The Second Little Tokyo: Suburb Building and Transnational Capital in Gardena, California

Gardena, California, located in the South Bay region of Los Angeles County, has been called "the ultimate Japanese American suburb" - by the mid-1970s, more than twenty percent of the population was Japanese American and nearly one-third of the city’s businesses were owned or controlled by either Japanese Americans or Japanese nationals. Upon his election in 1972, Mayor Ken Nakaoka became the first American of Japanese descent elected to that post; the following year, Paul Bannai became the suburb’s representative to the California State Assembly. Despite these atypical and even unique aspects of its demographic and political history, Gardena was otherwise typical of L.A.’s South Bay and competed with other incorporated suburbs in the region for both industrial investment and new homeowners. Nakaoka, a former realtor, shared the profile and goals of many pro-development "boosters" of the twentieth century who attempted to balance low taxes and public services in providing the quality of life and economic security associated with suburban homeownership. However, since the late 1950s he had also worked with other Japanese American businessmen and members of Gardena’s city council to pursue growth strategies, unavailable to neighboring suburbs such as Compton, that exploited familial and business connections to Japanese corporate capital. The success of this approach, beginning with the establishment of Nissan’s U.S. headquarters in Gardena in 1960, allowed Gardena to maintain low property taxes and high-quality services into the 1970s and authorized Japanese American participation in suburban "first-class citizenship" within a remarkably brief period of time following their internment as racially subordinate "enemy aliens." This case study of Gardena thus speaks not only to the shifting racial formation of Japanese Americans in the postwar United States, but also the transnational dimension of the simultaneous boom in suburban development.