Summer in the City

Summer time!  It’s summer time!  Cold tea and pizza time!

I am amazed at the volume of out of towners who show up in JTown during the summer.  Sitting on the steps of the old Higashi Temple waiting for a friend, I must have ruined at least 10-15 photos by people trying to document the ancient facade with their ancient digital cameras.  No Instagramming today.  All the smartphoners are on their bikes as part of CicLAvia.

I wonder, sometimes where they all come from.  They can’t all be from out of town, I highly doubt that our three block radius is hitting the front page of the Lonely Planet guide anytime soon.  Perhaps they are Westsiders cautiously venturing east of LA Brea.  Perhaps they are commuters, curious about the Gold Line stop they always pass through.  Perhaps they are daytrippers from OC, Santa Barbara, San Diego, looking for a bite to eat and a curiosity to pin on their Pinterest.

Regardless, they are here, and perhaps they will be back.  Perhaps they will become regulars, perhaps they will not return.  Perhaps they will be at a party and mention the bacon donut they got the other day at some cafe in Little Tokyo.  Perhaps they will be at a party spitting game and suggest dinner at this Japanese place they discovered some odd Sunday months ago.

It is summer in the city, and the days are long in JTown.  Out of towners and locals welcome.

Fly.

I’ve been hunched over my computer for the past three hours at Cafe Dulce, working on some writing in between sips of iced tea.

As I transition from paragraph to paragraph, I have been taking time breathe and look out the window and I must say that while I knew this to be true to a certain degree already, I have noticed that JTown people are FLY.

It could just be LA.  It could just be that as a city we have collectively imbibed the catwalk Kool Aid so deeply that we dress up to check out mailboxes (as if we have mailboxes).  However, I have seen no shortage of pomade, flowly dresses, and dolled up eyelids walking about the paper lanterns and stone gardens today.

Are we seeing the rise (or have we been seeing the rise) of a trendy Little Tokyo?  With the LT Design week a few years ago and the sudden explosion of streetwear in the ‘hood, is JTown a physical manifestation of the “Japan Cool” that hit in the ’90s and has somehow managed to keep hold?

What does that mean for JTown’s history as an ethnic enclave, a former ghetto, and a battleground that has pitted activists and organizers against city redevelopment efforts?  What does that mean for JTown’s historical love/hate relationship with Japanese interests who have gone as far as destroying affordable housing to build office buildings?  What does that mean for me sitting here in my t-shirt and scuffed up jeans?

Meanwhile, I am out of tea and I need a haircut.  Perhaps I will come back on another, less trendy day.

The Museum

I have always seen The Japanese American National Museum as a treasure.  As with every organization there are always kinks, but on the whole our community is so privileged to have an institution that documents our history.

Like many other JA families, my family has a grip of heirlooms in JANM and why not? My grandparents (particularly my grandma) helped facilitate its inception and my earliest memories of JTown are filtered through midday folding sessions with Ruth, the weekend origami instructor. Flash forward to 2013 and I have been to numerous panels at the National (now “Inouye”) Center for the Preservation of Democracy and after over two decades of visiting “The Museum,” I have informally walked countless friends and fellow organizers through the permanent Common Ground exhibit.

This exhibit does a great job of explaining JA history from first wave immigration to the camp story, but starts to trickle off after 1945, pushing forty years of social/political growth, rebuilding, and cultural development into one room.  And then nothing happens after 1988 (coincidentally the year I was born, so…I hope the drop off isn’t my fault.)  No doubt the camp story is extremely important and ever-relevant, but by peaking the narrative there, the museum forgets the decades following which pushed forward recovery, empowerment, self-determination, and community building.  It almost feels like our own stories as yonsei or even sansei are not worth commenting on, adding to the self-fulfilling conversation about the youth distancing ourselves from the JA community.

It seems things are changing.

With new leadership has come a new canvas for the curators to play with.  “American Tapestry: 25 Stories from the Archive” dusted off some pretty interesting and rarely told stories of important figures throughout JA history while going beyond the camp story.  The current exhibit, “Visible & Invisible: A Hapa Japanese American History,” has focus on the early 1900s, but takes the story to present day in a pretty striking manner, looking at both Japanese American and Japanese approaches to mixed race identity.  There’s even a banner featuring our good friend Jero.  I’m finding myself more and more intrigued by the programming, and the newly former young leadership advisory committee is bringing younger and younger programming to the building.

This weekend I had the opportunity to attend some very swanky JANM events including the annual gala (bomb dessert, by the way), placing my spike-pierced ears and grassroots vocabulary next to CEOs and big time philanthropists.  While I certainly felt out place, being pushed out of my element reminded me of the diversity in our community and how ultimately, no matter how we express it, we are all working towards preserving our community’s story as a gateway towards social change and community strength.  The museum is one way to do this.

My mom talks about the importance of museums becoming more than just a knowledge base and instead a full, well rounded experience. Curated experiences are ultimately how museums will attract a younger, more tech-saavy audience. This doesn’t mean everything needs to be touch screen with a mobile component, it just means that in the 21st century, facts are for Wikipedia and it is up to the institutions to contextualize the data.

Japanese America did not end in 1945. It did not end in 1988 with Redress. With an invaluable archive and upcoming exhibits around tattoos, the Dodgers, and Hello Kitty, JANM has the opportunity to rethink itself as a space that reflects the widening JA community and interacts with a JA community that is slowly coming back together.  And it looks like they’re taking that opportunity seriously.