Urban space, ethnic community, and national belonging: the political landscape of memory in Little Tokyo

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.