis of their relationship to Little Tokyo. For example, did people who
identified as employees see one or another art forms as especially important for the
community? Or did they identify certain cultural organizations as integral to the
community?
A follow up question asked about the relationship between the respondent and the
Japanese American heritage of Little Tokyo, asking if they felt a strong connection to it,
with a list of five options of increasing intensity. Respondents were only able to check
one answer, and the answers captured both whether or not the respondent identified as
JA, as well as the degree to which they felt Little Tokyo’s JA heritage was important.
Almost half of respondents felt a strong connection to Little Tokyo’s Japanese American
heritage, calling it fundamental to their identity (47%) and an additional 25% of
respondents felt a strong connection to Little Tokyo’s JA history even though they
themselves were not Japanese American. Another 15% of respondents felt a strong
connection but wouldn’t call it important to their identity, and 14% didn’t feel a strong
connection at all. The total percentage adds up to 101% because of rounding. These
responses demonstrate the importance of Little Tokyo’s Japanese American heritage with
87% of respondents having some form of yes answer, and virtually no respondents (only
2 out of 329) viewing it as “unimportant.” Furthermore, these results hold up even when
196
the respondent is not necessarily Japanese American with almost twice as many non-JA
respondents marking that they felt a strong connection as not (25% to 13%). These results
suggest that as Little Tokyo changes over time, and even as its stakeholders become less
Japanese American, its identity as a JA place remains important and future development
ought to respect and protect this heritage.

Figure 19. Survey word cloud: arts and culture
Relative frequency of the most common 125 words in survey responses to a question asking which arts and
culture organizations make an important contribution in Little Tokyo.

The first set of questions dealt with which art forms and arts and culture
organizations were seen as integral to the community. Respondents felt than many
different forms of art and culture were important for Little Tokyo with over half of
respondents marking all of the listed categories provided on the survey: festivals, music
concerts, film screenings, stage performances, art exhibits, food related, books &
literature, and religious ceremonies. The highest three categories included festivals
(88%), food related (86%), and art exhibits (81%; see table 2). It is rare to have this
197
Table 2. Frequency table of survey responses
N = 333. Respondents could only mark one answer for “Is JA identity important,” “SLT Familiarity,” and
“Change Concern” questions (% column totals 100, Frequency column total does not include no response
so may be slightly less than 333), while respondents could mark multiple answers for all remaining
questions (each individual % should be read as out of 100). Starred questions had options listed while all
others were open response, and only responses that had at least a frequency of 10 (~3% of 333 responses)
were listed.

198

degree of a uniform and consistent positive response, demonstrating the importance of
these categories. It is remarkable, however, that even the art form that garnered the
fewest responses — religious ceremonies at 56% — still had a majority of respondents
mark it as important. In other words, a wide variety of art and culture, including forms
that are not necessarily considered part of the “art world” are considered integral to the
community. Art and culture appear to play an important role in Little Tokyo, and its
stakeholders affirm the findings from historical sources and leaders which share this
199
view. Rather than a rarefied “art world” version of culture, here art and culture is widely
appreciated by the community and should be understood as an integral part of the
neighborhood as it develops, changes, and moves into the future (Becker 1982).
Specific arts and culture organizations that were consistently highly identified by
respondents and clearly demonstrated in the word cloud (fig. 19) include JACCC (40%),
JANM (31%), and Nisei Week (31%). These are also some of the largest organizations in
Little Tokyo which also are circulated widely because of their long histories and
grassroots funding — and they are also all explicitly cultural organizations. This response
was open ended without any prompting, so these responses can also be seen as a measure
of the degree to which these organizations have name recognition and are at the top of
stakeholders’ minds. Also, these organizations where consistently recognized by
community leaders in the previous chapter, suggesting that while there may be some
divergence in the degree of recognizability in the wide array of other cultural
organizations in Little Tokyo, there is at least agreement between leaders and
stakeholders that these three community institutions are heavyweights in the
neighborhood. East West Players, Obon festivals, the Little Tokyo Service Center
(LTSC), Visual Communications, and Tuesday Night Cafe were also regularly
mentioned, each mentioned by at least 10% of respondents. Obon festivals is a slightly
different response because it is not associated with a particular organization, but are a
type of cultural event produced by many different organizations, especially Buddhist
temples — which, for their part, also received explicit mentions by some 6% of
respondents (this is a total including mentions of temples and churches generically, as
well as specific temples and churches named properly). Tanabata festivals, which were
200
named by 6% of respondents, also fall into this category. LTSC is notable as a response
because it is, for the most part, not an arts and culture organization. It shares roots in
Little Tokyo’s history of arts and culture, and has a handful of programs such +LAB
which are explicitly focused on arts and culture, but it predominantly provides
community services and undertakes community development projects such as building
housing or the new Budokan. That it would still receive so many mentions — 37 out of
333, or 11% — in response to this question speaks to its importance in the community.
Kizuna and the Go For Broke National Education Center were each named by 8% of
respondents, and while they might be considered cultural organizations, they also both
serve a pedagogical role, making their presence significant. Sustainable Little Tokyo
(SLT) was mentioned by 4% of respondents, perhaps reflective of its role as a relatively
new organization and one that undertakes a variety of initiatives that are not necessarily
seen as art and culture, or that are collaborative in nature such that SLT doesn’t receive
“credit” for its role. And Cold Tofu, an Asian American improv and comedy troupe,
received mentions by 3% of respondents, an impressive showing given that it most often
performs outside of Little Tokyo, and is a volunteer supported organization without much
infrastructure or a physical location — speaking to Little Tokyo’s presence as the
physical place associated with Asian American arts and culture on a national scale.
Another interest from my partner community organization was the name
recognition of Sustainable Little Tokyo, an innovative arts-based organizing coalition, so
the survey included a specific multiple-choice question with given answers of which
respondents could only select one answer. About 30% of respondents have participated in
SLT activities, 41% have at least heard of SLT, and 28% have not heard of SLT. This
201
question sheds light on the 4% response rate from the previous question, suggesting that
many more people have participated in and heard of SLT, and that it may either be seen
as something different from an arts and culture organization, or that perhaps because it is
new it is not yet seen as making an “important contribution” to Little Tokyo as the
previous question asked. The response to this question suggests that, on the one hand,
SLT has accomplished a good deal of recognition in a short period of time, possibly
owing to its interventions in the cultural landscape of Little Tokyo, but that it has more
work to do in bringing more people who have at least heard of them into its activities and
events, and also more work to do in reaching out to the 28% of stakeholders who have
not yet heard of their initiative. There is a divergence between community leaders who
are well informed of SLT’s activities and see it as the vanguard of a new kind of
community-based organizing and activism in Little Tokyo versus a wider body of
stakeholders, many of whom have yet to build it into their mental picture of Little Tokyo.
This also suggests an additional avenue of research in exploring the boundaries of what is
considered art and culture from a grassroots level, insight which might clarify how so
many stakeholders consider LTSC an art and culture organization, and which might also
provide an alternative theory to Becker’s understanding of art worlds.
A key interest from the community organization that I partnered with was on the
economic impact of arts and culture in Little Tokyo — especially as measured by what
organizations, events, or art forms are bringing visitors into Little Tokyo, and what those
visitors are spending money on while in the neighborhood. Accordingly, one question in
the survey asked stakeholders what they spent money on while in Little Tokyo and as the
word cloud (fig. 20) demonstrates, food was far and away the most common response to
202
this open-ended question. Some 82% of respondents mentioned food which is all the
more striking given that this did not include drinks (17% of respondents named this,
including both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks), sweets (4% of respondents named

Figure 20. Survey word cloud: spending habits
Relative frequency of the most common 125 words in survey responses to a question asking where
respondents spend money when they visit Little Tokyo.

this or, more often, specifically naming mochi, manju, or the iconic Fugetsu-do
confectionary), or groceries (11%) which were all separate response categories. Events
and tickets to events was the second most mentioned item, with 24% of respondents
mentioning this category — while still a large number, this is less than a third as many
who mentioned food. Little Tokyo is seen by its stakeholders as a destination and locus
for food, and especially Japanese and Asian food. This corresponds with interview
subjects who described how Little Tokyo’s visibility in Los Angeles is in part due to its
identity as an important food destination, with many public officials walking over from
the neighboring Civic Center area daily for lunch, given it a presence in the minds of
203
elected officials and civil servants. A number of other retail categories were named
including clothing (17%), gifts (13%), generic forms of retail (12%, e.g., “shopping” or
“merchandise”), and art and books (11%). Clothing, in particular, included a diverse
array of responses which included specific brands like Japangeles and specific goods like
shoes or jewelry, suggesting Little Tokyo’s strength in this retail category as a locus for a
particular fashion sensibility along the lines of Japanese American and Asian American
inspired streetwear. Parking was the only remaining named category, with 5% of
respondents naming it. It is not unusual for parking to loom large in the minds of survey
respondents, especially in American cities, so I would not put too much weight into this
category, other than to note that it is a typical and everyday expense for visitors who
drive to cultural destinations. Additionally, all of the named categories with the exception
of generic retail and parking have some degree of culture embedded into them,
reinforcing Little Tokyo’s identity as a Japanese American and Asian American cultural
destination.
The second set of questions dealt with political engagement in Little Tokyo. At
least half of all respondents have engaged in some kind of political activity over the past
year, with 50% making a donation, 49% volunteering, 39% signing a petition, and 37%
attending a community meeting. Additionally, 27% raised money for a cause, 23%
attended a march or protest, 23% contacted an elected official, and 3% did door-to-door
canvassing. This question provided a list of options that the respondent could check, and
they could check more than one, so the question itself likely constrained the types of
participation to some degree, and also enabled respondents who many have only engaged
with one of these forms of participation once or in a passing fashion to check the activity,
204
somewhat flattening the data. While our data provides a great deal of insight into
participation, future research might also inquire about the frequency with which
participation occurred. Also, these response rates may be reflective of some bias of the
survey with its focus on self-identified stakeholders who may have higher participation
rates than normal. Nevertheless, these rates are extraordinarily high and are likely
reflective of the high degree of organization within the community, especially in regards
to the way stakeholders are connected to major organizations like JACCC, giving their
time and money to these institutions.
10
These high participation rates are also likely
reflective of the fact that Little Tokyo operates as a de facto “spiritual home” for
Japanese Americans, a tangible place that has become symbolic in its importance for
Japanese American history, and that the neighborhood is densely populated by
community and cultural organizations. This unique neighborhood structure engenders a
higher degree and greater scope of engagement than a typical residential community
which more often than not primarily sees engagement with home life issues such as
protecting the value of one’s home or school reform.
The numbers demonstrate that there are a series of about three “tiers” of
participation and political engagement, each one demonstrating a greater degree of
intensity and commitment, but each one also relying on the other in a symbiotic fashion.

10
Compare these rates with William M. Rohe and Michael A. Stegman, “The Impact of Home Ownership
on the Social and Political Involvement of Low-Income People,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 30, no. 1
(September 1994): 152–72 who finds that neighborhood participation rates in political organizations ranges
from 2.3-6.3%. Other studies, such as Kevin R. Cox, “Housing Tenure and Neighborhood Activism,”
Urban Affairs Quarterly 18, no. 1 (September 1982): 107–29, have consistently shown that homeowners
have a high degree of participation in neighborhood activism, but even this was only a rate of 38%.
Furthermore, these studies have generally examined the relationship between residents and their
neighborhood, and Little Tokyo provides an alternative example where the connection to place is based on
shared culture and identity rather than residence.
205
Again, this research might be further refined through examination of the frequency of
participation, and might even serve as an alternative to Arnstein’s ladder of citizen
participation. The greatest degree of participation might fall into a third-tier category of
“community service” or “volunteerism” where respondents are donating money and
volunteering for institutions like JACCC, JANM, or LTSC’s Budokan project, with
participation rates around 50%. These volunteers play an important role in enabling these
organizations who equip full time staff and experts who might engage much more deeply
on specific issues. The next category might be a second-tier called “community activism”
with activities focused on the development of and changes in Little Tokyo as a place,
with petitions and community meetings focused on planning issues germane to the
neighborhood, with participation rates around 38% — and it is likely that most of these
participants also engage in community service and volunteerism. A final first-tier
category might be identified as “political activism” with participants engaging in political
organizing almost from an expert or professional practice. The survey asked that
respondents only consider activism and engagement directly related to Little Tokyo as a
place, and while this qualifier might be interpreted in very different ways by the
respondent, it nevertheless suggests that this tier of engagement linked broader political
issues with Little Tokyo as a specific place. Participants in this category are highly
informed about specific political issues facing Little Tokyo not only from a local level
but also from a structural regional and national perspective, with issues such as civil
rights or federal spending on the military budget seen as intertwined with Little Tokyo’s
development as a place. This includes people who actively raised money for a cause or
campaign, marched and protested on a political issue, contacted public officials, and
206
canvassed door to door, activities which ranged from 3-27% but likely centered on closer
to the lower end of 3-10% of people who engaged regularly at this intensity of activity.
These participants also likely engaged in community activism and community service,
and many identified as being past leaders of things like the Redress movement and
formed a contemporary organization to engage politically called Nikkei Progressives.

Figure 21. Survey word cloud: political issues
Relative frequency of the most common 125 words in survey responses to an open-ended question which
asked which political issues respondents engage with.

A follow-up question asked which specific issues the respondent was engaging
with in their types of participation, leaving it open ended for the respondent to fill in any
number of issues. While the question was open ended and respondents could list as many
things as they wanted, or even write lengthier descriptions of their issues, it was common
for respondents to primarily describe a single issue rather than exhaustively list disparate
issues that they were involved with, unless they were heavily involved in a variety of
207
issues which was demonstrated a handful of times where a lengthy list of issues was
described likely by a respondent who fell into a tier one type of political engagement. The
various issues that people engaged on were very diverse, and reflected these three tiers of
engagement. The most frequently mentioned issue was “gentrification” with 22% of
respondents mentioning it, demonstrating the degree to which this once-technical and
academic term has permeated the public consciousness, especially in a place like Little
Tokyo that is heavily impacted by urban development pressures. This category also
includes less technical or historically used variants of this term, such as community
redevelopment or community preservation, or specific anti-gentrification campaigns such
as First Street North (FSN). This issue fits within the second tier of community activism
and, to a lesser extent, the third tier of volunteerism. The second most common category
involved respondents just explicitly naming one or another organization in the
community such as JANM, JACCC, LTSC, Kizuna, or others, with some 17% of
respondents doing so, and this might fall into the third tier of engagement, where
respondents might be volunteering for an organization without a commitment to a
specific underlying political issue. Additional issues that fall within the second tier and
possibly the third tier of engagement include cultural preservation (12%), youth-related
(10%) and elderly-related (6%) issues, and the LA Metro construction (3%). The
concerns around youth-related and elderly-related issues speaks to a wider interest from
stakeholders about the inter-generational issues raised by community leaders in the
previous chapter. Remaining issues include civil rights (10%) which likely includes many
political activists from tier one engagement, and an outlier was the relatively specific
issue of mental health within the Little Tokyo community (3%). This issue’s presence
208
was likely the product of a laudable campaign initiated by LTSC called “Changing
Tides” which focused on the often-taboo issue of mental health, and is demonstrative of
the power that a coordinated campaign can have on a specific issue, especially within a
small and close-knit community like Little Tokyo. It also demonstrates the sway that
community leaders hold, most of whom would likely fall into the first tier of professional
activism, or at least the second tier of community activism, and who can generate a
substantial community discussion over issues that might be off the radar simply by
organizing a coordinated awareness campaign — a powerful demonstration of the intense
networked connectivity of people in Little Tokyo, and of the social capital held by its
leaders.
The next and final set of questions dealt with issues of neighborhood change. The
following question was asked to determine the respondent’s intensity of concern around
neighborhood change, as well as to prime the respondent to provide insight into issues of
concern or excitement about development in the community: “On a scale of 1 to 10, with
1 being ‘never or rarely’ and 10 being ‘often or daily’ how often do you think about the
changes that Little Tokyo is undergoing as a neighborhood?” The mean response was 6.4
with a standard deviation of 2.5, and the median response was 7. In other words, while
there was a wide range of responses from one to ten, neighborhood change was more
often than not on people’s minds as an issue. With a median answer of 7, this would
suggest that it is regularly on people’s minds and is a very serious concern, though it is
not at a level of constant, existential anxiety — except for the 12-20% of respondents
who marked a 9 or 10 which, from another perspective, suggests the degree to which this
issue is rapidly becoming a bigger issue on the horizon. The survey was intentionally
209
constructed with this question not explicitly naming gentrification or putting
neighborhood change in negative terms as to bias the respondent, so we can assume that
these responses are conservative.

Figure 22. Survey word cloud: exciting neighborhood changes
Relative frequency of the most common 125 words in survey responses to an open-ended question which
asked which neighborhood changes respondents are most excited about.

When asked about specific issues that were exciting for respondents in an open-
ended response format, most people (about 70%) named a range of new developments in
the community. Most frequently named were new entrepreneurial businesses popping up,
especially mom and pop businesses and Japanese American and Asian American
businesses that were drawing in a younger crowd (16%), and also LTSC’s Budokan
development project which had broken ground and is slated to open in a year or so
(14%). Also named were a range of “community” related developments, such as Little
Tokyo’s increased liveliness with more young people and families on the streets (9%),
210
the diverse array of old and new cultural events available (8%), and other activities
undertaken by non-profit organizations (4%). The LA Metro construction was named by
8% of respondents, suggesting a counter-narrative to the idea that it is entirely something
bad and harmful to the community but that this is tempered with the expectation of new
life that the completed station will bring into Little Tokyo. A number of political
participation-related developments were named, such as community anti-gentrification
campaigns like First Street North (7%) and increased youth participation in organizations
and events (6%). The increased diversity of the neighborhood was also named by 4% of
respondents, suggesting a counter narrative to concern around a diminishing Japanese
American presence, and corresponding to interviews with leaders who acknowledged the
importance of Little Tokyo figuring out how to move into a new period where its JA
heritage needed to be protected and respected but within a context where perhaps even
the majority of stakeholders might not be JA themselves. Yet the biggest category of all
were the 30% of respondents who left this question blank, suggesting a degree of apathy
or exhaustion with neighborhood change, or even explicitly said that there was nothing
they were excited about, suggesting an even stronger degree of antipathy toward all of the
changes that Little Tokyo has been undergoing.
When asked about changes which concerned them, respondents most consistently
named some version of mom and pop shops closing (37%) suggesting the cultural
importance that these businesses have in Little Tokyo, and connecting to a gentrification
process very different from the typical understanding of residential upscaling and
displacement. Another 25% named the diminishing Japanese American presence as a
concern, countering those who were excited about new forms of diversity in the
211
neighborhood, and reinforcing the fact that Little Tokyo is singular in its role as a
physical place for Japanese American culture and heritage — a role that ought to be
protected. Again, this is a kind of cultural gentrification that does not fit within the

Figure 23. Survey word cloud: concerning neighborhood changes
Relative frequency of the most common 125 words in survey responses to an open-ended question which
asked which neighborhood changes respondents are most concerned about.

typical understanding of economic or housing-based gentrification. Another 15%
explicitly named gentrification as a concern, though it is unclear what, exactly,
respondents meant by this term which is so often interpreted in a wide and disparate
variety of ways. It provides little more specificity than the intentionally open-ended
questions which asked about “neighborhood change” and perhaps is just a marker, again,
of general concerns about change and how this term has become commonplace in lay
discussions about change. Another 14% of respondents noted housing costs and rental
costs which, at times, may have also referred to commercial rental costs — this specific
212
concern links more closely to traditional understandings of gentrification as economic
upscaling and displacement.
Additional changes that were disconcerting but not necessarily about various
forms of gentrification (or if they are, then they are indirectly) include concerns around
homelessness, crime, and trash (14%), the perennial concern about parking (6%), and
about LA Metro construction (5%). It is notable that the concern about the Metro
construction was slightly less than the excitement about it. This tracks with my interviews
with community leaders who had similarly mixed responses: many of the more business-
oriented leaders were excited for the Metro construction and the potential for a new
consumer base that it might bring in, while more activist-oriented leaders were concerned
about the gentrification and equity concerns that Metro development presented. Also,
homelessness, in particular, was an issue that came up repeatedly, and was one that was
often conflated with other appearance-related issues like trash and crime. There was not
necessarily data to support this connection, but it was one that was evident in at least a
subset of respondents’ minds, and perhaps has been one that has developed in
stakeholders’ imaginary because of the increasing visibility of homelessness throughout
Los Angeles and various personal anecdotal experiences, especially as Little Tokyo is
located just north of LA’s Skid Row. There may have been a few respondents who
intended their concern to be read as concern for people who are experiencing
homelessness, but the far more common desire seemed to be for these people to be
“cleaned up” and pushed elsewhere, out of sight and out of mind. This, again, tracks with
community leaders who included on the one hand more business-oriented leaders whose
primary concern was a pleasing atmosphere for potential customers and community
213
members, and activist-oriented leaders whose concerns around equity and social justice
led them to be concerned about homelessness not from the perspective of wanting to
“clean it up” but, rather, of wanting to provide safe and livable housing for people
without a home. A final note is that some 19% of respondents either left their response
blank or actively wrote that they were not concerned about changes because the changes
were good — this is a significant number of respondents, but it doesn’t form the largest
category for this question, and this amount is substantially less than those who were not
excited by changes in the previous question.
As a final comment in this section, it should be noted that there was also an
optional open response question at the end of the survey which allowed respondents to
insert whatever they liked, including any comments on issues facing the community
which were not included in the survey. There were no consistent and legible trends that
could be tracked through word frequency, so the open response has largely been left out
of analysis including frequency tables, regression analysis, and word cloud visualization.
Nevertheless, the tone of the responses, for those who did indeed respond, was generally
positive and optimistic — striking, especially given that this open response comes
immediately after a question about disconcerting neighborhood changes. There was often
a gratitude toward the surveyor because the survey was seen as helping preserve the
community, and there was a general sense of hopefulness about the future of the
community. This speaks, again, to the unique culture of Little Tokyo, developed over
generation of challenge, political action and response, and building community power
and agency. There seems to be a sense that there are urgent issues facing the community,
214
but also a faith in the integrity of the community to hold together and stake a claim over
its future, despite these and any future challenges.

What Kind of Stakeholder?

