Picture the first Japanese immigrants arriving in Los Angeles in the 1880s to work in agriculture and domestic service. By the 1920s, Little Tokyo was a thriving urban neighborhood of stores, restaurants, Buddhist temples, and newspapers serving a community of nearly forty thousand. Then on February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, and within weeks every person of Japanese descent on the West Coast — citizen or not — was ordered to report to assembly centers and then to internment camps in the interior of the country.
More than 110,000 people were incarcerated. Little Tokyo was emptied. During the war years, newly arrived Black workers from the South moved into the vacant neighborhood, calling it Bronzeville.
After the war, Japanese Americans slowly returned, rebuilt, and reclaimed the neighborhood. The Japanese American National Museum in the building beside you holds the most important collection of Japanese American history in the country. The experience of incarceration is documented here with photographs, personal objects, and oral histories that must not be forgotten.