Though the biggest ocean in the world separates the west coast of the United States from Japan, about 5,000 miles of open sea, the waves that tumble onto the beaches of Los Angeles are carried by powerful tides emanating from that nation. People in Los Angeles feel the impact of Japan’s disaster in ways that defy great distances. It isn’t merely the fact that Los Angeles’ economy depends heavily on tourists from Japan ($279 million dollars spent by 305,000 Japanese visitors in 2010 alone), or that most of Japan’s major corporations maintain their United States headquarters in the Los Angeles area and employ thousands of Angelenos. Or that the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach – the most important engines of job creation in the region – are normally bustling with Japanese cargo ships loaded with quality automobiles and a cornucopia of eagerly consumed electronics, or with parts and components that are vitally needed by America’s domestic manufacturers. The jolts that happen to Japan’s economy send powerful currents directly into Los Angeles’ economy – and California and the whole American nation.

As Japan struggles to recover from this catastrophe, and requires vital American assistance, we need to be reminded that there is a long history of interaction and mutual benefit between Japan and the United States, especially so between Japan and the U.S. continental west coast and Hawaii. No doubt, some of this shared history is very painful and bitter – for both nations. But stretching back into the 19th century when, despite American gunboats appearing in the harbors of Japan and forcing Japan’s Shogun to open up trade to Yankees, these two nations have had a significant and ongoing affair with each other. This is especially evident in California, particularly in Los Angeles, from where American cultural icons, customs and values have been exported to Japan for a century through the city’s movies, and later through its popular television shows. Los Angeles’ ports ship out to Japan the city’s fashion styles and sportswear; LA’s skateboard culture, hip-hop music, even its notorious graffiti artists have changed the look, tone and attitudes of Japan’s youth and their creativity. And Japan has had an equally powerful impact on the culture of Los Angeles: architecture, art, cuisine, sports, religion and spirituality has been profoundly changed by this ancient civilization from the other side of the Pacific. The introduction into America of Zen Buddhist philosophy and meditation, painting and calligraphy, Japanese gardening, martial arts and other aspects of traditional Japanese culture, as well as Japan’s modern manufacturing processes and its wealth of products and inventions, has so often been made through the gateway of Los Angeles’s open-minded culture. Japan has been a potent ingredient in the mix with Los Angeles’ other important ethnic influences in creating Los Angeles’ unique and captivating lifestyle.

More significantly, Los Angeles would not have become the economic powerhouse that it is today without the migration of Japanese people to this city in its first decades of explosive growth. As in Hawaii, where Japanese people were vital to development of commercial fishing and agriculture, Los Angeles (and all of California) benefited incalcuably from the expertise and hard work of Japanese fishermen and farmers. After discriminatory anti-Chinese immigration laws shut off that resource of immigrants who were crucial to the building of the West’s railroad infrastructure and extraction of its vast mineral resources, it was Japanese who manned the railroads’ round-houses and who grew or harvested much of the food that made California famous as the nation’s cornucopia. By the turn of the 20th century, Los Angeles’ fish and produce markets daily offered, year-round, a stunning bounty of fresh foods – many of varieties still exotic to Americans – that astonished visitors to the city, and that supported the city’s commercial growth through expanding exports by train to the East.

By 1940, Los Angeles had the largest concentration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans in continental America, and though they maintained some customs and traditions of their homeland, they had made remarkable adaptation and integration into American life. The surprise, deadly bombing by Japanese kamikaze of America’s Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941 sent shock waves eastwards across the ocean: Japan, in a secret pact with Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fascist regimes, launched war on the United States. Immediately, understandably, fear swept over the U.S. west coast, and in Los Angeles, skittish residents and officials prepared for an invasion from Japan. There were a rash of imagined sightings of Japanese fighter planes over Los Angeles. Real or imagined Japanese submarines off Los Angeles’s beaches were reported. Newspapers and radio news fed on and exacerbated the rising hysteria. A brutal war across the breadth of the Pacific that was to take the lives of many hundreds of thousands and wreck the lives of families on both sides of the vast sea dramatically changed everyone’s lives. Young men enlisted or were drafted to go to war – and many never returned alive or whole. The Great Depression in Los Angeles came to an end as every able bodied person was put to work in the city’s sprawling aviation plants and manufacturing infrastructure to support massive the war effort.