This section will explore correlations between the type of stakeholder — i.e.,
whether the respondent identified as a regular patron of Little Tokyo, as a volunteer,
employee, church member, renter, business owner, and/or homeowner, with respondents
being able to mark multiple connections to the neighborhood — and the various other
responses in the survey. I coded each of the variables as a dummy variable, including
each of the stakeholder categories, as well as each of the most frequently mentioned
responses listed in the frequency tables, except for the questions on JA identity,
familiarity with SLT, and degree of concern about neighborhood change, because these
were the only three questions that had continuous quantitative data. Each of the other
questions had to be coded as multiple dummy variables because respondents could mark
more than one response in their answer, or even list things in an open-ended response,
making it impossible to code each question as its own standalone categorical variable. I
ran OLS regression analysis using Stata for each variable against the stakeholder
categories to establish correlations between the two. It is important to note that these
numbers cannot be meaningfully interpreted in any way beyond establishing a relative
strength of correlation, with insight provided through whether the correlation is positive
or negative, and of relative intensity, demonstrating which stakeholder categories were
more or less strongly associated with each variable. Additionally, these regressions are
215
intended to evaluation stakeholder identity as a series of independent variables, and as
such, any number of other plausible variables that would influence responses are not
included (e.g., other demographic data such as age and gender), biasing the results. Logit
regression analysis might be able to provide more precise interpretations of correlations
because most of the variables were binary, but because the data set is relatively small, it
seemed best not to over-interpret the data and, instead, consider more general patterns
and trends in correlations.
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, this form of analysis could also be
performed with any of the other variable sets as the independent variable set rather than
the stakeholder connection to Little Tokyo, setting the stage for future directions in this
body of research. However, stakeholder connection was considered at this moment
because it made the most sense logically as a set of independent variables because these
identities seemed like a likely influence in the various other views and experiences that
the respondent had in relation to Little Tokyo. Stakeholder connection, including
identifiers such as renter, employee, and volunteer, provides a window into the range of
different kinds constituents with a personal investment in Little Tokyo beyond the
organizational and community leaders that we heard from in the previous chapter. I
hypothesize that we will see different trends in the types of arts, activism, and concerns
around gentrification identified by respondents based upon how they are connected to
Little Tokyo. For example, business owners and employees may have particular concerns
about the way in which Little Tokyo is changing more related to its commercial character
as compared to volunteers who may be more focused on concerns of the community’s
non-profit and cultural organizations. All of the results are reported in tables 3-10 for
216
transparency, with each regression that was run identified by a number from 1-68, but
because of the limitations mentioned above, specific numbers will not be reported in this
analysis and generally only correlations which had at least a p-value of 0.1 were
considered legitimate. For future versions of this survey, this data could be refined
through incorporating standard demographic information (especially age and gender), a
clearer question about JA heritage and generation, and a larger sample size — the tables
demonstrate a more present significance for “regular patrons” likely because there were a
greater number of respondents who identified as such, making the data more robust.
The first survey question asking about the degree to which the respondent felt a
connection to Little Tokyo’s Japanese American heritage, and the degree to which this
heritage was important, was coded as on a 1-5 interval scale with 1 being no connection
and not important, and 5 being a strong connection and very important. Based on the
regression analysis performed in (1), the stakeholders who had the strongest connection
to Little Tokyo’s Japanese American identity were volunteers which is surprising at first
blush: we might assume that business owners or longtime churchgoers would have a
more enduring connection to the community and, hence, a stronger family connection to
its Japanese American heritage (table 3). However, we might also understand those with
a material connection to Little Tokyo, through a business investment or commitment to a
church, as sustaining a connection to the neighborhood beyond what the individual might
217

Table 3. Regression table: important art forms
Relationship between stakeholder type and (1) importance of JA identity, (2) art forms considered important, and (3) familiarity with SLT.
218
do without any such connection — they are, in a sense, “required” to have this
connection and volunteers, on the other hand, have no such material connection, and
sustain a voluntary relationship with and investment of time into Little Tokyo regardless.
In this sense, it makes sense that volunteers would at least feel and express the strongest
connection to Little Tokyo’s Japanese American heritage given these individuals
willingness to donate time and resources to organizations and events in Little Tokyo even
though they are not necessarily residents, paid employees, or have some other formal
connection. It speaks to volunteers’ belief that Little Tokyo is important as a Japanese
American place, and that this heritage can only be protected by everyone giving back in
their time and money to the cultural institutions which perpetuate that heritage.
The next set of regressions was performed on data from the question asking which
art forms were important for Little Tokyo. In regression (2) we can see that the likelihood
of naming festivals as important was most positively associated with regular patrons and
employees, showing their ubiquitous presence and association with commercial life in
Little Tokyo and, surprisingly, negatively associated with renters suggesting that for
residence these festivals may be a bit more of a burden with added congestion than a
benefit. In regression (3) we can also see that food was unsurprisingly most positively
associated with respondents who were regular patrons of Little Tokyo, but again,
negatively associated with renters and homeowners, suggesting that the embarrassment of
riches in Little Tokyo’s food scene might be seen as something of an annoyance for
people who are, perhaps, eating homemade meals more often than not. In regressions (4-
9) we see a positive association between employees and mentioning the importance of
visual arts, film, music, and literature. This might suggest that these everyday forms of art
219
and culture are consumed and appreciated by those who are in the neighborhood every
day with the daily grind of employment, but it is also likely in part due to Little Tokyo’s
high density of cultural institutions for which many of these employees work at. We also
see a positive association between regular patrons and theater, film, music, literature, and
religious ceremonies but not, curious, visual arts, suggesting that perhaps Little Tokyo is
not seen as much as a destination for visual arts as much as these other art forms —
notable, considering the ambivalence about the presence of MOCA which is one of the
most important visual arts institutions in LA, and which has a large presence in Little
Tokyo, but is largely seen as not really part of the community. Church members,
unsurprisingly, had the strongest positive association with religious ceremonies.
In regression (10) we look at the correlation between stakeholder category and
how familiar the respondent is with Sustainable Little Tokyo. We will consider this in
more depth in the next chapter, but for the time being, there appears to be a positive
association between being a regular patron, a volunteer, an employee, or a homeowner
and being familiar with or participating in SLT activities. While it does not meet the
threshold for statistical significance, the only negative association is with being a church
or temple member, suggesting that this may be a population in Little Tokyo that SLT
could do a better job of reaching out to and engaging with.
The next set of regressions consider the association between stakeholder category
and the organizations named in an open-ended question asking about which cultural
institutions were important for Little Tokyo. In regressions (11-13, table 3) we can see
that the three most common responses, JACCC, JANM, and Nisei Week all had a strong
positive association with being an employee, suggesting these institutions importance in
220

Table 4. Regression table: cultural organizations
Relationship between stakeholder type and cultural organization recognition.
221
the commercial sphere, or even that they themselves may also employ many of the survey
respondents. JACCC and Nisei Week also had a strong association with being a volunteer
and, to a lesser degree, a regular patron, suggesting these institutions role in drawing
people into Little Tokyo and also being institutions where many people volunteer.
JANM, curiously, had a negative association with being a church member, suggesting
that this institution somehow exists in a separate space from the religious institutions in
Little Tokyo, also suggesting a potential new outreach strategy for JANM. As seen in
regressions (14-23), regular patrons also had a positive association with naming East
West Players, Obon festivals, LTSC, Kizuna, Go For Broke, and Cold Tofu. Volunteers
had a positive association with naming Obon festivals, Kizuna, and Tanabata festivals.
These appear to be the cultural organizations and events that are bringing the most people
from outside Little Tokyo into the neighborhood. Employees had a positive association
with naming East West Players, Obon festivals, LTSC, Visual Communications, and Go
For Broke, suggesting that these institutions loom large in the minds of the daily
participants of Little Tokyo’s commercial life. Go For Broke also had a positive
association with being a business owner and a homeowner, suggesting its connection to
those who have an especially strong investment into the neighborhood through real
property.
The next set of regressions (24-33, table 4) show the associations between
stakeholder category and the types of things that respondents spent money on in Little
Tokyo. Regular patrons had a positive association with food, drinks, clothing, and gifts.
Volunteers had a positive association with gifts and parking, perhaps suggesting that their
services ought to at least be compensated with parking vouchers when possible.
222

Table 5. Regression table: money spent on
Relationship between stakeholder type and what money is spent on in Little Tokyo.
223
Employees had a positive association with food, drinks, gifts, and groceries, and a
negative association with events, perhaps because their use of the communities
commercial spaces is more utilitarian and employees may not want to return to their
workplace during non-working hours. Church members had a positive association with
clothing and other generic merchandise, suggesting that Little Tokyo is still a place where
shopping is done on Sundays. Renters had a positive association with groceries and
art/books, unsurprising because of their need for these utilitarian goods, and actually had
a negative association with food, events, and drinks, suggesting that renters either see
Little Tokyo more in line with a domestic space rather than a cultural destination, or
perhaps just that because of limited income and low financial resources, these luxuries
are not a regular option. Homeowners also had a negative association with food,
suggesting that residents are either cooking at home or eating outside of Little Tokyo, and
business owners had a positive association with drinks, perhaps as a lubricant to help
with the daily grind or for networking and establishing new business.
The next questions considered types of political participation, evaluated in
regressions (34-41, table 5), and specific issues named by respondents evaluated in
regressions (42-49, table 6). Regular patrons were associated with making donations,
signing petitions, attending community meetings, fundraising, attending marches, and
contacting public officials. Volunteers were associated with making donations, signing
petitions, attending community meetings, fundraising, attending marches, canvassing,
and an especially strong association with volunteering (unsurprisingly). Volunteers
extensive participation is likely reflective of their identity as volunteers. Employees were
224

Table 6. Regression table: types of participation
Relationship between stakeholder type and types of participation engaged in.
225

Table 7. Regression table: political issues
Relationship between stakeholder type and issues engagement was for.
226
associated with making donations, signing petitions, attending community meetings,
fundraising, and contacting elected officials, a surprising number of activities for
employees who may not necessarily live in the neighborhood, demonstrating Little
Tokyo’s importance for those connected to it. Church members were associated with
making donations and fundraising, especially financially related activities, suggesting a
distaste for other forms of political action. Renters and homeowners were associated with
contacting public officials, again a relatively limited set of political engagement which is
reflective of Little Tokyo’s unusual status as a cultural and commercial center rather than
a residential one. And business owners were strongly associated with making donations
and attending community meetings, reflective of the high degree of organization that
business leaders have in the community, and the degree to which they are expected to
give back — also demonstrated by the ire drawn by businesses who do not participate in
community in these ways, such as Shoe Palace.
For specific political issues engaged with, gentrification was most positively
associated with regular patrons, volunteers, and employees, reinforcing Little Tokyo’s
status as a cultural and commercial center rather than a residential one. It is also
suggestive that “regular patrons” are more than just people who buy a lot of goods and
services in the neighborhood, but are true stakeholders who care deeply about a variety of
issues facing Little Tokyo. Organizational support was most strongly associated with
volunteers, unsurprisingly. Cultural preservation was associated with regular patrons and
volunteers, while mental health was associated with regular patrons as well. Youth-
related initiatives were associated with regular patrons, volunteers, business owners and
homeowners, speaking to the wide variety of concerns that these stakeholders have in
227
thinking about the future of Little Tokyo and its pipeline of leadership. Civil rights
actually had a negative association with renters, suggesting that it may not be seen as
pressing as other gentrification-related concerns. And Metro development was most
strongly associated with business owners, speaking to their relatively high degree of skin
in the game, and the extent to which they were negatively impacted by construction.
The final set of questions dealt with the degree to which there was concern around
neighborhood change (regression 50, table 7 and 8), and which changes were exciting
(regressions 51-60) and which were concerning (61-68). All of the stakeholders had a
positive association with increasing concern about neighborhood change, with volunteers,
employees, and renters being those with the most concern. No clear associations emerged
from the data with regard to what was generally considered the most exciting positive
change, new businesses, nor other changes including increasing liveliness, cultural
offerings, non-profit activities, or increasing diversity, speaking perhaps to the degree to
which these specific issues really varied by respondent and factors apart from their
connection to Little Tokyo. It could also simply be due to a limitation of the relatively
small dataset. Changes that demonstrated an association with statistical significance
included volunteer excitement about the Budokan development, employee excitement
about Metro construction (perhaps because of the potential ease for future commuting),
patron and employee excitement about anti-gentrification campaigns like First Street
North (corresponding to their engagement with the issue of gentrification from the
previous set of questions), and volunteer excitement about youth participation. Church
members were less likely to name excitement about the Budokan development, perhaps
228

Table 8. Regression table: exciting neighborhood changes
Relationship between stakeholder type and (1) degree of concern over neighborhood change and (2) changes that are seen as exciting.
229

Table 9. Regression table: concerning neighborhood changes
Relationship between stakeholder type and changes that are seen as concerning.
230
because of competing donation and fundraising interests identified from the previous
questions, though admittedly there is not a clear reason for this correlation. Renters had
the strongest association with marking that they had no excitement about changes,
speaking to their concern about their precarity in the neighborhood and its gentrification.
Volunteers, employees, and business owners had a negative association with marking that
they were not excited, suggesting that these groups have more exposure to positive
developments in the neighborhood and are excited about many of the changes that Little
Tokyo is seeing.
With regard to concerning changes, regular patrons, volunteers, and church
members had a positive association with concern about disappearing mom and pop shops,
speaking to their continued importance to regulars both practically and in a psychological
and symbolic sense as well. Concern about a diminished Japanese American presence
was similarly associated with regular patrons, church members, and business owners.
Concern about gentrification was associated with volunteers and employees, and housing
concerns, interestingly, were associated with volunteers. Parking had a negative
association with regular patrons, suggesting that regulars know where to park and haven’t
been concerned about a lack of parking. Regular patrons and employees, however, are
associated with concern about Metro development which, curiously, is matched by
excitement from the previous question, suggesting that Metro development is met with a
good deal of hope, concern, and overall ambivalence in the community. Concern about
homelessness, trash, and crime were associated with employees, perhaps because they are
the ones who most often have to deal directly with these issues. There were no groups
that had a significant positive association with marking that they had no concerns about
231
changes. Instead, volunteers, employees, and business owners all demonstrated a negative
association with marking that they had no concern, suggesting than many of the most
regular users of Little Tokyo’s urban fabric on a daily basis were also the ones who had
the most well-developed concerns about its changes and its future.
Many of these correlations track with the insights provided by community leaders
in the previous chapter, who shared a special appreciation for festivals and food, but also
recognized the importance of the wide range of cultural institutions in Little Tokyo.
Leaders also engaged in a wide range of political activities, with concerns emphasizing
Little Tokyo’s changing character (though also extending into issues like civic rights, and
youth and elderly-related concerns). Leaders tended to track most closely with patrons,
volunteers, employees, and business owners (at least two of whom were interviewed in
the previous chapter), and similarly diverged like these stakeholders from some of the
views held by church members, but especially residential stakeholders like renters and
homeowners. This demonstrates something of a gap, albeit an apparently minor one,
between the community leaders’ views and the views of commercial and cultural
stakeholders, versus the views of residential stakeholders — who seemed less impressed
with festivals, food, and political concerns outside of gentrification. This points toward
an area where more active outreach, engagement, and listening would benefit a more
socially and politically integrated Little Tokyo.

General Findings & Further Research

This chapter has provided a more nuanced and detailed look at some of the
232
perspectives related to art and culture, participation, and gentrification held by Little
Tokyo’s broader population of stakeholders. Additionally, it has identified some of the
correlations between these survey responses and the particular stakeholder identities or
connections to Little Tokyo held by respondents. Generally, it appears as though Little
Tokyo’s stakeholders are largely in line with its leaders and the opinions voices in
historical records. Art and culture are generally seen as integral to the community across
a wide variety of forms, and the extraordinary wealth of cultural institutions in Little
Tokyo are seen as playing a key role in its history, continued development, and identity
as a Japanese American and Asian American cultural center. However, there is a
divergence between stakeholders with regular patrons and employees having an
especially strong connection to art and culture, volunteers and church members with a
less strong connection, and residential stakeholders with, at times, a negative connection.
And festivals, in particular, were seen as an especially important form of culture, likely
because of their roots in Little Tokyo’s history of the Nisei Week festival, along with
obon and tanabata festivals. In response to my research questions regarding which art
forms seem embedded in the community, and how views on art and its importance might
diverge between community leaders and stakeholders, we can say that there is a good
deal of overlap in terms of how universal festivals and especially Nisei Week are still
seen as core to the identity of Little Tokyo for both leaders and stakeholders. Food was
also widely identified as important by both leaders and stakeholders, demonstrating the
continued importance of Little Tokyo with regard to everyday or traditional forms of
Japanese American culture as found in its foodways, an element that was noted in
interviews with community leaders as at the intersection of mom and pop businesses and
233
the idea of culture. Yet it is striking that for all of the emphasis by community leaders on
how traditional forms of art and culture are overlooked, that on the one hand it is clearly
appreciated and seen as important by stakeholders, and on the other hand the third most
identified form of art was visual arts — an art form most often associated with
contemporary forms of art — suggesting that while traditional arts and culture are
fundamental to the community, a wide range of forms of art and culture remain very
important as well.
Public participation rates are also very high, and even stakeholders who might not
typically participate in things like community meetings such as people who are primarily
in Little Tokyo to shop and go to events on a regular basis nevertheless feel a strong
connection to the neighborhood and avail themselves to contribute back to the
community. This reinforces the leaders’ view that Little Tokyo is a unique cultural
destination for Japanese American culture — and perhaps even the premier locus for
Asian American cultural activity in the United States, as community leaders envision —
and is also unusually well-organized because of its distinct history and culture.
Community members see the neighborhood not just as a resource or a place for their own
needs, but as a cultural center that they are responsible for giving back to, and ensuring
that it continues to thrive into the future for the next generation and the greater
community.
One theme that continued from previous chapters is cultural shift over
generations, especially as it relates to the “dilution” of Little Tokyo’s Japanese American
identity. The survey demonstrated that this is a very real concern for the community’s
stakeholders, and was associated with a kind of cultural gentrification. The
234
neighborhood’s Japanese American mom and pop shops are disappearing, generating far
more alarm than rising rents, even though these two phenomena are likely related to one
another. It would appear that leaders’ savviness toward the role of property rights may be
a regular discussion in expert and leader circles, but less evident in among a more general
public. And while leaders are aware of the reality of a changing neighborhood and are
generally optimistic, if a bit nostalgic, about Little Tokyo’s future with a diminished JA
presence, stakeholders remain very concerned about this process. Nevertheless, there is
hope in the fact that even though the community is undergoing demographic and ethnic
shifts, the vast majority of newcomers who are not Japanese American nevertheless
strongly associate Little Tokyo with its JA heritage and see it as something valuable to be
protected. If this transition can be managed well, with the right leaders and structures in
place, it would seem that Little Tokyo’s JA heritage and culture are here to stay, even as
fewer and fewer JA stakeholders populate its shops, homes, institutions, and events.
Community leaders, for their part, have pointed toward specific businesses such as Cafe
Dulce which they see as a model for the future because the business fits within the culture
and their proprietors are very plugged into the community, giving back and participating
in community life, even though they are not Japanese American.
Another theme is Little Tokyo’s identity as a cultural and commercial center
rather than a residential one — and especially as a destination for food-related cultural
events and businesses. It was clear that most of the concerns around gentrification were
related to the transformation of cultural and commercial locations rather than residential
ones, and those who were most concerned about gentrification processes were patrons,
volunteers, and employees rather than renters and homeowners. This speaks to the
235
importance of having tailored policies which protect cultural and commercial heritage in
the community, rather than solely a focus on rental prices, housing, or economic
displacement (though these things are also important). And forms of participation,
especially as they relate to community development, tend to be aware of this fact and
focus on issues related to business owners and cultural institutions. Though this narrative
dominates, it should not be forgotten that there are renters and homeowners in Little
Tokyo who have pressing concerns about a range of issues, especially with regard to the
precarity of renters in a gentrifying neighborhood. These stakeholders noted a fairly
different set of concerns, and were often less engaged with things like Little Tokyo’s
food culture.
For many of the responses, there was an ambivalence demonstrated, where things
like the LA Metro development were both looked forward to as an exciting portent for
the future but also a worrying signal to spark proactive anti-gentrification efforts. To me,
this seems to be a healthy balance. Leaders also spoke with optimism toward the future
“without being pollyannaish.” Church goers seemed to be somewhat of an outlier in
many of the responses, with different forms of participation, different issues of concern,
and differing degrees of awareness about things like Sustainable Little Tokyo. The
churches and temples have been a historically important part of Little Tokyo’s
development and its ability to hold on to place, so this seems to be an important site of
potential for growth in organizing and community development for the future, bringing
the various religious institutions and their congregations more into the fold with all of the
things that are happening in Little Tokyo.
On the note of varying degrees of political participation and engagement, I
236
provided a three-tier model of different levels of intensity for participation. This model,
currently grounded theory based in the responses to this survey, might be a useful one to
consider forms and degrees of participation in other settings. A third tier of stakeholders
are primarily engaged through what could be considered “community service and
volunteerism,” donating their time and money on the side. While this third tier is less
intensive that the other two, these individuals nevertheless form an important foundation
for institutional support and political power in times where it is necessary to activate a
large voting bloc. A second tier of stakeholders is likely found in employees, “full time”
volunteers, and business owners who regularly participate in community development
and as such might be considered “community activism.” This tier of stakeholders could
be drawn out more clearly in future research which clarifies not only whether or not
someone has participated in an activity, but also the number of times they have
participated, distinguishing between casual and regular participants. These participants go
to community meetings, sign petitions, and are more politically engaged and informed
about the various issues that are facing their local community — and they also participate
in the third tier as well. And a first tier of stakeholders could be considered professional
activists and might be called “political activism.” These participants also engage in
second and third tier forms of participation, but they are defined by seeing broader social
and political issues as structurally connected to the issues facing the community and, as
such, engaged in a wider array of forms of participation such as lobbying officials,
canvassing, and engaging in marches and rallies.
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, while this survey provides a range of detailed
insight, it also sets the stage for several additional questions. Some of these questions can
237
be answered through regression analysis which swaps out the independent variables of
stakeholder identities with other responses contained within the dataset. For example, we
might examine correlations between the types of art seen as making an important
contribution in Little Tokyo with the types of participation that respondents are engaging
in to evaluate the degree to which increased art participation is associated with increased
political participation. Or we might consider the degree to which increased political
participation leads to particular neighborhood changes that are either concerning or
exciting. This analysis would require another dimension for the matrix of regressions,
bringing the reporting of regression results to three rather than two dimensions. But many
of the findings in this chapter also raise interesting questions. What is the current role of
religious institutions in community development? Research so far has demonstrated their
importance historically and within the imaginary of community leaders, but there seems
to be somewhat of a disconnect, even if it is a relatively small one, in terms of the types
of responses engendered. And how does the transformation of Little Tokyo figure into the
minds of younger stakeholders who are seen as the future leaders of the community, or
into the minds of non-JA stakeholders who are increasingly playing an important role in
the community? Each of these questions would require new research design and
additional data collection for analysis, important next steps in this body of research.
For now, in the next chapter, we turn to a case study of one particular
organization which has been identified as touching upon many of the issues brought up
by examination of Little Tokyo’s history, by interviewing its leaders, and by surveying its
stakeholders, in large part because of its coalition status across many of the community’s
major institutions, and in part because of its highly intersectional yet culture-based
238
approach to issues ranging from environmental sustainability to gentrification:
Sustainable Little Tokyo.

