< The Latest 2025-10-17T17:15:14+0000
The Pasadena Star-News | Fri 10/17 08:00am PST | Charlie Vargas
Oliver Wang, a sociology professor and author at Cal State Long Beach, spent years griping to his friends about the lack of Asian American representation in Southern California’s car history.
“I was talking to an old friend,” Wang began during a recent Zoom interview. “And he said to me, ‘Oliver, you’ve been complaining that there’s no book about Asian Americans in cars for 20 years. You literally make your living as both a writer and a scholar, studying and writing about Asian Americans and pop culture, so if you feel like someone should go out and do this project, why don’t you go out and do it then?’”
“So that was really the impetus for me,” Wang said.
The quip from Wang’s buddy resulted in his recent book, “Cruising J-Town: Japanese American Car Culture in Los Angeles,” out now by Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library. The book is also accompanied by an exhibit through the Japanese American National Museum at the Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery in Pasadena dubbed “Cruising J-Town: Behind the Wheel of the Nikkei Community,” which runs through Dec. 14 and chronicles how Japanese Americans have played vital roles in the myriad car subcultures that exist across Los Angeles.
The project began with Wang interviewing his father-in-law, a Japanese American whose lineage traces back to the 1910s. His father-in-law grew up in the San Fernando Valley and attended San Fernando Valley High. Like many other young people in 1950s-era America, he and his friends started a car club.
“I was fascinated by the stories that my father-in-law was telling me, so I went out and found other Japanese Americans of his same generation who were car club people,” Wang said. “These were all men who came of age as teenagers in the ’50s or early ’60s, and that was where I started with this research.”
The book and exhibition were developed from the same research sources, including a wide selection of archival photographs loaned to Wang. Photos were brought in to be scanned and used alongside more than 90 oral history interviews with 100 people. Included in the photos were a woman driver hauling tractors at Minidoka concentration camp in 1944, street racers posing from inside a Chevrolet Vega during the 1982 Nisei Week cruise in Little Tokyo, and even drivers involved in the “first Japanese auto race,” held at Ascot Park in South Los Angeles in 1915.
The exhibit is more thematically organized, with sections on racing, car customization, automotive design, utility in everyday life, and community impact.
“Cruising J-Town: Japanese American Car Culture in Los Angeles” takes a more chronological approach, with a four-chapter breakdown that includes the origins of the Nikkei community, the effects of World War II on Japanese Americans, postwar developments, and the contemporary car scene.
Although street racing cars have become a focus of Japanese American contributions to Southern California’s car culture, the impact extends beyond that. Wang stresses that the “Issei”, a term used to describe the first generation of Japanese immigrants, gained social and economic mobility through access to vehicles that enabled them to take jobs that weren’t restricted by their immigration status.
The book details how Japanese immigrants were affected by the 1924 Immigration Act, which barred them from becoming citizens, thereby preventing them from owning land and operating as farmers. Wang explained that factory jobs were also out of the question for immigrants at a time when labor unions were solely focused on fighting for white workers. For Japanese immigrants, it meant finding other ways to make a living, such as service industry jobs in restaurants or gardening, where there were no organizational or institutional bodies limiting them. However, owning a vehicle that allowed them to work other jobs, such as farming or fishing, helped them circumvent the impact of those laws.
“I wanted to talk about the importance of the gardening profession, because Japanese Americans dominated that profession for most of the 20th century, which is a form of work in which you need access to a truck, van or some kind of motorized vehicle in order just to be part of that profession at all,” Wang said. “It would have been a massive oversight if we had done this project, and we’re not talking about the gardening trucks, fish trucks, mechanics or about Japanese-owned gas and service stations. I wanted to make sure that was just as important in this set of stories as the street and drag racers and car customizers.”
The chapter, “Driven Off,” details how, during World War II, Japanese immigrants, along with a majority of Japanese Americans, lost many of their possessions, including their cars, when they voluntarily drove to turn themselves in to what started as detention centers but quickly became Japanese internment camps.
Under Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the U.S. government forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in ten camps operated by the War Relocation Authority, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Those who drove themselves to the camps had their cars purchased by the government. Upon release, they found themselves starting with little support and without the agency that their vehicles had provided.
“Eventually, once they get released, they’re basically going home to nothing,” Wang said. “They don’t have their homes because they lost them and had to give up or sell most of their possessions before reporting to be incarcerated. If they drove themselves, they just lost — probably the single most valuable possession they had left, a motor vehicle. That is really the big indignity here, where if you were trying to start your life over, you probably would have wanted to have a car or truck to do that, because these things are tremendously powerful tools, but this is something that was taken from them.”
Wang said that the book and exhibition welcome a historical focus on Los Angeles and Southern California. He added that LA has always been a car-oriented city, and whether you are a car enthusiast or not, you likely have a car story. The missing pages of Japanese Americans’ impact on LA’s car culture left a void in the subculture’s history. Wang’s efforts to compile them honor a legacy that, according to Wang, had only been verbally recognized among car and Japanese communities.
“Japanese Americans have not just been influenced by LA car culture, but have contributed to it and transformed it over the many generations and decades,” he said. “This is part of this region’s history, but for whatever reason, institutions have not made it a point to center and share these stories, so we finally have the opportunity to do it and show it. At the very least, it is important in understanding the full complexity and diversity that make up the story of Los Angeles.”
When: Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays through Dec. 14.
Where: Japanese American National Museum, Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery, ArtCenter College of Design, 1111 South Arroyo Parkway, Pasadena.
Tickets: Free admission; ticket reservations recommended via janm.org.