Big Questions in Little Tokyo

The year is 1934. The atmosphere is exotic, electric.

The buoyant “ yoi yoi “ of Japanese folk singing and rhythmic booming of taiko drums reverberate through the lantern-bedecked streets of Los Angeles’ Japanese quarter. Hundreds of dancers flutter their fans, and clatter by in wooden geta . A parade of women forms a seamless circle of ond o, a traditional Japanese folk dance to evoke spirits of the dead.

Japanese American farmers and their families trek into town from the countryside, from Boyle Heights, uptown, and West Virgil (near Echo Park), for the first annual Nisei Week festival. They line up, five and six deep, to catch a glimpse of the demure kimono-clad women like those back home. Charlie Chaplin even makes an appearance before the cheering crowd.

This is the heyday of Little Tokyo.

The ghetto, as many call it, is a thriving hub for Japanese Americans throughout Southern California. In the 1920s, Los Angeles claimed the largest population of any Japanese American community in the continental United States. In the 1930s, families began to move out of the ethnic enclave, but still returned to buy groceries on the weekend, to see the latest Japanese flicks, or--in the case of first-generation Japanese--to hang out with fellow immigrants from their home prefectures. Japanese smells filled the air. Japanese was the language on the streets.

Nisei Week Japanese Festival 2001 started last Saturday, and continues through Sunday in Little Tokyo. Since the tradition began, it has only been interrupted once, for seven years during and immediately after World War II, when Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated and interned in camps.The festival grew. And inevitably, it changed.

Now in its 61st year, the festival faces dwindling funds and attendance, and--though few dare say it aloud--an uncertain future. Although the festival had close to a record turnout last weekend, that was because it coincided with a celebration honoring Japanese American veterans and a Tofu Festival. Still, the robust turnout was an aberration in what has otherwise been a long, steady decline.

“There is a sense that Nisei Week is not what it was,” said Chris Komai, 49, a spokesman for the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, and a third-generation Japanese American. “For years it had such a strong support base that it was clear it was OK for years to come. Now it is not clear who is going to come in and take over.”

The loss of Nisei Week--should it happen--would mean more than the end of what is believed to be the longest-running Japanese American festival in the United States. It would symbolize the slow fragmentation of the Japanese American community, broken apart by ever-weakening cultural ties--and time. The festival’s shrinkage also highlights the evolution of Little Tokyo from a once close-knit, vibrant community of family-owned businesses to an economic center for well-heeled Japanese nationals and tourists to the motley collection of grand historical and cultural establishments that it is today. A disparate group of shops run by Asian corporations with declining connections to Japan, or interest in the community, are interspersed with the Japanese American National Museum, the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center and two Asian American theaters.

Little Tokyo, bounded on the east by Alameda Street, on the west by Los Angeles Street, on the north by Temple and on the south by 4th Street, is one of the country’s three remaining Japantowns (the others are in San Francisco and San Jose).

The term “nisei” means “second generation” and refers to the American-born children of Japanese immigrants. The bulk of Japanese immigration took place from 1900 to 1920, with more than 213,000 entering America.

In recent years, the festival has had multiple setbacks.

The nisei who founded the festival with their parents (who are referred to as “issei”), mostly in their 70s and 80s now, are dying off. Japanese corporations flooded into Little Tokyo in the 1970s and ‘80s--lavishing contributions on Nisei Week. That provoked tension of its own, with cultural differences between the “Japanese-Japanese” and the Japanese Americans, but gave the festival a much-needed infusion of cash and jolted Little Tokyo back to life. But with the continuing economic slump in Japan, many companies such as Sumitomo Bank and Matsuzakaya (a department store) have gone home, taking their money with them.

“We have to start looking out from the narrowness of Little Tokyo and say, ‘How can we keep this going?”’ said Komai. “You have to adapt. Otherwise you will disappear.”

Nisei Week was conceived during the Depression as a way of boosting business for Little Tokyo merchants. After the war, the festival provided a place for emotionally wounded Japanese Americans to reclaim their cultural heritage ... and also to prove their American patriotism. (Now, with Census 2000 figures showing explosive growth among Asians in America overall, and a shrinking Japanese American population, the pendulum has swung back: Japanese Americans are striving to reclaim their “Japanese-ness.”)

As prewar restrictions on Japanese Americans relaxed, many began to move to the suburbs and entered mainstream American life.

Still, through the 1960s and ‘70s, Little Tokyo retained its status as a cultural and economic mecca for an increasingly dispersed community.

“In 1970, if you wanted to buy Japanese food products like soy sauce, tofu, you had to come to a Japanese market,” said Komai.

“What has happened in Little Tokyo is, all the mom-and-pop businesses have disappeared,” Komai said. The stores that are left are not necessarily run by Japanese Americans, who are actually now a minority. Where there were once six supermarkets, now there is one. And these days, any strip mall in Southern California has a sushi bar.

