Power In Visibility

Japanese American Buildings on Terminal Island Make National Trust’s Endangered List

By Emma Rault, Community Reporter

The two surviving buildings from the Japanese American fishing village on Terminal Island have made it onto the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 2025 list of America’s 11 most endangered historic places.

For nearly forty years, the trust has used this annual list to draw attention to important historic sites that are under acute threat. Almost all of the featured sites have gone on to be saved, said National Trust President and Chief Executive Carol Quillen at a webinar about the Japanese buildings held on May 7, the day the list came out.

“There’s power in visibility,” she said.

The announcement came just a few months after CD 15 Councilmember Tim McOsker nominated the two store buildings for LA landmark status, and almost a year to the day since Random Lengths sounded the alarm about the Port of LA’s proposal to demolish them.

The webinar, hosted by the LA Conservancy, told the story of Tuna Street and what makes it so important.

While many people associate Terminal Island mainly with sprawling container yards, it was once home to a thriving community of more than three thousand Japanese Americans, who played a pivotal role in the city’s booming tuna industry. The men fished, the women worked long hours at the canneries, while children went to elementary school on the island or took the ferry across to mainland San Pedro for high school.

Fish Harbor, as it was known, had a Shinto shrine, churches, gathering halls, its own baseball team, and a bustling commercial thoroughfare on Tuna Street.

All of that came to an abrupt halt after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Japanese Americans were scapegoated, wrongly accused of being spies, and imprisoned in concentration camps like Manzanar in California’s Owens Valley.

The residents of Terminal Island were evicted at gunpoint in February 1942, forced to leave their homes within 48 hours. Soon after, the village was almost totally razed by the US Navy. “It was the only Japanese community where the built environment was almost entirely destroyed,” said Donna Reiko Cottrell, Vice President of the Terminal Islanders Association.

This makes it all the more remarkable that the two structures on Tuna Street — what used to be the dry-goods store Nanka Shoten, built in 1918, and the A. Nakamura Co. grocery store, built in 1923 — have survived.

When Port’s plans to demolish them came to light, the Terminal Islanders Association — an organization made up of some 200 survivors and descendants of the Japanese fishing village — jumped into action. They set up a dedicated preservation committee and partnered with the National Trust and the LA Conservancy to explore ways to save and revive the buildings, for example by turning them into a museum.

Paul Hiroshi Boyea, a third generation — or sansei — Japanese American who spearheads the preservation committee, said the structures “represent family, history, and culture. This is an American story that no one should ever forget.”

“The buildings prove to others that we lived there. That many people lived there,” said former Terminal Island resident Alice Nagano, 90, in a written statement shared at the webinar.

The LA landmark nomination initiated by Councilmember McOsker — an important first step in saving the buildings — will move on to a final vote by the City Council later this year.