A trip to Disneyland is a dream come true for many ten-year-olds, but few can stake a claim to this quite like John Kuramoto. One day in 1957, his father surprised the family with a visit to Disneyland—although to a different part and for different reasons than one would typically expect. Rather than go to the nearby theme park, the family was there to watch quarter-midget racing: a form of racing literally scaled for children in which kids drove miniature race cars around tiny tracks. “The smell of the vehicles and the noise captured me. I watched these kids race, and I looked at them and said to myself, ‘This is just unbelievable.’ The moment I saw it, I went over the moon,” John said.
A Sansei from Boyle Heights, John has always been interested in racing; it’s in his blood, as he joked. “We are a Nikkei racing family,” he said, referring to how his father, Jack Kuramoto, was a former hot rod racer from before WWII.
However, that day in Anaheim, John also saw other Nikkei youth his same age fly around the track, including Richard Shoji, an early Japanese American quarter-midget racer that John would later befriend. John Kuramoto eventually set off to become a quarter-midget racer himself, and at the height of his career in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he and other Los Angeles-area Nikkei became some of the greatest racers of tiny cars in the world.
This was post-war Southern California, the hotbed of hot rodding, fertile grounds for automotive innovation. This included Jimmie Yamane, a Nisei from Pacoima, who watched go-karting blossom from its early beginnings in the 1950s. Like many Nikkei who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, he lived and worked on a farm with his family. “I was always interested [in cars] because I was on a farm. That’s all we had. We didn’t have any toys or anything, so anything I could drive with, I learned how to drive tractors, trucks, a Model T Ford.”
He was a young teenager when he and his family were incarcerated at Manzanar, which is where he had his first real job: “I worked as a swamper, which is unloading the trucks. The food trucks, the vegetable trucks that came into camp. And I stayed with that department until they needed a truck driver… I didn’t have a license, but they knew I knew how to drive, so they gave me the job.”
After the war, he went to trade school in L.A. on the GI Bill and became a welder. He was working for McCullough Motors Corporation as a welder when go-karting took off. McCullough was partly known for selling smaller engines, built for appliances like chainsaws and lawnmowers. By the 1950s, intrepid racers began experimenting with using these small but powerful engines to power small race cars that were barely more than a basic frame and suspension. These became the first go-karts.
“You could start seeing [go-kart racers] around different parking lots,” Yamane said. “But then they made so much noise, it was starting to attract everybody. Then they raced at West Covina, in the May Company parking lot on a Sunday, because they were closed on a Sunday. But it was right next to the freeway, so that lasted one weekend and the police made them stop that. But then that just shows you that there were different places that people were starting to make this go-kart thing and run with it.”
Yamane would go to watch these early racers and became inspired to build a go-kart for himself. After he built it, he would stuff his kart in the trunk of his car and take it to race in empty lots at May Company, Hollywood Park, and Van Nuys Airport. Racing gave him a feeling unlike anything else.
“I don’t really know how to explain it. It’s just the way you feel when you go around a corner. At the speed that they’re running, you’re not really driving around the corner. You have to get the back end to go around with drift. But if you have the proper weight distribution, and the proper [steering] that you get the kart to go into the corner faster. And then you can kick it around, to get the back end to come around… Some parts are really hard to handle. Because I got my steering geometry from somebody that had a quarter midget, it was perfect.”
As the scene grew, larger companies banded together teams of engineers, mechanics, and racers to compete in tournaments. This led to the world’s first international go-karting championship, held in 1959 in the city of Nassau in Bahamas. Competing—and winning—that first go-karting grand prix was Jimmie, whose wife, Kazuko, was his sole pit crew member. “I think it’s called Nassau Speed Week,” Yamane said. “They didn’t want the karts on the main track, so they set up a track behind the stadium out in the macadam… that’s where we raced the first year.” He surprised himself by pulling out a victory under bright stadium lights and a night sky. He credits the win to his gas-powered engine that allowed him to race the full hour without a single pit stop.
