Reclaiming, Story 1: Home is Little Tokyo

Little Tokyo is a small neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles. Since 1905, it has been home to generations of Japanese Americans. Today, gentrification is threatening to destroy everything these families have built. This episode tells the story of one community's struggle for survival and the ways in which historical development has both fractured and solidified its people. For some, home is a bed one sleeps in. For us, home is Little Tokyo.

Transcript for Reclaiming, Story 1: Home is Little Tokyo

Introduction

Max: This is State of the Human, the Podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. 

Each episode we take a common human experience, like teaching or breathing or joking, and bring you stories that deepen our understanding of that experience. My name is Max Du, and in the next few episodes we’re looking at the theme of reclaiming.

Live long enough, and everyone has this experience: something you love changes. Your relationship with this thing or place or person becomes complicated–maybe even problematic. You might even feel the need to distance yourself from it completely. But true loves rarely disappear without a trace. 

Today’s episode is the first in a series of episodes about reclaiming what’s been lost. This series will feature stories about reclaiming neighborhoods, music venues, childhood obsessions, sports teams, languages, and ways of seeing ourselves. It’s about holding the tension between what we were and who we’ve become. It’s about returning to our origins–but this time with a more nuanced perspective.

We want to start today’s episode with an old story–about a man who wanted to impress a woman. Gregory Petomkin was one of Empress Catherine the Great’s lovers. 

As the story goes, Catherine asked her lover Gregory to take her on a tour of Crimea (cry-mee-uh). As they floated down the river, they passed pristine villages. Townspeople waved to them next to milky white cows. The stretch of wealth and development seemed to go on forever. 

But if Catherine could have gotten off the boat and taken a closer look at the villages at the river’s edge, she would have seen something rather disturbing: these “villages” were just wooden facades, complete with stand-in cattle and some of Petomkin’s soldiers pretending to be townspeople. They’d wave at Catherine as she passed, pack up their set, and then move downriver to do the whole charade over again.

This deception also had some other problematic layers, like the fact that the place they were touring was war-torn Crimea (cry-mee-uh), which had been conquered by Russia and stolen from the Ottomon Empire. The facade covered a landscape devastated by colonization that hadn’t been rebuilt because Gregory and his army ran out of money.

Over the centuries, scholars have concluded that this story about Gregory Petomkin and Catherine the Great is fable, not fact. The whole charade was just that–a pretend story to illustrate a point. Even so, the term “Petomkin Village” outlasted the mythology. It’s a term used to describe a situation where an undesirable reality is hidden behind an impressive facade. 

So what does this have to do with reclaiming? Today’s story is about a modern-day Petomkin village–one that we’re so used to seeing that we sometimes forget it’s a facade. 

Here’s Leah Chase with that story

Leah: Everyone has a different idea of what Little Tokyo is. A themed shopping mall, a dining experience, a cheaper trip to Japan. For me, Little Tokyo was the answer to a question I had been asking myself ever since I can remember: who am I? As a child, the neighborhood was an immersive experience, every sight, sound, and taste a peek into my cultural heritage. Generations of Japanese Americans had lived here since the first boardinghouse opened in the 1880s. Every sidewalk was embedded with the shape of my ancestors. I felt them like phantom limbs, as if our feet were leaving the same footprints, only one hundred years apart. But there's only so much I could learn from the past. I wanted to see my culture alive and breathing. I wanted something real.

As the name implies, Little Tokyo is quite, well, little. [00:01:00] It’s one of the many dense, urban neighborhoods in Downtown LA, just five city blocks for a population just shy of 3,000. There's First Street, where the restaurants are packed wall to wall and the glass storefronts are plastered over with a collage of print ads and flyers. Being a culinary fad, ramen is a bit pricey, but the lesser known katsudon goes for ten bucks a bowl. A street performer plays the shamisen on the corner of First and San Pedro through a loudspeaker. Every twenty minutes, the Metro delivers passengers to Union Station, where they're funneled into the churning crowd of tourists, tenants, business owners, civil servants, and social workers, one giant stream winding through an outdoor mall designed to look like an old Japanese village. Traffic swirls around them while navigating the perpetual detours and construction. The jackhammer becomes the loudest noise in the neighborhood. Buildings are felled and resurrected, the new replacing the [00:02:00] old, constantly improving and updating, one hundred years of development culminating in the saddest silence you will ever hear. Because Little Tokyo as we know it is disappearing. 

