Latest / Japanese America / S2E9 Cruising J-Town: Exploring Japanese American Car Culture and Community

Transcript

S2E9 Cruising J-Town: Exploring Japanese American Car Culture and Community · Japanese America

• 0:00
  Michelle. If you had the time and the will to cruise a street, what street would you cruise in your car and why?
• 0:06
  And what car would you want to cruise in?
• 0:08
  I love cars. Did you know I love cars and I.
• 0:12
  I love to have red NSX.
• 0:16
  I'll take brand new, but 1990 would be okay.
• 0:20
  Um, I would like to drive on first Street by Fugetsudo, though, and I'm gonna eat some mo.
• 0:26
  No, I'm gonna buy some mochi, but I'm not gonna eat it in my car because I don't want the cornstarch to fall on my seat.
• 0:33
  I'm sorry. And also, I can.
• 0:35
  I have another car? I have, I'll have 1963 Porsche Roadstar Ivory color with the red trim, leather seats.
• 0:49
  And I'm going to drive highway one.
• 1:08
  Welcome to season two, episode number nine of the Japanese America Podcast, the podcast where we explore the blend of Japanese and American cultures, history, and traditions, as well as all the quirky and wonderful things in between. My name is Michelle and I'm one of your hosts.
• 1:23
  And I'm the other host, Koji Michelle.
• 1:25
  An exciting Halloween plans.
• 1:27
  What are you gonna dress up as?
• 1:28
  I don't have any Halloween plans.
• 1:31
  I don't know, I live on the street like all the people are old and there's no kids.
• 1:37
  So, like, every year, I have, like, a pot of candy out.
• 1:40
  Nobody shows up and I get to eat the candy afterwards.
• 1:45
  What about you? Are you going to dress up for Halloween?
• 1:47
  I'm one of those guys that doesn't love to get dressed up.
• 1:51
  I'm not one of those guys that that likes going out to trick or treat.
• 1:55
  I don't know why. I've never have. Ever since I was a kid.
• 1:58
  Although my area in South Pasadena is hopping on Halloween.
• 2:02
  We have tons of people and we give out a lot of candy, and it's kind of crazy, but it's kind of fun.
• 2:08
  Wow. I have a friend whose uncle is George Takei, and I get to go to his house to give out candies on Halloween night and all my gosh, people come with like a pillowcases to put candy in.
• 2:25
  I'm like, oh my gosh, that's a lot of candy.
• 2:28
  If you couldn't tell this month we are talking cards.
• 2:32
  Specifically, JANM's newest exhibition, cruising J-town.
• 2:35
  Southern California and Car Culture.
• 2:38
  They've been inseparable for generations.
• 2:41
  Out here, what we drive isn't just another getting from point A to point B, it's a statement, a symbol, a way to carve out identity, connect with community, and chase opportunity.
• 2:53
  For Japanese Americans in the Southland. That connection runs deep. Over a century of history, resilience and reinvention, all told through the vehicles they've built, driven and cherished for Model T's to modded imports, the story of mobility has always been more than mechanical.
• 3:08
  It's personal.
• 3:09
  Cruising j-town behind the wheel of the Nikkei community isn't just about cars.
• 3:15
  It's about legacy, identity and the roads that connect them.
• 3:19
  This exhibition dives into the stories of both iconic figures and everyday enthusiasts who've shaped Southern California's car culture across generations, from hot rods and lowriders to the import boom and drift racing.
• 3:34
  The Nikkei community has left its mark on every scene.
• 3:37
  To help us talk about the show, we brought on curator Doctor Oliver Wang.
• 3:41
  Welcome.
• 3:42
  Tell us a little bit about the exhibition.
• 3:44
  Cruising J-town, which opened earlier this summer and will be open through mid-December at this point, is dedicated to the 110 plus year history of the Japanese American community here in Southern California, and their long relationship to the world of cars and trucks. And usually when I tell when I give tours, what I tell visitors is that despite the very beautiful cars that are in the exhibition, I don't think of this as a car exhibition.
• 4:08
  I think of it as a community exhibition, which it is.
• 4:11
  I mean, that's really what it was meant to be that uses cars and photos and objects, documents, things related to the world of car culture as a way of telling the stories, whether it's individual, family, neighborhood, larger community histories that are tied to what it's been like to come of age and be part of the Nikkei community here in LA for six generations and growing.
• 4:34
  So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your role on the show?
• 4:37
  I'm Oliver Wang. I am the curator of Cruising J-town.
• 4:40
  I authored the companion book, also called cruising J-town.
• 4:44
  My background is I have been a long time arts and culture writer and journalist.
• 4:50
  I'm a professor of sociology at Cal State Long Beach.
• 4:53
  I study popular culture.
• 4:55
  In particular, I study the popular culture of Asian Americans for the most part.
• 4:59
  And so cruising j-town really grew, at least initially, I should say, my interest in the topic because I'm not a car person, not in any conventional sense of the term, but because I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley in the 1980s, I was very aware of the import car scene as it was launching off in that era. And more to the point, I was aware that the people in these lowered Hondas and, you know, Acuras with their tinted windows and HKS decals on the side of the cars, these were all being driven by people that looked like you and I.
• 5:30
  And when I went off to college and got interested and involved in Asian American studies, I assumed maybe, perhaps naively, that, oh, hey, this is going to be something that people are going to study and write about because this is lived culture out in the literal streets.
