Guide To L.A.'s Little Tokyo

Above, New Years Day Oshogatsu in Little Tokyo. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

During the last several years when I lived in Los Angeles, I would attend the Oshogatsu festival in the city's Little Tokyo district on New Year's Day.

I also wandered into the district for shopping or partaking in the district's restaurants. For kaiju fans, there are toy stores carrying Godzilla and other toys.

Above, former Assemblyman Paul Bannai and yours truly at the 2014 Oshogatsu.

When I worked for Assemblyman Paul Bannai back in the 1970s, we had events at the New Otani Hotel (now the DoubleTree by Hilton). My first visit was with my Asian Studies class during my senior year at Hawthorne High School.

Little Tokyo is one of the few things I miss since I moved to New Mexico.

AFAR has posted a guide to visiting Little Tokyo that should be useful for visitors.

It begins with:

Little Bangladesh, Thai Town, Little Armenia, Koreatown, Little Ethiopia, Tehrangeles, Historic Filipinotown—if there’s a culture you want to explore, chances are Los Angeles has a neighborhood for that. One of the city’s most popular ethnic enclaves is Little Tokyo, a district on the northern outskirts of downtown L.A. that dates to the turn of the 20th century. In 1885, Charles Hama, a former seaman from Japan, opened the now-closed Kame Restaurant on East First Street (the first known Japanese-owned business in L.A.). By the early 1900s, the issei (Japanese immigrant) population boomed from 3,000 residents to 10,000 people, leading to an explosion of Japanese-owned shops and restaurants; several remain open today. And so Little Tokyo was born.

One of only three official Japantowns in the United States (the other two are also in California, in San Francisco and San Jose), the area’s five-ish blocks are crammed with a sizeable Japanese American population who operate and frequent the district’s old-school sushi joints, streetwear vendors, Instagrammable soft-serve spots, manga hot spots, and more. Consider this to be your indispensable guide to one of L.A.’s most bustling, delicious, and explorable nabes.

To read more, go here.