Little Tokyo’s Roots Firm After Trials

As early as the “gay 90s” decade of the 19th century, Little Tokyo was the heart of the Japanese American community here, after Japanese immigrants began centering their lives on 16 restaurants, stores and lodging houses along 1st Street.

But Japan had heard about Los Angeles many years earlier--four years after the Civil War, in fact. In 1869, a guidebook published in Japan described California’s climate as mild and its produce as rich and varied and promised that “the person having no pennies will become a very rich man after five or six years.”

Yet, until the 1880s, it was San Francisco that attracted most of the Japanese. A few pioneering souls did venture south to the dusty cow town, attracted by low rents.

By 1898, Sanjuro Mizuno had opened the Santa Fe Hotel for railroad workers at 1st and Rose streets, thus launching the first Japanese boarding house and employment agency in Los Angeles.

It was the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that really sent shaken Japanese immigrants moving southward, increasing their population in Los Angeles to 5,000. About the same time, Russian Molokans escaping religious intolerance in their homeland began settling on Center Street, at the east end of 1st Street.

Unlike the Chinese of earlier generations, who were brought to work on the railroads, many Japanese arrived ready to do business for themselves.

Shiro Nakamura, who had immigrated to Los Angeles in 1901, graduated from USC in 1910 and became the state’s first licensed Japanese pharmacist. That same year, he opened the city’s smallest drugstore: the Nippon Pharmacy. Sandwiched between two taller and wider buildings, the store was only 10 feet wide--but 60 feet deep.

During World War I, Los Angeles’ first Japanese American nurse, Mary Akita, opened her small home at Turner and Alameda streets, just east of Little Tokyo, as a maternity hospital for Japanese women.

A few years later, she was joined by Kikywo Tashiro, a visionary physician. He and three other Japanese doctors would build the city’s first Japanese hospital, in Boyle Heights. The property was placed in the name of one of the doctors, a Japanese American, because only American-born Japanese could own property.

Little Tokyo’s enduring cultural and social centers began with the building of the Union Church in 1923, and two years later the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple opened its doors.

The church doubled as a YMCA; in 1942, it was used as a processing center for Japanese-Americans awaiting relocation to World War II detention camps. The temple served as a storage site for many of their belongings for the duration of the war.

But well before 1942, another disruption altered the Little Tokyo community. In anticipation of the Immigration Act of 1924, which ended the flow of people from Japan, a wave of so-called picture brides flooded into Los Angeles to marry the husbands their Japanese families had chosen for them by mail.

For the Japanese families already here, there was quiet prosperity. Jack Kunitomi recalled playing with his friends in the nearby Los Angeles River, while Russian children, the offspring of Molokan Russians, scared off the Japanese kids with slingshots.

Kunitomi and his gang of 8-year-olds had fun tunneling under the Union Church after construction workers went home--the same workers who, the next day, had to repair all the damage.

During Prohibition, the Tokyo Club on Jackson Street served bootleg liquor and was one of the city’s most notorious Japanese gangland hangouts. It sat where Parker Center, the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters, stands today.

Even then, the street had had its share of wild history. A haphazard volunteer police force known as the Los Angeles Rangers, often more vigilante than lawmen, frequented the area in the 1850s. In 1853, city Marshal A.S. Beard asked its members to help him arrest a band of “Mexican banditti” partying in the pueblo.

But the Rangers received a hearty welcome from the banditti and the dark-eyed senoritas. What did get them riled was the sight of Beard sneaking out the door, fearing a gun fight.

Incensed and emboldened by wine, the Rangers followed Beard home, dragged him from his bed and hauled him down 1st Street to the zanja madre--the “mother ditch,” the city’s water supply.

After a mock trial, they convicted Beard of “skulduggery.” Promptly tying a rope around his chest and arms and taking turns on their horses, they dragged him up and down the ditch, hoping to drown him. He survived. The next year, there was a new marshal.

As railroad-building jobs disappeared after World War I, the immigrant, or issei, population moved into farming.

Climbing the economic ladder, they began purchasing--through their American-born nisei children--land, where they grew fruit and vegetables. Soon they diversified and became pioneers in landscape gardening, abalone farming and the fish-canning industry.

By 1940, the Japanese were farming 26,000 acres in Los Angeles County, producing 90% of the county’s truck crops, such as asparagus, lima beans, carrots and cauliflower.

This fairly placid existence ended in December 1941 as panic swept the city after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. On Feb. 19, 1942, Executive Order 9066 was signed, giving Japanese residents five days to pack up and sell personal property before they were rushed off to assembly centers and then to internment camps.

As the Japanese were bundled out of Little Tokyo, African Americans moved in. Throughout the war, the area was known as Bronzeville, a place where late-night jazz clubs thrived.

After the war, many Japanese and Japanese Americans returning from 10 internment camps--among them Manzanar in the Owens Valley--arrived back in Los Angeles to find that their homes and businesses in Little Tokyo had been sold.

Slowly, the Japanese American merchants reclaimed the neighborhood. With the 1952 repeal of immigration bans, Little Tokyo began to grow and extend south from its original boundaries.

And in the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood and history buffs discovered Little Tokyo.

Raymond Chandler fans could actually dine at the Far East Cafe, a Depression-era Chinese joint and former hardware store where Philip Marlowe was having lunch when, he would recall, “a dark shadow fell over my chop suey.”

Its high, wood-paneled booths and naked light bulbs brought authenticity to the 1975 film of the Chandler story, “Farewell, My Lovely.”

In 1982, a more modern crime film enlisted Little Tokyo extras to flee as bad guys fired from the high-tech killer helicopter “Blue Thunder.” Special effects turned the Little Tokyo restaurant into a crater.

Little Tokyo’s history is recalled in a sidewalk art project called “Omoide no Shotokyo, Remembering Old Little Tokyo.”

Brass plaques are embedded in that sidewalk, where roots run deep along a stretch of 1st Street between San Pedro Street and Central Avenue, where 13 buildings were designated as national historic landmarks in 1995.