239
Chapter 6: Mottainai and a Sustainable Little Tokyo

As described earlier in this volume, public participation has been a key aspiration
in urban planning and public administration, among other fields, yet it has been critiqued
since its origins for its practical implementation inevitably manifesting as the lowest
common denominator of what a good participatory process might be. A key reason why
the repeated efforts to reinvent and reinvigorate public participation have been limited is
because theoretical frames have ignored the central role of culture. Civic expression
stands as a theoretical framing which links the arts, culture, and participation, and it has
been shown to be a critical element in Little Tokyo’s historical ability to build
community, organize, and hold on to place. This chapter focuses on Little Tokyo today,
especially regarding contemporary concerns around gentrification, demonstrating civic
expression as a key piece of how the community is, once again, organizing, building
community power, and staking a claim over the future of its place in the city.
Arts and culture have been foundational to this process, including building out a
distinct “third culture” and a sense of community in Little Tokyo, being a key site of
political action in the 1960s and 70s, and serving as a conduit to channel investment into
community assets during the 1980s and 90s. Today, art as “social practice” is en vogue,
and what was once a marginal practice has now found space within the circuits of global
art. Yet it takes numerous forms, and its reinvention as “creative placemaking” within
public art and urban planning circles has already evolved into more socially just and
engaged art forms even within the past decade. The most cutting-edge approaches have
moved beyond the model of “public art as economic development,” acknowledging the
240
interconnectedness and mutuality between placemaking and placekeeping. These
activities blur art, culture, activism, and community development, and will be examined
in this chapter through a case study of one remarkable community organization.
This chapter will focus on an in-depth case study analysis of Sustainable Little
Tokyo (SLT) as a part of Little Tokyo’s civic expression, and as a form of arts-based
community organizing and activism. It provides a dramatically different, even antipodal,
example of the relationship between art and the city to common narratives around urban
and public art, and their role in economic development, revitalization, and, ultimately,
gentrification. Instead, we see a grassroots form of urban arts and culture grounded in a
specific place, yet deployed to build community political power and, hopefully, slow or
even prevent gentrification. Now in its sixth year, it is beginning to transition from a
scrappy upstart program into something more institutional and has the potential to serve
as a template or model for other communities who are facing similar issues. In fact, many
communities are looking to Little Tokyo’s example in their own fights against
gentrification, and clarity about SLT’s role in contending with a changing Little Tokyo
will help not only it but others who seek to emulate its successes.
We found in chapter 4 that the leaders in Little Tokyo have identified a handful of
fundamental problems to tackle in the quest to hold on to place: reinventing property
rights, engaging new generations of community leaders, and cementing Little Tokyo’s
unique identity and culture within a broader, new constituency. How can these goals be
accomplished? In chapter 5, we analyzed the range of stakeholders and, despite their
various affinities and points of view, we found that arts, culture, and especially culture as
found in a handful of important legacy businesses were resoundingly important. While
241
regression analysis is helpful in isolating significant variables, for action we need models
that synthesize these variables into a vision, narrative, and plan. So, this chapter focuses
on a case study of SLT to consider what new experiments of arts and culture organizing
can engender. How can Little Tokyo connect generations, bring in new stakeholders, and
unite different members of “the community”? How does the spatiality of Little Tokyo
shape its social networking and activities? Close analysis of SLT’s participants and their
interactions yield insights into these questions.
While JACCC, JANM, and Nisei Week, all identified by stakeholder respondents
as some of the most recognizable important cultural institutions in Little Tokyo, have
long histories in Little Tokyo, SLT is the organization which I have observed and
identified as rapidly growing in importance as well as undertaking a uniquely cultural
approach to political organizing and activism. It is made up of a coalition of JACCC,
LTSC, and LTCC, with its key staff situated within JACCC institutionally. And it fits
into the long history of arts activism found in Little Tokyo described in Chapter 3, was
formulated and noted as an exciting development by leaders in Chapter 4, and clearly has
a growing role in the eyes of a broader group of stakeholders described chapter 5.
Because it is based on a coalition organizational form, and because it undertakes a wide
variety of activities based on a highly intersectional but diverse set of missional goals,
ranging from environmental concerns to gentrification, it actually touches upon many of
the issues and themes identified up to this point. While sustainability is often most
associated with environmental issues for English speakers, SLT’s motto is “mottainai,” a
Japanese phrase which directly translates to something like “what a waste!” but also has
connotations of a broader sustainability for environment, but also home, culture, and
242
community. It’s unique integrated and arts-based approach ensures that it will enjoy a
broad, intersectional coalition who can begin to see the connections between different
issues of concern for Little Tokyo.
In exploring this model of grassroots arts, I ask the following research questions:
How does art and culture hold potential for political participation and activism? Why
have SLT’s sponsors decided to use art and culture as an organizing tactic, and how has
the use of art and culture changed outcomes for its sponsors’ political organizing
activities? At its current stage of transition, what has SLT learned from its activities and
how might it need to evolve to best accomplish its goals? And perhaps most relevant for
the discipline of urban planning, how has the introduction of art and culture influenced
the participatory planning process? Is art and culture important for urban planning,
especially for community development beyond economic growth? As we explored in
chapter 1, public participation has a long history in urban planning literature, yet it
consistently overlooks the role of arts and culture. SLT’s example provides grounded
theory that can help fill this gap. Furthermore, these questions are especially germane for
understanding how coalition building and participatory planning operate in communities
similar to Little Tokyo: does SLT provide a model for understanding how to engage older
communities who not only face immense gentrification pressures, but are also intertwined
with questions of race, ethnicity, and identity?
I approach these questions through a case study approach using variety of
methods aimed at building out and analyzing Sustainable Little Tokyo. I have spoken
with and interviewed its leaders, collected and evaluated published media such as flyers
and reports, and attended meetings and events using participant observation. I have also
243
engaged in community-based research practices, embedding myself in the organization as
a member of its Arts Action Committee, helping out to produce and engaging with many
of its events, and also serving to provide research and analysis to the organization, as I
described in chapter 2.
In this chapter, I will begin with an overview of Sustainable Little Tokyo’s
history, how and why it developed, and the wide range of programs and activities that it
currently undertakes — and some of this history may be revisiting elements first raised in
chapter 3. Second, I will then go into my first-hand experiences and observations from
the time that I spent with SLT, especially focusing on the nature of person-to-person
interactions, social networks, and power relationships engendered through SLT. Third, I
will revisit the findings shared in chapter 4 and 5 directly related to SLT based on
leadership interviews and stakeholder survey responses, integrating them into our more
rich and built out case study of SLT, especially as they relate to generational shift and
new leadership. And forth and finally, I will provide some analysis of these materials as
they relate to my research questions, making some suggestions for SLT as it transitions
into a longer-term institutional status, and providing some theories as to what art and
culture can do toward the end of political participation and community organizing. In
particular, I provide a theory of “implicit political participation” as a key means for arts
and culture to provide unique contributions to political participation and community
organizing, wherein a community is brought together through a shared identity built on
arts and culture engagement without explicit political aims, but then that community can
be activated in times of need when that arts and culture foundation is threatened. In sum,
I hope that exploration of this organization will provide not only increased academic
244
knowledge about the nexus between art and culture, cities, and urban change, but will
also provide an actionable and practical set of recommendations both within Little Tokyo
and across the many communities who face similar threats of gentrification and
displacement, both culturally and economically. Overall, Sustainable Little Tokyo is
demonstrative of how civic expression works today.

Mottainai Emerging

Sustainable Little Tokyo is, in many ways, the culmination of this community’s
particular history of arts activism. It is a coalition of community organizations which
advocates to ensure a “healthy, equitable, and culturally rich Little Tokyo for generations
to come,” and it has done so primarily through participatory planning, community
organizing, and especially arts and culture. SLT began with a community visioning
process in 2013 which responded to the imminent development occurring at three large,
city-owned parcels of land in the neighborhood: LA Metro’s Regional Connector rail
station site, the Mangrove block to the east of the station site, and the First Street North
block to the north of the station site. The Regional Connector site, acquired through
eminent domain, was formerly a historic block of 19th century brick buildings home to
local institutions such as Atomic Cafe and Troy Cafe, hotbeds for punk rock talent in past
decades. Given this new development, and with memories of past evictions and seizures
through eminent domain still relatively fresh, community organizations in Little Tokyo
knew they had to mobilize to get ahead of this impending development and stake a claim
to the future of the neighborhood.
245
The first project of this coalition predates the official formation of SLT as an
organization. Representatives from community organizations including the Little Tokyo
Community Council and the Little Tokyo Service Center began meeting in early 2013
shortly after LA Metro’s plan for the Regional Connector was announced. Over the
course of the year, a task force of some 33 community leaders convened dozens of
meetings and workshops, and prepared a range of design and economic analyses with
consultants, culminating in a 3-day public charrette which included facilitators, design
experts, local businesses and institutions, public officials, and over 200 participants from
the community. The grassroots community visioning process released a final report in
January of 2014 which laid out a clear set of aspirations and expectations for the future of
the three sites. Affordable housing, human-scaled development, the fostering of mom and
pop businesses, a coordinated parking and transit plan, and the protection of the
neighborhood’s unique Japanese American identity were all key components of the plan.
Of particular note was the theme of mottainai, a Japanese exclamation of concern which
roughly translates to “what a waste!” This motif recurred in discussions regarding
environmental sustainability, with calls for renewable energy and water recycling in the
plan, but also the sustainability of the culture and community of Little Tokyo for future
generations. Art and culture were used here both as a part of the process of community
planning, but also seen as an integral goal for planning outcomes as well.
The importance of the organizing work which was required to see this vision
through was identified, and while the coalition partners continued working in their
various capacities, they secured grants from the Mellon Foundation, ArtPlace America,
Surdna Foundation, and the California Arts Council. All of these foundations and funding
246
agencies focus primarily on arts and culture, suggesting the importance of arts-based
activism assumed by the coalition. Through the funding, the coalition, composed of Little
Tokyo Community Council (LTCC), Little Tokyo Service Center (LTSC), and Japanese
American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC), established Sustainable Little
Tokyo as an official coalition initiative with its own full-time staff member who would
focus on arts organizing to continue a constellation of projects: spearheading arts-based
community organizing and political campaigns related to the First Street North
development, continuing to spread the word about the overall vision and getting
community buy-in, and generally building the necessary political capital to see the
community vision through. Additionally, the coalition members launched additional arts-
based community building programs, most notably the +LAB program led by LTSC and
funded by a three-million-dollar Community Development Investments grant from
ArtPlace America. The ability of Little Tokyo to receive such a sizeable grant speaks to
the grant writing prowess described by community leaders in previous chapters that has
been built up over time. While this funding was welcome, and a key reason why arts-
based activism could be pursued, the size of the grant and its “creative placemaking”
framing have sowed concerns in the community regarding how to best spend the sum,
especially as related organizations struggle to raise money, and have also led to
foundation concerns regarding conservative underspending of the grant money. The size
of the grant itself is reflective of both the belief in the unique power of what is happening
in Little Tokyo for national discussions around art and place by funders, but also the
degree to which creative placemaking funders are straining to find and support versions
of this activity that support communities without triggering forces of gentrification.
247
The first major project undertaken by SLT and +LAB was Takachizu, Japanese
for “treasure map,” led by artists Rosten Woo and Maya Santos. Woo is known as a co-
founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy, an arts and urban planning organization in
New York which has been at the foreground of rethinking how art can be used in
participatory planning processes, and Woo has since moved to Los Angeles, embedding
himself in local projects and initiatives such as SLT, and making an especially insightful
protagonist to take on the Takachizu project. The project’s goal was to produce a
community asset map of local cultural treasures, a common participatory planning project
which too often ends up being process without outcomes. Here, however, the project
served multiple purposes: to demonstrate the wealth of cultural assets which are densely
located in Little Tokyo, to advocate for their protection from outside development or
other such threats, and to serve as a means of building and activating the community in
discussions and reflections on the values of Little Tokyo. It now lives as an online
archive to which new materials can be contributed by anyone, and as such has fulfilled
yet another purpose: as a repository or archive of objects, images, and narratives about
the neighborhood. Takachizu was an appropriate beginning for SLT given its goal to
sustain the culture of the community and its need to first identify what this comprises this
cultural landscape.
Woo describes Takachizu as an “archive of archives,” noting the immense amount
of historicizing, archiving, documenting, and community building which has taken place
in Little Tokyo, but often remains in boxes, books, or photo albums in a community
member’s garage or attic — this effort has been key in creating a political consciousness
around Little Tokyo’s identity by bringing some of these items to a public light. The
248
process of collecting and mapping these items involved a series of community events and
a designed “memory collection space” where items would be professionally
photographed, and information cards filled out by the item’s owner. The process, data
collection, public display system, and website were all developed and designed to adhere
to archival practices so that the cultural data could be preserved and disseminated. Some
of the items uncovered during the project include past examples of arts activism in Little
Tokyo that might have otherwise been lost to time, including a “Don’t Be a Jerk” flyer
distributed at MOCA Geffen to promote support for the local Budokan community
recreation facility development project, and a guerrilla art campaign poster after Weller
Court was sold to a private developer (fig. 24). Once again, participatory planning
process and political activism are intertwined through the use of art and culture.
In addition to Takachizu, it has also sponsored a number of other culturally and
contextually specific arts activations in Little Tokyo which have raised awareness about
issues of gentrification and community sustainability. An annual ceremony using

Figure 24. Takachizu community asset mapping installation, 2016
Takachizu was developed through SLT and LTSC’s +LAB with artists Rosten Woo and Maya Santos (left)
and “Don’t be a Jerk” guerrilla art campaign from 2002 to support the Budokan development project
collected during Takachizu. Courtesy Sustainable Little Tokyo.

traditional performance to celebrate three historically important trees in the community
was paired with a fundraiser and celebration which used grapefruit juice made from one
249
of the trees in a local business beginning in 2015. Azusa Street, an alley that was also the
historically important origin point for Pentecostal Christianity, was improved and
activated with seating and murals in 2016. The FandangObon festival which was first
launched in 2013 by local Japanese American artist Nobuko Miyamoto, blending the
dancing and music of the Japanese Buddhist Obon festivals with that of Mexican and
West African fandango festivals, gained wider support and promotion through SLT and
introduced new components regarding the culture of sustainability. A range of food and
sustainability related initiative were launched, including a club for bokashi (a particular
kind of Japanese composting practice), a food recovery program, and a produce stand
which sells goods from Japanese American farmers. And the “Little Tokyo Mini Open”
and the “Windows of Little Tokyo” exhibitions were held during 2018, which hired
artists to develop and install a range of interventions throughout the community which
reflected on its history and future, raising awareness about the impending development.

Figure 25. SLT 2020 rendering, 2017
SLT 2020 was a short-term community visioning exercise to develop tactical urban interventions that
would help the community move toward its long-term goals in an incremental fashion and keep some
forward momentum.

250
Over a six-month period in 2017, SLT revisited its 2013 community vision with
the help of another arts, design, and participatory planning expert Theresa Hwang, who
was known for developing a community vision for the long-overlooked Skid Row
neighborhood. According to interview subjects, Hwang had to navigate “pie in the sky”
proposals, and the focus of this renewed community vision was to imagine more near and
mid-term scale projects that could be realized in the meantime to keep visible forward
momentum as the long-term vision was pursued through other means. Because the
original vision plan required building a great deal of community power and staking a
claim over the development of these large city-owned parcels of land, its realization
would take years or even decades, and a handful of “tactical urbanism” interventions
were seen as a good starting point to work toward that larger goal. Thus, this plan was
dubbed “SLT 2020” because of the plausibility of realizing many of its goals within a 3-
year time span. Some of the goals included creating a community market, developing a
pocket park at an important historical site, improve pedestrian connectivity between key
sites, and to work towards supporting business incubator sites and locations for new and
affordable housing (fig 2). Many of the envisioned projects include or use arts to achieve
“guiding principles” such as building a “strong community fabric” or responding to
mottainai. This strategy of building up smaller pieces that, on their own, are not
transformative, but collectively can set the stage for a fundamental change in community
dynamics echoes Nancy Fraser’s “non-reformist reforms” which pragmatically work
toward long-term change (Fraser and Honneth 2003). This approach, while appearing
similar on the surface, stands in stark contrast to conventional participatory planning
processes which privilege a Habermasian process of dialogue and do not necessarily seek
251
to transform systems on a fundamental level. Art and culture here provide a window
through which participants can reflect on the community’s past and imagine its future in a
very politically savvy way.
Another project, initiated in 2017 and realized in 2018, is the “Windows of Little
Tokyo” project, where an open call was put out to local artists who were asked to develop
large-scale two-dimensional graphics which would be installed in storefront windows
throughout Little Tokyo (fig. 26). The initial call asked for artworks which responded to
the of the “Past, Present, and Future of Little Tokyo” and which including responses such
as historical material on Japanese Americans, poetry and art linking Little Tokyo and its
Japanese American history with the experiences of other ethnicities and cultures, and

Figure 26. Nancy Uyemura, Butterflies (2018)
Physical installation of Uyemura’s piece as part of SLT’s Windows of Little Tokyo exhibition on site at
JACCC.

252
personal experiences of gentrification and displacement. This project is a quintessential
example of SLT’s methods and ethos. Substantively, it reflects on the history, current
issues, and future of Little Tokyo, including themes of Japanese American heritage,
culture, gentrification, and community vision. But it does so using art, and by pulling
together a wide array of artists with different connections to Little Tokyo, ranging from
young newcomers who live in Little Tokyo, to a third-generation Japanese American
whose family owns one of the historic buildings in the neighborhood, to a longtime
resident and artist who has worked in Little Tokyo for some 40 years. It builds new
connections between different stakeholders and different generations, generates buzz
about issues of concern, and does all of this in a way that pulls in local business owners
and promotes mom and pop shopping destinations. Each of the windows was located
either in a key cultural institution or a local mom and pop business, and the installation,
up for six months, included a map which could guide longtime stakeholders and
newcomers alike to these institutions and businesses worth supporting — ostensibly to
enjoy a work of free public art, but also to engage with the themes and to support these
local legacy businesses and organizations.
Most recently, at the end of 2018, SLT sponsored “ART@341,” a 2-month long
pop-up space in a former gift shop located in the heart of Little Tokyo’s historically
designated 1st Street. Led by an “Arts Action Committee” of artists and community
members, the grassroots initiative installed an exhibition of the history of arts activism in
Little Tokyo, and over 24 arts-related events such as poetry readings and jazz nights were
held featuring over 50 different artists. According to SLT’s records, over 1,000 people
attended the events, and over 3,000 signatures were collected to use in a rally and march
253
to raise awareness about the desire to maintain community control over future Little
Tokyo development, and these activities and petitions were delivered to the city
councilmember who, ultimately, retains make or break power to determine how the
parcels would be developed. On the opening and closing nights of the space, the former
proprietor of the now-demolished Atomic Cafe and DJ “Atomic Nancy” Sekizawa held a
revival of the space, drawing in crowds to view the actions and activities of SLT (fig. 27).
While SLT continues to pursue its goals, and final plans regarding the
development of the three parcels remains up in the air, its arts and culture-based activities
have left a political mark in Little Tokyo and Los Angeles at large. Councilmember Jose
Huizar’s office has been careful to tread lightly in future development plans, especially
after it was surprised by the number of active participants and signatures collected from

Figure 27. ART@341 pop-up storefront
The exterior (left) and interior (right) where “Atomic Nancy” spins records at the closing night of
awareness-raising and SLT-sponsored ART@341. Photos by author.

the community — though since this point in time, SLT has had to regroup and figure out
a new strategy as Huizar has come under federal investigation and much of this
community organizing will have to reactivate under the context of a future new
councilmember. Many shops throughout the community have SLT materials posted in
their windows, signaling a cohesive political identity shared by the largely locally-owned
254
and operated business community, and the dizzying array of local non-profit
organizations ranging from the various religious communities to arts and culture entities
have also signed on to support SLT in its goals. Little Tokyo will be hard pressed to
compete against global developers who may be eyeing the large city-owned parcels on
the basis of money alone, yet if it can maintain a unified political front with high
community participation — the primary logic behind grassroots political organizing,
based on the threat of electoral politics — then the City of Los Angeles and the
councilmember responsible for Little Tokyo will be hard pressed to make any
development decisions that do not have the approval of and alignment with the
community’s will.
Of particular note in all of SLT’s activities throughout its organic development
over time is how wide-reaching its intersectional approach to “sustainability” is.
Intersectional approaches are now seen as fundamental in contemporary social
movements which are reliant on pulling together disparate identities under a shared cause
— critically, by demonstrating the ways in which the issues themselves intersectionally
affect disparate groups in often unseen ways — to build enough political power to
achieve shared aims.
11
There are specific activities that emphasize environmental
sustainability, such as its bokashi club, bike tours, and slogans and cultural practices that
promote environmental sustainability. But these are then interwoven with culture, such as
the sites that are visited on the bike tours, or the art, culture, and dance of FandangObon
which also includes workshops and symposia on sustainability concerns. And, to take it a

11
The term is often traced back to legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw who used critical race theory and
feminist critique to analyze how different identities are legally, philosophically, and practically intertwined
(Crenshaw 1989).
255
step further, SLT frames all of its activities and especially its activism and organizing
around the future of Little Tokyo as sustainability concerns, but it is attempting to ensure
the sustainability of the community, culture, and environment of Little Tokyo for future
generations. This intersectional approach knits together a disparate group of participants
who may have a particular interest in one or another of SLT’s many activities, but can see
through this broad lens the way in which their interests are tied together with other
concerns.
Consider this example which plays out every time one of SLT’s Jitensha Bike
Club meetings: a bike enthusiast who might not otherwise show up to community events
is introduced to the history and culture of Little Tokyo as a place to be protected over the
course of a bike tour, as well as the way in which their bike riding can transform
transportation networks and, in turn, reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A fun bike ride
because both a pedagogical space and an opportunity to draw in political support for a
wide array of concerns facing Little Tokyo. Arts and culture are the driver for Little
Tokyo, and mottainai is the intersectional spirit that brings together a diverse set of
stakeholders over a shared set of goals. And the Jitensha Bike Club also connects SLT
and its participants to other organizations in the city, such as through API Forward
Culture, a sponsoring collaborator for the bike rides, or with Multicultural Communities
for Mobility, a similar justice-oriented bike and alternative transportation group dealing
with similar issues in Boyle Heights. In 2019, one bike ride was held which specifically
explored the shared Japanese American and Latinx histories of Little Tokyo and Boyle
Heights as cyclists built intersectional connections through these different community
256
organizations during a bike ride across the bridge that connects these two geographically
close neighborhoods.

SLT and Building Social Capital

Over the course of about 17 months, I attended some 23 different community
meetings, artist convenings, workshops, planning board sessions, and arts and culture
events related to Sustainable Little Tokyo. I experienced first-hand the so-called “over
organized” nature of Little Tokyo and its community, where decisions were rarely made
without some kind of in-person check in to confirm that trajectories were ones that
everyone could get behind. It was, frankly, refreshing to witness a group of stakeholders
who were so committed and concerned to the issues that Little Tokyo faces to attend
these meetings — and there were many more that I did not make it to — and the sessions
were generally jovial, made as accessible as possible, and included snacks and beverages.
Events were publicized through multiple means, including email invite circulated through
organizations, physical posting of flyers, Facebook events, and word of mouth. Events
were planned so as to include both fun activities as well as the important business of
sharing information and soliciting input. They demonstrate many of the best practices of
participatory planning and while planning was one of the many topics addressed, these
grassroots meetings were organized, sponsored by, and attended by Little Tokyo
community members, all of whom were typically unpaid volunteers except for SLT’s
primary organizer.
257
But many of the approaches used in SLT go beyond what is typical for a
community planning meeting hosted by a city agency or a consultant. Public agencies
would do well to note some of the practices that manifest in SLT’s communication,
meeting, and organizing strategy. In some meetings of the meetings I attended,
participants were given a platform to share their artistic work, creating a gracious space
where we could work together more effectively as we not only worked on a shared
project but also learned about each other’s passions and interests. In other meetings, we
were forced to get up and share quickly improvised collaborative performances, a great
tactic for helping us digest a lot of material very quickly and share it with each other, as
well as for breaking down barriers of discomfort. By embarrassing ourselves in front of
each other, and working together with people from diverse backgrounds, we were able to
quickly build up trust and the sense that we need not be embarrassed by something as
easy as asking a question or speaking out on something we’re just learning about. Art and
culture, especially, lowering barriers to entry, enticing people that might otherwise feel
uncomfortable attending something they don’t know too much about. In another artist
convening, organizers used some of the tools provided by the Center for Urban Pedagogy
(CUP) in New York who specialize in integrating artistic practices and tools with
participatory urban planning processes. We learned about how density and FAR works by
using colorful blocks and a quiz game, and made collages to figure out the intersection
between zoning and the desired public life of the neighborhood — otherwise fairly heady
topics made fun and accessible for non-planners through these artistic games.
As I attended Sustainable Little Tokyo’s meetings and events, I began to see a
picture emerging of a space created and produced through community arts making and
258
appreciation, yet one that could also quickly pivot to a focus on collective concerns
around neighborhood change and gentrification — echoing the concept of the three tiers
of participation based on a locally specific culture of participation. SLT creates a space
where non-participants might be pulled up into the third tier of participation, volunteering
with the organization, or where third and second tier participants in the community might
be pushed up to the next level of intensity of engagement. SLT itself is essentially acting
like a revised version of Arnstein’s ladder, providing steps up to more intensive
participation.
The types of meetings and events varied along with the types of stakeholders that
would be present at these sessions. On occasion, public events such as the culminating
outcomes of some of the planning from SLT’s Arts Action Committee — say, the
Art@341FSN popup — or meetings and workshops that had some particular goal
requiring input from specific community members would have a wider and more diverse
array of Little Tokyo’s stakeholders present. But, for the most part, the attendees as these
meetings tended to either be key community members who act as elders or are currently
employed by one of SLT’s coalition members (JACCC, LTSC, and LTCC), or local
artists and arts appreciators. I took an informal tally at many of the meetings and noted
that for many, a majority or at times even all of those present identified as artists. Artists,
in this context, it should be noted, include both full-time professional artists who are part
of the “art world” but also, and more commonly, everyday artists who might hold down
another job for income, but have a committed engagement with some art form ranging
from graphic design, to visual art, to poetry, to music. While these participants were often
artists, they nevertheless represented a very diverse group. In addition to diversity on the
259
basis of their chosen field within the arts, participants, while most commonly being
Japanese American, were also representative of a wide range of other POC ethnicities,
age groups, gender identities and sexual orientations, and so on. There were also a range
of connections to Little Tokyo, from longtime residents, to those who had family
connections based on their Japanese American heritage, to local employees or staff
members at one of Little Tokyo’s many cultural institutions, to newcomers who have
found a home in Little Tokyo or have started a new business.
This curious mix of, on the one hand, a relatively uniform collection of people
who all consider themselves artists yet, on the other hand, a diverse group of people with
different identities and attachments to Little Tokyo, created a potent mix of community
organizing potential based in Little Tokyo’s arts scene. This mix tended to be more
diverse with regard to how people were connected to Little Tokyo, as well as age and
gender, than many more conventional community meetings in the neighborhood where,
often, many of the same community leaders show up time and again. Art plays a role in
softening the seriousness of a community meeting where younger stakeholders might not
feel as though they belong, or stakeholders who are on the fence about attending might be
lured in by the added bonus of engaging with some fun and interesting cultural activities.
This space of mixing and encounter creates opportunities for the community to build
what Jacobs first identified as social capital, producing connections through what
Granovetter has identified as weak ties. Participatory planning processes often struggle to
get people into the room, let alone get them interacting with each other beyond discussing
some urgent planning concern, but here art and culture create a different kind of space of
convivial interaction.
260
I identify this community building aspect of SLT’s activities as one which is one
of its most productive functions, albeit one that operates either in the background or only
in a secondary fashion. SLT meetings always have some purpose or goal aside from just
“bringing people together”: events are produced to show off some kind of arts happening
or installation, or meetings are expected to have some actionable outcomes and decisions
made. For example, I participated in a series of meetings to help plan and execute our
Art@341FSN program, which involved setting up dozens of arts events, developing and
installing an exhibition and bookstore, and effectively taking over a storefront in the heart
of Little Tokyo for two months. While our day-to-day meetings entailed figuring out
what flyers would look like, or figuring out which printer to us, over the course of our
time, we got to be friends with one another, creating new connections across different
spaces in Little Tokyo. While organizers certainly put a lot of effort into making sure
events are well publicized and a diverse audience is made to feel welcome, the “dinner
party” model of community organizing where you are trying to be hyper-intentional
about bringing together specific key stakeholders and have them build connection and
community is not one used here. Attendees tend to be more grassroots and organic, with
new connections being forged from the bottom up.
Nevertheless, SLT remains very effective in bringing just these kinds of
stakeholders together through the lure of arts and culture, and through its capacious
understanding of what constitutes art and who art is for. SLT, in effect, forms a new
public who is brought together for the purposes of art and culture in Little Tokyo, and
these connections continue to bear fruit after the explicit purpose of one meeting or
another event. Some of the participants in SLT activities are not people who would have
261
necessarily shown up to standard community meetings, or engage with other existing
community institutions — stakeholders like the young and often non-Japanese American
renters who live in the recently constructed market-rate condo buildings. The literature
suggests that people don’t show up to meetings because they are often scheduled at
inconvenient times, or that people are overworked and under-resourced, making the
prospect of additional unpaid labor in the form of a community meeting untenable —
both very real issues, which SLT has tried to address through evening meetings that are
made as efficient as possible. Yet these literatures may simply be unwilling to concede
that participatory processes may simply be unpleasant affairs, based on outmoded models
of democratic life, and with the introduction of more contemporary culture, they are
made accessible for a new population of people. And, of course, there are also other
participants at meetings who are already engaged in the community and who now have a

