On a Saturday morning at the Del Amo Fashion Center, the food court at Mitsuwa Marketplace fills with the sound of three generations ordering at once: grandparents speaking Japanese, parents switching between two languages, children answering in English. The Japanese in Torrance are not one community but several layered on top of each other, from berry farmers who lost everything in 1942 to corporate engineers who arrived last year on a three-year posting. Torrance holds them all, which is why one writer once called the city Japan’s 48th prefecture.
The Place
Torrance sits in the South Bay of Los Angeles County, a coastal flatland between the Pacific and the 405 freeway. It was founded in October 1912 by the real estate developer Jared Sidney Torrance, who hired the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to design a planned community that balanced industry and homes.
For decades it ran on oil and aircraft. Thousands of derricks once dotted the land, and the aerospace plants drew workers from across the country. The city incorporated in 1921 and grew into one of the larger municipalities in the county, with roughly 147,000 residents at the 2020 census.
Today more than a third of Torrance is of Asian descent. The single largest strand of that, by ancestry, is Japanese, and it has shaped the city more visibly than its raw numbers alone would suggest.
How It Became Japanese
The farmers came first
Long before any car company arrived, Japanese families were working the soil here. In the decades before the Second World War, the South Bay was one of the few areas where non-citizen immigrants could still acquire and farm land, and dozens of Japanese-American families ran nurseries and produce farms across what is now Gardena and North Torrance.
They grew strawberries, vegetables and cut flowers, supplying the Los Angeles markets. It was hard, precarious work, built on long hours and family labour, and it created the first real Japanese foothold in the area.
Then came February 1942 and Executive Order 9066. Across Torrance and the surrounding South Bay, Japanese-American families were forced from their homes and farms and sent to incarceration camps inland. Many lost their land, their crops and their savings in the space of a few weeks.
Coming back, starting over
After the war, a remarkable thing happened: many came back. Japanese-American nurseries re-established themselves in North Torrance, on or near the land they had farmed before the camps. The wider South Bay, with Gardena at its centre, became one of the most concentrated Japanese-American settlements in the country, a parallel to communities such as Japantown in San Jose that survived the same wartime upheaval.
That postwar generation built the institutions that still anchor the community. The Japanese-American Historical Society was founded in Torrance in 1983, organised in part by local parents who wanted their children to understand what the family had survived. The group has documented community history and run commemorative trips, including pilgrimages to the Manzanar camp site in the eastern Sierra.
This is the older, deeper Torrance: multigenerational Japanese-American families whose roots here predate every corporate logo in the city. Their story is shared with neighbouring the Japanese farming families of Gardena and with the older urban enclaves of Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles and the Sawtelle district on the Westside.
Toyota changes everything
The second great wave of Japanese Torrance arrived not by ship but by corporate decision. In 1982, Toyota consolidated its American sales operations onto a large new campus in Torrance, chosen for its proximity to the Port of Long Beach and Los Angeles International Airport.
Where Toyota went, others followed. The South Bay became home to the largest concentration of Japanese companies in the United States. American Honda Motor Company built its headquarters in the city, at 1919 Torrance Boulevard, and it remains there today. Banks, suppliers, trading houses and electronics firms set up offices nearby.
With the companies came people. Japanese executives, engineers and their families arrived on multi-year postings, a population of expatriates living a Japanese daily life within an American city. By 2014 the Los Angeles South Bay held the largest concentration of Japanese companies in the United States. John Kaji, a Torrance resident and the son of Toyota’s first American-based accountant, described how the corporate presence drew ethnic Japanese to the area in steadily growing numbers.
The HQ leaves, the community stays
In April 2014, Toyota announced that it would consolidate its North American operations at a single new campus in Plano, Texas. The main driver was cost: housing in Los Angeles County ran roughly three times the price per square foot of comparable homes around Dallas-Fort Worth. Toyota Motor Sales staff began moving, and the financial-services arm followed by 2017.
The departure took thousands of jobs and a wave of expatriate families with it. The Dallas Japanese school expected to gain around 150 students from the move alone, a measure of how many Torrance children were uprooted.
Yet the community did not collapse. Honda stayed. Hundreds of smaller Japanese firms stayed. And the multigenerational Japanese-American families, the ones whose grandparents had farmed strawberries and survived the camps, had never had anywhere else to go. Torrance was simply home.
The Landmarks
Mitsuwa Marketplace, 3525 W. Carson Street, Del Amo Fashion Center. The cultural anchor of Japanese Torrance. It descends from a Yaohan supermarket whose customer base was once 70 percent Japanese; after Yaohan’s parent collapsed in 1997, executives rebranded the chain as Mitsuwa in 1998. The Torrance store moved from its longtime Western Avenue home into Del Amo in February 2020, trading a worn building for a modern food court packed every weekend.
American Honda Motor Company, 1919 Torrance Boulevard. The corporate institution that outlasted Toyota’s exit. Honda’s American headquarters has stood here for decades and still employs thousands, a steady reason for Japanese professionals to settle in the South Bay rather than leave it.