At one point, there were 43 Japan towns in California. Now there are only three in the entire country. San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles. These are the final holdouts of Japanese American culture. The land is caught in a decades long game of tug-of-war, changing hands between local tenants, city governments, private investors, wealthy developers, and overseas corporations. Year by year, decade by decade, our community finds the land slipping out of our control and into the hands of big business.

How did Little Tokyo go from a small immigrant community to a tourist trap? What changed? In this episode, I'll introduce you to a couple Little Tokyo natives, folks whose families have lived here since the second World War. Think of it as a [00:03:00] kind of walking tour of the neighborhood through the eyes of a local. You may be familiar with the shining displays and inviting storefronts, but take a peek inside, and you might find something a little different, a little darker. Through the locals' stories, you'll hear about three main threats to Little Tokyo, the disappearance of affordable housing, the rise of tourism, and the presence of police, and how these things are threatening our way of life. This podcast is about one community's struggle for survival, and the ways in which historical development has both fractured and solidified its people. For some, home is just a bed one sleeps in. For us, home is Little Tokyo.

The Oregon Hotel

Philip: There were several waves and there currently is and there forever will be waves of gentrification, whether it be internment, whether it be the imminent domain through the city, whether it be the displacement of the black [00:04:00] community here after the war. And then now it's the housing crisis.

Leah: This is Philip Hirose. He and his family are the proprietors of the Oregon Hotel, one of the last residential hotels in Little Tokyo, and it's been in their hands for almost 70 years. It's a small, three-story building with about 15 to 20 rooms. But what's special about the hotel is the price. The Hiroses rent rooms below market rate so that people can afford to live close to their community even as property taxes and new development swallow up the land around them. 

Philip: It started because my grandfather. He had a property, and that's kind of how the hotel supply business started. Because when a lot of Japanese Americans came back from the war, they could not simply move into the homes that they used to live in. So they would live in these hotels, and so he would provide like the linens, the chemical cleaning supplies, the toilet paper and whatnot. When he passed [00:05:00] away, my mom and my aunt inherited it. The spirit is that it is a way for people to live affordably in a close proximity to where they work in.

Leah: Philip may not have grown up in Little Tokyo proper, but it's still his home in every sense of the word. Now that home is in danger. Private developers have their eyes on old properties like the Oregon Hotel. They're playing the long game, waiting until families like the Hiroses fold under the pressure of rent and repairs. And then they strike.

Philip: Around 2016 there was an offer to purchase the building by the developer that is our neighbor. Their ideal plan is to just buy everyone out and build whatever they can and maximize profits. But my grandfather, he declined. I think he understood that it will be a cultural loss if we were to sell the building. The reality is that because of the rising market value of the [00:06:00] area, our property taxes are going up. So it's making it more and more difficult to keep the rent low.

Leah: All around him, Philip could see the Little Tokyo he knows and loves disappearing. His grandfather may not have sold the Oregon this time, but with property taxes on the rise, the future remains unclear. To save their home, the Hiroses closed the family restaurant in Pasadena and started a new restaurant in Little Tokyo.

Philip: Here it kind of felt like a homecoming of sorts. A lot of our friends are closer. My mom works right down the street, so that way it's very convenient. It kind of made sense to us.

Leah: The new restaurant, Azay, is located on the first floor of the Oregon Hotel. Phillip sees the place as the first step toward rebuilding a true Japanese American community in Little Tokyo.

Philip: The assumption is that there would be a lot of Japanese Americans that live in Little Tokyo. But historically, [00:07:00] I think, when there was this flight to the suburbs, that's when a lot of people moved, moved out. And they felt like chasing this American dream of living in a home with a front yard. It was a huge loss. I didn't live in Little Tokyo growing up, so like I am very much a product of that. But I think the question is more about, what are they gonna do now? It's fine to live outside the community, but what can we do to reinvest in it and what can we do to make it even a reality if we wanted to move back to Little Tokyo, cuz right now the trajectory is that it's not gonna be affordable at all.

Leah: Philip hopes to not only reinvigorate the local economy but also create a business environment that is sustainable and non-exploitative.