Figure 28. SLT Arts Action Committee meeting at 341FSN
Artist Jen Hofer presenting how her mobile book bike titled AntenaMóvil can be used for an SLT program,
with fellow Arts Action committee member and poet Kenji Liu and SLT manager Scott Oshima.

262
new space to bridge across their respective institutions, engaging with acquaintances that
they might not otherwise talk with and share information. SLT builds and sustains these
bridges, acting as a new kind of voluntarist and associational civic space whose demise
Putnam has perhaps prematurely lamented.
Sustainable Little Tokyo has oscillated on its role over its short lifetime: is its
purpose to promote arts and culture in Little Tokyo? Or is it to do political organizing?
Or something else? I would argue that because of its diffuse range of activities and
purposes, it actually achieves some of the hardest work of community organizing almost
as a side effect. As the lead SLT organizer shared with me, after voicing concerns about
the lack of clarity in the purpose of SLT’s activities to a community elder, that elder
respondent that SLT was already building out its list of participants, stakeholders, and
community members who could be called on in times of need — the hardest part of
community organizing. And because their purpose was not an explicit one that began and
ended with some kind of anti-gentrification campaign, but rather an interest in arts,
culture, and Little Tokyo that transcended means and end, and was more closely aligned
with identity and passion, its “public” was more sustainable and robust than even many
typical political campaigns. In other words, precisely because SLT was not so
instrumental, and because it was not explicitly framing its purpose around political action
but, rather, to pull in a new community together around arts and culture, that it was so
successful in getting participants to stay connected and engage in politics. This provides a
provocative response to our research question on how art and culture transforms political
participation: it does so by engaging publics in versions of non-instrumental participation
that are more sustainable than typical political campaigns — ostensibly a kind of
263
participation that is not even overt political participation — building up social capital in a
public that can be called upon in times of need.
Furthermore, because SLT is not a standalone organization, or even an offshoot
from a particular community institution, but instead is a coalition made up of some of the
biggest players in Little Tokyo’s community development and cultural heritage, JACCC,
LTSC, and LTCC, it already has those cross-cutting connections built into its DNA.
Throughout SLT’s short history, there have also been other organizations who have
supported its activities, even if they are not in a permanent financial supporter and
coalition member, including through institutional support for an event, or through staff
availing themselves for meetings and events — including the Little Tokyo Business
Association, JANM, and Visual Communications, among others. This coalition approach
is especially productive in a place like Little Tokyo where there is a saturation in the
number of community organizations and non-profit organizations, but better coordination
across these numerous groups is hard to come by — and, indeed, this has been a large
part of why LTCC has been so successful in its efforts to bring the community together
“in one voice.” Social mixing occurs within the context of shared projects, but also in the
informal spaces of learning and exchange that happen before and after meetings, and
outside of projects, as community members bump into each other at local restaurants and
bars. During my work with SLT, and over the course of conducting my interviews, it was
not uncommon for my interviewee or coworker to say hello to a friend who was sitting at
the next booth over, catching up with a quick chat.
Additionally, because SLT is integrated into these institutions which have played
a longtime role in the community, especially cultural institutions, and because it is based
264
in Little Tokyo’s history of arts, culture, and political engagement, it is effectively
already in sync with the local culture. City agencies and outside consultants often come
into communities with the best of intentions, setting up structures for engagement that
must contend with all of the problematics of differing cultures and positionalities and
either fail to do so, resulting in a process bound for failure, or take a great deal of time
and energy to overcome these hurdles, resulting in an often slow and frustrating process
with tenuous outcomes. SLT, being not only in and of the community, but also
considerate of the cultural issues at stake, sidesteps much of this hurdle. In other words,
Sustainable Little Tokyo is doing good work — and work that is often impossible to do
outside of organic and nuanced means — in building the social capital within Little
Tokyo and, in turn, its political power within Los Angeles.

Little Tokyo’s Next Generation of Leaders

One specific population of stakeholders that has repeatedly surfaced as one of
great concern for Little Tokyo and its futures, especially in the eyes of its leaders, is the
younger generation of Japanese Americans, Asian Americans, and others who have a
connection to Little Tokyo. As Little Tokyo ages, and especially given its status as a
place with very little residential, it becomes increasingly important to build out the next
generation of leaders who will carry on the community’s identity and development. As
one leader stated matter-of-factly, “To survive, we need a younger generation,” and to get
that younger generation, “they need their own stake, a sense of belonging.” Many of
these leaders expressed hope and optimism because of initiatives like Sustainable Little
265
Tokyo, and have named SLT specifically as one which can bring in new stakeholders,
and especially stakeholders who need more representation, including younger adults and
those who are outside of many of the traditional centers of cultural importance in Little
Tokyo, such as the religious institutions, JACCC, or JANM. Sustainable Little Tokyo has
been a site where newcomers, new residents, and artists can come together and engage
with Little Tokyo’s rich history of action and organizing.
During my time attending SLT meetings and events, I did notice that while
attendees were diverse and represented a wide range of ages, participants did tend to
skew on the younger side. For two young women, a couple who lived in one of the newer
market-rate buildings in Little Tokyo, SLT was their first entry into the rich history of
community organizing, activism, art, and culture in the neighborhood. They were first
enticed by the call for proposals for the Windows of Little Tokyo installation series, and
were ultimately selected for their proposal which went up on the windows of the koban, a
community visitor and grassroots security office at the heart of the historic First Street.
From there, their skillful and contemporary design work ended up being used to brand
not only the Art@341FSN events, but the entire pop-up storefront space which would
later be used by a number of organizations, including Visual Communications and Nikkei
Progressives. They have been two of the most active and consistent members of SLT’s
Art Action Committee, and they never would have gotten involved had it not been for
SLT’s particular blend of art and organizing. This points to at least one answer to our
questions regarding how art and culture can influence not only political engagement but
also participatory planning and community organizing: it acts as a cultural pipeline,
drawing in new stakeholders and, especially, younger stakeholders who might be left out
266
of conventional recruitment processes for participatory planning. This fact is especially
important in Little Tokyo where, as its leaders have described, there is concern about how
many of the organizations rely on leadership that is “aging out.”
This process has not been entirely painless. As one community leader and activist
asked, “Are people aware of SLT and what it’s doing or the campaigns?” They went on
to note that it “took a while for SLT to be understood, we had to see material results, but
it has raised awareness that sustainability means more than just environmental or
economic sustainability.” Because of SLT’s diverse array of activities and engagements,
it is hard to pin down — both a source of strength in its ability to draw an intersectional
public together, and to have the freedom and flexibility to engage in activities that might
not fit into others’ typical mission or portfolio of activities, yet also a source of confusion
and slow growth because of the lack of a clear identity. Yet the same leader went on to
say, “what gives me hope is that we have younger people like those in SLT which has
helped, trying things out, bringing people together.” Sustainable Little Tokyo’s lack of a
fixed definition has allowed it to experiment and while it may still take some time to
build a recognizable brand or identity, it has nevertheless been successful in two key
measures important for community organizing in Little Tokyo: brining in younger
people, and bringing disparate stakeholders together in community.
Other leaders also have reservations. One longtime activist and artist who is
actually quite engaged with SLT’s activities has described their view of it as
“ambivalent.” As they said, it’s hard not to have “melancholy because I’ve been there and
done that.” Little Tokyo has been the site of so many challenges, and while it has
managed to hold on to place, that place is a fraction of its former size because many of
267
the battles that it has fought were ultimately lost, with large parcels of land being sold off
to outsiders, being redeveloped and seized through eminent domain, or changing beyond
recognition. Though this same leader didn’t attribute their lack of excitement to SLT and
its particular approach necessarily, but more so because of an overall weariness from a
battle that never seems to end. As they went on to say, “I hope something works, and it’s
good to know that young people are getting involved.” While one aspect of leadership’s
focus on bringing in a new generation of leaders is practical and common sense, another
aspect may be driven from an acknowledgement that it is hard to do this work, and even
harder to keep doing it over a long period of time. Like a war of attrition, Little Tokyo
needs new troops to keep up the fight and hold on to its place in the city.
And another community leader noted that while SLT has done great work in
bringing in a new set of stakeholders and a different audience than others have been able
to do, there still remains more work to be done. As deep and rich the scope is for Little
Tokyo’s many cultural and community organizations, their continue to be struggles in
bringing in certain populations, including the “working class” of employees in restaurants
and other service sectors, the large population of elderly residents who live in places like
Little Tokyo Towers and who might not speak English well (and, incidentally, who might
also be some of the most engaged with traditional Japanese art forms), and new
immigrants both Japanese and from other parts of the world (and who also might have
trouble communicating in English), who don’t have ties to Little Tokyo’s deep history
despite exterior appearances. As we learned from our survey, about 30% of respondents
have participated in SLT activities, 41% have at least heard of SLT, and 28% have not
heard of SLT. This, in conjunction with the fact that it was only named by 4% of
268
respondents as being an important contributor to arts and culture in Little Tokyo, suggests
that perhaps it is seen as something apart from an arts and culture organization because of
its fuzzy identity, or perhaps that it has yet to make an “important contribution” because
of how new it is. Yet another possibility is simply that it is mostly reaching a particular
audience, and these other audiences, such as those listed above, may not be captured in
SLT’s activities. On the one hand, SLT has very quickly drawn in a large number of
participants, but on the other hand, it still has work to do in creating a recognizable
identity for itself, and in reaching out to even wider audiences.
Another way of looking at this issue is informed by our regression analysis, where
there appears to be a positive association between being a regular patron, a volunteer, an
employee, or a homeowner and being familiar with or participating in SLT activities.
Renters are conspicuously absent, and this is the group which is most commonly
associated with the low income or elderly renters in Little Tokyo’s precious few
residential buildings, including Little Tokyo Towers and LTSC’s Casa Heiwa
development. Additionally, while it does not meet the threshold for statistical
significance, the only negative association is with being a church or temple member,
suggesting that this may be a population in Little Tokyo that SLT could do a better job of
reaching out to and engaging with — and these are also a site for many of those elderly
Japanese American stakeholders who are most deeply engaged in traditional forms of
culture. SLT has done a great job of bringing in a class of artists and people plugged into
cultural sectors, and especially in bringing in a younger generation of Little Tokyo
stakeholders, but its intersectional approach may need to be expanded to capture these
269
additional populations in Little Tokyo who remain absent in many of the community
planning processes and local events and activities.

Sustainability in Transition

Considering the successes and unreached goals of Sustainable Little Tokyo, along
with the ways in which it may need to adapt or evolve to best continue its work is an
especially timely proposition given its transitional status within the community. SLT
began in 2013 unofficially through a community visioning process where ideas around
sustainability and mottainai were identified as important, and it grew institutional legs
through coalition partner commitments from JACCC, LTSC, and LTCC, and took on
additional projects such as Takachizu and SLT 2020. It ultimately raised additional funds
through grant writing, hiring a full time employee in 2017 — my friend Scott Oshima
who first brought me into this work — and is now at a moment where its first major
grants are wrapping up, it has continued to expand, and it is evaluating where it has come
from and where it ought to go in the years to come. Should it continue to grow, adding
staff and perhaps even establishing its own corporate identity and non-profit status?
Should it try to remain a coalition program and consider ways to stay viable in the long
term, especially considering that certain fund sources are sunsetting? Or should it try and
spin off its many programs into existing non-profits, and continue in some reduced form?
Staff and community leaders are considering these questions at this moment of transition,
but as far as I can observe, SLT only continues to grow in appreciation, recognition, and
importance within the community as a locus for a range of projects that might not
270
otherwise have a home, along with arts and culture community development, anti-
gentrification activism, and support for new young leaders who are coming up and
getting engaged in Little Tokyo.
It is hard to envision how these lauded accomplishments will continue without at
least existing levels of support and commitment, and because of a number of reasons, it is
perhaps even unlikely without expanded staffing and support. At a retreat for community
leaders connected to SLT, concerns around the unsustainability — ironically — of its
current structure were raised due to the way its decentralized formation put an unusual
degree of communication burden and responsibility for a dizzying array of projects into a
single staff member. Some seven volunteer committees and an executive cabinet all aid
this staff member in undertaking projects, making decisions, and executing strategy, but
that one staff member must then also sit on all of these bodies and coordinate both within
and between them. A range of key collaborators and consultants have been a great help
from SLT’s beginnings, including for its original visioning project, SLT 2020,
Takachizu, and others, but this reliance on contractors — even ones who are far more
personally committed and deeply engaged than is typical — makes building up
institutional knowledge and continuity difficult. And many leaders, including in several
of my interviews, have noted how SLT’s driving motivation focusing on the 3 large city-
owned parcels of land in Little Tokyo which it needs to stake a claim over are “make or
break” for the future of the neighborhood — and this hardly seems like something that
ought to be left to chance or an underfunded operation. One interviewee noted that other
organizations are addressing the issue through connected campaigns like First Street
North and the Parker Center redevelopment, but that the “future was about our ability to
271
leverage political influence” and without institutional support sustaining this work, it
could very well fall apart.

Figure 29. SLT organizational structure
Diagram from an SLT visioning workshop which maps out its organizational structure, showing SLT
manager Scott Oshima’s role at the center.

Another respondent shared similar sentiments, noting Little Tokyo’s 133-year
history as ground zero for Japanese Americans who later spread out to other areas —
mappable by the expanding number of Buddhist temples, JA community centers, and
Japanese groceries. But as the Japanese American community grows even more diffuse,
these satellites are beginning to decline as their primary users grow older. Yet Little
Tokyo remains the “mother land” and needs to be “sustained” — and this particular
interviewee noted the importance of holding on to its land and buildings because “when
buildings go, people go, and when people go, the businesses and organizations fail.” This
process theoretically plays out in reverse according to urban economics theory where
increased population size leads to demand and new construction, and vice versa, but for
272
historic communities facing gentrification pressures, the question isn’t about an abstract
population but, rather, friends and neighbors who might be displaced when a building
changes ownership. These interconnected view of Little Tokyo with both an almost
abstract and spiritual notion of Japanese American identity and also a very grounded and
practical notion of economic, architectural, and social life and death in some ways
reflects the disparate territories and concepts which Sustainability Little Tokyo itself has
sought to take up and address. Indeed, Little Tokyo as the symbolic center of Japanese
American identity has played a key role in its longevity, sustainability, and political
power, operating with logics at a local and community scale much in the same way that
national capitals operate as symbolic and mediatized centers of power for countries (Vale
1992; Vale and Warner 2001).
The issue of limited resources, staff burnout, and long-term sustainability are
common to nearly every non-profit, community organizing, and activist endeavor. So, in
many ways, these concerns are not particular to SLT and the way it operates, nor are
surprising in how it has developed despite its many successes. Yet given its emerging
identity as a different kind of space that focuses on an expanded notion of sustainability,
including cultural and social sustainability, as well as a space that can serve a new,
younger set of culturally-minded stakeholders who are often very savvy with concerns
around unpaid and emotional labor, self-care, and healthy forms of political engagement,
it would seem that this trajectory, though typical, is not the best one for SLT. And the fact
that its leaders and community members have already begun to recognize and voice these
concerns is, in fact, an interesting and unusual development — and a welcome one that
might, in future days, speak to other areas in which SLT provides a new template for
273
activism and community organizing. Art and culture are often seen as life-giving sources
of inspiration, hope, and healing, and they might just be the ticket for creating a space for
community organizing and activism that is based on such positive experiential principals,
rather than the beleaguered and exhausting culture of political engagement that is all too
typical for activists who often burn out and need regular periods of time and space to
recharge in order to effectively organize and activate.
Furthermore, there are numerous communities throughout Southern California,
the United States, and even globally that are facing similar threats as Little Tokyo, and
are looking to it as a model for resistance. Processes of gentrification and urban change
are facing nearly every city, both within major global cities at a greater intensity, but also
within secondary and smaller cities relative to their often less resourced residents. And
these processes are especially true for communities of color and immigrant communities
who can lack economic and political power. During my time in studying SLT, I
witnessed four different instances in which Little Tokyo was held up as an example of a
community that was able to stand up to unwanted outside forces and hold on to place —
within Los Angeles, but also at national and international conferences. And there were
almost certainly many more times that it was looked to as an example that escaped my
view. I believe that it is considered a model speaks to its impressive history in responding
to challenges — even if many of Little Tokyo’s community members see failures at times
even more often than success — and also to the shocking rarity of successful responses to
unwanted forces of urban change. Because of this, both SLT and Little Tokyo as a whole
have an even greater burden, even if it is one thrust upon them, in serving as a model and
sage advice giver for other communities who want to know how to hold on to their
274
communities, places, and cultural homes. For this reason, considering SLT’s future
beyond this transitory phase is especially important.
One thing that will help SLT as it takes on this mantle is doing what it does best
— building social capital and human connections — at regional, national, and
international levels. Indeed, its staff have already begun to do this, establishing a
presence within creative placemaking, community development, and arts and planning
circles. This exposure helps Little Tokyo and SLT by producing new intersectional
partnerships and sister neighborhoods, and also by creating exposure and recognition for
SLT, aiding in its justification for continued funding. Undertaking this work — often
seen as unnecessary, and extra labor for time and cash-strapped organizations — fits
within Little Tokyo’s long history of seeing its local issues in a global context, and in
putting the extra effort into building coalitions and partnerships across racial, ethnic, and
geographic differences. SLT is certainly at a moment of transition, and perhaps even at a
moment of disconcerting fragility given how it has largely entrusted its institutional life
into a single staff member, even one as beloved and energetic as Scott. For their part,
they too have hinted at concerns about burnout, a common refrain for non-profit
employees who are driven by a mission that poses a never-ending chain of urgent actions.
Scott and I have worked in the past on collaborative artistic projects that engaged
questions of place and spatial justice. Ironically, as they have taken on a full-time job
which tackles many of the same issues using arts-based organizing, their personal artistic
practice has had to take a second seat. But even by recognizing these realities, the
organization has already begun to take the necessary steps to ensure a sustainable future
275
by considering a revised organizational structure, and even by questioning some of the
standard non-profit practices which so often lead to burnout.

