Doors to Open on the Past in Little Tokyo : Culture: New museum preserves the history of Japanese-Americans.

For months James Hirabayashi traveled throughout parts of the West and Hawaii on a mission of historical proportions. A multimillion-dollar, first-of-its-kind museum was to open in a year and he was responsible for assembling the debut exhibit.

But he became frustrated by his assignment of collecting the treasured possessions of first-generation Japanese-Americans, as family after family said their closets were empty.

“The most common story was that they lost everything during the war or (they) burned everything up at the outbreak of war,” Hirabayashi said, referring to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. “People were frightened and would take everything with any connection to Japan down to the furnace.”

Slowly, though, he gathered a cache of heirlooms that have been artfully assembled into the showpieces of the Japanese American National Museum, which will be formally dedicated Thursday after nearly 10 years of planning and fund raising.

The $10-million museum occupies a landmark brick building in the heart of Little Tokyo. The former Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple was built in 1925 by some of Los Angeles’ first Japanese immigrants.

It will serve as a luxurious warehouse to preserve Japanese-American artifacts for posterity and will offer programs to enable families to record genealogies and family histories.

“We look at this museum as an opportunity to showcase what one ethnic group in America has contributed to our country,” said Bruce Kaji, the museum’s founding president. “Japanese-Americans helped develop part of the West, suffered discrimination, incarceration. But we have never had a place to tell our story.”

The ambitious drive by community leaders to raise funds and plan the museum has surprised professional museum administrators.

“From my point of view, this is a very big deal. It’s very gutsy to decide to open a new museum,” said Tom Freudenheim, assistant secretary for the arts and humanities at the Smithsonian Institution. “You have to stand up and take notice when a group of people start from scratch and turn into a national force.”

The opening of the museum comes at a sensitive time for many Japanese-Americans and other Asian-Americans. In recent months, they have been been the targets of “Japan bashing” incidents amid mounting U.S.-Japanese trade tensions, the 50th anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and political rhetoric of “buy American” campaigns.

But the political climate has only strengthened the resolve of museum supporters. They brushed aside some discussions about staging a low-profile opening ceremony and opted to capitalize on the issues to convey their stories of the Japanese-American experience.

“What’s happening on the international business scene and the government scene is of some concern, but we are not holding back or letting it influence us,” Kaji said.

Hirabayashi, the museum’s chief curator and the retired dean of ethnic studies at San Francisco State University, emphasized that the only way to combat misguided ill will is through the type of education that will be fostered by the museum.

“Right now some people don’t make any distinction between Japanese-Americans and people from Japan,” Hirabayashi said. “What we are trying to convey to the public is how we see ourselves.”

It was the fear of losing pages of their cultural history that drove Kaji and Young O. Kim to meet in 1982 to discuss a museum.

Kim, a Korean-American who was a World War II Army captain, commanded a Japanese-American battalion and leads a local Japanese-American veterans group. He had assembled an exhibit on Japanese-American soldiers for the County Museum of Natural History, but could not find a permanent place to house it.

Kaji, a Little Tokyo banker and activist raised in Boyle Heights, was ordered to the Manzanar internment camp in the Owens Valley with his family during World War II. One of his life’s dreams has been to open a museum “to remind people that something like this cannot happen again.”

The two men formed a community committee. Their fledgling plans took off when the group, with the help of state Sen. Art Torres, received a $750,000 state grant in 1985. The funds were matched by the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency.

The effort gained momentum when the committee found a museum site, the abandoned Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple. The building had been sold to the CRA in 1973 when the congregation moved to an opulent temple several blocks away on 1st Street. The dilapidated structure was leased to the nonprofit museum for $1 a year for 50 years.

The structure on 1st Street and Central Avenue is decidedly Japanese-American, reflecting the needs of working-class immigrants who in 1925 wanted a house of worship, a movie theater and a social hall to forge new friendships.

“It’s a Buddhist temple shaped like a Hollywood movie theater inside,” said Jim McElwain, the museum’s restoration architect. “It’s a true blending of what is Japanese and what is American.”

The building’s materials and designs reflected the modest resources of the first immigrants, many of whom were agriculture and railroad laborers. What would have been ornate brass beam connectors in Japan were gold-toned paintings of them in Los Angeles. Storefront shops and offices were built along the 1st Street side of the building so the congregation could rent out space to help pay the mortgage.

The temple altar was built on a stage to accommodate a movie screen or entertainment shows. During World War II, the building was turned into a huge storage facility for the belongings of hundreds of local Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps.

It is only around the corner from 1st Street, on Central Avenue, that the architecture reveals the primary purpose of the building. The graceful curves of a concrete overhang, a karahafu roof, form the entryway into the temple sanctuary. After years of Los Angeles dirt and smog were water-blasted from the overhang, museum workers found that colorful details had been painted on the facade.

Inside, the temple sanctuary has once again been converted, this time into the museum’s main exhibition hall. Hardwood floors, banisters and ceiling beams have been restored to a rich dark-brown finish. And painters have retraced the delicate ceiling etches.

The museum’s opening exhibit, “Issei Pioneers: Hawaii and the Mainland, 1885-1924,” is an overview of the initial wave of Japanese immigration to the United States, utilizing photographs, clothing, documents and even old home movies.

“There are very few Issei still alive who can tell their stories,” said Henry Y. Ota, chairman of the museum board of trustees. “If we don’t preserve that now and talk to these people, we will never be able to recover their experience.”