Asahi Gakuen Torrance campus, South Torrance High School. One of the largest Japanese Saturday schools in the world began renting space at South Torrance High in 1980. Children of expatriate families spend their Saturdays here keeping up with the Japanese national curriculum, so that a posting abroad does not cost them their place back home.
Torrance Cultural Arts Center, 3341 Torrance Boulevard. Near Madrona Avenue, this civic complex hosts the annual Bunka-Sai Japanese cultural festival each spring. The two-day event, free to the public, fills with taiko drumming, tea ceremony, calligraphy, bonsai and martial arts demonstrations.
Otafuku, Torrance. A family-run soba house that treats noodles like a science, milling rare buckwheat in-house each day with flour imported from Japan. Its all-white seiro soba has a devoted following among South Bay diners who know the difference.
Torihei, Torrance. A strip-mall izakaya famous for its grilled skewers and oden, run on a no-reservation, walk-in basis. It is the kind of unassuming, deeply authentic spot that turns a parking-lot mini-mall into a reason to drive across the county.
North Torrance nursery district. Less a single address than a memory written into the land: the flat northern edge of the city where Japanese-American farmers rebuilt their nurseries after returning from the wartime camps. It is where the community’s deepest roots in Torrance still run.
Where They Came From
The earliest Japanese in the South Bay came largely from the farming and fishing prefectures of western and southern Japan, the same regions that fed the great Meiji-era emigration to California: places like Hiroshima, Wakayama, Kumamoto and Yamaguchi. They were issei, first-generation immigrants who could not naturalise and so put their hopes into land and into American-born children.
Those children, the nisei and their sansei descendants, are the backbone of the multigenerational community today. Their connection to Japan is now several generations deep, more a matter of festivals, food and family memory than of recent arrival.
The corporate wave was different. The expatriates of the Toyota and Honda era came from across modern Japan, frequently from the Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka regions where the big firms are headquartered. They arrived as temporary residents, and many cycled home after their postings, which is why the community has always renewed itself rather than simply ageing in place.
Torrance Today
Toyota’s headquarters is gone, but you would struggle to feel its absence at Mitsuwa on a Sunday. The food court is full, the bookshop still sells manga, and the parking lot fills with families who have driven in from across the South Bay for groceries that taste like home.
The corporate Japanese presence is smaller and quieter than it was at its peak, anchored now by Honda and by hundreds of mid-sized firms rather than a single dominant giant. The expatriate population has thinned, and some Japanese schools and businesses have felt it. But the institutions built across a century, the Saturday school, the festival, the historical society, the nurseries, have proven durable.
What remains is a community defined less by any one company than by depth. In Torrance, a fourth-generation Japanese-American family whose ancestors were interned can shop in the same aisle as an engineer two years into a Honda posting. That overlap, the old roots and the new arrivals sharing one suburban city, is what makes the Japanese in Torrance distinct in California.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Japanese people live in Torrance?
Torrance has one of the largest Japanese populations of any city in California, with roughly 19,000 residents of Japanese ancestry. As of 2014 it held the second-largest concentration of people of Japanese ancestry of any US city after Honolulu, and Japanese ancestry accounts for close to nine percent of the city’s residents.
Why is there such a large Japanese community in Torrance?
The Japanese in Torrance grew in two waves. The first was prewar farming families who settled across the South Bay before 1942. The second came after Toyota built its American headquarters in Torrance in 1982, drawing Honda and hundreds of other Japanese firms and their expatriate employees to the area.
Did Toyota’s move to Texas end the Japanese community in Torrance?
No. Toyota announced its move to Plano, Texas, in 2014 and completed it by 2017, which took thousands of jobs and many expatriate families. But American Honda’s headquarters stayed in Torrance, hundreds of smaller Japanese companies remained, and the multigenerational Japanese-American population had always been rooted in the city regardless of any single employer.
Where do Japanese residents in Torrance shop and gather?
The main gathering place is Mitsuwa Marketplace at the Del Amo Fashion Center, a Japanese supermarket and food court that draws families from across the South Bay. The community also centres on Asahi Gakuen’s Saturday school, numerous Japanese restaurants, and the annual Bunka-Sai festival at the Torrance Cultural Arts Center.
What is the history of Japanese farming in Torrance?
Before the Second World War, Japanese-American families ran nurseries and produce farms across the South Bay, including North Torrance, growing strawberries, vegetables and cut flowers. Forced into wartime incarceration in 1942, many returned afterward and rebuilt their nurseries in North Torrance on the same land their families had worked before.
Is Torrance a good place to experience Japanese culture in Los Angeles?
Yes. Alongside Little Tokyo and Sawtelle, Torrance is one of the centres of Japanese life in the Los Angeles area. Its Saturday school, Japanese supermarkets, soba and izakaya restaurants, and the spring Bunka-Sai festival make it one of the most immersive places to experience Japanese culture in Southern California.
If your family’s story passed through Torrance, or any of the places Japanese people have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the strawberry nurseries of the prewar South Bay to a Saturday-school classroom at South Torrance High, to wherever you are now.