Art, Culture, and Implicit Participation

In this chapter, we have explored the history of Sustainable Little Tokyo’s history
and its current activities, considered the way in which SLT participants have engaged in
Little Tokyo and how they are effectively building social capital, revisited survey and
interview responses which explain how SLT is reaching out to a new audience in Little
Tokyo, giving hope to leaders who are seeking a new generation of leadership, and
considered some of SLT’s limitations as it transitions into a new phase of existence.
Woven throughout this narrative has been the way in which SLT has deployed art and
culture, and development art and culture, as a means of community organizing and
activism, especially against gentrification. This is an important element, especially as it
relates to literatures from urban planning on art and gentrification which typically
describe a process in which public and commercial arts move into a community,
economically revitalizing it — but too much success becomes a curse as cultural and
economic gentrification sets into a community that has changed beyond what its residents
recognize, even physically displacing them through rising rents and new development
emerges. Yet here we have an alternative narrative wherein arts and culture, long
embedded into the community with a particular aesthetics of Japanese American and
Asian American activism, is deployed through a grassroots organization to organize and
build community power in the interests of slowing and stopping gentrification — thus far
276
with incomplete yet positive results. This narrative upends typical arts and urban
planning theories about art and urban change.
What is the mechanism behind this process? How is it that the art and culture in
Little Tokyo results in such drastically different processes unfolding? This process
appears to be two-fold: The first step is use arts and culture within a locally appropriate
aesthetic regime. Each of the initiatives that SLT has taken on reflect a distinctly
Japanese American culture specific to Little Tokyo: to achieve environmental goals, a
bokashi composting club was starting, using a Japanese method of composting; to build
intersectional alliances, FandangObon pairs Japanese obon festivals with other cultural
forms of public dance; a bike club is referred to by the Japanese term for bicycle,
jitensha. Perhaps most importantly, these cultural endeavors fit within Little Tokyo’s
history of arts activism, engaging politics and participation rather than the commercial art
market so often associated with visual arts. Black geographers have identified a similar
approach yet with a different cultural and aesthetic regime is unfolding in many Black
communities, where forms of art and culture that have a long, place-based history in
communities are being used as mechanisms of cultural and political circulation, activated
to unite communities against threats of gentrification (McKittrick and Woods 2007;
Brand 2018). This underlying logic, if not the specific forms of culture, appears to be one
that works across different ethnic and POC communities who act as a counterpublic to
dominant white spatial imaginaries, to use George Lipsitz’s formulation (Lipsitz 2007).
The second step is to consider the secondary impacts of engaging people in a
series of accessible and participatory art and culture events, activities, and making: as
explored earlier in this chapter, SLT has managed to build a large mailing list and a
277
considerable amount of social capital for itself and its participants even though this was
an almost unintended consequence of its activities. Beyond the local legitimacy of the
arts and culture deployed through Sustainable Little Tokyo — that is to say, they are
using art forms and are operating in aesthetic regimes that fit within the community’s
history — there is also the active building of local power to a degree that an intervention
in urban development is expected through these large, city-owned parcels of land.
Political goals were laid out in the earlier community vision of 2013, but its recent
activities focused on arts and culture yet, curiously, achieved some of its political aims
almost better than it might had if it were to simply proceed with a conventional political
organizing campaign. Art and culture had the effect of building a public.
In the final section to this chapter, I provide a provisional theory of “implicit
political participation.” Civic expression emanates from a community, expressing its
political desires and will. But what of a grassroots will to accomplish those desires? How
can this be achieved? While theories of social change suggested routes through social
movements, community organizing, direct action, and electoral politics, SLT
demonstrates a particular tactic of organizing that pulls in a wider public to political
participation, yet does so in a roundabout way. Rather than directly pulling people into a
political movement, it pulls people into a shared process of meaning making, experience,
and culture. Because this public is formed through a process of art and culture rather than
through some shared goal, it becomes embedded into that public’s identity and does not
fizzle out after a goal is achieved. In this way, implicit political participation can be even
more effective at long-term organizing than direct engagement on political issues. And
once a community is formed with this shared identity, it can be pulled into political fights
278
as needed: SLT’s list of names can be called upon if Little Tokyo is threatened and needs
hundreds of people to sign a petition, or show up at a rally, or go to a public hearing. As
many of the long-time activists in Little Tokyo have noted, this is often one of the most
difficult parts of activism, and here it was achieved in an almost pleasurable way, through
joining together in shared culture.
Implicit political participation is an important consideration within literatures on
political and public participation as well, because it is a tactic that appreciates the varying
degrees of engagement that participants can afford to give. Most people care about their
community, but cannot be expected to constantly attend community meetings and public
hearings when working a full-time job, raising a family, and staying above water. Not
every community member can be expected to join the ranks of top tier professional
political activists, but most are willing to follow trusted leaders and join in a fight when
their place is threatened. And it is intertwined with civic expression because of its basis in
arts and culture that expresses political desires — neither is co-opted or instrumentalized
in the service of the other, but each plays a part in an intertwined expression of life. Arts
and culture create shared meanings and languages for expression, and at times these
languages are used to express a collective political desire — and this political desire can,
in turn, be accomplished through the activation of that community of shared culture.
Communities that form always participate in culture, in shared meaning making, and
while this process is generally implicitly political, the politics are often not explicitly
expressed except by top tier activists. But second and third tier participants who have
been implicitly participating all along can be pulled into a political fight when needed.
279
And this is what has been the story all along in Little Tokyo as it fights to sustain its
environmental, economic, and cultural resources for future generations to come.
280
Chapter 7: Conclusions, Comparisons, and Future
Directions

Throughout this volume, I have attempted to build out a theory of civic expression
through a multifaceted look at one community in particular which has a long and rich
history of demonstrating civic expression, Little Tokyo. The histories and arts organizing
activities in Little Tokyo could also be framed through any number of other literatures,
such as community development or ethnicity and placemaking, but I have integrated
literatures of political participation, art, and urban planning because they are missing
critical elements of culture, ethnicity, and place. Little Tokyo has a lot to teach us in how
we understand processes of political participation, and in the role art has to play in the
city. Civic expression provides a model for understanding where, how, and why people
are participating, often at hyperlocal levels which then connect to larger regional, state,
and national levels of politics. And this participation rarely takes forms which fit neatly
into the structures for public participation instituted from the top down but, rather, take a
range of expressive forms which often, first, have more to do with a collective need to
react to threats to a shared sense of place and, second, as a clear form of request or desire
expressed to political leaders. Returning to the overall research questions that have driven
this work, we can begin to suggest some answers.
Is arts and culture foundational to producing more meaningful and equitable
political participation, especially for marginalized groups? In short, yes. The practical
implementation of this finding is not to incorporate arts activities or cultural sensitivity
281
training into top-down participatory venues. Rather, it is to recognize that people are
participating all the time, in a variety of forms, as part of a fundamental human desire for
both individual and collective expression, expression which is shaped and realized
through culture. Marginalized groups, in particular, are compelled to express themselves,
and these forms of civic expression perform several functions. They are a means for
building community through shared language and meaning-making, as in the earliest days
of Little Tokyo and the creation of events like Nisei Week. They are a useful tool for
intervening in symbolic registers, such as the 1960s and 70s arts activists who created
effigies of Nixon during Nisei Week to protest the Vietnam War. They are a device for
community and economic development, channeling resources into cultural institutions
like JACCC. They are a means for intergenerational continuity and intersectional
solidarity, as the arts are used to communicate across ethnic divides and bring in younger
generations. And, fundamentally, civic expression is a humanizing practice which
therapeutic on both individual and collective scales, allowing people to meaningfully
voice hopes and fears. Yet all of this activity will not amount to more equitable political
participation unless it is seen, heard, and recognized as legitimate forms of participation
from those who hold political power at the local, state, and national level.
A key question to its success is: How has Little Tokyo managed to remain a
cohesive and political engaged community in the face of a history of challenges to its
place in the city? The answer is, in large part, a story of civic expression. Little Tokyo
has a unique degree of cohesiveness brought on by intensive investment in shared arts
and culture over many decades which then could be used as a tool for collective solidarity
and action in times of great challenge, from internment during WWII, to today’s battles
282
over gentrification. The community’s “propensity for organizing” was borne out of its
long arts and culture traditions, allowing shared symbols and meanings to be political
activated in times of need. It has rich venues for participation which range from top tier
activists, to second tier community builders, and third tier participants who demonstrate a
far greater degree of engagement with their community than most residential
communities — largely because of Little Tokyo’s unique identity as a commercial and
cultural heart for the Japanese American community in Southern California and across
the United States. And this process has continued with organizations like Sustainable
Little Tokyo intentionally using art and culture as an organizing tactic, one which drives
implicit political participation as a strong public is built so that when the time comes, it
can be politically activated and called upon.
In the remainder of this chapter, I will first revisit findings from Little Tokyo and
connect them to literatures from public participation, art and urban planning, and cultures
of political participation to build out grounded theory of civic expression. Second, I will
delve into an area of potential policy intervention. Our theories of participation idealize
how participation ought to occur while ignoring all of the ways that participation is
already occurring around us, often in culturally specific ways that do not register within
professional or “official” measures of participation: our theory of participation demands
an understanding of listening in the public sphere. This next section, “Listening to
(Implicit) Participation,” will establish why and how institutional interventions geared
toward enabling and ensuring that public and institutional holders of power can register
the various forms of participation that are occurring on the ground. Such interventions are
needed in contemporary urban and political spheres as a partial means of addressing the
283
problems of participation which have resulted in public disengagement, political
dissatisfaction, and social disintegration. Third, I will begin to construct a typology of
civic expression based on findings from this volume, comparing Little Tokyo to a handful
of other potential examples of civic expression, testing the degree to which this theory
translates into other contexts and forms of political engagement. And, finally, I will
suggest some future directions for further work and research on this topic, especially
given the limitations of constructing a theory of civic expression around the remarkable
and singular example of Little Tokyo.

Little Tokyo’s Civic Expression

Civic expression is a public manifestation of culture which demonstrates the
political desires of a community. How does Little Tokyo model an example of civic
expression? It does so through its long history of cultural production and political
engagement, which has both solidified its identity as a recognizable community, and has
also allowed the neighborhood to remain coherent and cohesive over time, holding on to
its place in Los Angeles. The forms of public participation and political engagement
found in Little Tokyo can often be classified as civic expression because of their basis in
forms of art and culture which are used to galvanize the community, bring it together, and
build political power such that it can make formal the demands which have bubbled up
through processes of expression. At times in Little Tokyo’s history, it has engaged
through so-called participatory venues with the City of Los Angeles, such as through the
Historic Cultural Neighborhood Council, one of Los Angeles’s many semi-autonomous
284
neighborhood councils which hold sway over official City Council decisions established
through its Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, yet more often than not, its civic
expression has bubbled up from the grassroots and made political demands rather than
abide by systems poorly equipped to respond to the community’s needs. For example,
because of the inadequacy of the neighborhood council to fully engage the community
and act as a deliberative body for shared decision making, most of the processes which
would, in theory, be embodied within the neighborhood council in fact take place through
the Little Tokyo Community Council, an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
This section explores the various manifestations of politics and culture in Little Tokyo,
building out a theory of civic expression based on what has happened and is happening
on the ground in this uniquely engaged community.
Civic expression is often borne out of a shared struggle against injustice and
marginalization, and this has certainly been true in Little Tokyo. I identify six periods of
challenge and threat to ibasho, or sense of belonging, in Little Tokyo, some of which
intersect and overlap. First, there are the practices of redlining and racial discrimination
which compelled Little Tokyo to locate where it did, and which governed much of
Japanese American settlement in Southern California from its first immigrants in the late
1800s, through the 1948 Supreme Court ruling Shelley v. Kraemer which outlawed racial
covenants, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 which banned housing discrimination. Even
still, forms of racial discrimination live on in traces from these earlier times, and in new
forms of economic and sublimated racism which are more subtle and hidden than in this
previous period. Second, and perhaps most significantly and distinctly, the entire
community of Little Tokyo was uprooted when Japanese Americans were plucked from
285
their homes and incarcerated during WWII, from 1942 to 1945. This experience, perhaps
more than any other, has shaped the shared identity and political culture in Little Tokyo
ever since. Third, an expanding City of Los Angeles used eminent domain to seize a large
portion of Little Tokyo to build municipal buildings, most notably the LAPD
headquarters, from 1945 through 1955, just as Japanese Americans were returning to
Little Tokyo and attempting to rebuild from virtually nothing. Fourth, the establishment
of community redevelopment agencies (CRAs) in California in 1945 and the launch of
the “Little Tokyo Redevelopment Project” by CRA Los Angeles in 1970 brought the dark
history of “urban renewal” to Little Tokyo, with a range of projects that dramatically
transformed the neighborhood, many undertaken without community support. This
development was coincident with the fifth period of an influx of foreign corporate capital,
especially from an economically booming Japan, during the 1970s and 80s, and many
public-private development projects were undertaken where CRA partnered with major
Japanese corporations who performed construction and literally redrew Little Tokyo. And
sixth, since around 2000, there has been increasing land values, and the construction of
several large condo buildings, leading to the present moment of gentrification and
displacement.
This continuous cycle of threat to ibasho in Little Tokyo has driven its
stakeholders who otherwise might have been perfectly content to stay out of politics to
engage in civic life and political expression in increasingly effective and coordinated
ways — demonstrating a creative co-creation of place and community in Little Tokyo
which Harry Boyte has identified as a practice of citizenship, de facto if not de jure
(Boyte et al. 2014). I identify four periods of civic expression in Little Tokyo, each which
286
takes a slightly different form and performs a different function. First, there is the origin
period of Little Tokyo as it formed through growth by new immigrants arriving, as
religious institutions were formed, creating a shared space of cultural expression,
meaning making, and identity, and as a “third culture” developed between Japanese roots
and American ideals, from the late 1800s through the return of Japanese Americans into
Little Tokyo after internment in 1945, and the rebuilding processes which often relied on
those religious institutions for support. Second, there was a period of more politically
engaged arts activism that arose from around 1963-1979 as a younger generation of
Japanese Americans artists and activists came up in the late 1960s with the civil rights
movement, the antiwar movement, student protests, and the emergence of an Asian
American political identity. Third, there was a period of cultural institution building as
Little Tokyo matured, and had to contend with an influx of capital investment, from
around 1980-1999. And fourth, there is our current period of gentrification, leading to
new forms of arts organizing as we see in things like Sustainable Little Tokyo.
These “collective expressions” were not modes of individual expression but rather
manifestations of a shared culture which pointed toward a desired future, a demonstration
of a different kind of urban politics around building community and community power
through shared meaning and language making (Arendt 2007; Delanty 2003). These
periods also coincide with the history of literatures on public participation, with Arnstein
developing her “ladder of citizen participation” in 1969, and the transformation of urban
planning and development into ostensibly participatory processes throughout the 1970s,
yet with widespread political dissatisfaction and increasing alarm and the seemingly
inexorable processes of gentrification today. Civic expression makes an urgently needed
287

Figure 30. Final revised ladder of participation based on civic expression
This diagram shows a revised version of Arnstein’s Ladder which incorporates the role of culture, and three
tiers of engagement. Here, we climb the ladder to achieve public outcomes based on the political desires of
the community, but it is important to note that there is no “bad” rung on the ladder: various forms of
participation and engagement are all necessary to get to the top, scaling institutional power and systems of
governance. Furthermore, the ladder is “meaningful” because participants can see that it is built on a locally
specific culture of participation, one which can be borne out through civic expression. This diagram takes
Arnstein’s two-dimensional ladder and transforms it into a three-dimensional and spatial model for
participation, especially within the specificity of places, each of which has its own culture.

intervention into theories of public participation by placing it on a foundation of culture
(fig. 30).
If we were to revise Arnstein’s ladder based on Little Tokyo’s history, we would
place it on a firm foundation of culture, such that it can produce meaningful engagement
used to scale institutional power and achieve public outcomes. Little Tokyo has held on
288
to its place despite of its array of challenges and even in spite of efforts by the City, in
large part because of its history of arts activism and cultural propensity for organizing.
Because organizing and activism came from the bottom up, rather than trying to fit within
some kind of external, ill-fitting structure, it allowed the community to cohere, develop a
shared vision, and build political power to achieve its aims. In particular, we can point
toward the community visioning process initiated by Sustainable Little Tokyo as a model
of participation which is situated on a specific foundation of culture. And we can also
consider our three-tier model of participation as making up the lower, middle, and upper
rungs of the ladder, as a large base of casual volunteers supports a more engaged but
small group of community activists who in turn support a smaller still yet full time cadre
of political activists, each one critical for the collective to make it up to the top of the
ladder. In contrast to Arnstein’s model, we can point toward lower rungs as both
legitimate participation as well as a critical element for scaling the ladder, rather than her
formulation of lower rungs equating fake participation. One can only imagine what Little
Tokyo would look like if it was not hindered by a consistent barrage of challenges, and if
the City created culturally relevant structures for participation and aided rather than
supplanted community desires. This history exists in an interstitial space between public
participation literatures and social movement literatures, giving a sense of grassroots
mechanisms of participation to public participation literature, and providing a richer
sense of culture and cultural production to social movement literature.
Yet, as my work in Little Tokyo demonstrated, cultures of participation are
anything but static. They shift from generation to generation, especially in the context of
immigrant communities where each generation has a dramatically different relationship
289
to culture, nation, place, and identity. Leaders and stakeholders alike in Little Tokyo fret
about the dilution of Japanese American identity, and what this means for the
neighborhood’s communitarian ideals. This also has an impact on the intensity of
participation: Little Tokyo has benefited from a historically tight knit and intensely
engaged community that has created groups of people who participate at greater levels in
first tier, second tier, and third tier forms of participation than most other communities —
in part a feature of Little Tokyo’s unique role as a commercial and cultural center rather
than as one of residential development, where individual property rights tend to take
hold. How will this feature of Little Tokyo’s community life hold up as newcomers have
less of a connection to its Japanese American heritage, and as Japanese Americans move
out into different areas, and intermarry to produce ethnically heterogeneous families? For
the time being, at least, the community’s efforts to recentralize Japanese American life in
the relatively small geographic footprint of Little Tokyo has imbued it with cultural and
symbolic power, and has also created a property rights regime that has at least slowed the
most harmful effects of gentrification.
Leaders in Little Tokyo, along with efforts through culturally and arts based
organizing and activism such as Sustainable Little Tokyo, are trying to grapple with these
thorny questions to develop a model of community sustainability that does not rely on
shared bonds of historical trauma or marginalized ethnic identities to hold together. Civic
expression, as it turns out, is not only a mode for political engagement and action, but
also what I term “implicit political participation.” Arts and culture-based modes of
engagement, like in the various periods of Little Tokyo’s historical development, serve as
intrinsically valuable means of shared meaning making and identity formation. Civic
290
expression not only manifests political desires, but also forms a public. And the people
who engage in this shared identity formation participate in a kind of stored political
energy production, participating now in a way that is pleasurable and meaningful, yet not
necessarily explicitly political. Yet this stored energy can be called upon in times of need,
such as when ibasho is threatened in Little Tokyo, producing community activism and
power such that political leaders cannot ignore it. As community organizers can attest,
this piece of the work is often the most difficult.
And the cultural work being done in Little Tokyo serves as a model not only for
other communities who face similar issues of threat and gentrification, especially for
marginalized communities, but also as a demonstration of a different kind of relationship
between art and the city. Art, here, is used more capaciously than what we might define
through Howard Becker’s “art worlds,” and is more akin to the culture-bearing activities
ranging from outsider art, to food cultures, and beyond, championed by people like Maria
Rosario Jackson (Becker 1982; Jackson 2006; 2011; 2012). Civic expression expands the
understanding of arts role in the city from its recognized place as a driver of community
and economic development (Currid-Halkett 2007; 2010) — a role that at times overheats
to produce forces of gentrification and displacement — to one which can play a role in
generating public participation and political engagement that can serve to slow or even
prevent gentrification as communities are able to build power and stake a claim on the
future of their place in the city. Activities of civic expression in Little Tokyo undertake
both placekeeping and placemaking efforts such that the most damaging effects of
gentrification will not wipe away its unique culture, yet the community remains dynamic,
hopeful, and oriented toward the future.
291
Yet while all of this portents well for the future of arts and culture-based
organizing and activism in the city, and provides a model for communities to build power
and keep a hold on place, the fact remains that our processes of participatory politics and
urban planning leave something to be desired. For all of the work in expanding our
understanding of public participation (Fung 2003; 2004; 2006; Lee 2015; 2016), it still
retains a fundamental gap in how we understand the relationship between top down and
bottom up processes of speech, listening, and institutional venues for those acts. Modes
of public participation inevitably involve institutionalized venues, be they old hat like
California’s Brown Act or novel like the burgeoning practice of participatory budgeting,
that are meant to extract public opinion, yet this fundamentally elides the fact that people
are already voicing their opinions and participating in systematic and culturally specific
ways in communities the world over. The public does not need yet another official
platform, so often mismatched to the communities they are meant to serve, extracting
more speech. Instead, government agencies and public bodies need systems implemented
such that they can register, listen to, and respond to civic expression already happening
on the ground.

