Little Tokyo

As early as 1869, a Japanese guidebook based on reports from countrymen who had tried their luck in California praised the state's mild climate and rich produce and promised that even a poor person could become wealthy after five or six years. Nearly 20 years later, 70 Japanese immigrants were centering their lives around a cluster of restaurants, stores, and lodging houses along First Street. By 1898, Sanjuro Mizuno had opened the Santa Fe Hotel for railroad workers at First and Rose streets, establishing the city's first Japanese boardinghouse and employment agency. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Japanese immigrants moving south nearly doubled the local Japanese population to about 5,000, while Russian Molokans escaping religious intolerance also began settling on Center Street. In 1910, Shiro Nakamura, who had arrived in 1901, graduated from the University of Southern California and became the state's first licensed Japanese pharmacist, then opened the Nippon Pharmacy, a drugstore only 10 feet wide but 60 feet deep. During World War I, Los Angeles' first Japanese-American nurse, Mary Akita, opened a maternity hospital for Japanese women in her small home at Turner and Alameda streets, and a few years later she was joined by physician Kikywo Tashiro. With three other Japanese doctors, he helped build the city's first Japanese hospital in Boyle Heights, with the property bought in the name of the only Japanese-American in the group because laws prohibited foreign ownership of land. Little Tokyo's cultural and social centers took shape with the Union Church in 1923 and the Buddhist Temple in 1925. In 1942, the church served as a processing center for Japanese-Americans ordered to World War II detention camps, while the temple stored many of their belongings during the war. Throughout the early 20th century, Japanese immigrants cultivated farmland and pioneered in landscape gardening, abalone farming, and fish canning. By 1940, they were farming 26,000 acres in Los Angeles County and producing 90% of such crops as asparagus, lima beans, carrots, and cauliflower. Before the Immigration Act of 1924 ended immigration from Japan, many picture brides came to Los Angeles to marry husbands chosen by their families through the mail, and families already there experienced quiet prosperity. That existence ended in December 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor. On February 19, 1942, Executive Order 9066 gave Japanese residents five days to pack and sell personal property before they were sent to assembly centers and internment camps. As Japanese residents were forced out, African-Americans moved in, and during the war the area became known as Bronzeville, where late-night jazz clubs thrived. After the war, many returning from relocation camps chose not to live there again but did open shops and restaurants there, and in 1952, after immigration bans were repealed, the district began to grow south beyond its original boundaries. In the 1970s and 1980s, Little Tokyo drew Hollywood and history enthusiasts, including Raymond Chandler admirers who visited the Far East Café, which also appeared authentically in the 1975 film of Farewell, My Lovely. Its history is also remembered in Omoide no Shotokyo, a sidewalk art project by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, along First Street between San Pedro Street and Central Avenue, where 13 buildings were designated a National Historic Landmark in 1995.

Los Angeles, California · United States