Did You Eat Yet? Feb 2025 with J-Town Action & Solidarity

Hello! We are J-Town Action と Solidarity (JAS), a grassroots collective dedicated to revolutionary organizing and building community power in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. We’re best known for our weekly serve the people program, Power Up, where we provide hot meals, snacks, first aid, electricity, and other supplies to unhoused and low-income residents. In addition to Power Up, JAS is a part of various campaigns aimed at ending the city’s attacks on unhoused people and stopping gentrification in Little Tokyo.

February is a deeply significant month for us: it marks the four-year anniversary of our organization. But more importantly, it marks our community’s forty-seventh Day of Remembrance for the mass incarceration of Japanese Amerikans during World War II.

This year, we’d like to share with you a meditation and call to action in the name of ancestors.

Eighty-three years ago, FDR signed executive order 9066, resulting in the incarceration of nearly all Japanese Amerikans on the West Coast in concentration camps. 9066 further led to the kidnapping of thousands of Japanese Latin Amerikans and the imprisonment of the Unangan people of the Pribilof and Aleutian islands off Alaska. Sixty-six years later in 1988 – after years of struggling for reparations – a mere portion of surviving JAs received an apology and checks amounting to crumbs for what they had lost and endured. The Unangan people received less. Most Japanese Latin Amerikans received nothing.

Today, Trump brings the War on Terror home in an executive order to send migrants to offshore concentration camps at Guantanamo Bay. Palestine grieves the 186,000+ martyrs murdered by US-sponsored bombs in Israel’s open-air prisons of Gaza and the West Bank. Unhoused tenants in LA are swept into cages while 6 people die on the street each day. Remembrance is a struggle.

Every year, JAs memorialize our incarceration and the struggle we waged for reparations decades ago. We memorialize. Yet, many JAs struggle to remember our history. Our own community members become embedded into institutions, making multi-million dollar deals with corporations at the expense of death and genocide. The injustices of the Japanese Latin Amerikan and Unangan people are glossed over. Unhoused tenants have been terrorized, swept, and fenced out of Little Tokyo, often at the demand of our own community members. ICE raids our communities, and countless JAs do nothing. Many are too busy selling our historic communities to developers and corporations, piece by piece. Many of them know the history, a few may have even experienced it themselves. But they’re participating in the gentrifying erasure of our struggles. To not only hold our memories tightly within us everyday, but to fight boldly against the systems that have imprisoned us all, remembrance is a struggle.

This year, we are demanding an end to sweeps against unhoused tenants and an end to the fences barring unhoused people from Little Tokyo. We demand true reparations for the Japanese Latin Amerikan and Unangan people. We demand that all businesses, non-profits, and landlords in our communities pledge to bar ICE from their properties, divest from the Zionist regime in whatever supply partnerships they maintain, and stop selling our community out to developers and corporations. We demand that the redevelopment of the 4th/Central Cold Storage into luxury buildings stop, so that it can be replaced with affordable housing units and space for local Japanese American businesses. And we, the working and progressive people of Little Tokyo, are pledging to fight for this. Remembrance is a struggle.

If there’s anything we’ve learned over the past few years of organizing in Little Tokyo, it’s the fact that our government belongs to the people with property and the rest of us only have each other to rely on.

When we started doing Power Up, Toriumi Plaza had an encampment with dozens of unhoused tenants. Some of the businesses (i.e. the people with property) complained, so the city swept the encampment and fenced the plaza off from everyone. The city put some of the unhoused folks in hotels for a few months, and then sent them back on the street. Most are still unhoused, and the city hasn’t lifted a finger to help—but the city is always able to send parking enforcement to hassle us when we’re trying to set up for Power Up.

It’s not just that the government won’t help poor and working class folks: the government works for the rich, and the rich send the government to attack us. We’ve seen this play out week after week in the streets of downtown. We’re all we’ve got, and we won’t survive if we don’t band together to fight back.

Here’s what we’re reading this month:

Check out this anthology of revolutionary Asian America in the 60s and 70s: Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America, edited by Fred Ho, Carolyn Antonio, Diane Fujino, and Steve Yip.
This historical newsletter from 1989 is a must-read: “Cash & Genocide: The True Story of Japanese American Reparations” by “D.K. Matsui” (a.k.a. J. Sakai).
And lastly, we highly recommend False Nationalism, False Internationalism, by E. Tani and Kaé Sera as your next political education reading.

Remembrance is a struggle. We’ll be holding a rally at Toriumi Plaza in Little Tokyo on Saturday Feb 22nd, at 11:00am. We hope you can join us this year, either in person or in spirit.

In solidarity,