Los Angeles’ Japanese people were as shocked and afraid as were others; many still had relatives in Japan, and many of their businesses were tied to trade with Japan. Shame and confusion about Japan’s actions mixed chaotically with their anxiety and dread about what would happen next. And what happened next for them came in Executive Order 9066 – President Roosevelt’s decision to intern for the duration of the war all ethnic Japanese people on the west coast in what amounted to concentration camps hastily built in remote areas of the nation. In total, 110,000 ethnic Japanese – including the ethnic Japanese families from the Los Angeles area – were forced to leave their homes, neighbors, and businesses… give up normal lives and their freedom, and live crowded together in rude and drafty barracks with the machine guns of guards pointed at them. They had just a few days to sell off belongings and businesses, or find trustworthy non-Japanese to keep their property and pets in trust for them. Two-thirds of these ethnic Japanese people were American citizens by birth. (You can read some of their powerful stories of how they lived through this ordeal at the website below.)

To bring the long war to an end, American bombers, fighter planes and munitions – many manufactured in Los Angeles’ massive factories – were flown over Japan. Widespread destruction of Japan’s infrastructure followed, with bombings and fires in population centers and ultimately nuclear weapons dropped that leveled the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At last, Japan’s leaders surrendered, and the war in the Pacific ended.

Los Angeles’ displaced Japanese American families were released from the internment camps and they went about reconstructing their shattered lives as best they could. Most returned to the city and over time many re-established themselves, their families reintegrating into post-war American life. Los Angeles today is filled with Japanese Americans who have risen to important positions in the city, or achieved outstanding contributions in its economy and culture.

As traumatizing and destructive as the war was, an equally remarkable healing and transformation followed, not only in Japan, but also in Los Angeles. American efforts to assist in the massive rebuilding of Japan resulted in an economic boon for Los Angeles, as it became an ever more important nexus of materials, products, expertise and trade going to Japan in the decades that followed. Today, through demographics, intermarriage, culture, commerce and tourism, Los Angeles and Japan are more powerfully tied than ever: In 2010 alone, California sold Japan merchandise valued at more than $12.2 billion dollars – most of it made in Southern California or flowing through Los Angeles’ two large ports. In the months and years to come, Angelenos and all Americans will more fully comprehend just how interwoven both sides of the Pacific have become: how the blows of misfortune that hurt one side, do harm to the other; and how the wellbeing and prosperity of one side raises the wellbeing and good fortune of the other. It behooves Americans, especially those on the west coast – a place with such long and meaningful history with Japan – to once again be generous and helpful to that remarkable nation in this hour of its great need. The swells moving across the great Pacific sea from that stricken country and breaking as noisy waves on our shores remind us that we are all joined together as one.

Web sources for more about Japanese in Los Angeles history and Internment of Japanese Americans: www.janm.org, www.nps.gov/manz/index.htm

The Matsui Family, Los Angeles 1938

Topics covered a wide range: The discrimination she discovered still persisted against minority Native American, Mexican American, and Asian students in public schools when she came down from Seattle, Washington to teach elementary school in the early 1960s; the history of the oldest town in Southern California – San Gabriel; The Mission Play, one of the landmark cultural events that in the early to mid-20th Century gave Southern Californians a dazzling theatrical spectacle that portrayed a glorious and stirring (and mostly false and sanitized) pre-American saga of the conquest of California by Spaniards, the converting of Native Americans into Christianity by Franciscan friars and their establishment of 22 missions… The abundant opportunities for Jewish immigrant families in Los Angeles, but also the blatant and painful anti-Semitism and discrimination against them. Connie, a self described “lapsed Catholic shiksa” upon arriving in Los Angeles found the man of her dreams in Michael Rothstein, the handsome, dashing, athletic son of a Jewish family with long roots in Los Angeles. Michael’s grandmother Rebecca Rouse regaled Connie with countless stories about early Los Angeles life and times, about the businesses and charities that Los Angeles’ Jewish families created, about how Grandpa Rouse loved to work as an extra in Hollywood’s silent movie industry and bring home to dinner all sorts of friends still dressed in their costumes. Grandmother Rouse also vividly recalled the physical and social geography and boundaries of the expanding city that restricted Jews and other minorities to certain districts and regions.

A dedicated and talented educator for over 40 years in the San Gabriel School District, Connie brought California history to life for her classes by using antique items that students could touch, feel and examine closely: vintage postcards, photographs, stereoscope views, posters… things emanating the past that she collected for decades by combing swap meets, flea markets, and thrift stores. In the end, she amassed a huge collection of important historical material that includes over 500 stereographic views of 19th and early 20th century Los Angeles and its surrounding areas and towns; original paintings, etchings and drawings of Los Angeles area historical sites; and much more. Already, before our crew arrived to set up the lights and cameras for the interview, Connie had a truck cart off most of her collection to be housed in perpetuity in the most important repository of historical material in the American West: the world-renowned Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in nearby San Marino. The rest of her lovingly assembled collection was waiting in stacks and boxes to be given to other local historical organizations, like the San Gabriel Historical Society, and to various life-long friends who share her passion for history. Connie is leaving for New England after a long love affair with Southern California. We were fortunate to interview this energetic and busy lady before she made the journey back east to live with her daughter. A very positive-minded person, Connie is looking forward to all the history that awaits to immerse herself in in New England. And she promises to be back here to visit friends in winter months. After the interview session, we strolled through her amazing cactus garden under towering palm trees, and it was clear from the way she inhaled in the beauty of the exotic plants and the glorious weather that she was savoring every sweet moment left of her wonderful years here in Southern California.