Philip: I feel like I'm very anti-business in that my hope is to just break even. I don't want to be making money [00:08:00] off of people but I just want to make sure that the maintenance cost is covered. I feel like if I'm somehow able to financially support the building and the family restaurant, I will do that. It may come at a like, cost of buying this like suburban home or whatever, but I feel like the restaurant's opening was my family's recommitment to the neighborhood.

Mokuyobi

Leah: When I was a kid, I used to resign myself to this terrible fate that the neighborhood's disappearance was inevitable. Look, Little Tokyo's already gentrified. There’s no point in trying to do anything about it now. At this point, it’s mostly cheap trinkets and Hello Kitty and anime. I mean, I don't even like anime, and God, there is nothing to do here. Maybe for a tourist, but not for me. And that's when it hit me. This place, which I had always considered my home, it wasn't for me. Not anymore. I was born after most of the land had [00:09:00] been bought by big corporations, after the luxury apartments had been built and the old hotels demolished, after everyone had already moved out. I never got to connect with Little Tokyo because, well, it was mostly gone.

Zen: I think gentrification in Little Tokyo affects me in a lot of ways because I have such a strong connection to Little Tokyo. I feel like it's a lot of my identity growing up there, and then I see it disappearing.

Leah: This is Zen Sekizawa. Her family has been active in Little Tokyo for almost 75 years. Her grandparents were the first to come to LA after their release from the camps, where they opened the Atomic Café in 1946. From the pictures I can find online, it looks like the typical fifties diner with red leather booths and wood veneer tabletops. But that classic setting is not what most people remember. Ask anyone from Little Tokyo, and they'll tell you about the band posters covering every inch of the walls, punk records blasting from the [00:10:00] jukebox, the artists, punks, and weirdos who came for refuge and ramen, and of course, Atomic Nancy, the misfit ringleader of the whole circus. Former patrons know Nancy as that girl who jumped across the tables in roller skates or played a mix of old rock and new wave punk from her father's 45s. Zen knows her as Mom. It's because of Nancy that Zen holds community in high regard. But the Atomic couldn't last forever. In 1989, it closed for good.

Zen: My grandparents were old and tired and my mom didn't want to take it over. And I think also there was some issues with the building that they just didn't wanna fix. It seems like that happens quite a bit where that'll be the nail in the coffin for a lot of businesses.

Leah: In 2014, the city decided to demolish the old brick building that housed the Atomic Café. Their plan was to build a new Metro station, which would [00:11:00] connect Little Tokyo to the entire county. Passengers from all over LA could board a train and be delivered straight to Little Tokyo’s doorstep. Foot traffic was expected to increase tenfold. Like sharks smelling blood in distant waters, private investors would follow the scent of tourism in the hopes of making their biggest catch yet. 

But what does tourism really do for a community? It's easy to see how tourism has impacted the physical growth of the environment. The buildings appear more fortified, less blighted because there is enough money to refurbish them. There is a bustling commercial scene that hasn't been seen in decades. From visual evidence alone, tourism looks like a good thing. But that colorful facade pales in comparison to the loss it has left in its wake.

Zen: I mean, gentrification in Little Tokyo is running rampant or at this point. You know, we have the regional connector coming in. We have most of the property owned by outside corporations. Japanese Village Plaza is owned by public storage [00:12:00] and that's where Mokuyobi is.

Leah: Mokuyobi is a clothing and accessories company founded in 2006. 15 years later, it opened its flagship store right in the heart of Little Tokyo. Its products are an explosion of pop art geometric confetti with cute cartoon rainbows and strawberries and cheesy slogans all oriented around the company's name, which means Thursday in Japanese. On the surface, Mokuyobi seems like any other Japanese store in Little Tokyo. The problem is the people behind the brand are white. 

Zen: Most people thought they were Japanese. If you have a store that is a Japanese word, and you sell things in a Japanese language, then people are gonna think you're Japanese. 

Leah: The community feared Mokuyobi was appropriating Japanese words and images to cash in on the tourist craze. But the company assured them they were there to help the Little Tokyo community by bringing in more customers.

Zen: How [00:13:00] does bringing more tourism into the community help our community? How does bringing more money into this community help our community when it's profiting them? Selling $300 rainbow fanny packs does not help the community at all. I don't think there's any way that Little Tokyo benefits from having a store like Mokuyobi there. Mokuyobi's for tourists.

Leah: So Zen put together a petition demanding Mokuyobi remove all references to Japan and move their flagship store somewhere else, somewhere where they wouldn't be taking space away from a local business community that barely had any space to begin with. The petition ended up getting over 3000 signatures, but Mokuyobi refused to comply.

