Posted Dec 14, 2014, 5:54 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 6,714
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kelbeen
Scaffolding is down on Little Tokyo galleria
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that's the first pic I've seen of that bldg since its facade was redone! What a relief too, since I recall all the yrs when I've gone past there & grimaced at how gray, bland and anonymous the original exterior was.
Unlike the following person, I'm less nostalgic for the little tokyo of the past & think the youth of LA of today are lucky to be living in the here & now, & are experiencing a dtla that isn't as much of a 'shambles' as it was in the past.
I say live long & prosper.
Quote:
A Los Angeles Primer: Little Tokyo
By Colin Marshall | April 23, 2013
Little Tokyo sold me on Los Angeles. My northern Californian childhood introduced the delights of San Francisco's Japantown, still one of my beloved areas, but every time I go there, it looks to have wearily endured yet another wave of exodus and surrendered to yet another degree of decrepitude. This, of course, makes for its own kind of charm; fallen places often seem to me the only ones worth visiting. Little Tokyo, too, feels fallen, and richly so, though with an accent of resilience I no longer sense in its San Franciscan predecessor.
Over a century into its existence, then -- and over the past decade, when the New Otani Hotel became the Kyoto Grand, which became the DoubleTree by Hilton -- how Japanese does Little Tokyo remain? Japanese enough to offer you flavorful, reasonably priced dinner and a few minutes of language practice (Suehiro, an open-until-3:00 a.m. institution of forty years' standing, provides my own homely venue of choice for both), not to mention a glancing exposure to the refined service culture America never developed.
Little Tokyo -- like the city, like the state, like the country, like more or less everywhere -- could use a fresh infusion of Japanese people, especially those who can fill the ever more forlorn gaps in the neighborhood's retail landscape. Spare a thought for the poor Little Tokyo Galleria on 3rd and Alameda, an outsized mall (by downtown standards, anyway), anchored by a Korean grocery store, whose vacant spaces can stay that way for years.
Yet a walk through the Little Tokyo Galleria amounts to much more than an urban decay fetish trip. It might mean a visit to the Kuragami Plant Boutique, a persistent time capsule of a flower shop, or one to the Japan Arcade, perhaps the city's last surviving preserve of competently serviced coin-operated video games. More notably, it usually means a meal at Shojin, which daringly opened on the quiet mall's top floor to reinvent the flavors of Japanese cuisine for the meatless, dairyless vegan diet.
But more sites of Little Tokyo promise grew from the efforts not of Japanese immigrants, and not even of Japanese-Americans, but to entrepreneurs with no apparent connection to the land of Big Tokyo. This goes especially for coffee: recent years have seen the appearance of both Café Demitasse in Weller Court (which also houses Joon Lee's jazz club and art gallery Blue Whale) and Café Dulcé in the blue-roofed Japanese Village Plaza, neither of which insist you drink your cappuccino out of a paper cup.
While I do frequent these slick new spaces (Shojin's restrooms alone repay the cost of a multi-course lunch there), I sometimes wonder if they've come into irreconcilable conflict with my existing conception of Little Tokyo as an endearing shambles. Part of me longs for a seedier time in the neighborhood's history when I might have sat all night at the Atomic Café amongst local punk rockers, flamboyantly Americanized yakuza, and passing-through Lower East Side icons like David Byrne and Debbie Harry. Though I can now get no closer to that experience than examining the Atomic Café's sign, moved whole to the Japanese American National Museum, I like to think that the gritty cultural spirit of the place lingers on, doing its part for the neighborhood's periodic small-scale waves of revitalization. It lets me and everyone else who makes a point of hanging out nearby to feel basically optimistic about the future of the Japanese-Angeleno hybrid experience, whatever forms it may take. Prosper, Little Tokyo. But not too much.
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