Japanese American Resilience in Los Angeles
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Theater Arts Faculty Works Theater Arts 2019 From Heart Mountain, Wyoming, to the Heart of Little Tokyo: Japanese American Resilience in Los Angeles Arnab Banerji Loyola Marymount University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/thea_fac Part of the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Banerji, Arnab. “From Heart Mountain, Wyoming, to the Heart of Little Tokyo.” Boom California, 8 July 2019, boomcalifornia.org/2019/02/18/from-heart-mountain-wyoming-to-the-heart-of-little-tokyo/. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Theater Arts at Digital Commons @ Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theater Arts Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons@Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Articles From Heart Mountain, Wyoming, to the Heart of Little Tokyo Japanese American Resilience in Los Angeles LIKE THIS: Like 2 bloggers like this. Boom California on February 18, 2019 Arnab Banerji Recent Posts 160 Miles East of Los Located in the heart of the city’s Little Tokyo Angeles: On Covering Historic District, a visit to Los Angeles’ Japanese the Eastern Coachella American National Museum (JANM) is a humbling Valley experience. JANM exists by active community Japanese American Resilience in Los Angeles experience. JANM exists by active community collaboration.[1] The museum’s exhibits tell the Black California: A Review of West of Jim story of a group of people who persevered in their Crow hopes of making America their home even as “white” America pushed back on accommodating South Central is and accepting people of Japanese ancestry. Home: Race and the Power of Community Anchoring the museum’s display is a wooden Investment in Los structure. The sparse and rickety edi!ce is frugally- Angeles built and a less sturdy version of the log cabins that one !nds in the Great Smoky Mountains in the Showcase Theater. Corona, CA American South. The wooden structure is one of the few surviving housing structures bought and Organized Labor, relocated to the museum from the Heart Mountain Organized Home: internment camp in Wyoming. It represents one of Domestic Worker Organizing and the the most dismal and yet often overlooked chapters Contradictory Politics of modern American history—the forceful removal, of Care in the relocation, and imprisonment of over 120,000 Nonpro!t Industrial Japanese Americans to inland detention facilities Complex from the coasts during World War II. The wooden structure with its modest interiors Tweets by @BoomCalifornia greets visitors as the !rst object of display in the Boom museum’s second "oor. Beyond the wooden @BoomCalifornia structure lies an exhibit that includes everyday “California’s history of race- based segregation, of course, objects, historic photographs, and useful runs deep. Modern California – now one of the most anecdotes that support the visitor in navigating outwardly liberal and cosmopolitan states in the what is bound to be a fairly new immigrant nation – was built upon the narrative for most people. The open "oor plan that forced relocation and dispossession of multiple one traverses to explore the !rst couple of rooms ethnic groups.”boomcalifornia.org/20 groups.”boomcalifornia.org/20 comes to an abrupt halt as visitors make their way 21/02/12/bla… past the thick glass doors into the section devoted to the Japanese internment. Although, it might simply have been an architectural choice to separate this section of the exhibit. I couldn’t help Black California: A R… but imagine a curatorial intent behind forcing Kevin Waite Mallie Robinson and her five visitors to push open a pair of heavy doors to enter boomcalifornia.orgchildren came to California in search of into an area earmarked for exhibits depicting life 15m during a state-sanctioned sequestering of fellow Boom Retweeted citizens. Like the sudden, swift blow to Japanese Ruxandra Guidi American aspirations of realizing their American @ruxguidi dreams, the visitor is transported, beyond the glass My latest piece explores how this girl from the tropics fell in doors, from the tranquility of everyday Japanese love with deserts, what they've taught me about American life to the hostile badlands of middle myself, about home, and about the kind of journalism I America. believe in. Categories Articles Excerpts Interviews Photography/Art Poetry Postcards Series Little Tokyo, the neighborhood that houses the Reviews museum is today a symbol of resistance and museum is today a symbol of resistance and Uncategorized resilience. A gateway to Japanese immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the neighborhood was home to some 30,000 Japanese Tags Americans before it was swept clean during African Executive Order 9066 in 1941-42.