Over a couple of green tea cookies at Callisto Tea House, San Marino native, current South Pasadena resident Dr. Oliver Wang says, “I’m not a car person, but my wife Sharon (Mizota) says I’m a car person-person. I’m interested in groups, and why we get together.”
Wang, who teaches Sociology at California State University Long Beach, is a first-time project curator for the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), serving as the creative force behind the new exhibit “Cruising J-Town: Behind the Wheel of the Nikkei Community,” opening July 31 at ArtCenter College of Design.
Racing, modifying and customizing existing vehicles, along with designing new rides, has long been an overlooked aspect of everyday life among Japanese Americans as demonstrated by this project, which features more than 100 objects including rare photographs and home movies, car club memorabilia, concept car designs and five classic cars that tell the story.
In addition to showcasing badass rides by any standard, the exhibition also honors the utilitarian but cherished trucks used by Japanese American farmers and fisher-folk to transport themselves into their version of the American Dream.
The idea, Wang says, was incubating in his thought-process for years: “No one was talking about Asian Americans and car culture. A word that was used by older Japanese was ‘yogore,’ which literally means stained or dirty. In the context of cars, it meant more like ‘delinquent.’ The young men who loved cars were seen this way, as sort of low-lifes, not respectable like scholars, doctors and lawyers.”
Wang cites the iconic lowered Honda Civic and Acura Integra as the most sought after cars of the Southern Californian Asian American communities of his youth, observing that “mainstream car culture was rejected on several levels and largely avoided by Asian American studies scholars because it was too low-brow to fit into the aspirational model, and too consumerist to align with any form of community activism.”
He says that the model-minority paradigm persists as one source of many “margins and gaps” which continue to restrict and distort the living experience and realities of Asian cultures.
This research sidebars the fact that Wang himself has been a DJ since the early 1990s, with an encyclopedic knowledge of hip hop and retro soul — areas not automatically linked with Asian-ness. Wang explored aspects of this phenomenon in his 2015 book “Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crew in the San Francisco Bay Area.”
Although car clubs existed in major American cities since around 1920, the fetish really hit the gas following WWII and, for Japanese Americans, the technical end of unjust and devastating incarceration. The automobile as the quintessentially American expression of individual autonomy carries a sharp sting here.
For a brief window in 1942, Japanese Americans were permitted to drive themselves and their belongings to sites including the Santa Anita temporary detention center and the Manzanar internment camp. Once unpacked, the cars were impounded and “liquidated” with minimal-to-zero restitution, mirroring the theft of businesses and property that defined Executive Order 9066.
In the installment’s companion volume with a foreword by actor George Takei, Wang writes “Most people don’t associate the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans with any aspect of conventional car culture, yet cars and trucks played a constant and complicated role for the Nikkei during this darkest moment in their American history…While in camp, they managed motor pools, serviced vehicles, went joyriding, and still found ways to take photos of themselves in front of cars.”
While incarcerated Japanese Americans formed car clubs while in camp, their kids emerged from the camps into the high-octane fusion of youth culture and accompanying car culture which picked up speed by the 1950s.
In the post-war boom, car production accelerated, and a new car purchase topped the list of status markers of the new prosperity for all Americans. This wave of affluence in turn generated an abundance of affordable used vehicles, coinciding with another major social shift: the emergence of the American teenager as a distinct, viable cultural entity…not to mention a lucrative marketing target.
The recent passing of Brian Wilson makes summer 2025 the ideally bittersweet moment for “Cruising J-Town,” capturing that pivotal moment where radio fare celebrated the hot rod promise of darkened back seats, the muscle and purr of an upgraded engine, the thrill of the pink slip securing vehicle ownership, and the damp, goose-pimply throes of young love in a single Top 40 breath. Sulking James Dean would have been nothing without his Porsche 550 Spyder, and Danny Zuko would just be another hand-jivin’ grease-monkey without his noble chariot, Greased Lightning.
“For years,” says Wang, “I complained to everyone that I couldn’t believe that no one was doing this project.” Then in 2018, Wang wrote an essay for Discover Nikkei that added creative fuel and oxygen to the long, slow burn.
By then, Justin Lin had established his pop culture franchise with various iterations of “The Fast and the Furious,” leaving no doubt in the popular imagination that Asian Americans valued cars for universal reasons, including prestige, performance and sheer roadster beauty.
With the tuner craze and drift-racing gaining local prominence, the clarity of his creative mission further crystallized after interviewing Don Mizota, his wife’s father who, along with his parents, had been incarcerated as a toddler at Jerome War Relocation Center in southeastern Arkansas.
As a young man, Mizota helped form a “Kame” car club, Kame meaning turtle in the Japanese language. The reason: Mizota like many of his peers often raced his family’s sturdy but rather slow-going flower-truck at the Saugus Speedway.
Although he’s no gear-head, it finally became obvious to Wang that the long-overlooked documentarian task belonged to none other than himself. Wang then embraced the project as an alternative to producing an elite academic publication because, he says, “I want my work to be public-facing. I want this to mean something.”
Given the long shadows cast by the period, there’s more nuance here than mere nostalgia, offering a compelling perspective into how Japanese American culture came of age in the driver’s seat.
DEETS
- A partnership of ArtCenter College of Design and Japanese American National Museum, JANM On the Go; media sponsor The Rafu Shimpo
- Cruising J-Town: Behind the Wheel of the Nikkei Community
- Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery, ArtCenter’s South Campus
- 1111 S. Arroyo Parkway, Pasadena 91105
- July 31 – November 12, 2025, Wednesday – Sunday, 12 PM – 5 PM
- Free admission, reservations recommended
