Save Tāminaru

The Fight to Preserve Terminal Island’s Japanese American Heritage

By Emma Rault, Columnist

      May is celebrated nationwide as Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month and National Preservation Month. However, this May brings worrying news: the Port of Los Angeles is considering demolishing the last two surviving buildings from the Japanese American community that used to call Terminal Island home. This even though it would violate one of five major goals in the port’s master plan.

Nowadays, many people associate Terminal Island with endless stacks of containers. But it was once known as East San Pedro, home to a vibrant community of some three thousand people, primarily Japanese immigrants and their American-born children. 

They made their living fishing and canning tuna and sardines in a part of the island called Fish Harbor.   

The national paranoia that followed Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 changed all of that. Suddenly, Japanese Americans were accused of being a national security threat. 

A few months later, Terminal Island residents were evicted at gunpoint, forced to leave their homes within 48 hours. 

Most were eventually sent to the Manzanar internment camp in the remote Owens Valley desert, where they spent up to three years living behind barbed wire. 

The Navy took over the island, bulldozed homes, businesses and churches, and fenced off the area as government property. None of the islanders would ever go home again.

It is remarkable, then, that two buildings from the Japanese fishing village have survived. Located on the community’s main drag at 700-702 and 712-716 Tuna Street, they housed a dry-goods store called Nanka Shoken and the A. Nakamura Co. grocery store, going back to 1918 and 1923, respectively. 

Now, the port’s department of real estate has “recommended” these buildings for demolition, according to information relayed by Sergio Carrillo from Councilmember Tim McOsker’s office. 

The port’s media relations team stated that these plans are currently “in the evaluation stage.” Demolition requires a vote from the Board of Harbor Commissioners, which last year decided in a 3–1 vote to tear down the former Star-Kist tuna cannery on Terminal Island. 

Community advocates and historians are alarmed that the port is considering tearing down what remains of the Japanese fishing village.

To writer Naomi Hirahara, it has uneasy echoes of 1942, when the Navy’s bulldozers moved in and wiped away almost every trace of decades of community life. 

“It’s kind of like a replay of what happened before,” she told Random Lengths News. 

She is the co-author, along with Geraldine Knatz, of Terminal Island: Lost Communities of Los Angeles Harbor, which was published this year. 

The surviving buildings matter, she says. “When I visited Tuna Street … I could just picture fishermen coming back from pulling sardines out of the water, or women coming home from a hard day’s working in the canneries,” she recalled. 

“There’s just something about being on that particular land.” 

Despite their storied history, the stores don’t currently have official historic landmark status — buildings need to be formally nominated for that. But their importance is widely acknowledged. In a 2013 letter to the port, the LA Conservancy described them as “nationally significant from a cultural standpoint.” 

For Warren Furutani, a former California Assemblymember and longtime activist whose parents and grandparents lived on Terminal Island, they have an important role in reminding people that the past is not just “a page in a book or a screen on a computer.” 

Organizations like the LA Conservancy and the National Trust for Historic Preservation believe the same. Back in 2012, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Terminal Island one of the country’s Most Endangered Historic Sites. 

“We’re not trying to say these areas shouldn’t have port activity, but the historic sites comprise less than 3% of the acreage on Terminal Island,” the LA Conservancy’s Linda Dishman told the Daily Breeze at the time. “We’re talking about very small pieces of land.” 

Advocates see the threat to Tuna Street as part of a broader pattern of cultural erasure. Hirahara points out that the National Trust put LA’s Little Tokyo on its 2024 list of most endangered historic places in the U.S. Sawtelle’s historic Japantown is also under threat, with many legacy businesses being displaced by unchecked development.

“Through the unfolding of history, [we see that] the demolishing of a community’s culture and history becomes a part of the demolishing of that people,” Furutani said.   

“If you’re willing to asphalt or cement over history to put … cargo containers [there], what does that say about our values?” 

For some, the issue is deeply personal. Derek Nakamura is the great-grandson of Akimatsu Nakamura, the founder and namesake of the A. Nakamura Co. supermarket. His grandmother, Aiko, worked there alongside her father.   

“I would love for it to be saved,” Derek said of his family’s store. 

He envisages perhaps a small museum or a mural on the storefront honoring Terminal Island’s Japanese history.

Tim Yamamoto, the grandson of Akimatsu’s other daughter, Hideko, said it makes him feel proud seeing those buildings and knowing his family operated a business there.

His parents made a point of educating younger generations about the history of Terminal Island. His mother’s recent passing, at age 103, has made him all the more determined that the buildings should be preserved. “I have pretty strong feelings about that.” 

Naomi Hirahara, who was involved in the development of the Manzanar National Historic Site in the location of the former concentration camp, agrees that the historic buildings on Tuna Street have untapped potential. 

