Growing Up Sansei in LA
Photograph courtesy of Yamashita Archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz; McHenry Library Special Collections My sister and I grew up in a series of Japanese American bubbles in the 1950s and 60s that shaped our sansei lives in LA from elementary to high school, each bubble bursting into another. By bubble, I mean a protective community space of Japanese Americans who didn’t have to explain to each other who they were or how they got there. Didn’t have to explain the war, that they’d been imprisoned in camps, exiled non-alien citizens, had returned to the West Coast to try to resume their American lives. The bubble was never an easy space; its safe containment also harbored shame, antagonisms, censures, provincialism, but it was still home. We stayed in this bubble even as we moved through three LA neighborhoods, confined by racial covenants at the margins of postwar social mobility.
Fifth Avenue, LA
In 1952, my parents were a young couple with a one-year-old baby (me), arriving from Oakland, my father called to pastor the Japanese American Centenary Methodist Church near Normandie Avenue and Jefferson Boulevard in central Los Angeles. That church, founded in 1896, became in the postwar years part of a social safety net for returning Japanese. My parents moved into the church parsonage, located about a mile and a half from the church on Fifth Avenue. The following year, my sister was born. The church and the Fifth Avenue parsonage were the center around which our early lives radiated. The surrounding neighborhood was home to mostly African American and Japanese American families. It was part of a midriff swath of LA
