Photo Studio to Mark Return of a Famous Name to Little Tokyo

For more than a decade, Archie Miyatake had dreamed of building a permanent showcase for the thousands of pictures that his late father, noted Japanese-American photographer Toyo Miyatake, took during the nearly 60 years that he ran a studio in Little Tokyo.

On Friday, in a parking lot on 1st Street, an ancient Shinto ceremony marked the first step toward fulfillment of that dream.

Miyatake invited about 100 relatives and friends to take part in the groundbreaking ritual for a new studio that will bear his father’s name.

A unique element of the studio will be three large windows through which the public will be able to view vintage photographs by Toyo Miyatake, who died in 1979 at the age of 83 and was widely regarded as the unofficial historian of Little Tokyo.

“The moments he captured on film are a pictorial history of the Japanese-American experience in this country,” said Community Redevelopment Agency commissioner Frank Kuwahara, addressing Friday’s gathering in Little Tokyo.

Toyo Miyatake, who had been a close friend of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, gained international recognition for the poignant black-and-white pictures he secretly shot of life inside Manzanar, the Owens Valley internment camp where he and thousands of other Japanese-Americans were held during World War II.

But his legacy, according to Miyatake’s admirers, is the diligent record of a community that he compiled in the course of shooting thousands of Little Tokyo events--from weddings and birthday parties to funerals and parades.

The studio, which will open next year, symbolizes the determination of one of Little Tokyo’s vanishing breed of family-run businesses to preserve a balance between the small shopkeepers who give the community its village feeling and the big developers who are changing its skyline.

The Miyatake studio is one of the last small family projects that will be built in the Japanese shopping village, said Gloria Uchida, the Community Redevelopment Agency’s project manager for Little Tokyo. Other proposed developments include a 26-story luxury hotel and two 30-story condominium-and-office complexes.

The first Miyatake studio opened in Little Tokyo in 1923, on land now occupied by Parker Center, the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters. From 1946 until 1985, the studio was on 1st Street, just east of San Pedro Street.

After that studio was demolished, Archie Miyatake, 66, moved the family business to San Gabriel. But he said he always intended to return to Little Tokyo, in large part because of a sense of obligation to the community in which his father had lived and worked for so long.

“My father had been in Little Tokyo from the age of 14,” he said during an interview earlier this week. “Because of that, people expected us to be back.”

The inspiration to build a permanent showcase for the family patriarch’s works came partly from a habit Toyo Miyatake had of keeping a small display of his Manzanar photographs in the front window of the old studio.

The family was afraid that the display, which went up shortly after they were released from the camp in 1946, might anger people who were anti-Japanese, Archie Miyatake recalled. But instead of provoking criticism, his father’s rare photographs turned the studio into a minor tourist attraction.

James N. Miho, design chairman at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design and also a Miyatake family friend, will be the curator of the gallery. In addition to showcasing some of the Manzanar pictures, Miho said, he is planning other shows that will offer a history of Little Tokyo from Miyatake’s vantage point as one of its most popular chroniclers. One show he is contemplating, Miho said, might be devoted exclusively to funerals that Miyatake photographed.

The museum represents a unique fulfillment of a city policy that requires redevelopment zone projects to incorporate public art, according to the CRA’s Uchida.

From Archie Miyatake’s perspective, the showcase represents a more sentimental mission.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say my father was like a walking history book of Little Tokyo,” Miyatake said. “So from that standpoint, I thought we should leave some kind of memorial. I think he would be real happy with it.”