Born in Okinawa in 1937 and raised on Oahu, Nobu Oshiro spent his teen years in the mid-1950s working at Honolulu gas stations, pulling a graveyard shift for the Dole Pineapple company, and with whatever time he had left, taking his souped-up 1941 Chevy to race through plantation fields. “We used to go racing west of Honolulu in a pineapple or sugarcane field…I did a lot of racing. That’s all I cared about,” said Oshiro, who still carries traces of a Hawaiian pidgin accent.
The problem is that Oshiro didn’t just rack up races, he also accumulated a pile of tickets. “I got 27 speeding tickets, I’m not kidding you… So I had to go to court and judge said, ‘I will put your butt in jail.’”
Oshiro and the judge worked out an unusual compromise: Oshiro offered to leave Hawai‘i for the mainland in exchange for not being jailed. The judge replied, “Tomorrow, noon. You come back here, show me a plane ticket, or I’m going to come pick you up.”
Sure enough, by noon the next day, Oshiro showed the judge a ticket for a flight to Los Angeles which soon brought the mechanic to the mainland for the first time ever in 1957, at age 20.
Oshiro found quick work at service stations and a dealership garage but also encountered forms of racial discrimination he hadn’t seen back in Hawai‘i. While working at a garage in Inglewood, a police officer stopped him and his co-workers when they went into town after work one night. Oshiro remembered the cop calling his group, “a bunch of pineapples,” warning them, “No n_____s allowed in the city of Inglewood after 8 p.m.… I felt really prejudiced [against]... I’m not used to that, you know. It really freaked me out. I couldn’t believe that.”
By this point, his wife, Vivian (Nakama) Oshiro, had joined him in L.A. from Hawai‘i, and for a while, they lived next to her brother, a Nikkei gardener in East L.A., before finding a house in Monterey Park, which had a tiny but growing Nikkei population by the early 1960s. Together, they raised their four kids in the neighborhood: Cheryl, Ty, Taryn, and Robin.
To make ends meet, Oshiro opened a gas station in the tony Larchmont neighborhood in mid-city, circa 1963. Much like his teenage days in Oahu, daytime was for working at the station but in the evening, street racing called except now, instead of traveling to pineapple fields, the racers came to Oshiro instead. He had developed a reputation amongst the local street racers for his 1958 Impala which, unknown to most, was using newer supercharging technology and other modifications to boost its performance way beyond stock specifications.
“Somehow, people find out about me, like in the gunslinger days,” he said. “They come in, try to beat you…from everywhere. Crenshaw area. White boys from the [San Fernando] Valley.” Some even towed their cars to his shop, which wouldn’t have been unusual at Lions Drag Strip but this was in the streets of an affluent residential neighborhood.
Oshiro and his friends soon developed a remarkable routine, waiting until late at night to block off a half-mile strip of Larchmont Blvd. between Beverley Blvd. and Melrose Ave: “That’s the only wide street there,” he explained. “All the way to Melrose, it’s about long three block[s] so we had guys blocking the street… We used to have a ball,” he said. Oshiro and his friends calculated that they could squeeze in six passes, up and down their impromptu suburban drag strip, until they had to reopen the road to avoid police scrutiny.
“That’s the way guys knew about me. More guys from all over Southern California, they came to try to beat me,” he said. It’s no surprise that when the car magazine, All Chevy Performance, profiled Oshiro in spring 2023, they referred to him as “an absolute legend in West Coast muscle car lore.”1
Oshiro parlayed his street reputation to the benefit of his business in 1966 when he came upon a garage space in Hollywood, right behind the famed Cinerama Dome on Sunset Blvd. That’s where he opened up his speed shop: Nobu’s Auto Lab/Dyno-Tune.
This wasn’t exactly your corner service station to get a quick oil change: the Auto Lab specialized in testing and optimizing engines to maximize performance though Oshiro took on other speciality jobs as his clients requested. For almost 15 years, his Hollywood shop drew all kinds of clients, coinciding with the last glory years of L.A.’s urban drag strips.
Oshiro spent many nights at strips like Lions, Orange County Raceway, and Irwindale Raceway, partly to see his handiwork in action amongst drivers who had brought him their cars at the Auto Lab. “I had tons of cars running out of my shop with my decal on it,” he said.
Naturally, Oshiro was also out there racing too, including with a 1965 Chevelle with an unusual modification: “That car was acid dipped. The whole body in acid. Make ‘em paper thin. Make it light so can go light with a big engine. That’s what makes it go fast.”
For such a notorious street racer—who had also been racially profiled by the Inglewood police—it’s ironic that Oshiro’s shop drew a steady stream of police officers who wanted him to help with their boat engines. “Southern California…cops got boats, you know, weekend toys,” Oshiro said, explaining that these boats were often outfitted with stock car engines. After successfully tuning such an engine for one officer’s boat, his colleagues soon followed: “I had more cop guys, got a boat I stuck those engine in.”
Meanwhile, by coincidence, his Hollywood location was near the then-headquarters of Petersen Publishing, home to many of the most influential auto magazines in the U.S. (Hot Rod, Motor Trend, Lowrider, etc.). Petersen writers and editors would often drop by the Auto Lab: “They just got interested in me… They came with zillions of questions.” Petersen staff ended up doing a photo shoot of Oshiro working on engines and used those images in a series of How To Fix Your Car-type manuals published through the 1970s.
To the surprise of many, in 1982, Oshiro decided to close up the Auto Lab despite its success. He was still in his mid-40s but having spent years working around the clock, he explained, “My wife begged me [saying] ‘Time for you to get out. Please. Enough is enough.’” Oshiro spent the following decades continuing to work on cars, just at his leisure now, rather than to support a business.
He reflected on what motivated him when he first started out, especially as an Asian American, or as he put it, “an Oriental.” When he first opened up the Auto Lab, he saw his main competition as a trio of speed shops in the San Fernando Valley: “I was bucking against three top-notch, well-known white guys in the Valley… I said to myself, ‘Being an Oriental guy, I got to be better than them.’ And that was my goal, tried to be better than them. And guess what? I retired before they did. Youngest guy.”
Note:
1. Fuelish Media. “One For the Road.”
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Cruising J-Town: Behind the Wheel of the Nikkei Community will be on view July 31 - November 12, 2025, presented by the Japanese American National Museum at the Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery at ArtCenter College of Design, 1111 South Arroyo Parkway, Pasadena, CA 91105. Learn more.
© 2025 Oliver Wang
