Abstract
The “Little Tokyo” neighborhood of Los Angeles was the center of pre-internment community life for Japanese immigrants and their children and is still considered the symbolic home of later generations of Japanese Americans in Southern California. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research in Little Tokyo, I explore in this article how contemporary Japanese Americans have used and transformed this ancestral landscape in order to express, contest, and formalize collective memories of the Japanese American experience, particularly with regard to their place in the national body politic. Historical narratives inscribed at many places in Little Tokyo, both informal and institutional, project a narrative of sacrifice, suffering, and redemption in the context of internment and military service, articulating neatly with mainstream American tropes of overcoming hardship as a process of ‘earning’ citizenship and its benefits. However, such narratives are also contested by alternative interpretations and representations of these spaces that describe a special role for Japanese Americans in making demands of their government, rather than just sacrifices to it. The resulting debates, disagreements, and even occasional consensus around constructions of nation, identity, community, and belonging are rooted in the ‘sacred ground’ of Little Tokyo, gathering meaning and persuasive power through their connection to a symbolically dense site of shared memory. The multiple memory projects of this landscape reveal how Japanese Americans have envisioned their relationship to the concept of America, to each other, and to other communities with shared experiences in a diverse metropolis.
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Notes
The geographical literature exploring the distinctions between “space” and “place” is vast; for the purposes of this article, it is enough to say that I here draw on Henri Lefebvre’s distinction between representations of space (conceived space, the abstract space of Little Tokyo as urban real estate) and representational space (spaces as lived and experienced, or place) (Lefebvre 1991). More specifically, I follow Doreen Massey’s argument that places are not mere “areas with boundaries around” them, but “articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings” (Massey 1994, pp. 154, 156). Little Tokyo as a place is thus made by specific qualities “embedded in the use of particular buildings such as neighborhood bars, ethnic groceries, or notorious apartment buildings,” meanings made not only by the property and capital relations represented by the buildings but by the memories they contain and organize (Mele 1996, p. 6).
Boym sees nostalgia, particularly in what she calls its reflective and restorative forms, as inextricably linked to both memory and space; a desire to repair the longing for an illusory past time and lost place with final belonging in a reclaimed and altered future. As Legg (2004, p. 99) has written with regard to Boym’s argument, “restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time,” while “reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space.”
I thank Greg Fisher, a city employee working in Jan Perry’s office and probably the most knowledgeable unpublished historian of Los Angeles, for pointing out this feature of the historical landscape to me.
Another reason that Little Tokyo was an attractive residential site for Japanese immigrants and their families was the lack of restrictive deed covenants preventing occupancy by “Orientals,” although most pre-World War II Japanese still found themselves limited to renting their dwellings due to California’s Alien Land Laws, which barred the purchase of land by aliens racially ineligible for citizenship (primarily Chinese and Japanese).
The post-war residential exodus from Little Tokyo was aided by a 1922 city zoning law that prevented new residential construction in the downtown area; thus the neighborhood’s aging housing stock could not be replaced with newer homes. In addition, the defeat of Proposition 15 in 1946 led to the invalidation of the Alien Land Laws and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that restrictive deed covenants were not legally enforceable, dismantling the legal framework for housing discrimination against Asians.
Although, as I point out later in this article, many Japanese Americans believe that the change in their status was a result of Japanese Americans’ service record during World War II and relatively peaceful reaction to internment, these scholars argue that shifts in the U.S. racial hierarchy, brought about in part due to economic and demographic changes, made Japanese Americans a useful, and thus more acceptable, minority racial group in contrast with African Americans making redistributive demands of the American government.
This statement, from a Japanese-language magazine for overseas executives, was translated and published in an editorial in one of Little Tokyo’s ethnic newspapers. See “Corporation History Reviewed (Letters to the Editor),” Rafu Shimpo, 7 October 1974.
For instance, the north side of East First Street between San Pedro and Central was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986 and made a National Historic Landmark District in 1994. The sidewalk along the Historic Landmark block was also engraved with quotes from residents, images of uprooting such as suitcases and bundles, and the names of lost prewar businesses as part of a Power of Place public art project designed by Sheila de Bretteville.
Sturken is building on Edward Linenthal’s description of U.S. battlefields that, although secular, are nevertheless national “sacred patriotic spaces” (Linenthal 1991). In her description of Ground Zero, Sturken writes that the land’s consecration as sacred space is at odds with the desire of local residents to get back to the “mundane everydayness and routine that defines the familiar sense of a neighborhood” (Sturken 2004, p. 315). In surprisingly similar ways, Japanese American efforts to treat Little Tokyo as the “sacred ground” of ethnic community is increasingly threatened by the desire of new residents for the walkable local amenities and services of a “normal” neighborhood. The conflict between everyday lived space and memorial space, which despite its “radical impermanence of meaning” at least appears to exist at a commemorative remove from the bustle of urban life, is increasingly an issue as memorials expand through the urban landscape. In addition to Sturken, the geographical literature on the politics of street naming has begun to address some of the issues surrounding this uncomfortably overlapped space (Alderman 2000, 2002, 2003; Azaryahu 1996, 1997; Rose-Redwood 2008).
According to the 2000 census, the residential population of Little Tokyo is about one-third African American, one-quarter Latino, and about one-fifth Japanese or Japanese-American. For 2000 census figures on the tract encompassing Little Tokyo (Tract 2062), see http://www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html. For a more in-depth discussion of the many ways that contemporary Japanese Americans in Los Angeles use Little Tokyo’s past as a means to strengthen ethnic identity and build community unity in the future, see my dissertation, “Home Is Little Tokyo”: Race, Community, and Memory in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles,” particularly Chapter Four (Jenks 2008).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Michan Connor, Jerry Gonzalez, Dan HoSang, Phuong Nguyen, the anonymous referees for GeoJournal, and the editors of this special issue, especially Reuben Rose-Redwood, for their comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank my interview subjects, participants in the Little Tokyo Community Council, and employees of the Little Tokyo Service Center for their assistance and generosity. Some of the research for this article was supported by a fellowship from the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation and the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California.
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Jenks, H. Urban space, ethnic community, and national belonging: the political landscape of memory in Little Tokyo. GeoJournal 73, 231–244 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-008-9205-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-008-9205-1