• 5:46
  It's not. It's underground to a certain extent, but it's not hidden. You can't you can't say that it's obscure in that respect, and much to my surprise, very little was done over the years, at least within. Well, I mean, it's not just that it was very little was done with the Asian-American studies, period. Very little was done at all.
• 6:04
  You would see the occasional, you know, journalism article that acknowledged the role that especially for the import car scene, that different Asian American figures played within it, which was important. That's great.
• 6:15
  There were a trio of academic articles that all came out in the 2000, and those were all about the import car scene as well.
• 6:23
  But it really bothered me that no one was doing something akin to, you know, a book length study, a dissertation, let alone something like, let's say, a documentary or a museum exhibition for that part.
• 6:35
  And this for me, this kind of came to a head nine years ago.
• 6:38
  This was the summer of 2016, and I was complaining to an old friend of mine who, like me, we both came out of Asian American Studies out of UC Berkeley together.
• 6:48
  And his remark was, you know, Oliver, you've been complaining about this for 20 years. The fact that there's no, you know, there's no book about Asian Americans in cars, which is true in up until this year, there's never been a book about Asian Americans in cars, which just seems kind of insane to me.
• 7:04
  And nine years ago, when I was complaining about this, my friend was like, hey, if you really feel like this work should exist, I mean, you have spent your career studying and writing about Asian Americans and pop culture. Why don't you just go and do it then?
• 7:18
  Which, after a moment's contemplation, I was like, okay, that's that's actually kind of a fair point. And later that same day, I was talking to my wife, I'm Chinese American second gen, my wife is Yonsei, so she's she's fourth Gen JA.
• 7:31
  And she was like, hey, look, if you're really interested in starting on this someplace, you should interview my dad.
• 7:37
  Because what I didn't know about my father in law is that I knew he was a car guy, but I didn't know that in high school, he went to San Fernando High School.
• 7:44
  His family were flower farmers who settled in the valley after coming back from from being incarcerated during the war.
• 7:51
  So he came of age in the 1950s as a high school student again.
• 7:55
  San Fernando High School and him and his friends were all these kids of farmers and gardeners, gas station owners, etc.
• 8:03
  they started a car club with each other called Kamei, meaning turtle, because their cars were all slow.
• 8:09
  And I was so fascinated by this, this aspect of of his history and by extension, the community history that I went out and found other people who had similar kinds of stories, similar backgrounds, being in gay car clubs from the 50s and early 60s. And I ended up writing an article just about that one tiny sliver of that, this moment in history of these Nikkei car clubs.
• 8:32
  And I published it through Discover Nikkei, the museum's newsletter.
• 8:35
  And by coincidence, the museum, independent of anything that I had been doing in 2018, they came up with the idea of a car related exhibition, and because I'd written this one article for their newsletter, they figured, well, he seems to know something about this stuff.
• 8:51
  Maybe he'd be interested in curating this exhibition that we're contemplating.
• 8:56
  So that's when the museum came in.
• 8:57
  That's when the exhibition was effectively born.
• 9:00
  I did not start this project with the intent of it being an exhibition.
• 9:04
  I wasn't even really sure I had the bandwidth or desire to want to see it through, to become a book, even though that was kind of the original impetus.
• 9:12
  But when JANM stepped in, it really provided this pathway to do something more substantial in which there would be an exhibition and there would be a book from it, not just fulfilling, but exceeding whatever expectations I might have had when I set out just to, like, start collecting some of these stories because I felt like, well, I guess someone should.
• 9:31
  Did you have a lowered car?
• 9:33
  No, no, my first car was a, um, was a 1980 Chevy citation.
• 9:37
  It was a hand-me-down from my parents.
• 9:39
  And the citation Notoriously is considered one of the worst cars that Chevrolet ever produced. I mean, it's one of those jokes where it's, you know, Chevy looked at how bad the Pinto was from Ford and decided they could outcompete Ford and making even worse car. But as crappy as that car was, you know, it was my car. So it's how I.
• 9:59
  It's what I learned to drive on.
• 10:00
  It's it's the car that I had access to.
• 10:02
  And especially for anyone who, you know, you grew up in Los Angeles.
• 10:05
  Having that license, having access to a car was, you know, it was your ticket to freedom. You could kind of, in theory, go where you wanted to go when you wanted to go.
• 10:14
  And so it didn't really matter that it was not a, I mean, it was it was a bad car.
• 10:18
  The thing that I remember now thinking about it is it only had an Am.
• 10:22
  I think it only had an Am stereo, so not even FM.
• 10:25
  Number one. Number two, there was exactly one speaker in the car that was in the center console.
• 10:31
  And at some point I blew out that speaker.
• 10:33
  So I had to just bring a boombox in the car if I wanted to listen to music.
• 10:38
  And anyone who knows my background as a DJ, as a music journalist, etc. the idea that I would be driving spending hours in a vehicle that had no good sound system would seem anathema.
• 10:48
  But it's sort of what I just kind of put up with back then because like I said, because it was the car that I had.
• 10:52
  Was there a moment where cruising through J-town made you feel seen in a way you hadn't before?
• 10:59
  Well, the thing is, I, you know, I didn't cruise j-town.
• 11:02
  Um, and what the title of the exhibition and book refers to, or at least partly refers to, is from the 1970s through the late 1980s, cruising the annual Nisei Week.
