In the spring of 1949, a group of Japanese American men from Los Angeles, all in their 20s, met to discuss forming a new car club: The Turtles. Their name was presumably a tongue-in-cheek joke about how slow their cars were, and as reported on by the Rafu Shimpo in April 1949, their purpose was “primarily to promote automotive engineering.” That was a fancier way of saying that the Turtles were interested in racing hot rods.
Hot rod culture was born in the dry lakes of the Mojave Desert, north of Los Angeles. There, beginning in the 1920s, drivers raced cars modified for peak performance — retroactively known as hot rods — flying across the hard clay left behind by lakes that had dried up tens of thousands of years ago.
Initially, the flat, empty expanse of dry lakes like Muroc, Harper, and Rosamond felt like smart spaces to throttle around in, with nothing to run into for miles around. Ironically, the popularity of lake racing created a distinctly man-made peril: other drivers. Before racing events became better organized, accidents — some fatal — were a regular occurrence. Likewise, though drivers went there to pursue land speed records, there were no governing bodies to validate anyone’s times.
To solve both problems, car clubs united to create timing associations, beginning in 1937 with the Southern California Timing Association, whose mission was to organize sanctioned racing events and provide the staff and equipment to record official speeds. Drivers participating in timing association events would leave with small, metal timing tags that recorded their names, cars, and top speeds.
One requirement to participate in a timing association event was that drivers had to belong to a car club, and each club had duties to perform at races, including setting up, cleaning up, or issuing timing plates. As detailed in the Rafu Shimpo article, the Turtles Racing Club (TRC) was formed specifically so that members could participate in events organized by the Russetta Timing Association (RTA), the primary competitor with the SCTA. However, club or no club, Nisei racers constituted the largest non-white group of enthusiasts in the WWII-era hot rod scene.
Before WWII, that included everyone from the Mobilers’ Frank Moriomoto, whose family ran a produce stand in Monrovia, to the Walkers’ Akira “Danny” Sakai, scion of the Tokio Florist family in Los Feliz, to the Outriders’ Yoichi “George” Yata, a gardener from Hollywood. Because of the friendships that these men made with other car club members, some had the fortune of having their cars/engines protected by others while they were incarcerated during the war.
For example, Tsuneo “Tunney” Shigekuni came from a nursery family in the Exposition Park area and as a member of the Road Runners club, he became good friends with future hot rod legend, Vic Edelbrock Sr. When the Shigekuni family was sent to Santa Anita Assembly Center, Edelbrock would visit. Tunney’s brother Tom recalled how: “Vic Sr. was fiercely loyal to his friends and he was horrified by the fact that Tunney, Henry, and I were to be sent away, but there was nothing he could do to prevent us from facing the situation.”
When Edelbrock learned that the engine for Tunney’s 1941 Mercury roadster was being stored in a neighbor’s cellar, he grew concerned it would rust and picked it up himself, keeping it protected. This allowed Shigekuni to resume racing as early as 1947 alongside other drivers, such as Glendale’s Yam Oka, who also had allies keeping their engines and cars safe for the duration of the war.
The members of the Turtles were too young to have participated in these events before the war, but they were part of a prominent postwar wave of Nikkei eager to join the dry lake races by the late 1940s. TRC’s members reflected the landscape of postwar Nikkei Los Angeles, including people like Motomu “Moke” Nakasako, a veteran of the 442nd. He and fellow TRC driver George Nomura were both gardeners, living in the Exposition Park area. Kei Nitta was a mechanic from Venice, while Hiroshi “Yoke” Kuromi was a florist from Hollywood.
One of their youngest, original members was Lawrence “Larry” Shinoda, only 19 at the time TRC formed. Hailing from the tiny Hermon neighborhood near South Pasadena, Shinoda would go on to become one of the most celebrated auto designers of the 20th century, but in ‘49, he was taking classes at Pasadena City College while building and racing hot rods on the side.
I first learned about the Turtles in the pages of a scrapbook that landed in my lap. At some point in time — no one knows when — a pair of photo albums that had accidentally left the possession of the family of Yoke and Corrine Kuromi. The albums bounced between a series of antique and book dealers until finding their way to Steven Doi, a Bay Area bookseller who specializes in Asian American ephemera.
