LA's Little Tokyo - JTown In Peril
Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo district, the largest J-town in America, suffered a potentially mortal wound last summer. The Perennial beacon of the community in recent decades, the 21 story New Otani Hotel, was sold in secret proceedings to 3D investments, a Beverly Hills company. After the lease expires November 30th the hotel will be renamed, the management scrapped and the future of the surrounding shopping court (Weller Court) and 3rd floor Japanese garden remain undetermined.
The building was built as part of the Little Tokyo redevelopment plan of the late 1960’s and 1970’s. The Hotel itself opened in 1977 and catered primarily to Japanese businessmen, tourists and students during the subsequent thirty years. The adjacent Weller Court has been home to a number of Japanese retail outlets from Family Mart (pre Famima!!) to Kinokuniya and Mitsukoshi.
Now, with the ink of one pen, the property that was once a key element to the redevelopment of J-town is no longer a part of Little Tokyo.
It may appear ironic, but in fact it is an inevitable twist of the re-gentrification of the urban landscape. Realistically the bulk of the Japanese community left J-town in the 1940’s. The World War II government forced the relocation of thousands of LA’s Japanese and Japanese Americans. Many never returned. Many of those who did, found J-Town resettled. A few stayed on to rebuild the community and eventually in the 50’s and 60’s Little Tokyo was an entertainment center – A place to be seen - especially if you were Japanese American in LA. Still as the rest of the city moved to the suburbs, and the urban core became increasingly unsafe, Little Tokyo finished the 60’s increasingly vacant and worse for wear. The people were living, working and even playing somewhere else.
Of course it wasn’t just J-Town. The “Leave it to Beaver” generation of the 50’s and 60’s believed there was a house in the suburbs and an American dream for everyone. People were leaving the old neighborhoods for new far away homes on new streets with new neighbors. While J-Town, Bunker Hill, Chinatown, Little Italy and other downtown destinations deteriorated, new area codes were being added for the San Fernando Valley, Inland Empire and Orange County.
By the 1990’s the companies had started following suit. By the mid 1990’s almost every major Japanese company had relocated their headquarters from downtown LA, south on the Harbor Freeway, to Torrance. Some even went all the way down to Costa Mesa in the O.C.
Additional Japanese businesses and support services sprang up in these areas, the constant influx of Japanese Businessmen and their families kept these new businesses vital. Downtown was no longer the place to be.
Even if Little Tokyo was no longer a place to be, clever market appeals gradually made J-Town a place to go. The eighties and nineties saw the fruits of a more than a decade of redevelopment. Hotles like the New Otani and the Miyako began to attract droves of wealthy tourists. Nearby language schools attracted foreign students who came to LA for weeks or months straight. The lure of the “Mystic East” and “Authentic Sushi Chefs” drew the non-Japanese customers. There were a lot of folks coming to J-town, spending their money and going home somewhere else. The few residential buildings housed the older generations, and the blocks where single family houses once stood or where dilapidated old businesses rotted, had been plowed over for parking. Little Tokyo was smaller now – about 3 square blocks of sushi, Japanese curios, cultural icons, karaoke and parking lots – and it seemed to be working out.
Then people starting coming back. But these were new people. The 2K generation. And they love their condos. Within a few short years we’ve seen those parking lots disappear and be replaced by condo complexes. Land that couldn’t be given away 20 years ago was being traded at a premium now – and so was the parking! Oddly enough, though people were coming back, the curio shops and sushi bars were going out of business at an ever increasing rate. These people were the wrong people! They weren’t shopping for rice paper lanterns and Japanese fans. They were looking for Starbucks, Sports Bars and markets that sell Hamburger Helper and Lean Cuisine… and they were taking the parking away.
And so it is in Little Tokyo today. The ethnic village is of little value, but the land upon which it stands has turned into gold. The thought of losing Little Tokyo and many of LA’s other cultural communities is painful. The whole city will suffer. Yet there hasn’t been a wave of new Japanese immigration for more than half a century. Most JA’s are third, fouth - even fifth generation. Without new generations of immigrants or a strong immigrant community to counteract the efforts of the Starbucks generation’s encroaching on J-town’s borders, is there anyone left to fight for Little Tokyo’s survival?
Labels: J-Town, Little Tokyo, Los Angeles