• 11:14
  Um, not just festival, but specifically Nisei Week used to have a carnival with rides and games.
• 11:19
  And a car show, right?
• 11:20
  Well, no, the car show followed the cruise.
• 11:23
  So the cruise really began informally, as best as we know, at some point in the early to mid 1970s, but it really grew in proportion and scale throughout the rest of the 70s and absolutely into the 80s.
• 11:36
  So that, you know, by its high point, probably in the mid 1980s, it had become the pinnacle Japanese American, really Asian American car event of the year, even though it was always informal.
• 11:49
  Right? But it was because it was at the end of the specifically in the LA community.
• 11:55
  It was at the end of the JA festival season.
• 11:57
  So every other church or community center had already done their different festivals or obons, whatever. Nisei week was the end of the season in a sense.
• 12:07
  So it really became, as one of my interviewees described it, became like the Super Bowl of cruises.
• 12:13
  And so, you know, you would have hundreds of cars, trucks, motorcycles out there.
• 12:17
  And this one weekend or maybe two weekend nights every year, thousands of people lining the sidewalks.
• 12:23
  So the photos and we had we have at least one home movie from that era.
• 12:28
  It's just astounding to see.
• 12:30
  And as I said, it was completely informal, which also explains why Eventually, both the festival organisers and law enforcement decided to shut it down.
• 12:39
  It was a combination of safety concerns, probably more around noise complaints, because at that point Little Tokyo had become redeveloped with a lot more residential housing and but weren't really crazy about hearing cars doing donuts at like, I don't know, 11 p.m. on a Saturday.
• 12:53
  So the car show was created.
• 12:56
  I think, as you know, we think the earliest one was 1988 or 89.
• 13:00
  I'd have to go back to my notes, but Car Show was a compromise or a concession, which is that we don't want you cruising anymore, but we'll give you a static space to put your car so people can still come look at these cars. But we don't want you cruising.
• 13:16
  But the cruise was and again, why we named the exhibition and the book after it was partly because it was this formative generational event in which if you came of age in LA in the 70s or 80s, whether you were a car person or not, you knew about the cruise, you probably witnessed it at some point if you went to, you know, Nisei Week every year.
• 13:36
  And it was a really big deal that in a sense, you know, it glued together.
• 13:41
  This whole generation of mostly, you know, Sansei women and men who had this shared experience that lasted for a good, you know, ten, 15, maybe even 20 years, depending on when we can pinpoint when it started.
• 13:52
  Following up on that question.
• 13:54
  Tell us a little about the cultural significance.
• 13:57
  Why was it formative for that generation?
• 14:00
  Anything that brings people together, you know, into this, into shared space.
• 14:04
  And I would say cruising, you're sharing the road that you have these spectators on the sidewalk, like you're basically occupying and you're activating this public space in downtown.
• 14:13
  Anytime you're able to do that, especially year after year, it's just bound to create these kinds of social ties and associations because it becomes this defining memory that people have growing up so that, you know, whatever other differences people might have in terms of their personal interests, their professional backgrounds.
• 14:32
  You can always go back to like, hey, do you remember when we all used to cruise Nisei and the people that I met, you know, through working on this project for whom Nisei Week was a big deal.
• 14:41
  They are most of them are still friends with the people that they met back then.
• 14:46
  So, you know, we're talking 40 years later.
• 14:48
  It defined not just their social life at the time, but it has really colored their social community.
• 14:54
  You know, two generations later.
• 14:56
  How is the cruising culture different from the import car culture?
• 15:00
  They're not I don't think they're wildly different.
• 15:02
  I mean, the thing about cruising is it's a way of being seen, right? It's a way of occupying public space, but from the comfort of a private vehicle, you know, the ways in which people who and I've absolutely drawing from years of people writing about Lowriding culture, which is very much also cruising culture.
• 15:22
  The thing about a cruise is it's a way of especially for young people, right? It's a way for them to insert themselves into public civic space in a way in which young people typically don't have access to for any number of reasons, because they're not they're not taken seriously.
• 15:39
  But when you're in your car, you kind of get to define the turf in which you get to occupy. And the the more memorable your car is, the better your sound system.
• 15:49
  These are all ways of attracting attention.
• 15:51
  And just like I keep saying, you know, you're inserting and asserting yourself into the public sphere in a way that I think symbolically is really deeply meaningful. I mean, there's a reason why all across the United States, for decades, young people would, you know, every city would have its cruising blocks, multiple ones, especially here in Los Angeles.
• 16:13
  There was there had to have been something that was compelling to draw all these people to continue this activity week after week, year after year.
• 16:21
  And I think a lot of it, again, it goes back to this was a way for us to claim, you know, space for ourselves where we might have been disregarded in other places. You wanted to know about the intersection, though, between cruising and the import scene.
• 16:33
  So the import scene absolutely grew out of things like the Nisei Week cruise, the first Japanese imports that really begin to make waves within.
• 16:44
  I mean, not just the Japanese American community, but within the American car market begins in the 1970s with cars like the Datsun 510, the 240 Zx, early Toyota like Corollas and Celicas, and these same youth who are, you know, spending all their time cruising different festivals and whatnot.
• 17:06
  They're amongst the first to begin adopting and then modifying and racing and really helping to legitimize these cars.
• 17:13
  After decades in which Japanese cars were roundly dismissed and ignored within the US car market. I mean, some of that is absolutely due to lingering anti-Asian racism following World War two and other factors.
