Before WWII, L.A. was home to thriving Japanese communities

6, 1941, and in the years before then, closer to home, for one group of people for whom that date would alter their lives — the Japanese and Japanese Americans in Los Angeles?

In 1941, about 36,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were living in and around Los Angeles, most of them within about five miles of Little Tokyo, the growing nucleus of the community for more than half a century.

This new labor wave from Asia arrived legally, but ran up against some of the same kinds of proscriptions that the Chinese had faced, which is why Little Tokyo — like other cities’ “Japantowns” — formed and thrived: because of, as well as in spite of, the discrimination.

She directs collections management and access at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo.

“But they also adopted American traditions, so you see the emergence of Japanese American culture: baseball, even food traditions — you definitely see them incorporating some American foods.”.

Working at her family’s Little Tokyo confectionary, she dreamed up a mochi ball with an ice cream heart, and if there’s a dessert hall of fame, this should be in it.

Beyond the footprint of Little Tokyo itself, pre-war Japanese and Japanese Americans lived and worked across much of L.A.

The floricultural talents of Japanese gardeners were a status symbol — sometimes, as The Times wrote, on the assumption that the immigrant was made for the job, “in this case, the Japanese gardener, a humble servant whose mystical Eastern philosophy grants him a flair for plants and agriculture.” At one time, historians calculated, one Japanese American man in four was a gardener, and, as The Times noted, gardeners “became the cornerstone of the Japanese American community, establishing schools and churches.”.

Like many communities of color, the Japanese population here perforce had its own doctors, lawyers, teachers, dentists and other professionals; white institutions often wouldn’t serve nonwhite clients and patients.

In 1929, Japanese and Japanese American doctors tried to build a hospital in Boyle Heights to serve their own.

supreme courts sided with the doctors, and the Japanese Hospital opened, and flourished.

As its sign states, “Immigrant Japanese doctors prevailed in 1928 U.S.

A new foundation of law and principle for Japanese people in California — and by extension the nation — was laid down too.

When the hospital was being planned, a USC-trained lawyer named Sei Fujii — barred by his Japanese citizenship from the actual practice of law — with his law partner, Marion Wright, persuaded the U.S.

Supreme Court in 1928 to let the Japanese doctors incorporate and build the Boyle Heights hospital.

Unusually, some Japanese gardeners resumed their old trade after the war, perhaps in part because hostility kept them from getting hired to do anything else.

Members could shop for supplies at a Little Tokyo co-op, which closed in 2012.

And before they too were evacuated to incarceration camps, the staffers of the Rafu Shimpo, L.A.’s Japanese-language newspaper, founded in 1903, managed not only to arrange to keep up the rent on the paper’s Little Tokyo offices, but to hide the Japanese-language lead type under the office floorboards, and so start publishing the paper once again, on New Year’s Day 1946.

“While Pearl Harbor upended Japanese American lives, it’s part of a long arc of discrimination,” Hayashi told me.

It could be for benign things like they were a Japanese language teacher, or sent money to a charity in Japan, or if the Japanese navy visited the U.S., they would socialize.

In time, the restrictive covenants and laws that isolated Japanese and Japanese Americans were thrown out