[2] During the war Americans years, the once burgeoning neighborhood became a ghost town before being populated by large Architecture Art groups of Hispanic and African-American laborers. asian Asian These workers who had arrived in the city lured by Americans defense manufacturing jobs were unable to !nd Criminology housing because of restrictive housing covenants Culture and occupied the abandoned Little Tokyo structures.[3] Education Environment Bronzeville, as the area came to be referred to Featured Film Food during World War II, was the site of the Zoot Suit riots between white sailors and Hispanic residents Gender History of the area.[4] After the war, Japanese residents Immigration gradually started coming back to Little Tokyo. Inequality Labor Under the leadership of the Little Tokyo Business Latinx LGBT Association, the area was rebuilt and revitalized Literature around 1947 and is today a thriving tourist and Media Music Native business destination, even if escalating costs have Americans forced the bulk of the Japanese American Photography residential communities to move to Torrance, Politics Poverty Gardena, West Los Angeles, and Arcadia.[5] Prisons Race The Little Tokyo neighborhood is framed by the Religion Science JANM on one side and the Aratani Theatre on the Social Justice JANM on one side and the Aratani Theatre on the Social Justice other with the Little Tokyo Village plaza, with its Social Movements convenience stores, confectioneries, and Technology restaurants separating the two pivotal landmarks. The Aratani theatre managed by the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC) has been a point of pride for the Little Tokyo district. Since opening its doors in 1983, they have hosted some of the biggest names in Japanese theatre, music, and the arts.[6] The East West Players (EWP) is another stalwart of the neighborhood. EWP was founded in 1965 by Asian American actors. Now in its !fty-third year, the company is the longest-running professional theatre of color and is seemingly the largest producing organization of Asian American work.[7] Snehal Desai, who is the EWP’s producing artistic director, explained how the East West Players is located at an interesting intersection of the city in that it is surrounded by the Los Angeles Police Department, City Hall, the erstwhile Los Angeles Times building, and a stone’s throw from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Music Center. This puts it squarely in the middle of the multiple loci of power—intellectual, political, and administrative—in the city. And yet the nation’s oldest and largest Asian American company holds on dearly to its diminutive appearance, housed in a former church.[8] It seems the company former church.[8] It seems the company deliberately stays away from the glitz and glamor of the entertainment world even as it continues to produce and promote high caliber work that celebrates the diversity of the American experience. EWP was founded in 1965 by Asian “ American actors. Now in its 53rd year the company is the longest-running professional theatre of color and the largest producing organization of Asian American work. With Little Tokyo as its setting, the memories enshrined in the Japanese American National Museum as reminders, East West Players and the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center as partners, and the Aratani Theatre as its venue, Allegiance: A New Musical Inspired by a True Story made its Los Angeles premiere in March 2018. Before it arrived at Aratani, the George Takei starrer had had its world premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe and a brief Broadway run at New York City’s Longacre Theatre. The musical had been in the works since 2008 when Takei and his husband Brad initiated a conversation with its creators, Jay Kuo and Lorenzo Thione, about creating a musical Kuo and Lorenzo Thione, about creating a musical that would embrace and put the experience of Takei and several thousands like him who survived the Japanese internment during the Second World War into a stage performance. The conversation started in the aftermath of two back to back chance meetings between Takei and Brad, and Kuo and Thione while attending shows in New York City. Takei was particularly moved by the song “Inutil” during a performance of In the Heights, which the four attended together. And the conversation that ensued convinced Kuo and Thione that Takei’s family experience would produce a moving show.[9] The George Takei story itself is a celebration of the Asian-American version of the American Dream. Born Hosato Takei in 1937 in Los Angeles to an Issei (!rst-generation) father and a Nissei (second- generation) mother, Takei was christened “George” after the British monarch of the same name. In 1942 Takei and his family were forcefully relocated !rst to Santa Anita, then to Rohwer, Arkansas, and !nally to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, Northern California as part of the Japanese- American internment during the Second World War.[10] After the war and the release of the former internees, Takei and his family moved back to Los Angeles where his father took up a petty job to support his family.