• 17:26
  But for what? For all those reasons, it's significant that generation, young generations of Asian Americans really helped to take the lead in not necessarily popularizing these cars. I mean, I think that's true to some extent, but really, I would say legitimizing them.
• 17:41
  And so I don't think you get to the import car movement without preceding roots, which include things like the cruise, which include things like custom cars in the 50s and 60s amongst within the JA community, you have street racing traditions that go back to the 1930s within this community.
• 17:59
  And so the import scene really is just an outgrowth.
• 18:02
  It's the latest chapter, if you will, from a very long book of examples in which Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans have been have involved themselves in the Car world in many, many different ways, again, going back well over a century.
• 18:17
  And so I think the import scene really is just that, a more contemporary manifestation of a phenomenon that you would have seen ten years before, 20 years before.
• 18:26
  You know, so forth and so on.
• 18:28
  Do you think cruising culture has a different impact on Japanese American activism and redress?
• 18:33
  Yeah, that's a great question.
• 18:35
  I don't know what the direct relationships are.
• 18:38
  What I do know is, and I only discovered this literally just the other week, is one of the first people that I interviewed is this guy Roy Nakano.
• 18:48
  And I interviewed him because he was the founder and editor of Lacar.com, which is a car news and review site.
• 18:57
  And I later found out that he was at Cal State Long Beach, which is where I teach in the early 70s.
• 19:03
  So he was there for really the first wave of Asian American studies to come out of, of Long Beach. And so a lot of our conversations weren't about cars at all.
• 19:10
  It was really about those years at Long Beach.
• 19:13
  But I only just found out the other month that he was one of the co-founders of the NCRR. I had no idea. It's not so much that I think the car scenes have a direct relationship to redress.
• 19:25
  It's that it's the same community of Sansei youth who, on the one hand, were interested and involved in the car world, but were also interested in politically activated to be able to then help to give birth to Asian American studies in the late 60s and early 70s, and by the 80s were really at the forefront of of redress and reparations.
• 19:48
  So, in other words, I think it's more about like this overlapping set of Venn diagrams in which car folks, community folks really deeply overlapped.
• 19:58
  I would be a little bit more hesitant to try to draw some kind of direct causal relationship between the two.
• 20:04
  What I can say, though, is, and this is something that I discuss in the book, is you find that the ways in which cars wind their way into Japanese American stories here in LA, it's kind of endless.
• 20:20
  Even in the more indirect ways.
• 20:23
  And so during the World War II incarceration experience, there are all these kinds of stories involving cars and trucks that you just may not assume when you have this incarcerated population.
• 20:35
  But camps needed motor pools in order to transport, do deliveries, ferry people around these these basically these small towns.
• 20:44
  Those motor pools were almost exclusively manned by Japanese American mechanics and drivers. And so you have all these stories about the motor pools.
• 20:51
  And the motor pools were very powerful within camp politics because they performed a pretty important need. You know, I found stories about adolescence in camp, stealing cars to joyride.
• 21:02
  So, you know, even behind barbed wire, they're still engaging in these kind of youthful pursuits around car stuff.
• 21:08
  And so to tie this into what you're asking, it doesn't strike me as being remotely unusual, then, that that interest in cars would then carry into future generations.
• 21:19
  So now jump forward a generation and you know the early years in which people actually start making pilgrimages back to the camps.
• 21:28
  You know, this took what I think the first pilgrimages weren't until the 1960s, if I'm not mistaken, the day of Remembrance, I don't think started until either it was God. Was it the early 80s?
• 21:41
  So, I mean, it took decades for people within this community to kind of revisit this obviously deeply traumatic experience and begin to not just talk about it, but then to pursue justice around it.
• 21:53
  But cars wind their way into this, too, because what is a pilgrimage if not involving driving back to these sites, some of which people had to drive themselves to get to, like, you know, Manzanar?
• 22:04
  In March of 1942, hundreds of families started in a caravan from the Rose Bowl.
• 22:09
  This was in March of 1942.
• 22:11
  They gathered in the morning at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena and then had this four mile long caravan to drive themselves to Manzanar, to be incarcerated and to have their cars impounded, and then later basically sold to the government without consent.
• 22:25
  And, you know, there's a kind of eerie, you know, full circle or I you know, I don't know if you would call it irony, but when the pilgrimages begin, what's happening is people are getting back into cars and they're taking caravans back to these spaces in which their parents and their aunts and uncles were all incarcerated during the war.
• 22:45
  Day of remembrance is a very powerful story about how in the car ride and this was up in the Seattle area in the car ride.
• 22:53
  And they also started from, I think, a baseball stadium to drive down to one of the relocation, so-called relocation centers.
• 23:00
  And they were talking about how in the cars themselves is that their family members finally began to talk about their wartime experience.
• 23:09
  And sure, if it wasn't a car, it'd be some other space.
• 23:11
  I'm not trying to make too much of the car angle, except that there was a car angle.
• 23:15
  It's that these cars, these conversations were happening in vehicles. So as I was trying to say, it's just incredible the ways in which when you just kind of just scratch a little bit beneath the surface, you just find aspects of car culture winding its way through all of these community stories, even in ways that may not seem remotely intuitive.
• 23:36
  Has any of the stories stayed with you while doing research for that book or for the exhibition?