In 2017, Doi, knowing I was doing research on Nikkei car culture, offered the albums to me because he had seen photos inside of JAs with hot rods. Within those pages were remarkable photos of Yoke and the 1932 Ford roadster he raced at El Mirage at an RTA event in August of 1949.
Yoke and Corrine were part of the Ito-Kuromi florist families, a well-respected part of the floral industry in Southern California. Yoke’s sister and brother-in-law, Alice and Arthur Ito, ran the popular Flower View Gardens in Hollywood, where Yoke served as vice president. Yoke’s brother, Isamu “Ise” Kuromi, opened ISE Automotive in Los Feliz, a popular repair shop still run by Ise’s sons, Craig and Gary Kuromi.
Meanwhile, though there’s no evidence that Yoke stayed active in the hot rod world past his 20s, I did find this photo in the Arthur Ito Papers at the Huntington Library, featuring Arthur and Yoke at the Los Angeles Auto Show in 1961, when Flower View Gardens was hired to create all the floral displays.
Thanks to records kept by Jim Miller, historian for the American Hot Rod Federation, and Russ O’Daly, historian for the Gear Grinders car club, we know that TRC members, including Kuromi, were active throughout 1949 at RTA events, especially that year’s June, July, and August meets, where at least 5-6 people belonging to the TRC came to race. That included the aforementioned Kuromi, Nakasako, Nitta, and Nomura, as well as other TRC members like Seinan mechanic Kazuo Uyehara, and Kozo Ikemi, future owner of K&Y Motors, which specialized in industrial engines.
However, there were other Nikkei at the same events, a reflection of how invested Nisei racers were in the robust hot rod scene of the era. At RTA events in 1949 alone, there were at least 15 different Japanese American drivers recorded in programs. Outside of the TRC, the Rotors car club had members Nobuo “Nob” Steve Hori and Frank Ige participating at various meets while the American Racing Club’s Harry Maeda was part of the same August 1949 event that many TRC drivers also participated in. It’s very likely there were other Nisei racers who were at the same events but didn’t register early enough to be listed in the programs.
Best as I know, though, no other car club of that era had more Nikkei members than the Turtles. In the course of working on Cruising J-Town, I’ve spoken to the children of at least three original TRC members including Kevin Kuromi (son of Yoke), Kathy Nitta (daughter of Kei), and Greg Amano (son of Akira, who joined the club in the early 1950s).
Of the various Nikkei car scenes from the 20th century, the dry lake hot-rodders are some of the best documented and yet the amount of information known is limited to a handful of articles and the occasional, brief mention in an oral history. All we can say for certain is that Nisei racers were highly visible and welcomed participants in this most vibrant and influential of Southern California car scenes, the crucible of everything from the aftermarket performance industry to custom car culture. Some, like Danny Sakai — who died in a 1941 motorcycle accident — have even been honored with contemporary reconstructions of their original, prewar roadsters.
However, these still amount to snippets from much richer histories we likely will never fully know. Questions we weren’t able to answer include: How did the members of the TRC find one another? Did they socialize with each other outside of the RTA events? How did they learn to modify their cars for racing? Most were only in the hot rod world for a handful of years, and few of the children we spoke to knew anything about their fathers’ racing days. The best we have are the things they left behind: car plaques, patches, and photos that offer us a tantalizing glimpse into an era of Nikkei car culture that looms large in the imagination, enigmatic yet alluring.
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To learn more about the WWII-era Nisei racers and their legacies, check out the Cruising J-Town book. Special thanks to Greg Amano, the CSU Japanese American Digitization Project, Steven Doi, the Kuromi Family, Jim Miller, Kathy Nitta, Russ O’Daly, the Sakai-Kozawa Family, Li Wei Yang
Cruising J-Town: Behind the Wheel of the Nikkei Community, an exhibition presented by the Japanese American National Museum, has been extended and will be on view until December 14, 2025, at the Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery at ArtCenter College of Design, 1111 South Arroyo Parkway, Pasadena, CA 91105. Learn more.
© 2025 Oliver Wang
