The rebuilding of Little Tokyo in Downtown Los Angeles after the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II has been thought to be proof how Japanese had a strong attachment to their “ethnic community.” Some studies, however, focused on the fact that the place was also called “Bronzeville,” where African American wartime workers occupied ex-Japanese tenants, and described the process of racial “integration” between two groups in the resettlement era. This paper aims to clarify how Japanese returnees and Black residents experienced the transition from Bronzeville to Little Tokyo and discuss what kinds of “sense of community” toward the place both groups hold.
When the United States government allowed the Japanese to return to the West Coast in 1945, federal and local officials, civic organizations, and racial and ethnic group leaders appealed for “interracial cooperation” to help ease resettlement into local communities. This interracialism emphasized that loyal “Japanese American citizens” deserved to have the right to live anywhere they wanted just as other American citizens did.
Under the influence of interracialism, Little Tokyo appeared to be rebuilt as a symbol of Japanese community. More than 500 Japanese businesses reopened around East First Street, and Issei leaders became involved in political activities in a few years. Some Japanese journalists, however, recognized that the post-war Little Tokyo was different from the pre-war community in which they perceived “authenticity.” In fact, out-of-towners and Nisei entrepreneurs, rather than pre-war generation businessmen, revitalized the ethnic economy in the resettlement era and young Japanese American Citizens League OACL) leaders extended political leadership over Issei pioneers. New Japanese businessmen preferred having their residences in the “Southwestern District” along Jefferson Blvd and Boyle Heights on the east of Downtown rather than in Little Tokyo.
Through the resettlement of the Japanese, interracialism was contextualized within the spatial formation in multiracial Los Angeles. Interracialists appealed to a color-blind ideal promoting a race-neutral approach, and they were reluctant to eradicate restrictive covenants that kept barriers between “west” of LA as white middle-class suburbia and “east” as multiracial working-class neighborhoods. Faced with this contradiction, on the one hand, Japanese returnees found “safety and stability” in Little Tokyo, even though they recognized its lost authenticity as an ethnic community. On the other, African Americans pursued interracial cooperation against white supremacy and discovered their original community along Central Avenue to Watts in South Los Angeles, while they alienated Black working-class southerners living in Bronzeville.
Little Tokyo/Bronzeville was a multiracial place where neither single “ethnic community” nor color-blind “community” was impossible. Japanese and Blacks rediscovered their senses of belonging within frictional and sympathetic interracial relations, even though newly developed ways of identification with the place was also difficult to achieve. Thus, the sense of a multiracial community such as Little Tokyo in the resettlement era rose from dynamic relations of difference, belonging, and solidarity, rather than cooperative unity.
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