Little Tokyo is Born: Charlie Hama’s Restaurant on East First Street
The first Japanese to arrive in 1869 were two servants, T. Kamo and I. Nosaka, of the Kewen family living in El Molino Viejo, the Old Mill, previously owned by Mission San Gabriel in San Marino today. Their names are recorded in the 1870 Census. The late senior curator William Mason of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History believed they were members of the ill-fated Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony near Sacramento.
By 1884, there were fewer than fifty Japanese in town, one of whom, Hamanosuke Shigeta, opened a restaurant at 340 East First Street, in a …