The Japanese Neighborhood Buried Under the Port of Los Angeles: Terminal Island Documentary

The Port of Los Angeles sits on top of a fishing village most of the country has never heard of. Terminal Island's Japanese American community, known to the people who lived there as Furusato, grew into a self-contained town of roughly three thousand people between 1899 and 1941, then lost nearly all of it in one week in February 1942, when the United States Navy gave about five hundred households, including a restaurant owner named Orie Mie left alone with four children, just 48 hours to leave the only home most of them had ever known. This documentary follows the whole arc: immigrant fishermen from Japan's Wakayama Prefecture settling San Pedro Bay around 1899 and building California's canned tuna industry out of almost nothing; the canneries, the share system, and the discriminatory 1918 law barring Japanese immigrants from owning their own boats; daily life on Tuna Street, inside the cannery whistle schedule, and through the island's own dialect and traditions; the FBI arrests that began within hours of Pearl Harbor, including the arrest that opens Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar; Executive Order 9066 and the Navy's own accelerated 48-hour eviction notice, faster than almost any other removal order issued that year; the Shinto shrine a priest dismantled board by board rather than leave standing for the Navy to tear down; the total demolition of the village in the weeks that followed; the scattering of survivors into Gardena, Long Beach, and Little Tokyo with nothing left to return to; and the decades-long fight by descendants, culminating in a 2025 Historic-Cultural Monument designation, to save the two buildings that are all that remains standing from Furusato. Today the historic village footprint belongs almost entirely to container terminals. Two buildings on Tuna Street, a 2002 memorial at Fish Harbor with bronze statues of two Issei fishermen, and the descendants who still gather once a year at a picnic far from the island itself are what is left of a community that took 40 years to build and 48 hours to lose. Chapters: 0:00 Forty Eight Hours to Leave 1:40 Building Furusato on San Pedro Bay 4:07 Daily Life in a Fishing Village 8:30 Pearl Harbor and the First Arrests 12:11 Executive Order 9066 and the Navy's Order 16:04 The Forty Eight Hour Evacuation 19:19 Demolition and Dispersal 24:19 What Remains of Furusato Today Researched from the Densho Digital Archive, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's Farewell to Manzanar, Naomi Hirahara and Geraldine Knatz's Terminal Island: Lost Communities on America's Edge, the Los Angeles Conservancy, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and contemporary reporting on the Tuna Street preservation campaign. 📘 Buy Vanished America Ebook: https://www.allansabandonedamerica.co... 📕 Get The Field Guide Now: https://www.allansabandonedamerica.co... ▶️ Help me to 1000 Subs:    / @allansabandonedamerica   About This Channel: Allan's Abandoned America tells the stories of abandoned ghost towns, forgotten tourist resorts, and declining infrastructure across the United States. Each video investigates who built these places, who profited, and who was left behind. WATCH Next: The Neighborhood Buried Under Dodger Stadium: Chavez Ravine Documentary:    • The Neighborhood Buried Under Dodger Stadi...   Full Playlist: Abandoned Places in America:    • Abandoned Places in America   READ the full written report at allansabandonedamerica.com/places/terminal-island DISCLAIMER This video is for educational and documentary purposes. Visit any locations mentioned at your own risk. Some visual sequences in this video are dramatic re-enactments created for illustrative purposes and do not depict real footage.