The City Council Wednesday designated two buildings from the Japanese American Commercial Village on Terminal Island as the latest historic-cultural landmarks in Los Angeles.
In a unanimous vote, council members approved the recognition of buildings located at 700-702 and 712-716 Tuna St. in San Pedro, which have been described as among the last “standing links” to a once-thriving fishing village, Councilman Tim McOsker said.
“They need some work, but they still evoke the memories of what that village was. And today we get the chance to designate as a historic monument each of those buildings and create the leverage that we need… to make sure that the buildings are restored, are protected and can be a more complete evidence and memory, a living memory, for visitors of the great Japanese fishing village that was in East San Pedro on Terminal Island,” McOsker said.
The village thrived in the early 1900s with a close knit community of approximately 3,000 Japanese American citizens and immigrants.
”They were directly responsible to help create the nation’s tuna industry,” Terminal Island Association President Terry Hara said. ”But all that changed with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”
The federal government began taking all non-native Japanese fishermen and community leaders into custody after the attack, and all traffic to and from the island was suspended. Then, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, which authorized the forced relocation and internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens.
The Terminal Island community became one of the first in the nation to be forcibly removed and relocated to internment camps. It is believed to be the only one that was destroyed almost entirely. The two remaining buildings stand as a testament to the experiences of those uprooted from their homes by the government during World War II because of their ethnicity.
“Their lives were destroyed and forced off the island into horse stables and concentration camps because of hate and paranoia,” Hara said.
Councilman McOsker noted the history of Japanese American Commercial Village is a lesson for Wednesday.
“It’s a tragic irony that this very property, some of this very property, is being used to commit similar violations of constitutional principles of people’s due process rights and of people’s autonomy over their own bodies,” McOsker said.
The Trump Administration has used federal-owned land as a staging area for immigration enforcement.