• 23:41
  Yeah, I think my favorite and I've told this to, you know, people who've come to visit the exhibit and other interviews, but it's it's the story of the fish trucks because I knew nothing about them.
• 23:51
  Did you grow up with fish trucks? Do you have a memory of that at all? Did you grow up in LA?
• 23:54
  I grew up in South Pasadena.
• 23:56
  Oh, okay. Yeah. So, yeah, maybe South Pas didn't necessarily have fish trucks. Um, in fact, I've talked to people who grew up in Pasadena who are a generation older than you and I, and they didn't have them here.
• 24:07
  And I think partly it was because in, in the Pasadena JA community.
• 24:12
  They had local markets, so there may not have been as much of a need.
• 24:16
  But in any case, for folks unaware, unfamiliar though with the audience who listens to this podcast, I'm sure a lot of you probably have known about the fish trucks, or at least your parents did.
• 24:25
  But the fish truck started in the late 1940s, as best we know, and lasted through really the late 80s and early 90s.
• 24:33
  It's like a 40 year phenomenon in which, you know, a few dozen. I think at the height, there was probably about two dozen fish truck drivers who worked six days a week working very long, you know, 16, 18 hour days.
• 24:46
  And every morning they would drive to a fish market, whether it was in San Pedro or in downtown LA.
• 24:52
  And they would stock up with fresh fish, rice, beef jerky, fish cake, tofu, botan rice candy, whatever, and then drive all across the greater Los Angeles area, door to door making deliveries.
• 25:06
  And they did this? Yeah, it was a form of work, absolutely for them. But it was also, to me, a massive community service is because after the war, a lot of JA families did not move back to the downtown area.
• 25:20
  They moved up to Pacoima, up in the valley.
• 25:23
  They moved down to Gardena and Torrance in the South Bay.
• 25:26
  You know, they moved out to Montebello and Monterey Park, but most of the markets were still in Little Tokyo, so it wasn't that convenient, you know. You moved out to the suburbs, but your markets didn't go with you.
• 25:36
  This is, you know, way before, like the age of, like, mitsuwa's and nijiya's being everywhere. So the fish trucks just they, they, they managed to bring the markets to the people instead and made sure that, you know, generations of Japanese American households had access to the food goods that were important to them.
• 25:55
  So fresh sashimi, you know, tofu, rice, things that you wouldn't necessarily be able to easily get at a conventional, you know, quote unquote, white market, if you would.
• 26:03
  So I love the story of the fish trucks because it because there are also a touchstone where people who grew up in LA, except for, I guess, those who grew up in South Pasadena. But, you know, you know, most Japanese Americans, if they grew up in LA, especially in the 60s through the 80s, they all have a memory of their their local fish man.
• 26:22
  Maybe not his name, but they might remember the color of the truck.
• 26:26
  The point being is they remember the fish man like that was just part of their daily, weekly experience in ways that that they kind of maybe took for granted at the time.
• 26:34
  But when they think back now, it's kind of like in the same way that I was saying earlier about how the Nisei Week cruise was a touchstone for at least a generation of people. The fish trucks in LA have been a touchstone for generations of Japanese Americans as well.
• 26:49
  It's a memory that they can all turn to and talk about, because it was something that they all grew up around.
• 26:54
  What do you think younger generations miss about the cruising culture?
• 26:57
  I guess what comes to mind is it's about the importance of being able to do things with others In the same kind of shared physical space.
• 27:08
  So even though cruising, everyone's siloed inside of their car, when you're in a cruising area, you know, so you think about like Whittier Boulevard in East LA being arguably we're not even arguably, Whittier Boulevard is the most famous cruising space in Los Angeles. But also, you know, the many years in which the Nisei Week Festival brought folks down there.
• 27:30
  There's something about participating in the same activity, in the same shared physical space that I think produces social ties, a common experience that I think is, as I've been saying, it can be very really deeply meaningful in a way where and, you know, I don't want to sound like one of those old people like, you know, bemoaning online culture because, you know, I spent I spent a lot of time online. It's not that I don't get it, but there's a difference there.
• 27:57
  Like online allows you to connect with people that you may never come face to face with.
• 28:03
  And I do believe you can build meaningful friendships and relationships in that environment. I mean, I met my wife online, not through a dating app, but we were email pen pals for like two years when we were on opposite coasts.
• 28:14
  That really would not have been.
• 28:16
  I mean, I guess we could have written physical letters, but I mean, our relationship very much began by us, by the existence of the internet.
• 28:23
  So I'm not Pooh poohing that at all.
• 28:25
  But there is something about the power of sharing space, which I don't think can be replicated in other means.
• 28:32
  It is about the physicality of being in each other's presence, in each other's orbit, that I do think produces a kind of social tie and experience that is that's significant.
• 28:45
  And I do think that, you know, it's not like cruising culture is completely disappeared, but it's not what it used to be, let's put it that way.
• 28:52
  And especially in an era in which young people are much less interested in getting their licenses or driving.
• 28:58
  I have a 20 year old daughter who grew up here in LA.
• 29:00
  She doesn't have her license still, and it's just not as important to them.
• 29:05
  And I don't bemoan this.
• 29:06
  I mean, there's actually there's plenty of great reasons why we should be less car centric, let alone in Los Angeles.
• 29:13
  But in answer to your question, I think what you miss out on is the disappearance of things like the cruises is it was a opportunity, not the only opportunity, but it was a opportunity to have this shared experience with your friends and your peers to make new friends.