Listening to (Implicit) Participation

Given cultural difference, when and how do people participate? What forms does
this participation take? In the examples from Little Tokyo these forms of participation
arose out of an existing community with an established culture. Communities move in
and out of active civic expression from a foundation of ongoing community building
292
based on shared daily life. What compels a community to actively express itself in the
public realm? For an answer to this question, we can look to two historically important
political theorists and philosophers, John Dewey and Walter Lippmann. As sociologist
Noortje Marres recounts, in their famed Lippmann-Dewey debate in the 1920s, Lippman
was seen as believing that new technologies had made public affairs so complicated, that
the public could not be assumed to have the interest or competence in dealing with such
matters, while Dewey responded by reconceptualizing democratic politics at large,
arguing that it was precisely this new complexity that demanded and allowed for public
participation and engagement — and, indeed, their debate did more to join their shared
opinions rather than highlight any real differences (Marres 2005). As Marres describes,
“How did Lippmann and Dewey sustain this strange argument that democratic politics
thrives when there is not enough good information available and when the problems are
too complex for anyone to understand them fully? They did so by zeroing in on the
specific circumstances under which a public comes to be involved in politics. They
posited that this happens when existing institutions and communities prove incapable of
settling an issue. . . . When issues risk being deserted by the agencies that should attend
to them, the public steps in as a caretaker of these affairs.” (Marres 2005, 212) In other
words, it is only when governance breaks down, when issues become murky and
problematic, when people are individually and collectively confronted by a problem or
issue, that they form into a public capable and willing of addressing the concerns at hand.
Time and time again, this is precisely the hand that was dealt to Little Tokyo where its
very elected leaders seemed to turn against them.
293
This concept of the process by which publics engage in discourse and deliberation
is a dominant theory from literatures on public spheres which has come to shape a
particular variant of participatory democracy — that of discursive democracy — along
with the assumptions held within urban planning and participation studies at large of the
actual mechanism of participation: i.e., that participation occurs through public discourse.
In general, the most recent manifestation of these ideas was borne out of Jurgen
Habermas’s ideas on the public sphere and rational communication which has since been
heavily critiqued — he idealizes a particular sphere of discourse that lies in between
official statehood and the private realm, found in spaces such as 17th century Parisian
coffee houses where the news of the day was debated. Habermas’s original position and
its criticisms are perhaps best summed up within Craig Calhoun’s edited volume
Habermas and the Public Sphere (1992). John Dryzek’s book Discursive Democracy
articulates this position with particular regard to ideas on democracy, claiming that the
communicative rationality of the public is preferable to the professional rationality of
technocrats and experts — an argument strikingly similar to Marres’s reading of the
Lippmann-Dewey debate (1990). Yet these texts also remain beholden to the notion that
there remains a singular public and means through this single social construction to voice
political will — something that did not exist for Japanese Americans in Los Angeles,
who were often marginalized, redlined, and ultimately incarcerated in camps during
WWII.
Several other noted political theorists have critiqued but also built upon
Habermas’s ideas in ways that have expanded the notion of a singular public sphere
toward our contemporary reality of a multiplicity of public spheres within a diverse
294
society, and have even gone on to critique the general assumption that discourse is to be
rational or civil. Nancy Fraser was one of the first to critique Habermas’s notion of the
public sphere with the basic contribution of mapping his ideas onto the political realities
of today, taking into account the inclusion of women into the political sphere and the
changing power differentials between different groups within “the public,” among other
things (1990). Iris Marion Young extends her own ideas on community and difference
within the political realm (1986) to Habermas’s ideas of the public sphere, noting that
regardless of any ideal theory, discourse occurs in a “de-centered” way across multiple
publics, mediums, spaces, and cultures (2006). Michael Warner goes so far as to define
“counterpublics” which operate either in direct antagonism or in entirely separate spaces
from hegemonic publics, and allow for subaltern groups to have their own internal
discourses (2002). And Chantal Mouffe, perhaps more than any other, has laid out ideas
around “agonistic” participation, which intentionally privileges the emancipatory
potential of conflictual forms of engagement as opposed to “rational” forms of “civilized
debate” (1999). Little Tokyo demonstrates a more nuanced version of these theories,
suggesting that they are not one thing or another, agonistic or entirely separate, but that
they move between spaces as a counterpublic, voicing concerns and even constructing its
own identity through a de-centered collection of arts, culture, and politics.
Many of these ideas share origins in the political theories which drove the
emergence of participatory democracy, such those by Pateman and Barber, which
emphasized the dialogical nature of participation and theorized that this process would
educate and raise civic consciousness in participants. Yet as many of the theorists who
themselves would argue for deliberative democracy, such as Fraser and Young, actually
295
start from the point of identifying the flaws in deliberation — namely, that deliberation
favors a specific subset of well-spoken, “rational” citizens who have power and authority
to be heard. One attempt to practically reconcile this fundamental issue has been explored
by James Fishkin who developed what he termed the “deliberative opinion poll” which
sets up a level playing field for participants by creating specialized spaces for
deliberation which control for power differentials, especially those of education by
providing expert information on topics of deliberation, as well as those related to the
nature of forming and speaking out on opinions — as deliberation occurs through
structured interviews and polls (1993). While promising, the contrived nature of these
polls has led to a sense that they, too, have inaccuracies in their results, and have failed to
be taken up in any kind of wide scale. Even the radical nature of theories of participatory
democracy remain beholden to the idea that the structures for democratic participation
remain singular and tied into the system of electoral politics, rather than the community-
based de-centered reality that we see in Little Tokyo.
While the literature on public spheres and deliberation is vast and includes myriad
forms of publics, public spheres, and speech which stand in contrast to totalizing and
hegemonic ideas of a singular public sphere as first described by Habermas, the form of
deliberation which has spread to other fields and, in particular, to urban planning remains
of the most simplistic variety. Notions of “the public” are still uncritically and casually
used, and an ideal image of civilized discussion between strangers dominates in the
design of participatory spaces in governance. Civic expression demonstrates that
“speech” takes on many expressive forms, ranging from marches and protests to poetry in
window paintings. Further, it specifies whose voice is speaking: that of a community, in
296
the Delantyan sense. Collective expression creates a community, and a community
creates collective expression, in a virtuous cycle.
The implications of civic expression, however, go beyond the one-sided focus that
so often dominates literatures on public spheres. That is, the theory of the public sphere
often focuses almost exclusively on who is doing the talking, and the form that the speech
takes. But if the proverbial tree topples in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it
ever really fall? A key failure of theories of political participation is that they focus solely
on the perceived absence of participation, creating solutions which can generate more
participation through top-down, structured venues. Our theory of civic expression
suggests that people are participating in all kinds of exciting and culturally specific ways,
but that those who are meant to be on the receiving end — public officials, institutions,
and the like — fail to recognize or hear this participation. As Andrew Dobson has
written, “good listening has been almost completely ignored in that form of political
conversation we know as democracy. Practically all the attention has been paid to
speaking, both in terms of the skills to be developed and the ways in which we should
understand what enhancing ‘inclusion’ might mean” (Dobson 2012, 844). We need
institutional practices of listening.
Dobson goes on to describe how better listening can lead to better legitimacy for
governments, to enhanced ability of a society to process deep disagreements, to more
accurate understanding of public interests, and to empowerment for a greater swatch of
society (Dobson 2012). He immediately picks up on the central problematic in defining
institutional practices of listening: “development of this culture of listening is
complicated by the way in which our ‘listening for’ is distorted by the way in which we
297
receive certain forms of speech and ways of speaking” (Dobson 2012, 851). Some
speakers are part of disenfranchised groups that may not be regarded or heard, and the
forms of “political noise” are diverse and may not even sound like idealized Habermasian
“speech.” Dobson quotes the feminist political theorist Susan Bickford to note that,
“What tends to get heard in public settings is a way of speaking associated with those
who control social, political, and economic institutions” (Bickford 1996, 97). To
transform our institutional capacities for listening into ones that can register and respond
to cultural diversity would be to make a radical and much needed transformation of our
political system.
Even much of the literature around the potential for practices of listening to
transform our public sphere tend to focus, however, on the individual participant rather
than institutional entities. Practices of listening are recuperated from the assumed second-
class status that it holds to the typically lauded ideas of speech and voice by scholars such
as Kate Lacey who writes that “to call listening an ‘act’ is already to resist the widespread
association of listening with passivity” (Lacey 2011, 6). Kate Crawford similarly
describes digital practices of listening: “The concept of listening, on the other hand,
invokes the more dynamic process of online attention, and suggests that it is an
embedded part of networked engagement – a necessary corollary to having a ‘voice’. If
we reconceptualize lurking as listening, it reframes a set of behaviors once seen as vacant
and empty into receptive and reciprocal practices.” (Crawford 2009, 527)
While in both face-to-face and mediated spheres, more listening rather than more
speech may well benefit society, but the issue remains that particular voices are more
often listened to, and that the notion of listening we seek here for civic expression is one
298
wherein institutional power can register and respond to historically disenfranchised,
ignored, silenced, or even misunderstood speakers. Tanja Dreher writes, “The interest in
listening is situated and strategic, aiming to develop thinking on media change beyond
increasingly predictable critiques of representation and a politics of speaking up which
leaves the primary responsibility for change with those who are subjected to media
racialization. Crucially, attention to listening shifts some of the focus and responsibility
for change from marginalized voices and on to the conventions, institutions and
privileges which shape who and what can be heard in the media.” (Dreher 2009, 447) If
civic expression demands listening from those in power, policy interventions that would
enable this theory would focus on considering where and how civic expression occurs,
and shaping “ears” for institutions, the media, government entities, and the like so that
participation can register, and these listeners can be held accountable to enact desired
social and structural change.
Theorists who have written about Black public spheres point toward some
cautionary notes as to how these “ears” might be implemented, insights which are all the
more relevant in our present moment of surveillance justified through national security
and internet behemoths’ bottom line. Anthony Neal writes that “The Black Public Sphere,
with its requisite examples of black church and civic organizations as well as
barbershops, beauty parlors, and dance halls, was best realized by Harlem. Many of the
institutions that constitute the Black Public Sphere have been invaluable to the
transmission of communal values, traditions of resistance, and aesthetic sensibilities. . . .
[They] were attempts to re-create the covert social spaces of the South, spaces that
afforded safety, sustenance, and subversion among the black masses in the Deep South.”
299
(Neal 1999, 2) So in this case, while Neal writes of these spaces and voices as
constituting a “public sphere,” they are nevertheless based on and assume some degree of
privacy from a broader public. My calls for listening from the top down must be
tempered with the horrifying reality of state surveillance and violence — there needs to
be a different kind of listening that is more akin with the values behind the construction
of participatory processes and venues that so often fall flat despite their good intentions.
What is missing is listening.
Neal goes on to discuss what have been referred to as “hidden transcripts” to
describe forms of collective speech that were meant to be disguised from public ears:
“The most crystalline examples of these underground critiques are seen in African-
American spirituals during the era of chattel slavery. Though often interpreted as
African-American submission to the God of the dominant culture, these spirituals often
functioned as coded messages that called for blatant acts of resistance.” (Neal 1998, 2) In
other words, there are forms of civic expression which are intended to build up a
community and produce its shared meanings, visions for the future, and plans of action,
and these precious forms of communication are meant for people within the community,
rather than some external listening entity. An NSA-enabled government with even good
intentions might misinterpret a voice not meant for it to hear, labelling the groanings of a
community as “Black radical extremism” or other such harmful and racialized monikers.
And Catherine Squires describes how these listeners too often predetermine what
they are hearing on the basis of assumed identity and community formations, such as
those based on racialized categories, collapsing the difference which is always present in
even the most in sync of communities: “Differentiating the ‘dominant’ public sphere
300
from ‘counterpublics’ solely on the basis of group identity tends to obscure other
important issues, such as how constituents of these publics interact and intersect, or how
politically successful certain publics are in relation to others. Additionally, focusing on
traditional political protest actions, such as boycotts or marches, may cause us to
overlook important developments in inter- or intrapublic discourse as well as publicity.”
(Squires 2002, 447) She goes on to describe a theoretical framework for differentiating
between different forms of speech, some meant for the broader public and government
entities to hear, and others meant for an internal audience: “The model consists of three
types of responses a marginalized public sphere might produce given existing political,
economic, social, and cultural conditions. A public can enclave itself, hiding counter-
hegemonic ideas and strategies in order to survive or avoid sanctions, while internally
producing lively debate and planning. It is also possible to create a counterpublic which
can engage in debate with wider publics to test ideas and perhaps utilize traditional social
movement tactics (boycotts, civil disobedience). Finally, a public that seeks separation
from other publics for reasons other than oppressive relations but is involved in wider
public discourses from time to time acts as a satellite public sphere.” (Squires 2002, 448)
The spaces which Neal describes might fall into an “enclave public” while the civic
expression meant for public ears would be termed a “counterpublic” in Squires’s
analysis.
Beyond an understanding of the variety of exciting forms of civic expression that
are manifesting by urban communities around the world, policy interventions are needed
which ensure that these voices do not go unheard. Institutionalized practices of listening
are required such that civic expression can be recognized, registered, and responded to.
301
Critically, capacities of recognition must also be paired with the nuanced differentiation
between self-address internal to enclave publics, and the civic expression voiced by
counterpublics. Given the history of state violence and abuse of power not only in the
history of the United States but by every government and powerful institution across
human history and geography, these practices of listening must be carefully constructed
and implemented. One very straightforward way to implement a policy of active listening
would be for city governments to employ a number of representatives who act akin to
“cultural attachés” to communities, people who are responsible for showing up to arts and
cultural events so that they can develop a more nuanced understanding of who the
community is and what their political desires are — I describe this suggestion in more
detail in a following section on recommendations for planning practice.
Another policy which might stand alone or even be implemented in relation to the
“cultural attaché” policy would be to actually recognize and legitimate planners of color
through the process of education and professional practice such that their culturally-
specific forms of knowledge can act as a productive conduit between communities and
government rather than as a form of tokenism. One can only imagine the splendor of a
Little Tokyo that was listened to — and whose political desires were respected — by
political leaders in Los Angeles throughout its long history of challenges, one where its
community power and growth went into building even more culture and shared identity
rather than having to be perpetually mobilized just to hold on to its place.

A Typology of Civic Expression

302
For all of my work in building out a theory of civic expression, Little Tokyo
remains a remarkably unique community, given its distinct Japanese American identity,
the density of community and cultural institutions within its small geographic footprint,
and its role as a predominantly commercial and cultural center rather than a residential
one. So, one area where more work remains to be done is to test this theory of civic
expression against other contexts and forms of culturally-based political engagement such
that the theory can be modified, refined, and updated. I hypothesize that while the general
contours of civic expression — that it represents a form of political participation, at times
implicit and at times explicit, which is based in artistic and cultural expression — remain
a solid foundation, it might take on a variety of different forms given different contexts
and political issues. For example, the case of Little Tokyo was fundamentally intertwined
with its development as a place in Los Angeles, and so issues of urban redevelopment
and gentrification naturally came to the fore. Yet what of other issues that are not so tied
to place, such as civil rights? To what extent does place play a fundamental role in civic
expression? While these questions warrant further research and are outside of the scope
of this project, I suggest that in the interim, we can make some informed speculation by
way of a typological approach to understanding the different flavors of civic expression
and filling out its gaps. For starters, civic expression has already taken on several
different forms just within Little Tokyo’s history.
These various forms of civic expression may not be entirely distinct, with some
degree of overlap between the period of arts activism during the 1960s-70s and the
present period of arts and culture-based organizing, yet nevertheless we see a range of
different forms of civic expression across Little Tokyo’s history. We can also begin to
303
identify some of the variables between these different forms: implicit vs. explicit political
participation, direct expressive forms vs. indirect activities which set a foundation for
cultural expression (i.e., cultural institution building), cultural forms that engage with
broader systems of cultural circulation vs. those that remain for and by an enclave public.
All of the forms of civic expression within Little Tokyo are tied to place, but we might
imagine civic expression that is not directly tied to place, such as digital forms of
activism.

Table 10. Forms of civic expression in Little Tokyo
Period Medium Function
Late 1800s-1963 Traditional forms of culture, religious
institutions, hybridized public culture
Shared meaning making, developing
a community identity
1963-1979 Arts activism through photography,
public performance (e.g., creatively
inflected protests), pedagogical
“consciousness building” (e.g., through
Gidra)
Politically activating a latent culture
and intervening in the broader socio-
symbolic sphere
1980-1999 Community development processes of
cultural institution building
Community organizing and planning
to productively channel capital
investment into long-term
community institutions
2000-Present Various forms of arts and culture based
political organizing, community
building, and activism
Brining in new stakeholders and
younger generations to community
ownership, building latent political
participation, anti-gentrification
campaigns

One example which demonstrates a social movement which has often used art and
culture in their efforts, is not always tied to place, and often uses digital forms of activism
is the widely publicized Black Lives Matter movement against police violence. On July
13, 2013, protestors angry with the acquittal of George Zimmerman filled streets across
304
the United States. Zimmerman was on trial for the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed
Black teenager, and his acquittal signaled to these protestors that, in the eyes of the law,
kids like Trayvon were not worth justice. In Los Angeles, some entered the 10 Freeway,
shutting it down, while others marched in Downtown LA near City Hall or in the historic
Black neighborhood of Leimert Park. Two days later, on July 15, local artist and activist
Patrisse Cullors brought many of these protestors into a conversation held at St. Elmo
Village, an important community art space, after conversations with fellow activists
Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi “about how to build a movement not a moment” (Black
Lives Matter 2019). The movement found its name in a Facebook post from Garza: “I
continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that. Stop
giving up on black life.” (Baptiste 2017). Cullors artistic vision and Tometi’s social
media savvy transformed Garza’s poetic statement on a Facebook post into a now
globally known movement: #BlackLivesMatter. With local chapters in most major US
cities, and a decentralized structure reflective of much contemporary networked activism,
the movement continues to put emphasis on symbolic and cultural interventions ranging
from iconic merch that anyone can buy from the website to specific campaigns and
events which use art in urban space.
Based on this very preliminary set of criteria — and, given further empirical
research on civic expression in other contexts, we might conceive of additional criteria —
we can produce a typological matrix as such, filling in each cell with a representative and
hypothetical example. Many of the examples below come from Little Tokyo, and I have
also drawn upon the example used at the beginning of this volume of anti-gentrification
protests in Boyle Heights. I have also included some examples from writings on the
305

Table 11. Typological matrix of forms of civic expression
Implicit Participation Explicit Participation
Direct
Expression
Indirect
Expression
Direct
Expression
Indirect
Expression
Place
based
Public Cultural
Activities of
Sustainable
Little Tokyo
Creating East
West Players
in Little Tokyo
Art activism of
1960s-70s in
Little Tokyo
Organizing
around
JACCC in
Little Tokyo
Enclave Practice of
traditional arts
in Little Tokyo
Creating
Buddhist
temples in
Little Tokyo
Activist con-
sciousness
building via
Gidra/VC
Creating
Defend Boyle
Heights
coalition
Non-place
based
Public Production of
Red Guard
symbology
Formation of
Serve the
People Orgs
#BlackLivesM
atter hashtag
Creation of
BLM network
Enclave Rags and blues Creation of
juke joints
“Hidden
transcripts”
(Squires)
Development
of spirituals
(Neal)

formation of Black public spheres from Squires and Neal in the previous section, and
Black Lives Matter which was just mentioned. This typological structure presents a few
categories of civic expression: Implicit participation is ostensibly for the direct purposes
of expressing and performing culture, while explicit participation has direct political
aims. Indirect expression generally sets up or creates a space for civic expression, while
direct expression is the manifestation of that civic expression itself. Place based civic
expression is tied to a specific place or neighborhood, while non-place based civic
expression moves through networks, both digital and non-digital, which transcend a
single place. Public expression is meant to address an open audience, while enclave
expression is meant to address an internal audience — it’s “for us.” Based on these four
dimensions, there are 16 different types of civic expression, though the matrix can be
306
read as linking left and right pairs as, typically, the indirect expression on the right (e.g.,
creating the BLM network) serves to create a platform or space for the expression on the
left (e.g., actively using the #BLM hashtag).
All of the examples from Little Tokyo were place-based because of their
connection to the specific geography of the neighborhood. Much of the activity in Little
Tokyo took the form of implicit participation, with the historical development of the
community’s identity formed through the creation of religious institutions that made
space for the practice of traditional forms of art and culture. Later, organizations were
formed for more public-facing expression, such as the creation of East West Players
(noted as a form of indirect expression, leading to the direct expression found in specific
performances), or the activities of Sustainable Little Tokyo like Windows of Little Tokyo
or Art@341FSN (noted as direct expression, enabled by the indirect expression found in
the formation of the SLT coalition by actors from JACCC, LTSC, and LTCC). Explicit
forms of civic expression arose in response to a range of political events and challenges,
including the public anti-war arts activism in the 1960s-70s (noted as direct expression),
or the organizing around creating JACCC as a public space for cultural expression in the
1970s-80s (noted as indirect expression). The notion of an enclave form of explicit
participation is difficult to contend with because of the typically public aims of political
participation, but we might consider something like the activist consciousness building
found in the arts and cultural making of Gidra, intended largely for the Asian American
community, though with clear political aims.
Another example of enclave expression yet explicit participation might be found
in the formation of Defend Boyle Heights (DBH), an anti-gentrification community
307
organization based in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights, just across the
Los Angeles River from Little Tokyo. As described at the beginning of this volume, DBH
has been one of the main organizations who has taken an active stance against art
galleries and other cultural spaces such as hipster coffee shops that they perceive as not
from the neighborhood, using radical tactics to push them out of Boyle Heights (Crisman
and Kim 2019). While many are sympathetic to their underlying anti-gentrification goals,
their tactics and discourse have proven contentious, sparking a degree of unease between
them and many of the other long-time community development organizations in Boyle
Heights. They are place-based because of their situatedness in Boyle Heights, and they
are an example of explicit participation with clear political aims. Yet while their tactics
might be very public, and forms of direct expression — especially considering the fact
that many of their participants are themselves artists who are well versed in how to make
their political protests engage on a savvy symbolic register — the process of community
building (i.e., indirect expression of creating the organization as a space for action) has
been one which is surprisingly enclave. Their position is that the neighborhood is by and
for a very specific community which has clear boundaries — boundaries which these
“outsider” galleries and coffee shops are crossing. In other words, the formation of their
public is very much an enclave public which is meant only for a select group of
community members (Defend Boyle Heights 2019).
Defend Boyle Heights comes out of a lineage of Maoist thought and organizing in
the US, a kind of contemporary take on movements like the Black Panthers. They are
partners with Serve the People — Los Angeles and Red and Anarchist Skinheads — Los
Angeles, both autonomous chapters loosely affiliated with national Maoist networks
308
which advocate for militant, anti-capitalist politics and use similarly radical rhetoric and
symbology (Serve the People-LA 2019). So, while DBH may be a place-based
manifestation, it nevertheless fits within a larger cultural current that is not tied to a
specific place but rather a global vision for overthrowing capitalism — and we can see
something like the formation of Serve the People chapters in places around the globe as a
non-place-based form of implicit participation where a space is created for this culture.
Similarly, the production of Red Guard symbology used in these organizations as not tied
to a specific political campaign but rather is a direct expressive form that is put out in the
public with the aim of building a distinct political identity and community — still a form
of implicit participation. As radical as these organizations may be, their process remains
more closely linked to forms of cultural production and shared identity formation more
than specific political outcomes as we might see in more conventional social movements.
However one feels about their particular rhetoric and political aims aside, it is clear that
they are tapping into a desire for community and shared identity in their members.
Black Lives Matter, on the other hand, is a political movement borne out of the
specific issue of police brutality. Its success is in part due to the fact that there is already
a rich culture and history of Black organizing and activism, and it rests on this
foundation, continuing processes of coalition building and organizing, yet not having to
generate an entirely new shared culture and identity, thus it remains firmly within explicit
participation. We can see the creation of the BLM network as a form of indirect
expression that has, in networked fashion, allowed a wide and diffuse array of activists to
produce impactful forms of civic expression. That said, the origin point for Black Lives
Matter, as discussed at the beginning of this volume, was less about the intentional
309
creation of spaces for this political desire to be circulated but, rather, an almost
spontaneous expression as a visceral reaction to the murder of Trayvon Martin and the
injustice of his killer being let free. Operating in reverse to many other direct-indirect
couplets, in this case, the spontaneity and virality of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, a
form of direct expression, then led to more formalized strategies for organizing and
activism through a network of BLM chapters.
And the non-place-based enclave forms of civic expression all reflect the writings
of Squires and Neal above who interrogate the formation of Black public spheres — the
very discursive spaces of shared identity and culture that have been long developed in the
US and serve as a foundation for Black Lives Matter — based in the horrors of slavery
itself. Explicit forms of participation as enslaved people organized and communicated
against the wishes of their oppressors had to remain within an enclave public as to avoid
being squelched, leading to the indirect expression found in the creation of entirely new
languages such as the spirituals, sung in the fields right under the gaze of slave owners,
and the active use of these “hidden transcripts” as a form of direct expression. And, later,
under a Jim Crow America, juke joints were created as spaces of culture, shared identity,
and discourse for Black Americans who were often inhibited from building up too much
obvious or evident political power. And the rags and blues songs written by Black artists
were the direct expression which circulated through these spaces.
This very preliminary matrix of possible types of civic expression is likely
missing a dimension or two, and it is also likely that the examples provided may not be
the quintessential model for each type. Indeed, many of the examples slip between two
types, as in the hidden transcripts of spirituals which both directly express political
310
desires but also create new languages for that expression through the process of creation.
The examples of civic expression within Little Tokyo could certainly be mined further,
especially using humanistic methods — such as art history, theory, and criticism;
rhetorical, linguistic, and semiotic analysis; and musicological, sound, and performance
studies approaches — to further unpack how they operate as both expressive and political
forms. And so, this is to also say that these brief mentions of a range of additional
examples, including DBH, BLM, and beyond, warrant a much greater deal of exploration
and analysis to refine theories of civic expression.
Another approach to further refinement of our theory of civic expression,
however, would be to examine more cases which demonstrate similarity to Little Tokyo,
rather than typological difference. One fact that initially drew me to studying Little
Tokyo in depth was how striking its approach towards arts and culture is within the
context of gentrification as compared to the seemingly wholesale rejection of arts and
culture by anti-gentrification activists just across the river in Boyle Heights. Yet there are
a wide range of other neighborhoods and community development projects which also
display curious similarities to the logics of civic expression within Little Tokyo. Beyond
Boyle Heights, just within the city of Los Angeles, the historically Black community of
Leimert Park is facing similar issues. Long a locus for Black arts and culture, the
community has recently had to develop a visioning coalition to determine where and how
the neighborhood would move into the future given forces of gentrification, its renewed
identity as a Black cultural center, and the specter of future development with the soon-
to-open Crenshaw subway line. The notable Black American artist Mark Bradford, who
grew up in the area, has been buying up real estate in Leimert, opening Art + Practice, a
311
non-profit gallery and youth education space, complicating matters even further. His
intervention, which has ambitions to grow further with event and food spaces, both
portents well for the cultural cache and vibrancy of the neighborhood, but also creates
concern for those worried about affordability.
Just to the north of Little Tokyo, there is Chinatown where new development is
rampant, where there has been a long-evolving relationship to arts and culture given the
influx of “art world” spaces into former mom and pop storefronts in the 1990s, and where
there is now a renewed set of activists and actions undertaken by anti-gentrification
groups and arts-based organizers. Urban planner, community organizer, and journalist
Wendy Chung is but one of these new, young leaders and WAPOW, the neighborhood
magazine that she started explicitly describes their mission thus: “As the Los Angeles
Chinatown neighborhood undergoes rapid change and urban development, WAPOW
seeks to be a resource to share information and highlight personal stories to help locals
better cope with change, and promote dialogue across the community’s diverse cultures
and generations” (WAPOW 2019). Chung and WAPOW exemplify many of the same
elements of civic expression as in Little Tokyo: the use of arts and culture to organize a
community under threat of gentrification, and concern about building social capital and
intergenerational links to ensure that political desires can be enacted.
And that is just Los Angeles. In New York’s Chinatown, the Chinatown Arts
Brigade undertakes both community building through art and culture along with anti-
gentrification demonstrations and direction actions — and, indeed, has even teamed up
with anti-gentrification groups in Boyle Heights to protest artists and arts institutions that
operate in these two bicoastal nodes of the global art industry. As mentioned earlier in
312
this volume, a unique synthesis of art, culture, community development, and urban
planning has unfolded through the efforts of Rick Lowe and his Project Row Houses in
Houston, and Theaster Gates and his Rebuild Foundation in Chicago. In these cases,
community arts and culture intersect in different ways with the “art world” to enact
neighborhood placemaking and placekeeping, welcomed at times and fraught in other
times. And outside of the United States, artists and community activists have teamed up
to build structures for political participation and engagement with concerns around
gentrification in Seoul (see, for example, the gentrifying artists district of Mullae),
Mexico City (consider the border arts turned community development initiative
inSite/Casa Gallina), and Tokyo (most recently reinvigorated against the impending
Olympic Games). Civic expression is on the move, and more scholarly attention toward
this critical intersection of art, place, and politics is sorely needed.

