The Doors: LA Woman
Great video with a lot of ambience from Los Angeles in the 1970s and maybe 1980s. Interesting to see that the Japanese community in LA played such a big role at the city's festivals and that The Doors payed attention.
Little Tokyo in LA had 30,000 Japanese-American residents at its peak. Little Tokyo extended east and south of the present location, and covered approximately one square mile. The area was a magnet for immigrating Japanese until the racist U.S. Exclusion Act of 1924 halted any further immigration. Nisei Week is a good website too (Nisei or 二世 lit. means second generation). More about the internment of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans during WW2, based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership".
Densho is a nonprofit organization started in 1996, to document oral histories from Japanese Americans at that time. All very relevant today, as we have to make decisions about how to deal with people of faiths and backgrounds that are different from our own, as artist Roger Shimomura has pointed out:
In 1958, Roger dated a Swedish American girl named Jan Johnson. Jan lived in West Seattle, an area known to be hostile to people of color.
One evening, while Roger was driving Jan home, she told him to drop her off one block from her house. When Roger asked why, she told him that when she informed her parents that she was going out to dinner with Roger Shimomura, her father said he did not want her dating "Oriental people." If she did, and he caught her, he said he would shoot "the Jap" with his gun like he had done in World War II. While she argued with her parents, her father got out his shotgun, loaded it, and placed it next to the front door.
As Jan got out of Roger's car a block from her home, her last words were, "You think I'm kidding?"
I had my first sushi in Palo Alto back in 1987, read Jobs in Japan, and decided to buy the ticket. That was before the boom of all things Asian. China and Vietnam were still rigidly communist. Halryu? Both Koreas were dictatorships, and before the fall of the Berlin Wall, who would have guessed we would all be living in such happy times thanks to the market-based WTO-led globalized economy!!
Bonus: The Doors The End live at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival (8:03 version)
Little Tokyo in LA had 30,000 Japanese-American residents at its peak. Little Tokyo extended east and south of the present location, and covered approximately one square mile. The area was a magnet for immigrating Japanese until the racist U.S. Exclusion Act of 1924 halted any further immigration. Nisei Week is a good website too (Nisei or 二世 lit. means second generation). More about the internment of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans during WW2, based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership".
Densho is a nonprofit organization started in 1996, to document oral histories from Japanese Americans at that time. All very relevant today, as we have to make decisions about how to deal with people of faiths and backgrounds that are different from our own, as artist Roger Shimomura has pointed out:
In 1958, Roger dated a Swedish American girl named Jan Johnson. Jan lived in West Seattle, an area known to be hostile to people of color.
One evening, while Roger was driving Jan home, she told him to drop her off one block from her house. When Roger asked why, she told him that when she informed her parents that she was going out to dinner with Roger Shimomura, her father said he did not want her dating "Oriental people." If she did, and he caught her, he said he would shoot "the Jap" with his gun like he had done in World War II. While she argued with her parents, her father got out his shotgun, loaded it, and placed it next to the front door.
As Jan got out of Roger's car a block from her home, her last words were, "You think I'm kidding?"
I had my first sushi in Palo Alto back in 1987, read Jobs in Japan, and decided to buy the ticket. That was before the boom of all things Asian. China and Vietnam were still rigidly communist. Halryu? Both Koreas were dictatorships, and before the fall of the Berlin Wall, who would have guessed we would all be living in such happy times thanks to the market-based WTO-led globalized economy!!
Bonus: The Doors The End live at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival (8:03 version)
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