• 29:31
  And this was made possible because people, as I keep saying here, were able to be in the same space as each other.
• 29:38
  And I do think that more than anything, it doesn't matter what you're doing, but sharing that space is important.
• 29:43
  If cruising J-town were a mixtape, what song would you insist be on it and what memory does it hold?
• 29:51
  I can answer the first question, but it doesn't apply to the second. I think the answer to the first question would be it would have to be the song crusin in J-town by Hiroshima. So the the name Crusing j-town itself, even though it is absolutely partially a reference to the Nisei Week cruise like we've been talking about. But directly it comes from the name of the name, a title of a 1975 documentary by Duane Kudo, or Kubo, I should say, who was at.
• 30:18
  He's one of the founders of visual Communications, and he made this short documentary in 75 about Hiroshima.
• 30:24
  This is before Hiroshima was even recording.
• 30:26
  Yet they were just kind of a community group, but it was had developed notoriety.
• 30:31
  And so that was the name of his movie.
• 30:33
  And Hiroshima later then recorded a song also called Cruisin J-town that came out after the movie came out. And it's both.
• 30:43
  It's the inspiration behind the name of our exhibition in the book.
• 30:46
  It's also the case that Hiroshima's founder Dan Kuramoto has all of these car intersections, not with him specifically in terms of he was not really a car person, for example. Dan's older.
• 30:58
  His older brother, Ford Kuramoto, was named after the car brand because their father, Jack Kuramoto, who was a pre-war hot rod racer and most hot rods, especially before World War two, were all built on Ford platforms.
• 31:13
  So father loved Ford named his first born after the car company.
• 31:17
  Jack Kuramoto opened up a gas station at Second and San Pedro.
• 31:22
  This was before the war.
• 31:23
  It survived the war because an employee who was not JA ran it so that the family, when they came back to LA after I think they went to Manzanar after they came back from camp, were able to get back into business.
• 31:34
  He ran that gas station, which became known as Jack's Auto Service, for for decades. And Dan's younger brother, John Kuramoto, was the three time back to back to back national quarter midget racing champion.
• 31:48
  Uh, that's it's own whole story.
• 31:50
  So we did not choose the name Cruising J-town because we realized that you know, it's it's it's taken from a documentary about a band whose founder has all of these car stories within his family. Like, we didn't know any of this stuff.
• 32:05
  We just thought it was like a cool sounding name for exhibition.
• 32:08
  But as it turns out, it has all of these other layers that tie back into Japanese American car culture in Los Angeles.
• 32:16
  And so you have to have that that Cruisin J-town song on that mixtape.
• 32:21
  But I don't have a personal relationship to it because it's not a song that I grew up with. You know, if I had to pick something, just my personal mixtape about like cars, I would probably have to pick a song that, you know, I just remember hearing a lot when I was learning how to drive.
• 32:37
  So this would have been the summer of can I do math here?
• 32:41
  1988 is when I turned 16, and back then this was before I really discovered and was listening to hip hop.
• 32:48
  It was. I was before then, before hip hop, I was listening mostly to modern rock on K-Rock, which if you grew up in LA, you knew was like the new wave modern rock station.
• 32:58
  And some of the songs I remember from that, from learning how to drive, like for whatever reason, REM's Rome Comes.
• 33:06
  Oh no, no, no, I'm sorry, that's the B-52's.
• 33:09
  Rome comes to mind, as does R.E.M.
• 33:11
  stand. So one's about standing, one's about roaming.
• 33:14
  But I just remember those two songs just being on the radio a lot.
• 33:18
  So I think maybe those would be songs that I would pick, just because I associate it so much with learning to get behind the wheel, learning how to drive.
• 33:27
  And as someone who still enjoys driving, you know, some 40 years later, you know, those those memories and those songs kind of stick with you in terms of defining this moment in your life in which you're really thinking about, like, what does it mean to be in a car and to be able to go places in it?
• 33:40
  Michelle, any thoughts on Doctor Wang's interview?
• 33:42
  You know, I love cars and I, I don't know, I came to America and I lived in San Diego, and I used to go to this thing at the stadium in San Diego.
• 33:56
  They put cones on it and they do like spins and stuff.
• 34:00
  I was like, I was thinking of my youth while listening to his interview.
• 34:05
  My favorite part of the interview was when Oliver talked about the caravan to Manzanar from the Rose Bowl, and how it was a four mile line that must have been super slow. But also, I can't believe I've never heard that before.
• 34:19
  And it's something that, uh, just goes to show that, you know, as much as you study, as much as you read, as much as you watch, you don't know everything.
• 34:27
  Yeah, I thought they were all they all gather and went from Santa Anita to Manzanar, so I had no idea.
• 34:34
  Anything else come to mind when you were listening to the interview?
• 34:37
  I listened to the whole thing, but, like, I don't know, do I have ADHD? I was like, I was thinking like, oh, the cars, you know, I remember watching see like LA the lowriders, all those people on like El Camino with like going up and down on the street.
• 34:56
  I was thinking of that, but I've never I never knew about Japanese Americans doing that same thing as, like, Latinos and black people.
• 35:06
  So I was like, happy to know that.
• 35:09
  Why did it make you happy?
• 35:10
  Because like my people, like, we build cars, you know.
• 35:15
  Before the war, it probably was Fords.
