Japanese-Americans of Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo community work hard to retain its identity
- Little Tokyo has a history dating back 140 years, and Japanese-Americans are doing their best to retain its identity in a changing landscape
In Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, the past and the future have long been at odds.
Less than a month after the iconic Suehiro Café closed its 1st Street location – evicted after nearly 40 years – community leaders gathered, shovels in hand, to mark the start of construction of an ambitious housing complex a block away.
Little can offset the departure of Suehiro from the historic storefronts on a historic block. But the groundbreaking in February of the First Street North complex is considered a victory by those who argue that Little Tokyo has for too long been a target for opportunistic development by city planners, overseas corporations and absentee landlords.
“We need to define our future,” says Erich Nakano, executive director of the Little Tokyo Service Centre, which played a major role in getting First Street North approved.
Outsiders, Nakano says, have played an outsize role in determining the direction of the neighbourhood, a centre of Japanese-American life in Los Angeles that is celebrating its 140th anniversary in August.
Built on nearly 2½ acres (1 hectare) of land that was once a part of Little Tokyo’s post-war streetscape, levelled in the 1960s and left to languish as a city-owned car park, First Street North is a US$168 million mix of affordable and supportive housing, a park and commercial space.