Implications for Practice

Throughout this volume, I have tried to develop a theory of civic expression. This
theory has a wide range of implications for scholarly literatures, linking writing on public
participation, art and urban planning, gentrification, and politics. But how do we link this
theory to practice? The implications of civic expression, most notably that our methods of
public engagement are fundamentally flawed because of inattention to logics of culture,
ought to reconfigure how we practice participatory urban planning and governance. Our
standard practices of public engagement — the public hearing, the community meeting or
workshop, and even new practices like deliberative polling — ought to evolve to better
313
incorporate understandings of culture. Furthermore, those working at the intersection of
community development and the arts, especially those working in the emergent field of
creative placemaking, should also consider the implications of civic expression, shifting
the center of gravity for creative placemaking away from historic preservation, economic
development, and community branding, toward projects that enable and engender
culturally resonant practices of participation and political engagement. Creative
placemaking has a tarnished reputation from the way in which arts and urban
development have become implicated in processes of gentrification, and a shift toward
practices of civic expression and arts-based community organizing are but one way to
counter these impacts. Civic expression, therefore, also has implications for our
understanding of gentrification and how to slow or stop its processes in the contemporary
city.
So, what, exactly, are these implications, and how might they modify practice? I
propose six ways in which practitioners in governance, public art, and especially urban
planning can refine their practices based on insights from a theory of civic expression: (1)
modifying the ladder of participation to incorporate culture, tiers of engagement, and
implicit participation; (2) expanding understandings of gentrification to contend with
cultural gentrification and ibasho, or a sense of belonging; (3) integrating understandings
of creative placemaking with creative placekeeping and cultures of participation; (4)
considering long-term strategies and implications for property rights in communities; (5)
considering the importance of symbolic centrality for communities, and especially ethnic
and immigrant communities; and (6) incorporating practices of “active listening” into
standard planning operating procedures, especially by having staff responsible for
314
participating in community cultural events. I elaborate on these six implications for
practice in the remainder of this section.
Despite the wealth of scholarship that has been done since Sherry Arnstein’s 1969
“A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” it’s main insight into how public participation
operates on a continuum between tokenism and real, empowered participation remains
the starting point for most insight into public participation since. So-called P2 or public
participation professionals and urban planners responsible for engendering public
participation alike owe their framing of how to best solicit engagement to this touchstone.
Civic expression rewrites the starting point for participation away from abstract ideals
toward a grounding in specific, place-based cultures from which participation is meant to
be solicited. Thus, the first implication for practice is to re-orient practices of public
engagement and participation away from the often-reasonable concerns around access
and empowerment, and instead to build out structures for participation based in the
recommendations directly from communities and their specific cultures of participation.
Rewriting Arnstein’s ladder would thus also entail the acknowledgement that forms of
participation are already occurring within these communities, including forms of implicit
participation the might practically build community but not necessarily be explicitly
stating some kind of political goal. Planners should seek out these existing forms of
participation both to understand how to best engage the particular community, but also as
a means of participation itself. And planners should recognize that there are variable
levels of participation — first, second, and third tier participants — whose engagement
may look varied, but is needed for different purposes. Depending on the project that is
315
soliciting engagement, planners might engage a whole community at all tiers, or might
focus on engaging community leaders in the first tier.
The second implication for practice is to expand concerns around gentrification
beyond the most obvious forms of economic gentrification related to increased housing
costs. While this form of gentrification is important to contend with, it is but only one
kind of concern that communities have when they publicly fret about gentrification.
Often, concerns are centered around processes of neighborhood change that impact local
cultural and commercial institutions, such as community arts organizations, long-time
mom and pop businesses, or even material objects that have some kind of symbolic
importance like notable trees — the Aoyama tree in Little Tokyo comes to mind. This
network of cultural institutions — and here it is important to stress a broad understanding
of what constitutes of cultural institution — are what gives a neighborhood its character
and are what create a sense of belonging, or what I have referred to as ibasho, for its
inhabitants. Protecting ibasho thus becomes a critical goal for planners, and while the
devastating importance of housing gentrification cannot be overstated, it is often these
softer forms of community identity and belonging that engender the strongest of emotions
when it comes to neighborhood change and gentrification. Thus, planning policy needs to
evolve strategies for protecting these cultural institutions, such as the recent policy of
providing funds to “legacy businesses” implemented in San Francisco, or emergent
efforts to incorporate “intangible heritage” beyond architecture and buildings into historic
preservation guidelines.
A third implication gets at the heart of ongoing debates within the emergent field
of creative placemaking. The ubiquity of foundation and public funding for creative
316
placemaking projects meant to goose up economic growth in communities has led to calls
for placekeeping, but even before the emergence of creative placemaking, there have
been grassroots, organic placemaking processes in communities that have always had to
contend with placekeeping when old-time residents have raised their voices as a place
seems to change too quickly. Little Tokyo is no different, with new generations of
community members forging new kinds of art and culture, prompting older community
members to temper enthusiasm for the new with respect for heritage and what has come
before. Thus, placemaking and placekeeping should not be seen as antagonistic forces, or
entirely different processes where a community needs to choose one or another. They are
both critical and complementary processes for urban communities to remain dynamic,
retain a sense of belonging, and create a quality place for its inhabitants. Furthermore,
creative placemaking projects should be funded and valued not only for producing
economic growth, but also for being a means for soliciting public participation and
engagement — especially because creative placemaking projects that do so have a kind
of “placekeeping alarm” built into them as participants inevitably bring up concerns
around neighborhood change. Urban communities, like living things, are always
undergoing a process of change, and creative placemaking is a culturally-based strategy
for being intentional about that change, and soliciting participation and engagement in
community development. Yet placekeeping is also needed so that nobody gets left
behind, concerns about equity are met, and so that places do not change so fast that their
inhabitants feel like strangers in their own place. Thus, planners and especially cultural
practitioners who engage with creative placemaking should consider how their project
also takes into account placekeeping and participation, balancing a project’s enthusiasm
317
for the future with ethical concerns about respecting the past and present of a place. Also,
projects should equitably consider the needs and participation of all different stakeholders
in a place, and especially those stakeholders who are marginalized in some way, such as
by race, class, age, or gender.
A fourth implication from civic expression stems from the insights in Little Tokyo
regarding property rights. Real estate and land ownership, sales, and transfer, along with
underlying property rights regimes, are the “hidden layer” that can make or break a
community’s ability to hold on to place, and often these structural factors go ignored by
communities who try to fight gentrification — leading to inevitable failure. Civic
expression was the means by which Little Tokyo was able to recentralize its cultural
institutions and gain some degree of property ownership that was not beholden to the
private real estate market and speculation, with major institutions built on long-term
leases of public land, non-profit ownership beholden to a board of directors, or soon to
include a community investment fund. Other alternative models include co-operative
ownership and community land trusts. While the question of property rights can be
engaged outside of the realm of culture, it was particularly effective in the case of Little
Tokyo to both channel funds into land acquisition for cultural institutions, and it has also
had some effect in creating a cultural imaginary on the importance of property rights at
least in the minds of its community leaders. These factors have been critical in enabling
Little Tokyo to hold onto place, and offer some hope for other communities who are
facing similar issues. Thus city leaders and urban planners who have some degree of
control of questions of entitlements, property rights, and especially over the leasing and
sourcing of public lands ought to use their considerable power to support those unable to
318
engage in the real estate market at the level of now-global financial firms who have
wholesale bought up housing, communities, and buildings, at times even land banking
with the expectation for such land to increase in value and then be sold off in the future.
While some planners might feel uncomfortable “favoring” local communities in their
pursuit of local control of land, there is in fact a long legal tradition of supporting such
property rights through understandings of use value and the duration of claims to such
property rights — two criteria which would inevitably favor local communities over well-
capitalized firms that can almost always outbid a local buyer. Planners should respect
these claims to space that come out of local communities.
A fifth implication from civic expression, and one related to the question of
property rights, is the way in which a critical mass of cultural activity and institutions can
allow a community to be transformed from a relatively generic residential community
into one imbued with a serious and legitimate symbolic power. Because Little Tokyo has
such a high density of historic, cultural, and community institutions from the Japanese
American community, ranging from religious organizations, to arts organizations, to
legacy businesses, it has become the sole, de facto spiritual home for Japanese Americans
in Southern California, and also has significance for Japanese Americans and Asian
Americans across the United States, and even for Japanese nationals in Japan. This
process is especially true for ethnic and immigrant communities who don’t otherwise
have a space within cities that are designed and built for dominant cultural norms. Places
like Little Tokyo become incredibly important, even if their constituents do not live there,
or even if they rarely visit. Even to know that you have a place in the city is
psychologically important, and this symbolic importance leads such neighborhoods to
319
build political power and influence such that they can hold onto place. While
demographic maps might point toward disconcerting trends of segregation, communities
like Little Tokyo (though they may have originated out of racist histories of segregation)
now operate under different logics, logics which some have termed “congregation.”
Planners should recognize and respect these sites of symbolic importance, ensuring that
generic urban uses do not encroach on this culturally important locales, and also
responding to the political power imbued in the constituencies of such spaces —
constituencies which are often not marked by where one sleeps at night, or where one is
registered to vote, or even where one works, but rather where one has a legitimate
cultural connection. This is connected to the second implication regarding legacy
businesses and intangible heritage, and is an exciting and cutting-edge site for new
scholarship and practice (Magalong and Mabalon 2016; San Francisco Heritage 2014).
The sixth and final implication for practice from civic expression relates to the
previous section on listening, and is perhaps the single most evident implication from the
recognition that participation is happening in communities everywhere, if only planners,
public officials, and practitioners had the cultural capacity to recognize it. Furthermore,
much of the theory around public participation emphasizes the importance of “voice” and
the ability to “speak out” rather than recognizing the equally important task of those
soliciting such participation to listen. Some scholars, such as Archon Fung, have
identified one piece of the puzzle, which is that participatory processes must be
“empowered” or, in other words, actually respond to the participation. But even Sherry
Arnstein noted this in her original ladder, identifying processes that just solicited token
participation versus those that actually responded or even bequeathed “citizen power.”
320
But these understandings fail to recognize that one can respond to participation outside of
artificially created venues for engagement as well. What are the political desires of a
community that manifest in its local cultural spaces? What do community members gripe
about, or wish they saw in their community, or opine when they hear about a new
development, when they are interacting at a locally important food establishment or
legacy business? Thus, rather than institute yet another newly developed venue for
soliciting public participation — venues that will typically inadvertently cater toward
populations which already participate at high rates, such as those who are whiter,
wealthier, older, and homeowning — planners and other P2 professionals ought to go
into communities an actively listen. This process is one that needs to be developed and
refined in collaboration with communities such that they will both be responsive to local
cultures of participation, and also so that they won’t turn out to be unwanted snooping.
And one great initial policy to implement in order to achieve this is to hire municipal staff
that act like cultural attachés, whose job is to attend community functions, to show up at
cultural events, to build trust with communities, and to listen. And beyond a theory of
civic expression providing such a direct, instrumental proposal, it is also more broadly
important for civic leaders — both within the government, but also between neighbors as
community leaders from one community interface with other communities — to
recognize the implications of civic expression and be better informed about local cultures
and practices of participation (Kim and Kang 2019). Civic expression occurs whether or
not city officials are paying attention, but if they had the ears to listen, it would be the
first step towards a healthier urban democracy and more just, livable cities.

321
Future Directions

Two main trajectories of additional research come out of this volume. First, Little
Tokyo itself, despite its relatively tiny geographic footprint, has been demonstrated to be
not only the spiritual home for Japanese Americans in Southern California and
throughout the United States, but also the premier locus for Asian American arts and
culture in the US, given its incredibly dense network of cultural institutions and histories
— and network effects between these entities only serve to magnify Little Tokyo’s
importance. While a considerable amount of work has been done by scholars of urban
history and Asian American studies in examining Little Tokyo, most often in context to
other themes or larger regional histories, it remains surprisingly underexposed in both
academic and popular literatures. During my time in Little Tokyo, I came to realize how
incredibly dense the archival, historical, and cultural resources were in Little Tokyo, not
to mention the depth of institutional knowledge held by community elders who are all too
aware of their diminishing time left to leave their histories and legacies for future
generations. The incredible amount of material that is stashed in this attic or that garage
provides both a wealth of historical and cultural treasures for an enterprising researcher,
as well as an alarming degree of precarity for the collective record of this important
neighborhood. Suffice it to say, one could spend an entire lifetime studying Little Tokyo
and sharing its history, and barely scratch the surface.
Just using the data that I have collected over the course of this project, a number
of additional forms of research could be conducted. One body of work could focus on a
new institutionalism approach to understanding art, culture, and community. The survey
322
is the first of its kind in Little Tokyo, linking art, identity, political participation, and
concerns around gentrification, and could be used to examine correlations between a
range of additional phenomena of import to the community, such as links between
particular cultural organizations and degrees of political participation, building out a
theory of political engagement at an institutional level, rather than the individual and
community scales that I explored in this project. And this is only one example. The
historical and archival materials that I collected could be examined from art historical
methods, in conjunction with consideration of the number of cultural organizations in
Little Tokyo and literatures from Asian American studies, to write an art history of the
premier Asian American locus for arts and cultural activity in the United States. And the
interviews that I collected could be used to consider themes of institutional construction
and continuity, as opposed to culture and political participation. Furthermore, there
remain a lengthy list of potential interview subjects that my interviewees provided —
perhaps most important to this work would be to incorporate the voices and positions
held by the younger generation of leaders that is now coming up in Little Tokyo,
transforming its culture and identity yet again. All of these findings would provide a
wealth of insight into non-profit administration, illuminating how and why community-
scale institutions are formed, how they are sustained, and their linkages to forms of
culture.
The insights into property rights regimes provided by community leaders in Little
Tokyo point toward another area of further analysis that could prove fundamental for
discussions around gentrification: namely, the amount and spatial distribution of land
which is held in forms of ownership that are at least partially shielded from the vagaries
323
of privately held, for-profit land speculation. Non-profit and religious institutions,
publicly held long-term land leases, and commonly held real estate — hopefully soon,
with Bill Watanabe’s community investment fund — all play a role in Little Tokyo’s
property rights landscape, and analysis of this particular phenomenon might point toward
ways in which a minimum threshold of such ownership, along with the right spatial
distribution, might provide a kind of “herd immunity” and “inoculate” neighborhoods
from the worst and most rapid effects of gentrification.
Another key area of interest that I was unable to do more than mention, yet would
be illuminating for intersections between Asian and Asian American studies, along with
international relations and politics, is to hone in on the multifarious relationship between
Little Tokyo and Japan. There are a range of connections, including histories of
migration, the emergence of transnational capital and neoliberal economies, and cultures
constantly in flux based on generational shifts, complicated by continuing flows of goods
and people. The instinct to connect ethnic enclaves with nations of origin is often
approach in a facile way by academics and lay publics alike, and the degree to which
these processes were acknowledged and often even protested in Little Tokyo provides a
rich narrative through which these transnational flows can be explained and complicated.
Within the past few years, a handful of Japanese nationals have begun to attend the
annual Manzanar Pilgrimage, learning the history of internment, a history which is barely
taught in American schools, let alone Japanese schools, pointing toward a growing
interest in considering questions of race, ethnicity, and state power in a global perspective
— and demonstrating the complicated links of ethnic identity and culture which retain
curious lacunae based on the contingent realities of national boundaries.
324
Aside from the range of future directions that this volume presents which go into
more depth in Little Tokyo is a research trajectory that actually moves farther away from
Little Tokyo, focusing instead on the theory of civic expression. As conveyed in the
previous section, this volume built out its theory of civic expression based on existing
literatures from public participation, cultures of political engagement, and art and the city
from urban planning. These literatures were grounded through a deep engagement with
the rich history of civic expression in Little Tokyo, and its contemporary use of arts and
political engagement against gentrification today. Yet the question remains: does this
theory translate into other contexts, and does it apply with other kinds of political
participation? I would argue that it does, although we do not yet know the contours of
how the theory must be refined and modified given different cultural contexts. When
civic expression moves into a different place, how much of it looks the same?
This trajectory for future research would entail using a variety of methods,
including both additional in-depth case studies in different contexts and national or even
global quantitative data that can shed light on trends with regard to culture and political
participation. There are a handful of examples of an intersection between art, culture,
ethnicity, and gentrification that exist with many similarities to Little Tokyo — Boyle
Heights, Chinatown, and Leimert Park in Los Angeles come to mind, or the Chinatown
Arts Brigade in New York, but also noted community development projects such as
Theaster Gates’ Rebuild Foundation in Chicago, and Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses in
Houston. International cases such as those in Seoul, Mexico City, and Tokyo, as
mentioned earlier, would also provide a critical perspective that moves beyond the United
States. The tendency for research to focus on contexts in the United States is a common
325
one, and moving into spaces in other countries would be a strong first start. What do anti-
gentrification battles look like in Seoul’s Mullae neighborhood, or in Mexico City’s
Santa María la Ribera, where Casa Gallina is located? Are there particular neighborhoods
that have deep histories of cultural production that might model similar tendencies as
Little Tokyo? And, if so, how does its history and contemporary use of civic expression
look different? Another approach might involve examining forms of political engagement
that are not place-based to consider how civic expression changes when it exists in digital
space, or is not tied to a particular neighborhood. The issue, in that case, would likely
also shift from concerns around gentrification toward other social issues, such as
concerns around civil rights, or economic concerns.
By broadening the horizon of civic expression, and more carefully finding the
entry points in the literature for its formulation, it can be constructed as a theory that is
not only explanatory for Little Tokyo, but one that might provide more practical power as
communities, governments, and non-profit organizations all try to understand how to best
engage publics, employ participatory planning processes, and build a more democratic
society that alleviates some degree of the political dissatisfaction that has gripped the
globe. Art and culture remain expressive forms that can but do not necessarily always
convey political desires, and their basic function as a form of human communication
serves to build shared ties of community. It can be life giving, especially for those worn
out by seemingly never-ending political battles and marginalization by society and the
state. Civic expression offers a means for humanizing politics and social life for the
future.