• 35:17
  That was one of the things that, uh, really stands out from the interview was when he talked about Hiroshima and the family and how.
• 35:27
  Oh, yeah.
• 35:28
  The father race cars, and he loved Fords, and he named his oldest kid Ford. I just think that's hilarious.
• 35:36
  Um, I was, uh, trying to name my kid Tupac, so I totally get it.
• 35:41
  And he was listening to K-Rock.
• 35:42
  Yeah. Oliver listened to K-Rock as a kid.
• 35:46
  Yeah, I was listening to keys because it was like keys and K-Rock back then.
• 35:52
  I think, I don't know.
• 35:53
  That's how I felt, and I, I switched over from Keys to K-Rock when I was in like late 20s. I'm like, ah.
• 36:02
  So I was just thinking about my youth, and then I had to look up the Chevrolet citation, and it looks just like Pinto.
• 36:11
  And I'm like, whoa, what?
• 36:14
  And I was gonna listen to that song Hiroshima the cruising in J-town.
• 36:18
  I forgot to listen to it.
• 36:20
  I'm gonna listen to it.
• 36:22
  I never, I never I, I knew the band and I've listened to the songs before, but I didn't know, like, which song is which, so I gotta look it up.
• 36:30
  I also like, um, going for a drive used to be a pastime.
• 36:36
  I don't know, in America, but in Japan, on, like, Sunday afternoon, when we have nothing to do.
• 36:42
  Okay, let's go for a drive.
• 36:45
  But now on weekends when we have extra time, we just sit at home and go through my, you know, phones. And like, I don't know, I missed the American pastime driving.
• 36:59
  One of the things we did during Covid was just go for a drive.
• 37:02
  It probably had a lot to do with the fact that we were kind of we were isolating.
• 37:07
  So just getting in the car and going somewhere felt very freeing and exciting.
• 37:11
  And that's probably something like what you're talking about.
• 37:14
  Well, some of the street in America is long, like the gosh, with Hawthorne. It's long.
• 37:22
  Um, what other street?
• 37:23
  Rosemead Boulevard, from Pasadena to Long Beach.
• 37:26
  Yeah. Like long. And that's amazing.
• 37:29
  Like, they go through the numbers like one through, like, 25,000, and then it goes west or east or north or south.
• 37:40
  That's amazing. Because in Japan, And thus we don't really have street.
• 37:45
  Street. But even if we do a long street, it's not that long.
• 37:50
  Another thing that seemed interesting to me was the cruising in J-town, and I've heard from other people that there was a lot of fighting and a lot of things like that, and I just think it's really interesting to see also, because I have this image in my head that's like Greece, where people are getting out of their cars with slicked back hair and singing and dancing, and I'm sure that's not how it was.
• 38:12
  But also, I'm sure it wasn't like the the gangs that we imagined in the 80s or 90s or something like that either.
• 38:19
  Uh, also, um, my, the, the car that I practiced to drive in America was a Datsun 240 Z. And this was this guy's baby car.
• 38:33
  Like, he it was like 1972 or 73, but it was in 1990, So it's his baby car that he had, like, he, um, soup it up and the stick shift was so hard to change.
• 38:51
  And on the way to my house, there's a little slope at the light, and I had to wait for the light to change, to turn.
• 38:57
  And it was, like, so hard.
• 38:59
  And I, like, barely made it back home.
• 39:03
  He must have really liked you.
• 39:04
  Oh, I know, right? Because it's his baby.
• 39:08
  Like you are letting me drive your baby.
• 39:10
  Ha ha. That's crazy.
• 39:12
  I wouldn't.
• 39:14
  Yeah. What's crazy also is that it's power steering, right?
• 39:17
  No, it was like hard.
• 39:18
  Stick shift power steering.
• 39:21
  No. Or the lack thereof.
• 39:23
  That's a pretty hard car to learn how to drive on.
• 39:26
  I'm impressed.
• 39:27
  In the clutch was, like, so heavy.
• 39:29
  Yeah. That's weird.
• 39:30
  And also remember. Remember car stereo?
• 39:33
  I could talk about cars forever.
• 39:35
  Um. Car stereo. I put car stereo in by myself.
• 39:40
  And I let the cord when, you know, going under the carpeting of the car like I took detail.
• 39:48
  And then I parked it by, um, the little I.
• 39:53
  Gosh, what's the name of the place? It's on the corner of First Street and San Pedro.
• 39:59
  I park my car and somebody took my car stereo the next day, and it took me whole day to install the stereo by myself.
• 40:10
  And somebody just yank it out and took it.
• 40:12
  Did you ever race cars or just admire them?
• 40:14
  Oh, I've been to Bonneville, um, Salt Lake City.
• 40:18
  I didn't I didn't race, but I watched those, um, quarter mile race.
• 40:23
  A quarter mile. Like, how do you call that 0 to 100 or 0 to 200 in whatever second was like, amazing, but not anymore.
• 40:33
  I used to change oils too.
• 40:35
  And brake pads. But. Ah, yeah, but when you change your own brake pads, it's like your baby.
• 40:43
  You don't want to step on a brake too fast.
• 40:46
  Like you go slow to brake.
• 40:49
  To see the show. It's up until December 13th at the Peter Admiral Mullen Gallery at the Art Center in Pasadena.
• 40:55
  It's open from Wednesday through Sunday and is free, but ticket reservations are recommended.
