'Cruising J-Town' is love letter to Japanese American car culture

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Karlene Koketsu and Sadie Hifumi sit in Susan Uemura’s Bel Air . (Japanese American National Museum)

It is a photograph that feels like a film still: A vintage, black and white snapshot shows two young women in cat-eye sunglasses sitting in the elegantly upholstered back seat of a Chevrolet Bel Air. One of them gazes confidently at the photographer, her arm extended over the backrest of the bench seat. It is 1956, and the women — Karlene Koketsu and Sadie Hifumi — are members of a social club called the Atomettes, and they’re on a road trip. A handwritten caption at the bottom of the print reads: “Enroute to San Francisco. June 1956.”

The photograph is a remarkable record of female independence at midcentury. And it’s made more poignant by the fact that Koketsu and Hifumi, along with their traveling partners, were Japanese American. The decade prior, such a road trip would have been unimaginable; they had been imprisoned in incarceration camps during World War II.

The photo, and the history behind it, appears in an engaging new book by LA writer and scholar Oliver Wang called Cruising J-Town: Japanese American Car Culture and Los Angeles. Published by Angel City Press, the 288-page tome is Wang’s deep dive into Japanese American car culture and features additional texts by half a dozen contributors (including actor George Takei). Best of all, it is beautifully illustrated — meaning there are additional photographs of the fabulous Atomettes.

Oliver Wang's book is a deep dive on an unexplored area of pop culture. (Angel City Pres)

The book’s debut will be accompanied by a related exhibition curated by Wang and produced by the Japanese American National Museum (JANM). On July 31st, Cruising J-Town: Behind the Wheel of the Nikkei Community will go on view at the galleries of ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena (since JANM’s Little Tokyo facilities are closed for renovation).

The show will present ephemera spanning more than a century, including early photography, snazzy car club jackets, and other memorabilia. Also on display will be actual cars — including a 1989 Nissan 240SX driven by drift car racer Nadine Sachiko Hsu and a stunning customized Mercury Coupe from 1951 belonging to car buff Brian Omatsu. The latter features custom chrome and upholstery, as well as a striped paint job rendered in shades of eggplant — hence its moniker, “Purple Reign.”

Bob Hirohata's 1951 Mercury Coupe, known as the Hirohata Merc, on display in Washington, D.C. (Hagerty Drivers Foundation)

Wang was inspired to write Cruising J-Town after noticing that there were no studies devoted to Asian American car culture. “That felt like a massive blind spot,” he says. In 2016, without a concrete plan for what he might do, he began recording oral histories — ultimately interviewing more than 120 people; two years later, JANM approached him about doing a show. Thus, a book and exhibition were born.

Cruising J-Town takes us back to the earliest days of motoring. It recounts the history of important businesses like the F&K Garage, which opened in Little Tokyo in 1912 by Fred Jiro Fujioka and George Kawamoto. The garage came to include a car dealership, as well as the headquarters of the Japanese Auto Club in Southern California — becoming, like many Japanese American-owned garages during the 20th century, a community center for auto aficionados.

Fred Jiro Fujioka (seated) poses with employees of the F&K Garage in Little Tokyo in the 1910s. (Seave Center for Western History Research / Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History)

Wang documents how the availability of cars and trucks helped propel Japanese immigrants into professions such as farming and gardening to great success (at a time when the US wouldn’t let Japanese people own land), and the ways in which cars became status symbols imbued with the mystique of the open road. But most gripping is the section devoted to how the US government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war put a brake on the community’s momentum.

Cars play a role in that narrative, too: when Japanese Americans were “evacuated” to the camps, beloved cars were sold at a loss, left in the care of friends, and even taken to detention centers. Among the many fascinating episodes Wang chronicles is the story of a group of Japanese American teens at the Amache detention center in Colorado, who figured out a way to hijack official vehicles late at night so that they could go joyriding. “One time, it must have been about seven or eight of us, and we were riding around this convoy truck, about 15 miles from the camp,” Richard Iwao Hidaka recalled. “Boy, if we got caught out there.”

Designer Larry Shinoda poses in a metal car frame in the 1960s. (Japanese American National Museum)

Wang brings the story to the present, chronicling the car clubs of the 1950s and ‘60s (with their grand names like the Paladins and the Shogans), the cruising culture of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and the tuner scene that followed, when gearheads began to modify Japanese imports like the Datsun 510 into customized, street racing machines.

It’s a fascinating narrative about how immigrants, with grace and humor, adapt to American phenomena, then add to it in unexpected ways. Take Larry Shinoda, who as a youth was incarcerated at Manzanar. After the war, he became known for his roadsters, which he would baptize with the ironic name, “Chopsticks Special.” Shinoda later became a well-known designer at General Motors, the man behind iconic rides like the Corvette Stingray.

The ultimate American car? It was designed by a Japanese American.

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Oliver Wang’s Cruising J-Town: Japanese American Car Culture in Los Angeles is available through retail sites like Bookshop.org and the online store of the Japanese American National Museum.

The exhibition Cruising J-Town: Behind the Wheel of the Nikkei Community goes on view at the Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery at Art Center College of Design on July 31st; janm.org.

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