“Where are our stories and histories about Asian Americans and cars?”
For me, this question planted the seeds for the Cruising J-Town exhibition and book, decades ago. Back in the early 1990s, I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, taking Asian American Studies classes for the first time. I was excited to learn about our community histories as well as Asian American novels and movies I had never known about before. But when it came to the culture being lived out in the literal streets, I was surprised how hard it seemed to find those stories in my classes.
I grew up in the western San Gabriel Valley in the 1980s, and I was well aware that many of the loud, lowered Hondas and Toyotas rumbling around local blocks and freeways were driven by young Asian Americans behind their tinted windows. The import car scene may have been considered “underground,” but it was also undeniably public, with drivers cruising busy boulevards or racing down more clandestine streets, late at night. And yet, as visible as this distinctly Asian American scene was around many California cities and elsewhere, it wasn’t chronicled in any of the books I was assigned back then.
Over 20 years went by, and that void persisted, much to my bewilderment. After all, if the goal of Asian American scholarship was to highlight the stories of the forgotten, the overlooked, and the marginalized, investigating car culture seemed obvious to me. As I write in the introduction to the Cruising J-Town book, “Perhaps Asian American car culture is perceived as too low-brow to burnish aspirational narratives of model minority success and/or too consumerist to meet activist ideals around socio-political empowerment.” Either way, no one outside a few car journalists and a tiny number of scholars seemed interested in the topic.
In the summer of 2016, I was chatting with my old friend, Hua Hsu, who also came out of Asian American Studies at Cal, and I was remarking, once again, “I can’t believe no one’s done a book about Asian Americans and cars yet.” Hua responded by pointing out, “You’ve made your career from studying and writing about Asian American popular culture. If you think this topic is so important, why don’t you just go out and study it yourself?” It was a fair point.
My wife, Sharon Mizota, suggested that I could start by interviewing my father-in-law, Don Mizota, a Sansei who grew up near Pacoima after the war, where his family members were flower farmers. He shared that, as a student at San Fernando High School in the mid/late 1950s, he and his friends—JA kids of farmers, gardeners, gas station owners, etc.—started a car club: Kame (as in “turtle” because they all had slow cars).
That first interview led to another, and then another. While I had been initially curious to learn more about Asian American car scenes all across the US, I quickly began to focus on other Nikkei car club members from the 1950s and early ’60s. It was fascinating to learn about their activities—cruising, racing, customizing, and souping up their cars and trucks—and how this culture was at the center of their social lives.
In the early spring of 2018, I wrote an article about “Nikkei Car Clubs” for Discover Nikkei. One of the people who read that article, Brian Karasawa, originally of Long Beach, wrote me to say that he and his JA friends had their own car club, Shoreline Racing, whose original heyday was in the early 1980. I now had a whole new generation of people to talk to.
As this was happening, by complete coincidence, YOMYOMF (the production company of Fast and Furious filmmaker Justin Lin) and the Japanese American National Museum had independently discussed mounting a car-related exhibit. JANM was open to the idea, but they wanted to find an outside curator to assist with it. Because I had written that single article for the Museum’s newsletter, they approached me. Seven years, 100+ interviews/conversations, and one exhibition and book later...Cruising J-Town has finally arrived.
At its heart, this project, encompassing the exhibition, the book, and all its related research, is about the Japanese American community in Los Angeles. People outside this community often assume Cruising J-Town is about Japanese car brands in America, and I’ve had to gently, but clearly, explain that this project isn’t about Japanese car companies (or Japanese culture). Instead, Cruising J-Town traces the long relationship between the Nikkei and the world of cars/trucks, going back over a century, well before any Japanese car ever touched American shores.
Vehicles were just as important in helping Nikkei gardeners and truck farmers find work in the early 1900s as they were for Japanese American drift racers to gain notoriety in the early 2000s. In the 100 years between, Nikkei car culture can be found in the countless gas stations once run by JA owners, in the fish trucks that canvassed the Southland to deliver fresh seafood every week, door to door, in the massive crowds lining the sidewalks during Nisei Week to watch the lines of cars and motorcycles cruise around the carnival grounds.
These experiences have always been out there in people’s memories. We hope, by collecting and sharing a relative handful of them, Cruising J-Town will inspire others to go further and deeper into all these topics and more. Ours was never meant to serve as the last word on Nikkei car culture; it’s merely a first set of suggestions. We still need many more stories and histories about Asian Americans and cars, but on behalf of the project team and myself, we’re very proud and privileged to have had this opportunity to get things rolling in our own, small way.
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Cruising J-Town: Behind the Wheel of the Nikkei Community will be on view July 31 - November 12, 2025, at the Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery at Art Center College of Design, 1111 South Arroyo Parkway, Pasadena, CA 91105. For more info here.
© 2025 Oliver Wang