326
Bibliography

Albrecht, Glenn, Gina-Maree Sartore, Linda Connor, Nick Higginbotham, Sonia
Freeman, Brian Kelly, Helen Stain, Anne Tonna, and Georgia Pollard. 2007.
“Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change,” Australasian
Psychiatry 15 (S1): S95–98. doi:10.1080/10398560701701288.
Alinsky, Saul D. 1971. Rules for Radicals. New York: Random House.
Alejandro Portes and Julia Sensenbrenner. 1993. “Embeddedness and Immigration: Notes
on the Social Determinants of Economic Action.” American Journal of Sociology
98 (6): 1320–1350. doi:10.1086/230191.
Almond, Gabriel and Sidney Verba. 1963. The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and
Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Arendt, Hannah. 2007. The Promise of Politics. New York: Schocken.
Arnstein, Sherry R. 1969. “A Ladder of Citizen Participation.” Journal of the American
Institute of Planners 35 (4): 216–224.
Baptiste, Nathalie. 2017. “Origins of a Movement.” The Nation, February 27.
Baiocchi, Gianpaolo. 2017. Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Barber, Benjamin R. 1984. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Becker, Howard. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 1979. “Do photographs tell the truth?” In Cook and Reichardt, eds., Qualitative
and Quantitative Methods in Evaluation Research. London: SAGE Publications,
pp. 99–117.
Bedoya, Roberto. 2013. “Placemaking and the Politics of Belonging and Dis-Belonging.”
Grantmakers in the Arts Reader 24 (1).
http://www.giarts.org/article/placemaking-and-politics-belonging-and-dis-
belonging.
327
Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Berman, Marshall. 1982. All That Is Solid Melts into Air. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Berry, Jeffrey M, Kent E Portney, and Ken Thomson. 1993. The Rebirth of Urban
Democracy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Bickford, Susan. 1996. The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and
Citizenship. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Bishop, Claire. 2004. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110: 51–79.
———. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. New
York: Verso Books.
Black Lives Matter. 2019. “Herstory of BLM Los Angeles.” Black Lives Matter Website,
accessed 2019, https://blacklivesmatter.com/chapter/blm-los-angeles/.
Blair, Edward, and Johnny Blair. 2015. Applied Survey Sampling. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Blount, Casey, Wendy Ip, Ikuo Nakano, and Elaine Ng. 2014. “Redevelopment Agencies
in California: History, Benefits, Excesses, and Closure.” Report. Washington DC:
US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy
Development and Research.
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications/Redevelopment_WhitePaper.pdf.
Boal, Augusto. 1979. Theater of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press.
Bonin-Rodriguez, Paul. 2015. Performing Policy: How Contemporary Politics and
Cultural Programs Redefined U.S. Artists for the Twenty-First Century. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Brand, Anna Livia. 2018. “The Duality of Space: The Built World of Du Bois’ Double-
Consciousness,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36 (1): 3–22.
doi:10.1177/0263775817738782.
Calhoun, Craig J. 1992. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 1994. Social Theory and the Politics of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Castells, Manuel. 1983. The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban
Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press.
328
Chang, Wen-Chun. 2016. “Culture, Citizenship Norms, and Political Participation:
Empirical Evidence from Taiwan.” Japanese Journal of Political Science 17 (2):
256–277. doi:10.1017/S1468109916000062.
Chapple, Karen and Shannon Jackson. 2010. “Commentary: Arts, Neighborhoods, and
Social Practices: Towards an Integrated Epistemology of Community Arts.”
Journal of Planning Education and Research 29 (4): 478–490.
Cilliers, Elizelle J. and Wim Timmermans. 2014. “The Importance of Creative
Participatory Planning in the Public Place-Making Process.” Environment and
Planning B - Planning and Design 41 (3): 413–429.
Converse, Jean M, and Stanley Presser. 1986. Survey Questions: Handcrafting the
Standardized Questionnaire. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Cox, Kevin R. 1982. “Housing Tenure and Neighborhood Activism,” Urban Affairs
Review 18 (1): 107–29. doi:10.1177/004208168201800109.
Crawford, Kate. 2009. “Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media.”
Continuum 23 (4): 525–535. doi:10.1080/10304310903003270.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black
Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist
Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–67.
Crisman, Jonathan and Annette Kim. 2019. “Property Outlaws in the Southland: The
Potential and Limits of Guerrilla Urbanism in the Cases of Arts Gentrification in
Boyle Heights and Street Vending Decriminalization in Los Angeles.” Urban
Design International, online first.
Currid-Halkett, Elizabeth. 2007. “How Art and Culture Happen in New York.” Journal of
the American Planning Association 73 (4): 454–467.
———. 2010. “Symposium Introduction—Art and Economic Development: New
Directions for the Growth of Cities and Regions.” Journal of Planning Education
and Research 29 (3): 257–261.
Dahl, Robert Alan. 1971. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
———. 1961. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
329
Davidoff, Paul. 1965. “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning,” Journal of the American
Institute of Planners 31 (4): 331–38.
Davis, Susan G. 1986. Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century
Philadelphia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Defend Boyle Heights. 2019. “Home.” Defend Boyle Heights: A Revolutionary Anti-
Gentrification Organization Based in Boyle Heights, accessed 2019,
http://defendboyleheights.blogspot.com/.
Delanty, Gerard. 2003. Community. London: Routledge.
Dobson, Andrew. 2012. “Listening: The New Democratic Deficit.” Political Studies 60
(4): 843–859. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00944.x.
Dreher, Tanja. 2009. “Listening Across Difference: Media and Multiculturalism Beyond
the Politics of Voice.” Continuum 23 (4): 445–458.
doi:10.1080/10304310903015712.
Dryzek, John S. 1990. Discursive Democracy: Politics Policy and Political Science.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Duval, Jared. 2010. Next Generation Democracy: What the Open-Source Revolution
Means for Power, Politics, and Change. New York: Bloomsbury USA.
Ehrenhalt, Alan. 2013. The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City. New
York: Vintage Books.
Ellis, Mark, and Richard Wright. 2005. “Assimilation and Differences between the
Settlement Patterns of Individual Immigrants and Immigrant Households,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
102 (43): 15325–30. doi:10.1073/pnas.0507310102.
Fainstein, Susan S. 2000. “New Directions in Planning Theory,” Urban Affairs Review 35
(4): 451–78.
Fallon, Michael, and Maren Fox. 2014. Creating the Future: Art and Los Angeles in the
1970s. Berkeley: Counterpoint.
Fischer, Frank. 2009. Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
330
Fisher, Mark. 2012. “What is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly 66 (1): 16.
doi:10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16.
Fishkin, James S. 1991. Democracy and Deliberation. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
Florida, Richard L. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming
Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books.
Flyvbjerg, Bent. 2002. “Bringing Power to Planning Research,” Journal of Planning
Education and Research 21 (4): 353–66.
Forester, John. 1999. The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning
Processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 1989. Planning in the Face of Power. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fraser, Nancy. 1990. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of
Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text (25/26): 56–80.
Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-
Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso.
Freire, Paulo. 2018. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th Anniversary Edition. New York:
Bloomsbury Academic.
Frenette, Alexandre. 2017. “The Rise of Creative Placemaking: Cross-Sector
Collaboration as Cultural Policy in the United States.” The Journal of Arts
Management, Law, and Society 47 (5): 333.
Friedmann, John. 1973. Retracking America: A Theory of Transactive Planning. Garden
City: Anchor Press.
Fung, Archon. 2004. Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2003. “Survey Article: Recipes for Public Spheres: Eight Institutional Design
Choices and their Consequences.” Journal of Political Philosophy 11 (3): 338–
367.
———. 2006. “Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance.” Public
Administration Review 66: 66–75.
Gadwa Nicodemus, Anne. 2013. “Fuzzy Vibrancy: Creative Placemaking as Ascendant
US Cultural Policy.” Cultural Trends 22 (3/4): 213–222.
331
Galletta, Anne. 2012. Mastering the Semi-Structured Interview and Beyond from
Research Design to Analysis and Publication. New York: New York University
Press.
George, Alexander L, and Andrew Bennett. 2005. Case Studies and Theory Development
in the Social Sciences. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Gerring, John. 1999. “What Makes a Concept Good? A Criterial Framework for
Understanding Concept Formation in the Social Sciences.” Polity 31 (3): 357–93.
doi:10.2307/3235246.
González, Jennifer A., C. Ondine Chavoya, Chon A. Noriega, and Terecita Romo, eds.
2019. Chicano and Chicana art: a critical anthology. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Goodspeed, Robert. 2016. “The Death and Life of Collaborative Planning Theory,”
Urban Planning 1 (4): 1–5.
Granovetter, Mark. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology
78 (6): 1360–1380.
Great Leap. 2019. “FandangObon.” Great Leap Website, accessed 2019,
http://greatleap.org/fandangobon/.
Greenberg, Anna. 2000. “The Church and the Revitalization of Politics and Community,”
Political Science Quarterly 115 (3): 377–94. doi:10.2307/2658124.
Grodach, Carl. 2011. “Art Spaces in Community and Economic Development:
Connections to Neighborhoods, Artists, and the Cultural Economy.” Journal of
Planning Education and Research 31 (1): 74–85.
———. 2010. “Beyond Bilbao: Rethinking Flagship Cultural Development and Planning
in Three California Cities.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 29 (3):
353–366.
Grodach, Carl, Nicole Foster, and James Murdoch. 2014. “Gentrification and the Artistic
Dividend: The Role of the Arts in Neighborhood Change.” Journal of the
American Planning Association 80 (1): 21–35.
Groves, Robert M, Mick P. Couper, Eleanor Singer, Floyd Fowler, Roger Tourangeau,
and James Lepkowski. 2009. Survey Methodology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
332
Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hacker, Karen. 2013. Community-Based Participatory Research. Thousand Oaks, Calif:
SAGE.
Harry Boyte, Stephen Elkin, Peter Levine, Jane Mansbrige, Elinor Ostrom, Karol Sotan,
and Roger Smith. 2014. “The New Civic Politics: Civic Theory and Practice for
the Future.” The Good Society 23 (2): 206–211.
doi:10.5325/goodsociety.23.2.0206.
Hart-Brinson, Peter. 2012. “Civic Recreation and a Theory of Civic Production.”
Sociological Theory 30 (2): 130–147. doi:10.1177/0735275112448051.
Hayden, Dolores. 1995. The power of place: urban landscapes as public history.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Healey, Patsy. 1992. “Planning through Debate: The Communicative Turn in Planning
Theory,” The Town Planning Review 63 (2): 143.
Hernandez, Rafael and Haraldo Dilla. 1991. “Political Culture and Popular Participation
in Cuba.” Latin American Perspectives 18 (2): 38–54.
doi:10.1177/0094582X9101800205.
Hibbing, John R, and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. 2002. Stealth Democracy: Americans’
Beliefs About How Government Should Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Higa, Karen. 2008. “Hidden in Plain Sight: Little Tokyo Between the Wars,” in Asian
American Art: A History, 1850–1970, Gordon H. Chang, ed. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 30–53.
Hillery, G. 1955. “Definitions of Community: Areas of Agreement.” Rural Sociology 20
(2): 111–123.
Hillier, Jean. 2003. “Agonizing Over Consensus: Why Habermasian Ideals Cannot Be
Real,” Planning Theory 2 (1): 37–59.
Ho, C. S. Bryan. 2011. “Political Culture, Social Movements, and Governability in
Macao.” Asian Affairs: An American Review 38 (2): 59–87.
doi:10.1080/00927678.2010.550837.
333
Hoch, Charles J. 2007. “Pragmatic Communicative Action Theory,” Journal of Planning
Education and Research 26 (3): 272–83.
Hofstede, Geert. 2001. Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors,
Institutions, and Organizations across Nations. Thousand Oaks: Sage
Publications.
Hosokawa, Bill. 1969. Nisei: The Quiet Americans. New York: Morrow.
Holland, Dorothy C, Dana E Powell, Eugenia Eng, and Georgina Drew. 2010. “Models
of Engaged Scholarship: An Interdisciplinary Discussion,” Collaborative
Anthropologies 3 (1): 1–36. doi:10.1353/cla.2010.0011.
Hung, Derek, Gary Painter, Jacob Denney, Jovanna Rosen, Jung Hyun Choi, and Vincent
Reina. 2013. “Little Tokyo Community Assessment.” Report. Los Angeles: USC
Price Center. https://socialinnovation.usc.edu/files/2013/01/Little-Tokyo-
Community-Assessment-093016-Final_with-description.pdf.
Inada, Lawson Fusao. 2000. Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American
Internment Experience. Berkeley, Calif: Heyday Books.
Innes, Judith E. 1995. “Planning Theory’s Emerging Paradigm: Communicative Action
and Interactive Practice,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 14 (3):
183–89.
Ishizuka, Karen. 2016. Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties.
London: Verso.
Irvin, Renee A, and John Stansbury. 2004. “Citizen Participation in Decision Making: Is
It Worth the Effort?” Public Administration Review 64 (1): 55–65.
Jackson, Maria Rosario. 2011. Building Community: Making Space for Art. Washington,
DC: The Urban Institute.
———. 2012. Developing Artist-Driven Spaces in Marginalized Communities:
Reflections and Implications for the Field. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute.
———. 2019. Personal communication. May 24.
Jackson, Maria Rosario, Florence Kabwasa-Green, and Joaquin Herranz. 2006. Cultural
Vitality in Communities: Interpretation and Indicators. Washington, DC: The
Urban Institute.
Jacobs, Allan B. 1993. Great Streets. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
334
Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random
House.
Jasper, James M. 1999. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in
Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jeung, Russell, Karen Umemoto, Harvey Dong, Eric Mar, Lisa Hirai Tsuchitani, and
Arnold Pan. 2019. Mountain Movers: Student Activism and the Emergence of
Asian American Studies. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center.
Joanne Sharp, Venda Pollock, and Ronan Paddison. 2005. “Just Art for a Just City:
Public Art and Social Inclusion in Urban Regeneration.” Urban Studies 42 (5/6):
1001–1023.
Johnston, Hank and Bert Klandermans, eds. 1995. Social Movements and Culture.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kalima, Rose, Milly Hawk Daniel, and Jeremy Liu. 2017. Creating Change through Arts,
Culture, and Equitable Development: A Policy and Practice Primer. Report.
Oakland: PolicyLink.
Kapitan, Lynn, Mary Litell, and Anabel Torres. 2011. “Creative Art Therapy in a
Community’s Participatory Research and Social Transformation.” Art Therapy 28
(2): 64–73.
Kaplan, David H. 2018. Navigating Ethnicity: Segregation, Placemaking, and Difference.
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Kelty, Christopher. 2017. “Too Much Democracy in all the Wrong Places: Toward a
Grammar of Participation.” Current Anthropology 58: S77.
Kester, Grant. 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern
Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2011. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global
Context. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kim, Annette M. 2011. “Introduction: Real Rights to the City—Cases of Property Rights
Changes towards Equity in Eastern Asia,” Urban Studies 48 (3): 459–69.
doi:10.1177/0042098010390235.
335
———. 2012. “The Mixed-Use Sidewalk: Vending and Property Rights in Public
Space,” Journal of the American Planning Association 78 (3): 225–38.
doi:10.1080/01944363.2012.715504.
———. forthcoming article. “Ethnic Signage in Los Angeles.”\
Kim, Annette M. and Kang, Kristy. 2019. “Making Our Mark on the City: Names, Signs,
and Community Cognitive Maps to Plan an Ethnically Inclusive Los Angeles.”
Los Angeles: SLAB Working Paper Series 2019: 1.
Kurashige, Lon. 2000. “The Problem of Biculturalism: Japanese American Identity and
Festival before World War II,” The Journal of American History 86 (4): 1632–54.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2567581.
———. 2002. Japanese American Celebration and Conflict a History of Ethnic Identity
and Festival. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Knight Commission on Trust Media and Democracy. 2019. Crisis in Democracy:
Renewing Trust in America. Report. Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute.
Kunikata, Hiroko, Yuko Shiraishi, Kazuo Nakajima, Tetsuya Tanioka, and Masahito
Tomotake. 2011. “The Relationship between Psychological Comfort Space and
Self-Esteem in People with Mental Disorders,” The Journal of Medical
Investigation 58 (1/2): 56–62. doi:10.2152/jmi.58.56.
LA Times. “Good People.” 1888. Los Angeles Times, February 5.
https://search.proquest.com/docview/163401861.
LA City Planning. “Little Tokyo CDO District.” 2013. Report. Los Angeles: Department
of City Planning.
Lacey, Kate. 2011. “Listening Overlooked.” Javnost - the Public 18 (4): 5–20.
doi:10.1080/13183222.2011.11009064.
Lee, Caroline W., Michael McQuarrie, and Edward T. Walker, eds. 2016. Democratizing
Inequalities Dilemmas of the New Public Participation. New York: New York
University Press.
———. 2015. Do-it-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
336
Lerner, Josh A. 2014. Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower
Citizens and Transform Politics. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Li, Wei. 2006. From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb: New Asian Communities in
Pacific Rim Countries. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai’i Press.
Lin, Jan. 2019. Taking Back the Boulevard: Art, Activism, and Gentrification in Los
Angeles. New York: New York University Press.
Lindblom, Charles. 1959. “The Science of ‘Muddling Through,’” Public Administration
Review 19 (2): 79–88.
Lipsitz, George. 2007. “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race:
Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape.” Landscape Journal 26 (1):
10–23.
Lowery, Bryce, David Sloane, Denise Payán, Jacqueline Illum, and Lavonna Lewis.
2016. “Do Farmers’ Markets Increase Access to Healthy Foods for all
Communities? Comparing Markets in 24 Neighborhoods in Los Angeles.”
Journal of the American Planning Association 82 (3): 252–15.
Lung-Amam, Willow S. 2017. Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for
Suburbia. Oakland, California: University of California Press.
Lynch, Kevin. 1985. Good City Form. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Lynch, Kevin and Gary Hack. 1984. Site Planning. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Magalong, Michelle G. and Dawn Bohulano Mabalon. 2016. “Cultural Preservation
Policy and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders: Reimagining Historic
Preservation in Asian American and Pacific Islander Communities,” AAPI Nexus
14 (2): 105–116.
Manzanar Committee. 2011. “Who We Are.” Manzanar Committee Website, accessed
2019, https://manzanarcommittee.org/who-we-are/.
Margerum, Richard D. 2002. “Collaborative Planning,” Journal of Planning Education
and Research 21 (3): 237–53.
Marks, Mara A. 2004. “Shifting Ground: The Rise and Fall of the Los Angeles
Community Redevelopment Agency,” Southern California Quarterly 86 (3):
241–90. doi:10.2307/41172224.
337
Markusen, Ann. 2013. “Fuzzy Concepts, Proxy Data: Why Indicators would Not Track
Creative Placemaking Success.” International Journal of Urban Sciences 17 (3):
291–303.
Markusen, Ann and Anne Gadwa. 2010. Creative Placemaking. Washington, DC:
National Endowment for the Arts.
Marres, Noortje. 2005. “Issues Spark a Public into being: A Key but often Forgotten
Point of the Lippmann-Dewey Debate.” In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of
Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Massey, Doreen B. 2005. For Space. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
———. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mazziotti, Donald F. 1974. “The Underlying Assumptions of Advocacy Planning:
Pluralism and Reform,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 40 (1): 38–
47.
McGuirk, Pauline M. 2001. “Situating Communicative Planning Theory: Context, Power,
and Knowledge,” Environment and Planning A 33 (2): 195–217.
McKittrick, Katherine., and Clyde Adrian. Woods. 2007. Black Geographies and the
Politics of Place. Toronto, Ont: Between the Lines.
Morley, Elaine and Mary K. Winkler. 2014. The Validating Arts and Livability Indicators
(VALI) Study: Results and Recommendations. Washington, DC: National
Endowment for the Arts.
Mouffe, Chantal. 1999. “Deliberative Democracy Or Agonistic Pluralism?” Social
Research 66 (3): 745–758.
Mumford, Lewis. 1938. The Culture of Cities. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.
Nakagawa, Mark M. 2016. “Our History.” Centenary UMC Website, accessed 2019,
https://www.centenarydtla.org/history.
Nakagawa, Martha. 2006. “Lawsuits.” Bronzeville - Little Tokyo, Los Angeles Website,
Accessed 2019, http://bronzeville-
la.ltsc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=2.
Neal, Mark Anthony. 1999. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public
Culture. London: Routledge.
338
Noveck, Beth S. 2009. Wiki Government how Technology can make Government Better,
Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful. Washington: Brookings
Institution Press.
Pateman, Carole. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Peck, Jamie. 2005. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research 29 (4): 740–770.
Preserving California Japantowns. 2010. “Home.” California Japantowns Website,
Accessed 2019, http://www.californiajapantowns.org/index.html.
Pulido, Laura. 2006. Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Putnam, Robert. 1995. “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” Journal of
Democracy 6 (1): 65–78.
———. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New
York: Simon & Schuster.
Putnam, Robert D., Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Nanetti. 1993. Making Democracy
Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Redaelli, Eleonora. 2016. “Creative Placemaking and the NEA: Unpacking a Multi-Level
Governance.” Policy Studies 37 (4): 387–402.
———. 2018. “Creative Placemaking and Theories of Art: Analyzing a Place-Based
NEA Policy in Portland, OR.” Cities 72: 403–410.
Reeves, Richard. 2015. Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment
in World War II. New York: Holt.
Rios, Michael, and Paul Lachapelle. 2015. “Community Development and Democratic
Practice: Pas de Deux or Distinct and Different?” Community Development 46
(3): 190–97. doi:10.1080/15575330.2015.1032050.
Rios, Michael, and Leonardo Vazquez. 2012. Diálogos: Placemaking in Latino
Communities. Abingdon: Routledge.
339
Rios, Michael, and Joshua Watkins. 2015. “Beyond ‘Place’: Translocal Placemaking of
the Hmong Diaspora,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 35 (2): 209–
19. doi:10.1177/0739456X14568023.
Rohe, William M, and Michael A. Stegman. 1994. “The Impact of Home Ownership on
the Social and Political Involvement of Low-Income People,” Urban Affairs
Review 30 (1): 152–72. doi:10.1177/004208169403000108.
Rothstein, Richard. 2017. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our
Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Roy, Ananya. 2019. “Research Justice,” lecture. May 1, 2019, UCLA.
Ryan, Mary P. 1979. “The Power of Women’s Networks: A Case Study of Female Moral
Reform in Antebellum America.” Feminist Studies 5 (1): 66–85.
Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring
Neighborhood Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
San Francisco Heritage. 2014. “Sustaining San Francisco’s Living History: Strategies for
Conserving Cultural Heritage.” Working paper.
Sander, Thomas and Robert Putnam. 2010. “Still Bowling Aline? the Post-9/11 Split.”
Journal of Democracy 21 (1): 9–16. doi:10.1353/jod.0.0153.
Sandercock, Leonie. 1998. Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities.
Chichester: Wiley.
Schudson, Michael. 2000. “Good Citizens and Bad History: Today’s Political Ideals in
Historical Perspective.” The Communication Review 4 (1): 1–19.
Schupbach, Jason and Don Ball, eds. 2016. How to do Creative Placemaking: An Action
Oriented Guide to Arts in Community Development. Washington, DC: National
Endowment for the Arts.
Scott, Allen J. 2006. “Creative Cities: Conceptual Issues and Policy Questions.” Journal
of Urban Affairs 28 (1): 1–17.
Serve the People-LA. 2019. “Points of Unity.” Serve the People-LA Website, accessed
2019, https://servethepeoplela.wordpress.com/points-of-unity/.
Smith, Graham. 2009. Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen
Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
340
Squires, Catherine R. 2002. “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative
Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres.” Communication Theory 12 (4): 446–
468. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2002.tb00278.x.
Stein, Stanley M, and Thomas L Harper. 2003. “Power, Trust, and Planning,” Journal of
Planning Education and Research 23 (2): 125–39.
Stern, Mark J. and Susan C. Seifert. 2010. “Cultural Clusters: The Implications of
Cultural Assets Agglomeration for Neighborhood Revitalization.” Journal of
Planning Education and Research 29 (3): 262–279.
Suga, Miya Shichinohe. 2004. “Little Tokyo Reconsidered: Transformation of Japanese
American Community through the Early Redevelopment Projects,” Japanese
Journal of American Studies 15: 237.
Sustainable Little Tokyo. 2019. “Windows of Little Tokyo.” Sustainable Little Tokyo
Website, accessed 2019, http://sustainablelittletokyo.org/projects/windows.
Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological
Review 51: 273–86.
Timm-Bottos, Janis. 2006. “Constructing Creative Community.” Canadian Art Therapy
Association Journal 19 (2): 12–26.
Tinkler, Penny. 2014. Using photographs in social and historical research. London:
SAGE Publications.
Toji, Dean, and Karen Umemoto. 2003. “The Paradox of Dispersal: Ethnic Continuity &
Community Development among Japanese Americans in Little Tokyo,” AAPI
Nexus 1 (1): 21–45. doi:10.17953/appc.1.1.002170106p24t787.
Tuan, Yi-fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Twenge, Jean M, Ryne A Sherman, Julie J Exline, and Joshua B Grubbs. 2016. “Declines
in American Adults’ Religious Participation and Beliefs, 1972-2014,” SAGE
Open 6 (1). doi:10.1177/2158244016638133.
Umemoto, Karen. 1989. “On Strike! San Francisco State College Strike, 1968-69: The
Role of Asian American Students,” Amerasia Journal 15 (1): 3.
———. 2011. “Where Do Collaborative Planning Instincts Come From?” Planning
Theory and Practice 12 (2): 303–4.
341
Umemoto, Karen, and Hiroki Igarashi. 2009. “Deliberative Planning in a Multicultural
Milieu,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 29 (1): 39–53.
doi:10.1177/0739456X09338160.
Vale, Lawrence J. 1992. Architecture, Power, and National Identity. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
———. 2018. “Cities of Stars: Urban Renewal, Public Housing Regeneration, and the
Community Empowerment Possibility of Governance Constellations,”
International Journal of Urban Sciences 22 (4): 431–60.
doi:10.1080/12265934.2018.1455530.
Vale, Lawrence J., and Sam Bass Warner. 2001. Imaging the City: Continuing Struggles
and New Directions. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research.
Wali, Alaka, Rebecca Severson, and Mario Longoni. 2002. Informal Arts: Finding
Cohesion, Capacity and Other Cultural Benefits in Unexpected Places. Chicago:
Chicago Center for Arts Policy.
WAPOW. 2019. “About.” WAPOW Website, accessed 2019, http://wapow.la/about/.
Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14 (1): 49–90.
Weber, Bret A, and Amanda Wallace. 2012. “Revealing the Empowerment Revolution:
A Literature Review of the Model Cities Program,” Journal of Urban History 38,
38 (1): 173.
Whyte, William Hollingsworth. 1980. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.
Washington, D.C: Conservation Foundation.
Wuthnow, Robert. 1987. Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Yin, Robert K. 2018. Case Study Research and Applications: Design and Methods.
Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Young, Iris Marion. 2006. “De-Centered Deliberative Democracy.” Kettering Review 24
(3): 43–53.
———. 1986. “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference.” Social Theory
and Practice 12 (1): 1–26.
342
Zhao, Dingxin. 2010. “Theorizing the Role of Culture in Social Movements: Illustrated
by Protests and Contentions in Modern China.” Social Movement Studies 9 (1):
33–50. doi:10.1080/14742830903442493.
Zhong, Yang. 2018. Political Culture and Participation in Urban China. Singapore:
Palgrave MacMillan.
Zhou, Min. 1997. “Growing Up American: The Challenge Confronting Immigrant
Children and Children of Immigrants,” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1): 63–
95. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.23.1.63.
Zukin, Sharon. 1987. “Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core.” Annual
Review of Sociology 13 (1): 129–147.
———. 1982. Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Avoiding middle-class planning 2.0: media arts and the future of urban planning

PDF

The geography of Black commerce and culture: Los Angeles, California, and beyond

PDF

Participatory public culture and youth citizenship in the digital age: the Medellín model

PDF

Alternative citizenship models: from online participatory cultures to participatory politics

PDF

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

PDF

Multiracial politics or the politics of being multiracial?: Racial theory, civic engagement, and socio-political participation in a contemporary society

PDF

On planning, place, and race: how trauma imaginaries reveal communal trauma and impact collective well-being

PDF

Crowdsourced art: activating creative participation in online spaces

PDF

In the art of revolution: integrating community arts into the existing development work of non-government organizations in Guatemala and El Salvador

PDF

Infrastructures of the imagination: building new worlds in media, art, & design

PDF

The role of social media for community-based organizations focused on environmental justice in southeast Los Angeles

PDF

Trailer talk: performance journalism staging conversations and re-engaging public space

PDF

Engaging together: exploring the peer effects of civic engagement

PDF

Developing art-based cultural experiences in North Kohala: A community engagement project with OneIsland

PDF

Legacy business program implementation in American urban immigrant neighborhoods: a case study of Little Tokyo and Chinatown, Los Angeles

PDF

Spaces of market-culturalism: the case of Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong

PDF

Performing the collective

PDF

Artistic intervention in the Los Angeles urban geography: the art practices of Charles Long, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn

PDF

A framework for evaluating urban policy and its impact on social determinants of health (SDoH)

PDF

Trendy or transformative? How the global meme elite creates social change in the multilingual internet

Asset Metadata

Creator Crisman, Jonathan Jae-an (author)

Core Title Civic expression in Little Tokyo: how art and culture empowers communities and transforms public participation

School School of Policy, Planning and Development

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Urban Planning and Development

Publication Date 07/11/2019

Defense Date 05/24/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag action research,activism,art and culture,Asian Americans,civic engagement,civic expression,community based research,Community development,community organizing,creative placemaking,democracy,gentrification,immigrant urbanism,Japanese Americans,Little Tokyo,Los Angeles,mapping,OAI-PMH Harvest,participation,participatory art,participatory planning,placemaking,Political participation,property rights,public participation,social capital,social practice,socially engaged art,urban governance,Urban Planning

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kim, Annette (committee chair), Currid-Halkett, Elizabeth (committee member), Jackson, Maria Rosario (committee member)

Creator Email crisman@email.arizona.edu,crisman@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-181802

Unique identifier UC11659986

Identifier etd-CrismanJon-7542.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-181802 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-CrismanJon-7542.pdf

Dmrecord 181802

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Crisman, Jonathan Jae-an

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA