
Little Tokyo
Historic Japanese American enclave of temples, shops and gardens, reborn twice after wartime displacement.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Little Tokyo in Los Angeles traces a neighborhood built around a restaurant opened in 1885 by Japanese seaman Hamanosuke Shigeta, and the morning in February 1942 when its residents were ordered to report to a local church for wartime removal. Black families arriving during the wartime migration filled the emptied storefronts, and for a few years the neighborhood took on a different name, Bronzeville, with jazz clubs and late-night restaurants filling rooms that had once held Buddhist altars and tailor shops.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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