He continued racing competitively for four years without getting so much as a scratch until his luck took a turn for the worse one day:
I went to Orlando Raceway. I was behind a guy, and I stepped on the brakes, and [learned] I didn’t have any, so I wound up going into the fence. And that’s when I got hurt, because they had a chain fence and big barrels of oil. I just ran into one of those barrels, and I severed my Achilles tendon. And that was the end of my racing career.
Yamane worked for McCullough for years after and later worked as a welder at UCLA, where he helped fabricate machinery for research needs. In his retirement, he built a mini go-kart for his grandchildren to ride around the farmhouse.
Meanwhile, as the older Jimmie Yamane was tearing up go-karting tracks in the late 1950s, the much younger John Kuramoto, barely 10, was doing the same in the quarter-midget world. After his love-at-first-sight encounter in Anaheim, his family made him wait six months to make sure it was something he really wanted. John never wavered: “I could not stop thinking of what I just saw for months.” When the wait was up, the whole family went full throttle to help the youngest Kuramoto move towards his dream.
In 1958, they won a quarter-midget car in a contest sponsored by an engine additive brand, largely thanks to the Kuramoto family’s ability to sell the product through Jack’s Auto Service, the much-beloved service station on 2nd and San Pedro in Little Tokyo.
John reflected on how his father’s passion shaped the way he lived his own life. “What drove him was, the way I see it, to make sure that he provided for our family… And he wanted to do what he enjoyed doing as a living. And time afterward, he would say, ‘Be sure to do that. When you pick something to do, make sure you love it.’”
John followed that advice closely. He lost his first race on a technicality but rebounded with two wins the very next day. “Things happened fast,” he explained. That success on the racetrack led to a close friendship with Richard Shoji, the very boy who inspired John in the first place. Just a couple of years older, Richard was a fast and daring racer himself, and the two boys began competing in the same races. One such event was in Las Vegas, against top racers in the sport. To his own surprise, John found himself in fourth place, then third place, then second, and…
“Lo and behold, Richard was in the lead… It was just a beautiful experience. We’re flying around, coming around. We won one and two. The best Nikkei family racing experience I ever had was the moment after that. [My brother] Dan was there. I remember how happy [Richard’s mom] Janet Shoji was. My God, she was just beside herself as a Japanese American, seeing [us] out there.”
The end of 1958 brought the national championships in Phoenix. John set a new track record in claiming the championship, with Richard Shoji also placing in the top five. Just like that, within ten months of starting his racing career, John was a national champion. A year later, he defended his title. A year after that, he did it again, becoming a back-to-back-to-back champion. “People asked me, ‘What do you think was the difference between you and the other guys?’ John shared. “I wanted to do well because of my family. I look back at [those days] with a lot of pride.”
It wasn’t just John Kuramoto and Richard Shoji out on the tracks either. Ron Yamaoka was a fellow Nikkei quarter-midget racer from Pacoima who didn’t just race against John but also other racers from the San Fernando Valley including Dickie Takimoto and Bryan Mizushima Jr. According to Ron, the existence of a Japanese American racing community “was a big deal because they all became friends. The fathers became friends. Dickie’s father turned wrenches for him. John always had his dad and someone else working on this engine. It was kind of a cool thing. Bryan and I, we grew up throughout our lives, and we were great friends.”
In the years since the heydays of Jimmie Yamane and John Kuramoto, quarter-midgeting has largely faded away. The kart Yamane built for his grandchildren never inspired them to take up racing like their grandpa, and John ended up in the property management business after his retirement from racing. Even still, go-karting remains strong and Nikkei of all ages continue to stay active in the sport: big ambitions fit into tiny cars.
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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 13, 2025, at the Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery at ArtCenter College of Design, 1111 South Arroyo Parkway, Pasadena, CA 91105. Learn more.
© 2025 Oliver Otake