Zen: I think a lot of folks were upset and a lot of folks, I think it triggered a lot of people being erased. You set up in a community and [00:14:00] you erase their identity and then you silence them and then you profit off of them. Like how do you even connect to Little Tokyo that you can't even identify with? That's totally on purpose.

But the worst part about this story is that there are a lot of people in the community who don't see it being a problem when white people pretend to be Japanese and extract profit from your community by doing that. I really thought it was like a slam dunk, like fucking Mokuyobi. Like, oh my God, this community's gonna just rally against this really terrible apparent thing. And it was really eye-opening to see how far some folks in this community have lost their sense of identity.

Philip: I think people have different ideas about gentrification cuz there are people who genuinely feel [00:15:00] like it is good. The business improvement district, the business associations, their only interest is bringing in money. It's not bringing in people. They want Little Tokyo to be more attractive to tourism, and they want the property value to go up at the cost of people not being able to afford to live here, or even at the cost of its own legacy businesses.

Zen: I want people to understand that gentrification isn't a good thing. Like if you think that it's gonna benefit you, it's not, not in the long run. The gentrifiers eventually get gentrified. You know, you go through different waves of gentrification and that's what destroys a community. It's like Orientalist fantasies. Um, you have to dig pretty deep to find the soul of Little Tokyo right now.

Toriumi Plaza

Reporter: Community organizers gathered at the side of the latest homeless encampment that city officials are clearing out right now. It's at the Toriumi Plaza here at the corner of First and Judge John Aiso Streets in Little [00:16:00] Tokyo. Now, however, advocacy groups for the homeless community argue that this is really the wrong tactic when it comes to tackling such a huge problem.

They demand the city keep this area open, give them permanent housing and services, proposing the city uses the more than $1 billion that's spent on policing for the unhoused instead. 

Surrounding business owners, however, describe a crime infested atmosphere that hurts everyone. It will be closed at midnight and at that time, anyone remaining inside those barricades must be out.

Leah: Toriumi Plaza was originally built in 2010 and designated as a community park in 2012. But when COVID hit, all that changed. People lost their jobs, their homes, in some cases, their loved ones, their support systems. One by one, tents popped up in Toriumi Plaza, and a small community of unhoused folks was born. But business owners saw this encampment as an invasion of their community and a threat to their livelihood. They didn’t see people in need, they saw crime, drugs, and blight. [00:17:00] The solution? More police.

Zen: The police don't keep people safe. They keep property safe by killing people. So that's not safety, like safety for who? 

Leah: The more police that occupy the neighborhood, the more hostile the environment. Land becomes increasingly privatized. People become defensive over their property. Business owners blame the unhoused for the persistence of blight in the neighborhood and turn to the police to handle their grievances. But Zen sees this line of thinking as heavily flawed.

Zen: If you criminalize someone and then they have a record, then they can't get a job, they can't get a house, then they're on the street, and then you call the police because they're on the street. It's just a vicious cycle. Calling the police creates the conditions for being unhoused. 

I definitely think unhoused people are members of Little [00:18:00] Tokyo. They chose to be here. You know, they chose to, for whatever reasons, to try to survive in this community. Homelessness is not the crisis. It's the result of the crisis, you know, it's the result of capitalism. That's the crisis.

Leah: Someone needed to take action. Against market rate housing, against tourism, against policing, against everything. Little Tokyo had fallen too deep into money and bureaucracy to remember who they were: a small, historic community who had each other's backs before anyone else. So Zen took a stand.

Zen: I started to get into organizing against gentrification with Defend Boyle Heights. I had been recently illegally evicted and needed to understand what the hell happened. This was probably eight years ago now. We befriended an unhoused man, Theo Henderson, and he was [00:19:00] being targeted by the Chinatown BID. And we helped him in any way we could and supported him in any way we possibly could. So fast forward to early pandemic. The encampment in Toriumi Plaza popped up and we thought, Oh, what should we do about this? So Theo, and I and my partner, Mario and a few other folks were like, "Let's start a mutual aid for the folks at Toriumi Plaza." And that's what happened. So we started JA&S J Town Action and Solidarity and yeah, we've been doing it for, it's been like 79 weeks in a row now.

