Little Tokyo Political Tour By Alex Chalaganyan, Carolyn Chan, Gloria Chan, Justin Drury, Van Hoang, Eric Imoto, Kenne Kubo, Tatiana Kwok, Trinh Le, Heather Lee, Virginia Lin, Kyle Low, Justin Miyamoto, Karin Miyazaki, Huong Nguyen, Triet Vo, and Davy Xu 1. Why did you choose the particular community for your political tours? There are several reasons why the students in this class wanted to go on a political tour of Little Tokyo. A lot of people can identify with the community in Little Tokyo, while others had prior connections with this community and wanted to learn more about its political history. There were also a handful of people without prior connections who were interested in getting to know the Little Tokyo. Some had been to the area previously, but only for shopping, dining, and/or entertainment purposes, and did not know about the controversial history of this area. Some of us are connected to Little Tokyo through family, student organizations, and/or personal ties to the community. Specific involvements that connect students to Little Tokyo include the Nikkei Student Union (NSU) at UCLA, Manzanar Pilgrimage committee, Asian American Studies Majors and Minors, participants in the Little Tokyo Service Center and San Tai San children’s basketball tournament for the Little Tokyo Recreation Center campaign. For others, Little Tokyo is one of many ethnic areas in the Los Angeles area. We come in and out of Little Tokyo as participants in events, visitors, and consumers, yet do not spend time learning about how the area has developed nor what struggles it currently faces. Something that is common across the board for our group was the general interest in learning more about the political history of the community. With the rich history that the Japanese American and Japanese community has in Los Angeles, we did not want to miss out on a chance to get to know the community first hand. This included being able to take the political tour from those who work in Little Tokyo through the Little Tokyo Service Center, J-Town Voice, and Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress. 2. What have you learned in your previous Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies, and related classes about this community? In Asian American Studies classes here at UCLA, we have learned about many issues relating to the Japanese American community due to its extensive history here in the United States. For instance, the most well-known Japanese American plight is that of internment. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, all persons of Japanese descent were scapegoats and consequently, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, which forced 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans to relocate into the interior of the United States. This had large repercussions on Japanese ethnic2enclaves like Little Tokyo. It was in Little Tokyo that many of the interned Japanese were gathered before going to the internment camps. When the Japanese vacated Little Tokyo, it became Bronzeville, with mainly African American occupants, which changed not only the population, but also the ideals and perspectives of the community. Even today, Little Tokyo remains a diverse community where people of all ethnicities – mainly Latinos and African Americans – call home. For a long time, Japanese Americans fought for justice from the United States for the atrocities they suffered during internment, but the United States government would not recognize them. Finally, in 1988, President Carter recognized the injustice suffered by the Japanese Americans and granted reparations. Even after all this, the Japanese Americans still fight adamantly against current social injustices, such as Michelle Malkin and her atrocious book defending Japanese internment. We have had many great community heroes to look up to, such as Yuji Ichioko, who coined the term “Asian American” and focused attention away from the commodification and exoticism of Asian Americans through the use of “oriental.” In addition, Yuri Kochiyama spent her whole life advocating for all minority rights, not just Asian American, alongside great historical figures like Malcolm X. Today, we as college students are taught the difference we can make in the community by taking examples from the past. We have united together under causes like Don Nakanishi’s Tenure fight and have kept our responsibility to educate others and raise awareness through Week of Remembrance and the Manzanar Pilgrimage. Right now, we are fighting for a recreation center in Little Tokyo so that we can bring the community together as a social and cultural network and to provide a safe environment for the children of the community. These are all things that we have learned as college students through Asian American studies and ethnic studies and as active members of our community, because this is not the history that is taught to us in high school. It is in college that we learn about a life that is not United States-centric and we learn about how we can work to better our community by advocating for changes to bring about awareness and understanding and to preserve the diverse history of our country by preserving our ethnic identity and culture. 3. How did you prepare for your political tour? For example, what did you find out about the history of this community, size of population, other demographic characteristics, etc.? What are current issues facing low-income residents or immigrant workers in this neighborhood — e.g., housing, health care, education, police abuse, etc.? Where did you find information for your tour preparation? In preparation for this political tour, we as a group did not formally meet to discuss our knowledge of Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo. Much of this can be attributed to practical reasons, for our group was extremely large and coordinating schedules would have been difficult. However, a few of us did casually discuss our knowledge of the area on the day of the tour in a small group sharing what we had learned about the community’s history, current struggles, and demographics. Therefore, our preparation for this political tour was predominantly independent and varied according to the individual. For those of us that3did research the community, the majority of them used the Internet or tried to remember what they had learned about the community from previous classes. Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo currently is a diverse