“It seems ideal to put some kind of interpretation there,” she said. 

Derek still has various items from the family business, including the custom “A. Nakamura Co.” stamp used for bills. The date on the rubber rollers is still set to Dec. 4, 1941 — just a few days before Pearl Harbor. 

After the surprise attack on the U.S. Naval base in Hawaii, the stores on Terminal Island were padlocked for a month with military guards placed at the doors. 

Then, following the 48-hour evacuation order, many families were forced to sell off their possessions for pennies on the dollar. 

The Nakamuras were relatively lucky, Derek explained in a 2022 interview with Random Lengths. “My grandmother Aiko was friends with a lot of Caucasians and they saved a lot of stuff for us. And after the war, they gave it all back.”

Other families burned furniture in bonfires, unable to bear the idea of local scavengers getting hold of it. Warren Furutani’s grandfather, a boat mechanic, took a sledgehammer to his equipment. 

“These are the kinds of stories … that [those] two old buildings [are] symbols of,” Furutani said.

In 2002, a monument honoring the Japanese village was installed on nearby Seaside Ave, funded partly by the State of California and partly through crowdfunding by the Terminal Islanders, a group of former residents and their descendants.  

Growing up, Furutani could always tell when his father took a particular liking to one of his friends: “Eventually, they would be taken on a tour of Terminal Island.” They would get in the car to go look at what was left — those two storefronts. 

Monuments are important, says Furutani, who contributed to the fundraising campaign — but they can’t replace built fabric. “They don’t provide the texture [of history].”

The port’s preservation policies — just lip service? The “recommendation” to demolish the store buildings on Tuna Street raises concerns that the port is violating its own historic preservation policies.  

In 2011, the port first introduced plans to demolish what remained of the Japanese village. There was a huge outcry from former islanders and historic preservation organizations. 

As a direct result, the port included preserving the “existing buildings and sites” as one of the five goals in its master plan, echoed in its 2013 “Built Environment Historic, Architectural and Cultural Resource Policy.” 

When the port solicited community feedback on its draft master plan in 2013, several stakeholders asked for a Japanese history museum on Terminal Island.

And yet the buildings, which are owned by the port, have been sitting boarded up for years, falling into disrepair — a process sometimes called “demolition by neglect.”

Life on Terminal Island

So what was life on Terminal Island like?

Like mainland San Pedrans, the fishermen of “Tāminaru” had a reputation for being tough and a little rough around the edges. Terminal Islanders spoke their own dialect, Tāminaru-ben, a mixture of the fishermen’s choppy shorthand, Japanese, and English. 

It was a tight-knit community where everyone looked out for each other. Children walked barefoot on dirt roads named after fish: Tuna, Albacore, Sardine. Teenagers took the ferry across to mainland San Pedro to attend high school. The island had its own successful baseball team, the San Pedro Skippers. 

People lived by the rhythms of the ocean. Fishermen got paid “dark moon to dark moon.” When they brought in their catch, each cannery would sound its own whistle and the women would hurry to work. 

Above all, it was life — not just business, but a community that remains a cherished part of people’s identities and the nation’s maritime history.

“We have a voice” With demolition once again on the table, stakeholders are realizing that now is the time to consider how these buildings might be brought back to life. 

“It’s like, let’s open this up [for discussion],” said Hirahara. 

Furutani emphasizes Terminal Island’s importance to California’s origin story. Croatian, Italian and Japanese fishermen came here from their seaside nations and helped build a thriving economy. In San Pedro, buildings like the Dalmatian-American Club and Croatian American Hall help tell this story. Tuna Street does, too. 

Hirahara recalls the process of developing the interpretive center at Manzanar. 

“There were so many conversations that were so fruitful. There were competing interests — there were people who didn’t want anything there to remind them. They were part of the conversation, too. … And now, as a result of that, we have this wonderful national historic site [where] hundreds of people visit and learn. Even the people who opposed it at the time, many of them feel very differently [now].” 

In the late 1980s, Hirahara was a member of the Little Tokyo Service Center’s Housing Committee, which successfully fought for the preservation of the San Pedro Firm Building, a 1923 building in Little Tokyo that now provides 42 units of affordable housing to low-income seniors and is operated by LTSC. 

Like the establishment of the Japanese American National Museum, it was a moment when LA’s Japanese American community powerfully came together. “We have some track record of reconceiving public space.”   

“Through that experience,” she said, “I’ve come to see that we as people of Southern California do have a say in what’s important — and it’s not only economics.” 

Preservationists and stakeholders are looking to connect with others who want to explore possibilities for saving the buildings on Tuna Street. To get involved, please email savetaminaru@gmail.com.