• 40:59
  We asked Doctor Wang what people can expect to see when they come to the show.
• 41:04
  Yeah, so the show is divided into four thematic sections.
• 41:08
  There's speed, which is all about stories regarding performance and racing.
• 41:13
  We have a section on style which is about car customization, auto design and drift racing.
• 41:19
  There is work which is about the role that utility vehicles have played in the, you know, the economic lifelines within the JA community.
• 41:28
  And then the last is community, which is a bit of a catch all because really community is at the heart of the entire project.
• 41:34
  But that includes things around the car clubs from the 50s.
• 41:38
  It includes stuff about the Nisei Week cruise.
• 41:40
  It includes things about the role that cars and trucks played during the wartime incarceration experience.
• 41:45
  And so we really wanted to aim for great deal of breadth within the exhibition, especially because best, as we know, this is the first time anyone's done anything like this.
• 41:56
  So rather than doing, let's say, a deep dive into just one area, like we could have made the whole exhibition just about the import car scene, and it would have been rich, and we would not have been lacking in anything had we gone in that direction.
• 42:09
  But I thought it was more important that we try to cover as much as we could in different ways. That may not seem evident to folks, because when you think of car culture, you may not think about gardening trucks.
• 42:21
  But gardening as a profession was profoundly important within this community.
• 42:26
  And you, I mean, you could be a gardener without a truck.
• 42:29
  It would be just very difficult.
• 42:30
  So this is a case where cars and trucks made something possible that ended up becoming incredibly. I mean, you cannot remotely overstate the importance of the gardening profession within this community's history.
• 42:41
  And so we wanted to be able to make sure people understood, because like I said, it's not a car exhibition.
• 42:50
  So it's not about like how fast cars go or how amazing they look, even though, yes, it is about those things.
• 42:56
  But at the core of it is, you know, it's not about the cars, it's about the people and their stories and the ways in which cars help to tell those stories. And so for that reason, we just wanted to go with a vast span and scope of different kinds of car stories, whether they made intuitive sense to, to, to kind of the, the conventional car person or not.
• 43:32
  Koji, what does the inside of your car say about you?
• 43:35
  The inside of my car is an organized mess.
• 43:38
  So that. What does that mean?
• 43:39
  It means that even though it might look dirty and messy, if you ask me where something is, I can tell you right away.
• 43:46
  And that's kind of my brain organized but messy.
• 43:49
  Um, my, I don't know, my car.
• 43:52
  It's a mess. I got some French fries on the ground, I'm sure, because my kids eat, you know, food inside the car, and she drops and oh, my gosh, I you know what I found?
• 44:04
  I, I found those chocolate with the cookie thingy.
• 44:10
  How do you call those the hazelnut flavor spread with that little cookie that you could. Yeah. How do you call that anyways?
• 44:21
  Well, that got dip chocolate thing.
• 44:23
  My daughter ate half of the cookies and left the chocolate open.
• 44:30
  And she left it in a side pocket and the chocolate melted all over the side pocket.
• 44:37
  Ah. And my car is still fairly new.
• 44:41
  I don't know, I told my daughter, hey, you gotta clean it up.
• 44:45
  But she's not gonna clean it up.
• 44:46
  You have to make her clean it up.
• 44:48
  She's not gonna clean it up.
• 44:49
  I know how she is.
• 44:52
  Michelle, what's your favorite car of all time? No pressure.
• 44:56
  Um, I don't know. I like my car right now.
• 45:00
  It's like the. It's Mazda three, and this is actually my second Mazda three.
• 45:06
  I have 2019 and I have 2025 Mazda three and they are great.
• 45:14
  I had a Mercedes before, I had a BMW.
• 45:18
  Before that I totaled.
• 45:21
  I like Mazda, my first very first car was a mustang and I also had another Mustang.
• 45:28
  And that was I mean, the Mustang used to be nicer looking.
• 45:34
  I don't approve the new Mustang.
• 45:38
  I've never owned an American car.
• 45:40
  I've only driven them when I've rented vehicles.
• 45:45
  Oh my. My cars made in Japan.
• 45:46
  So the VIN number starts with J.
• 45:49
  So it has some Japanese paperwork in my car, like the.
• 45:54
  I think somebody left it at the factory, somebody left a paper in my car, and they are supposed to check stuff out, like to make sure everything is right.
• 46:05
  Like, ah, thank you, Doctor Wang.
• 46:07
  And thank you all for listening to our podcast.
• 46:09
  We are deeply grateful for your continued support and enthusiasm for the Japanese America Podcast. Your engagement, feedback and passion inspires us to keep sharing stories and perspectives that bridge cultures and bring people together.
• 46:24
  Thank you for being a part of our community and for tuning in to each episode.
• 46:27
  We're excited to continue this journey with you, exploring the rich and diverse tapestry of Japanese American experiences.
• 46:33
  Stay tuned for more exciting content, and don't hesitate to share your thoughts and ideas.
• 46:37
  This podcast is a program of the Japanese American National Museum.
• 46:41
  The museum's mission is to promote understanding and appreciation of America's ethnic and cultural diversity by sharing the Japanese American experience.
• 46:51
  Please rate, review and subscribe to our podcast, and be sure to join us next month as we delve deeper into the world of comedy.
• 46:59
  Doo doo doo doo.
• 47:00
  Yay. Comedy. Bye.