Summer can be a great time to visit Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles.
For one thing, summer is festival season. Three Buddhist temples in Little Tokyo celebrate Obon on two different weekends — Higashi Hongwanji on July 30-31; and Nishi Hongwanji and Zenshuji Soto on July 8-9. All three festivals feature the traditional Obon festival dances, but I like to go for the food.
Summer can be a great time to visit Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles.
For one thing, summer is festival season. Three Buddhist temples in Little Tokyo celebrate Obon on two different weekends — Higashi Hongwanji on July 30-31; and Nishi Hongwanji and Zenshuji Soto on July 8-9. All three festivals feature the traditional Obon festival dances, but I like to go for the food.
Little Tokyo will celebrate Tanabata on Aug. 19-20. Tanabata is not well known outside of Asia, but the Little Tokyo version is based on the celebration in Sendai, Japan. The festival features big, hanging ball decorations called kazari. There’s also a Tanabata wishing tree in the middle of Japanese Village Plaza.
And then there’s Nisei Week, the biggest annual event in Little Tokyo, which celebrates the history and future of the Japanese-American community. A couple of Nisei Week events take place in July, but the bulk of it will be Aug. 19-27.
But any weekend is a good weekend to visit. If you’ve never been to Little Tokyo — or if you haven’t gone recently — you may not realize how much there is to do there.
The Japanese American National Museum on First Street is one of the highly-visible anchors of Little Tokyo. It is primarily a history museum, with a major focus on the early Japanese immigrants and especially the World War II-era concentration camps. The preserved artifacts can be uncomfortable to contemplate, but the internment of Japanese-American citizens is a vital part of U.S. history.
The museum also features a changing collection of Japanese-American art and pop culture exhibits, which can be fun, interesting, intriguing, unusual or all of the above. Star Trek fans may enjoy the George Takei exhibit on display through Aug. 20.
Directly across from the Japanese American National Museum sits a historic brick building which was once JANM’s original home, and before that was a Buddhist temple. Today, it houses the Go For Broke National Education Center.
The center’s main exhibit is similar to JANM — it also tells an important bit of World War II history that might otherwise be overlooked. But it focuses on the Japanese Americans who volunteered to fight against the Axis powers — primarily the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Many of these brave soldiers had been sent to camps (the major exception being the soldiers from Hawaii).
I may be biased because I recently got a job as an editor for the organization, which operates the exhibit and also holds various events to honor veterans. But I think the exhibit does a good job of telling this important story.
In addition, there are also two Japanese gardens in Little Tokyo — one at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center and one at the DoubleTree Los Angeles Downtown hotel. There is also plenty of shopping in the area, ranging from anime to tea cups to Japanese food to books.
If you want to avoid traffic and parking, the Metro Silver Line connects the Gardena area (and also San Pedro) with downtown Los Angeles. The Harbor Gateway Transit Center at 182nd Street has a huge free parking lot. The buses are fast and stop at iconic Los Angeles City Hall, a couple of blocks from Little Tokyo.
Little Tokyo is growing as a cultural neighborhood. It is certainly worth a visit or two.
James Fujita is an editor at the Go For Broke National Education Center in Little Tokyo. He is a former GVN news editor, and copy editor for Visalia Times-Delta. Fujita can be contacted at jim61773@yahoo.com