Leah: Every Saturday, JA&S sets up tables outside Toriumi Plaza, where they provide hot meals, water, masks, COVID tests, Narcan, and other essential items. Together JA&S and the unhoused community grow vegetables [00:20:00] and herbs in a small community garden. There is music, dancing, poetry readings, and community meetings where unhoused folks can voice their concerns. It's a place like no other in Little Tokyo. And Zen is not alone in the struggle. JA&S has brought many corners of the Little Tokyo and broader Japanese American community together to fight gentrification in solidarity.

Philip: It started with friends. That's the core of mutual aid. That's the core of abolition. I think with this new restaurant and with me being a little more involved, I wanted to see how we could be more involved in community work other than being at strictly food events. We don't have a lot of money, like a lot of foundations. But we have umbrellas and tables and chairs and an ice maker.

We are food businesses that provide hospitality and the root of hospitality is like taking care of people. And there are [00:21:00] things that cannot be valued with money. It's very anti-business, but my ideal quote unquote business is one that doesn't require people to make a transaction. 

Zen: I think Little Tokyo's always been a combination of lots of things. There are people in the community who wanna see it be a tourist trap. But there are people in the community who wanna see Little Tokyo as a self-determining community that is not rooted in violence. I think a lot of people all over the place are trying to reestablish their identity. Yeah, like what do you wanna be proud of?

Philip: I feel like ultimately it comes down to the messiness of politics and what people value. The question is who is a stakeholder in the community? How is a community represented? Usually it is with politicians. It is with big [00:22:00] business. It is with spiritual leaders. It is never the houseless residents and it's never the people who work service based jobs in the community. There's so many people whose voice isn't accounted for during these decision making processes.

Zen: I think we can save Little Tokyo. I think it's just gonna take a lot of fighting for it right. A lot of people wanna fight for it.People really identify with Little Tokyo, identify with being Asian in America, you know, identify with all the struggles that are happening citywide and also in Little Tokyo, and are fighting for that identity. We're all tied into capitalism and imperialism right now. I mean, that's unfortunately where we are. But to acknowledge the ways we are tied to it, complacent about it, and do something about it and organize against [00:23:00] those forces, I think, that's what I would say. Yeah. Don't fuck with little Tokyo.

Conclusion

Leah: I remember my mom taking me to this one museum every single time we went to Little Tokyo. It's supposed to be a testament to the broader Japanese American experience, but all I remember from that place are exhibits about the camps. Walking through reconstructed barracks, reading old diary entries and letters from the incarcerated, peering at rusted fob watches and tattered books through a glass case, all these things were just relics of our shared trauma, injustice, and displacement. I defined myself by the past because I believed it was the only part of Japanese American culture left. I figured the rest vanished once gentrification came knocking.

But lately, I've begun to reconsider. Is that all I am? A sad story? A living relic? We have a right to preserve our past, but what about our present, our future? [00:24:00] Where is the Little Tokyo of the past with its pool halls and bath houses and farmer's markets? In those public, communal spaces, culture was born out of solidarity and interdependence. It lived in the people and magnetized the bonds that held us close. But as our neighborhood becomes increasingly privatized and profit driven, those bonds lose their charge. We begin to isolate ourselves from each other. Culture becomes symbolic. We displace our heritage onto the dead and inanimate: an exhibit, a meal, a product.

But groups like JA&S give me hope. The old Little Tokyo may be gone, but the people are still here, and they're fighting to stay. This is the Japanese American community I've been looking for, one that puts people over profit. This is my identity, and to save it, we must change the way we think about our relationship to land, history, and culture. Gentrification demands we buy our culture. Community allows us to experience it.

Max: That story was produced by Leah Chase.

You’ll hear more stories of reclaiming what’s been lost in upcoming episodes. 

You’ve been listening to State of the Human, the Podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. 

This episode was produced by Leah Chase and me, Max Du, with support from Laura Joyce Davis, Dawn Fraser, Megan Calfas, Melissa Dyrdahl, and Jonah Willinghanz. 

For their generous financial support, we’d like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, The Program in Writing and Rhetoric, the Office of the Vice President for the Arts, and Bruce Braden.

You can learn about the Stanford Storytelling Project and our podcasts, workshops, live events, and courses at storytelling.stanford.edu. You can find this and every episode of State of the Human on our website or anywhere you listen to podcasts. 

 For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I’m Max Du.