Joyce Wakano Chinn organized Nisei Week for 22 years, from 1974 through 1996. In those days, she said, the festival was flush with money from Japanese nationals and staffed by still-active nisei.

But in recent years the festival has “dwindled and dwindled and dwindled,” she said.

Chinn, a 53-year-old sansei (third-generation Japanese American), chatted during a Nisei Week luncheon at the New Otani Hotel on Wednesday. The room was packed with people over age 50, except the shining young faces of the Nisei Week queen and her court, some of whom spoke to the crowd in halting Japanese, some of whom spoke no Japanese at all.

While some nisei, and even sansei, lament the gradual assimilation of Japanese Americans, others see assimilation as the most compelling reason of all to keep the festival going. Indeed, for many fourth-and fifth-generation Japanese Americans, Japanese culture is as alien as it might be to any other American.

“You see the girls, the queen contestants,” said Frances Hashimoto, 57, president of the Little Tokyo Business Assn. and owner of one of the remaining family-owned Japanese American businesses there, pointing out young women with sashes draped about their torsos. “Nisei Week becomes a learning experience for them. With the fourth-and fifth-generation Japanese, you have to almost build up an awareness in them that they are Japanese.”

Hashimoto, a nisei who was born in an internment camp during the war, believes it is time to call upon all lovers of Japanese culture, regardless of race, or the festival--and even Little Tokyo--may die.

Despite the fact that she is director of the Nisei Week Foundation, 35-year-old Irene Kurose, a yonsei, or fourth-generation Japanese American, shares some traits with her fully assimilated peers. For instance, she doesn’t speak Japanese, didn’t attend Japanese school and has never been to Japan. “I grew up in Little Tokyo,” she said. “It’s not like Japan is the place I want to travel.”

And though she was raised in East L.A., and helped out in her father’s 1st Street toy store, she doesn’t remember “the old Little Tokyo,” she said, referring to the community before 1970s-era redevelopment. (Weller Street, which was the heart of Little Tokyo, is part of the New Otani now. Her father’s store was plowed under.)

In 1997, the festival received nonprofit status, so it could more aggressively solicit grants. The festival costs about $200,000 to put on, Kurose said. The departure of Japanese businesses has translated into a loss of about $20,000, she estimated.

Even the businesses the festival once set out to support don’t always support Nisei Week these days. The parking lot on the corner of 2nd and San Pedro streets raised its prices last weekend, Kurose said. And when her volunteers went door-to-door to ask merchants to hang posters for the event in the windows, many refused.

Kurose said her generation may be less devoted, less close-knit, more American and less Japanese. Older folks seem reluctant to let go of the reins, or to help younger ones learn how to carry on unfamiliar traditions.

“I don’t think we are going to get a bunch of yonseis knocking on the door, saying, ‘I want to work at the festival,”’ she concedes. “But the older generation needs to invite and include the younger generation.”

Still, Kurose believes that carrying on the tradition will take more than a rekindling of cultural pride among Japanese Americans. “It needs to be the Little Tokyo community as a whole,” she said. That, she said, includes groups like the Downtown Arts District, which helped out this year by opening its galleries.

Hashimoto, whose family has run the Mikawaya sweets shop for 91 years, says she hopes Nisei Week and Little Tokyo can find a way to survive, because the enclave has turned into a repository for certain pieces of Japanese culture that can’t even be found in Japan anymore.

Her family makes sweets with traditional red bean paste. They buy only the best beans--known as “red diamonds” in Japan, and still use the same family recipe.

Young Japanese eat the sweets and say, “Where’s the salt? These are too dark. These are American.”

But Japanese over 50, she said, bite into her sweets and melt with delight.

They remember those flavors from when they were young.

“Japan is so Westernized now that Little Tokyo is more Old Tokyo than Tokyo,” she says.

Nisei Jack Kunitomi, 85, was born and raised in Little Tokyo and saw Japan for the first time as an American soldier in World War II. He witnessed the first festival, and still visits Little Tokyo weekly to lunch with old friends. He has faith the traditions will survive, despite intermarriage, time and an ever-shrinking Japanese American population. “Now we see more Caucasians because of intermarriage,” he said. “We see blonds at our dances. Freckles.

“I think our generation has some ties because our generation went to Japan to visit. They had relatives there. The sansei didn’t go back as much. But I think the fourth generation will rekindle it.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Nisei Festival Events

Nisei Week Japanese Festival 2001’s schedule of events:

* Street Arts Festival. Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. San Pedro Street between 2nd and 3rd streets.

* Yujo Friendship Play. Saturday, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. Japan American Theatre.

* Carnival. Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sunday 10-4 p.m. Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, San Pedro Street between 2nd and 3rd streets.

* Car Show. Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Parking lot at San Pedro Street between 2nd and 3rd streets.

* Ondo and Closing Ceremony. Sunday, 4 p.m. 1st Street between Central and San Pedro streets.

There will also be exhibits throughout Little Tokyo.

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For more information go to https://www.niseiweek.org