What is the history of Los Angeles Little Tokyo?
Los Angeles has had the largest urban Nikkei population in the United States since the 1910s. Early in the twentieth century, the Japanese community began to center itself around a cluster of homes at the corner of First and San Pedro Streets. The first mention of the name “Li’l Tokio” appeared in newspapers in the 1930s. In the period just before World War II, Little Tokyo was a large and bustling residential and economic center. During the war, the forced exclusion of Japanese Americans emptied Little Tokyo, which was resettled mostly by African Americans. The Japanese Americans returned after the closure of the concentration camps, but Little Tokyo never regained its original size or vitality. Many Japanese Americans were drawn away from the downtown area, and opened businesses and established cultural centers in Gardena and other suburban locales. In the 1970s, developers looking to transform Little Tokyo to fit the needs of Japanese tourists and businessmen alienated the Japanese
