While outsiders or newcomers may view Pasadena, the second oldest incorporated city in Los Angeles County, as a white-privileged neighborhood, longtime insiders like me have a slightly different perception.
We remember dressing in yukata for the Obon at the Pasadena Buddhist Temple, where we could scarf down the most “oishii” down-home chow mein, or attend services at the First Presbyterian Church of Altadena, led by the Rev. Donald Toriumi, a community leader since World War II. Sunday school was taught by a then young and long-haired Cory Ishida, who would end up leading a larger Asian American evangelical movement.
I sometimes wondered why our local Japanese American basketball team, the Pasadena Bruins, was named after the UCLA mascot when USC was much closer geographically, but I picked up that it was taboo to make such inquiries. In addition to church and basketball, my weekends were marked (ruined, I thought at the time) by Japanese-language school at Pasadena Cultural Institute on Lincoln Avenue.
I credit Pasadena and Altadena for forming my young Japanese American identity, creativity, and spirituality. These communities introduced me to African American, Jewish, Taiwanese American, and white family and cultural practices. They also taught me how to expertly dribble and steal a basketball despite my 4’10” height. Yet the ‘Denas, from a Japanese American perspective, have been viewed as an afterthought—a bit of mystery, perhaps, due to our isolation and seclusion at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains.
It didn’t help that the 210 Freeway took away our most visible cultural centers—the Pasadena Japanese Community Center, where the Salvation Army exists now, and the Pasadena Union Church—from Old Pasadena, ostensibly leading to our diaspora to more hidden northern areas.
When my parents came to town to join my uncle and aunt in 1961, they first lived in an apartment on Raymond Avenue. At the time, there were more than 1,600 Japanese American adults and businesses in Pasadena and 250 in Altadena. My parents’ social circle revolved around other Japanese-speaking families whose patriarchs were gardeners, like my father. Through innovative preschool and parenting programs pioneered by Pasadena City College, my mother, a native of Hiroshima, became friends with more English-speaking women, including Nisei who would end up becoming her best and lifelong friends.
For the past 20 years, I’ve been doing a deep dive on Pasadena. The first opportunity came when I answered the call to serve as a volunteer windshield surveyor with three others for the Preserving Japantown project. Our team was dispatched to locations throughout Pasadena where dozens of Japanese American businesses were flourishing in 1940, two years before the Civilian Exclusion Order would mandate Japanese American residents in Pasadena to gather at 38 E. California Street, where a diaper service is now located. Their destination from there would not be the nearby Santa Anita Assembly Center but the Tulare Fairgrounds, close to 200 miles away in the San Joaquin Valley.
Among the memorable interactions as part of the Preserving Japantowns project was meeting an African American 83-year-old man, Gilbert Perry, who had delivered Rafu Shimpo newspapers from his bicycle to local subscribers in the 1930s. I later discovered that where a neighborhood Ralph’s grocery store stands on Lake Avenue was once the location of several Japanese American produce stalls. I couldn’t help but imagine what Pasadena today would look like if all those enterprises were not either erased or stymied because of the forced removal of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Other local history projects revealed additional sites, institutional histories, and personalities. Through research and writing about the early Japanese immigrant community in Pasadena for a book commemorating the centennial anniversary of Huntington Library’s Japanese garden, I followed the voyage of carpenter Toichiro Kawai from Yokohama to Pasadena in 1902. Kawai and another pioneering family, the Wakijis, who helped open the city’s first Japanese-owned nursery, eventually established residences outside of downtown. Most of the 90 other early Japanese residents, on the other hand, lived in two districts around the central core of Pasadena, according to the 1910 Census.
The Japanese population consistently grew from 40 households in 1915 to 60 in 1920. The Pasadena Union Church, a combined effort of the First Congregational and First Friends Church missions, was established in 1913. By 1923, the community had raised enough money to unveil its newly constructed building for the Pasadena Japanese Community Center.
The later years were just as fascinating, as Japanese Americans of Altadena and Pasadena had many organic interactions with the African American population of this region—from playing on the same Pasadena Junior College baseball team as Jackie Robinson to later sharing experiences navigating mandated school busing in the 1970s.
Of course, the tragic fires to besiege Southern California—the Palisades and, here, the Eaton Fire this January—have revealed how tenuous the documentation of our local histories is. While my childhood home on McNally Avenue in Altadena was destroyed, our current home in Pasadena was fine; we did not even experience any loss of power or smoke damage. However, I still acutely felt the real and tangible losses of homes owned by friends, both old and new, as well as places of worship and small businesses.
I thought about the family photos and albums lost in the fire and contacted Pasadena City College Professor Susie Ling, who has dedicated much of her academic work to documenting the history of people of color in the San Gabriel Valley. She and her husband, Roy Nakano, scanned 50 of my photos, which mostly reflect the 1960s and ’70s of a young Japanese American girl growing up in the ‘Denas. These will be available for researchers at the archives of the Pasadena Museum of History. I felt a sense of relief that part of that story has been preserved for curious and interested people to piece together.
This column, Past Pasadena and Postcard Histories, will shine a spotlight on some interesting histories that I’ve encountered in my work on the ‘Denas. I will sprinkle in features on historic postcards that document little-known stories of the Japanese American experience in other locations. As the rebuilding of our beloved Altadena will certainly be a slow one, my hope is that the presence and struggles of Japanese Americans will not only be remembered but will inform what develops in the future.
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Along with Misch Anderson-Takemoto, a volunteer with Walktober Pasadena, Naomi has developed a walking tour of some notable pioneering locations of Japanese Americans within Old Pasadena. The first walking tour will be on Wednesday, October 29, 2025, from 9:00 to 10:30 a.m. Participants will be limited; you can register at WalktoberPasadena.org starting October 12.
© 2025 Naomi Hirahara