Keep an eye out for video clips from Connie’s interview to be posted in coming weeks.

Connie Rothstein, Historian

As job opportunities opened up for Blacks in Chicago, many went north to that city. But another vital escape route for Blacks was opened up when transcontinental train service was built to the West, particularly Los Angeles. The trains from New Orleans to Los Angeles were a means out of the South and a path to refuge and opportunity for hundreds of thousands of African Americans. By the early teens of the 20th Century, the “Great Migration” of African Americans began in earnest. Los Angeles became as much a paradise for them, as it was for the millions of white Americans who migrated to this city. In Los Angeles, while remaining a racially segregated city for much of the 20th century, Blacks experienced less overt discrimination and the city was not dominated by white supremacist organizations as in the South. The young, booming west coast city was not mired in the rigid traditions and ugly history of slavery, as in the South. People were coming to Los Angeles from all parts of the nation and the world; it was a place where increasingly people of differing ethnicities and cultures had to learn to adjust to and tolerate each other, like it or not. Most importantly, there were good-paying jobs to be found in Los Angeles’ massive manufacturing industries. While there were many significant problems for Blacks in Los Angeles borne out of persistent racism and discrimination against LA’s ethnic minorities, a good life could still be built for Black families, such as in South Central Los Angeles, which for much of the 20th century was a safe, pleasant multi-ethnic working class region offering a middle class lifestyle. The Civil Rights movement led by Reverend King in the 1950s and 60s, threw sharp focus on the remaining and significant obstacles to complete equality and empowerment for Blacks in Los Angeles, as everywhere in the United States. Great gains were made. But despite these vital achievements, in the last decades of the 20th century Los Angeles was the scene of some of the worst cases of police and civic abuse of Black citizens (and other ethnicities) in the nation, resulting in the infamous Los Angeles Riots or Los Angeles Insurrection of 1992 – the worst outbreak of civilian rebellion, violence and property destruction in the nation’s history since the Civil War.

As long as there are dominant ethnic populations and smaller minority populations within Los Angeles and within our nation, the vital work of protecting the civil and human rights of all our citizens and residents must continue. That is one important lesson to be remembered on this important national holiday.

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El Paso, Texas, just over the border from the Mexican state of Chihuahua, was filling with refugees from the increasingly dangerous and chaotic country of Mexico, and it was a hotbed of anti-Díaz revolutionaries, and of U.S. and Díaz’s secret agents seeking to apprehend them. In El Paso, Prax called upon men who were veterans of his previous, failed, attempt in 1908 to begin the insurrection against Díaz. On December 19, Guerrero led his force of twenty-two men on horses across the Río Grande into Mexico, hijacked a train, appropriated horses, arms and food, took in more rebels, and on December 29 confronted the authorities of Janos, Chihuahua. The mayor of Janos agreed to surrender the town to Prax’s forces on the morning of December 30. But when Praxedis learned that this presidente municipal had wired for federal troops, Prax launched a surprise attack at 10 P.M. the night of the 29th. By morning, after a long night of intense fighting, the rebels gained control of Janos. But federal troops arrived and during the barrage of bullets that ensued, Prax took to a rooftop and was shot through the eye. He died instantly. The eye that hemorrhaged blood had once looked out at a world of pain and suffering for the masses of Mexican people, and saw beyond it to a time of economic and social fairness, and justice for all. On January 1st, 1911, the voice that was now silent echoed in the minds of surviving companions retreating across the Chihuahua desert, and in the coming years still stirred the hearts of those who had heard Praxedis speak with the strength of conviction and sincerity. And his words and thoughts continue to live on through his powerful writings. By May 1911 Porfirio Díaz was forced into exile, and the ten year long Mexican Revolution had begun and there was no turning back. One out of five Mexicans died from the chaos and violence. Hundreds of thousands fled the country and most went to the U.S. Southwest, especially booming Los Angeles where safety and jobs could be found. Eventually, peace returned to Mexico and a new social order began to take shape.

No one knows for certain if the body inside the monument built to house his remains in the capital city of Chihuahua, in the state of Chihuahua, is actually that of Praxedis Gilberto Guerrero, but he is remembered and honored as one of Mexico’s national heroes. One hundred years after his death, however, violence and fear have returned to Mexico, and his impassioned call for a world of social and economic equality and justice awaits fulfillment.

Praxedis Guerrero - A young fighter for justice