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KU: Can you tell me about the, what was happening with redevelopment and how you got involved in that anti-eviction movement and the organizations? Were you in the Anti-Eviction Task Force before Little Tokyo was...

MM: Yeah. So Little Tokyo in the prewar days was a community, residential community of Japanese Americans and others. There's a marker on the corner of San Pedro and First Street, which is considered to be the main intersection of Little Tokyo. There's a marker on the ground that says -- I think it was 1934 or '35 -- about thirty thousand Japanese Americans lived within a three-mile radius of that corner. This was a huge population. But because of World War II and being evicted, taken to camps, so a certain part of, a certain portion of World War II, people said it was like a ghost town, and then became Bronzeville, which I won't get into, but it was the Black community for a short period of time. After World War II, just as the Nisei young people, they were mostly in their college or post-college years, the Nisei were. And they were beginning to have families, and they were trying to rebuild their lives and rebuild the community. But during that time, it was also a rapid expansion of the city as a whole, because after World War II, many people from all over the world, all over the country, were coming to California, and particularly in Los Angeles. And so the city government determined that they needed more facilities, buildings, for their Civic Center. Because the city services were growing, too, so what happened was, in the early '50s, the city used a tool called eminent domain to take by force -- it's kind of like a public taking of private lands -- a whole section of Little Tokyo, particularly the block between San Pedro and Main Street, all along First Street. They did eminent domain and razed, just demolished a whole block of buildings that look... I tell people today, it looked sort of like the block where Fugetsu-Do and Daikokuya and all those are, the main block, but they took that away. So redevelopment was going on, and many changes were taking place in terms of the uses for the community.

And so by just moving forward in time from the '50s on, '60s and '70s and '80s was a time when there were a number of changes taking place in Little Tokyo. And among sort of the interesting people that were coming in, I mentioned Civic Center or the local government, governmental entities were interested, but also looming was Japanese corporate money. So Japanese corporations started investing a lot in many places in the United States. At one time, I think they were buying up many hotels along Waikiki. Even in downtown L.A., hotels like Biltmore and Bonaventure were being bought by Japanese. There's a very big corporate presence in downtown L.A., including Little Tokyo. And so they became one of, they forced us to be a part of trying to rebuild it, and in their case, rebuild it in their own image. And therefore, what it meant was that they would bring in, for example, culture from Japan, or entertainers from Japan or other businesses and other things from Japan. But didn't take into account the needs of the Issei, Nisei and Sansei residents that were living there. So people started getting displaced as the buildings became dilapidated, somebody wants to develop it into something new. And so for many people who had lived there for many, many years, they're being told to move out, and in most cases, not getting any relocation benefits and not getting any replacement housing. So they're being kind of displaced and thrown into the streets, basically. So we wanted to fight for their rights. Again, that's beyond case management, beyond reading envelopes and stuff, but to really advocate for the people and saying, you can't just destroy things.

This was happening not only in Little Tokyo, but what they used to call "urban renewal." And I think it's very similar to gentrification now, but urban renewal, I mean, nobody denied the fact that old buildings have to be replaced by new buildings. But in the process, rather than to just come in as a, sort of an invading force, or kind of similar to the European settlers using this "manifest destiny" and just kind of taking over, as if there was no one there before. Little Tokyo, there were people there before, too, yet all the money interests were looking at it in terms of developing, and there were sort of obstacles, just have them move. And so we began advocating for not only their immediate needs, but also for starting to envision, what kind of community do we want Little Tokyo to be in the future? And so I don't think we did anything sophisticated like power mapping or figuring out all those things in that sense, but we could see very easily what the needs are. I mean, we need, like a community center, we need places for culture, for learning about history. And we wanted to have what we call legacy businesses or long term businesses that had done business in Little Tokyo to remain, have an opportunity to stay. But like a lot of other gentrification scenarios, people are getting squeezed out. So the Little Tokyo Anti-Eviction Task Force was, I don't remember how it got formed, you might remember. But anyway, so we started working with residents, including non-JA residents who were living in these single room occupancy hotels, SRO hotels. And from that we formed the Little Tokyo People's Rights Organization, which continued to take up the issue of evictions and the future of Little Tokyo. But also, in a way, just expanding the scope of what we did to other things which we can talk about later, but which eventually led to the redress movement as well.

KU: I never understood the... Anti-Eviction Task Force wasn't around by the time I came to Little Tokyo, and I wasn't sure what the relationship was between Anti-Eviction Task Force and LTPRO. Is it, the same people would just change the name and broaden the scope, or what catalyzed that change?

MM: Yeah. I think it's fair to say that the Anti-Eviction Task Force was a sort of predecessor to LTPRO. Maybe not perfectly or a hundred percent, but the other entities that existed at the time was the redevelopment agency, which is obviously a governmental or quasi-governmental agency funded by the government to execute plans for the redevelopment. But they had people from the community working in the redevelopment agency. But I think in terms of the Anti-Eviction Task Force, I think it was seen as maybe that in our own consciousness, we were beginning to understand that displacement and evictions is just one... it's not an isolated issue and a problem by itself. It's connected to all the needs and things that people in Little Tokyo cared about. And so I think, again, in a way, I feel that LTPRO, we don't use the word "class struggle," but there's a big class-struggle element to it where, even within the community, there's certain forces who supported Japan's corporate expansion efforts, and others who thought that Little Tokyo should be mostly for Japanese, and then so we don't want to deal with all the multiracial Little Tokyo. Which, you know, like in LTPRO we were determined not to be discriminatory in that sense, we're fighting for eviction or anti-eviction rights.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.