They called it Berryland. Not on any official seal, but if you stood in Gardena before the war and looked out across the flat South Bay plain, you saw rows of strawberries and carnations stretching to the horizon, most of them worked by Japanese hands. By the time you smelled the cut flowers heading for the Los Angeles market downtown, you already knew whose fields these were. For most of the twentieth century, no city on the United States mainland held a higher share of Japanese Americans than this one.
The story of the Japanese in Gardena, California is a story of soil first, then survival, then quiet endurance. It is one of the deepest roots the Japanese American community ever put down outside Japan itself.
Gardena: The Place
Gardena sits in the South Bay of Los Angeles County, wedged between Torrance to the south, Compton to the east, and the unincorporated stretch of Los Angeles that runs up toward the harbor. It is flat, low, and watered historically by the Dominguez Slough, which is exactly why berries grew so well here.
The streets are wide and residential, lined with modest single-story frame and stucco houses, with commercial strips running along Western Avenue, Redondo Beach Boulevard, and Artesia Boulevard. The 110 and 405 freeways frame it. It reads working class and unhurried, a town that never tried to be glamorous and built its identity instead around who lived there.
How Gardena Became Japanese
Before the Japanese
Before incorporation, the Gardena Valley was open farmland on what had been Rancho San Pedro, the Dominguez family land grant. White and a scattering of other settlers grew grain and then turned to berries, and the area earned its Berryland nickname with a Strawberry Day Festival held each May.
The crop fit the moment. Strawberries needed little capital to start but enormous, patient labor, and that combination would shape who came next.
The Japanese Arrive
From the 1890s, Japanese immigrant men began working the Gardena fields, single laborers from the southern prefectures who earned roughly a dollar a day. They came overwhelmingly from rural southwestern Japan, from Wakayama, Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Kumamoto, and Fukuoka.
One of them was Joe Kobata, who left Wakayama in 1890, sailed from Kobe to Seattle, and listed Los Angeles as his destination. By 1905 he was living in Gardena with a family and growing flowers, wholesaling them through the L.A. Flower Mart. Three generations of his family would farm here.
These first-generation immigrants, the Issei, moved from wage labor to leasing and working land of their own, often through their American-born children because California’s alien land laws barred them from owning it outright. They built institutions fast. The Moneta Japanese Institute, a language school, was established in 1916, and the Gardena Buddhist Church followed in 1926, founded by the Japanese immigrants of the valley as a Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-ha temple.
Gardena at Its Peak
By the eve of the Second World War, Gardena had the first Japantown in the valley, anchored by churches, language schools, farming associations, and produce markets. Chain migration did the rest, each established family vouching for relatives and friends from the same village back home, who arrived and worked the next field over.
Then in 1942 the U.S. military removed the Japanese of Gardena to wartime incarceration camps under Executive Order 9066. The fields went untended, the church locked its doors, and the school fell silent. Families lost leases, businesses, and a decade of momentum in a matter of weeks.
What makes Gardena remarkable is that they came back. After 1945 Japanese Americans returned in large numbers, and community buildings such as the language school served as hostels for families released from the camps with nowhere else to go. By 1980 roughly 21 percent of Gardena’s residents were Japanese American, and until 2014 the U.S. census ranked it the city with the highest share of Japanese Americans in California.
The Change
Postwar Gardena slowly traded fields for tract housing as Los Angeles sprawled outward, and farming gave way to professions, small business, and civic life. The community did not scatter. It rooted itself in the same streets, just in a new economy.
In recent decades the numbers have eased downward. As the Nisei and Sansei generations aged and younger families moved to suburbs across the region, the Japanese American share fell to around 8 percent of the city’s roughly 61,000 residents by the 2020 census. The institutions, though, held.
The Landmarks of Japanese Gardena
Gardena Buddhist Church, 1517 W. 166th Street. Founded in 1926 by the valley’s Japanese immigrants, this Jodo Shinshu temple has anchored the community for a full century. It still runs a Japanese language school and the Nakayoshi Preschool, and its seasonal festivals draw families whose grandparents were married here.
Gardena Valley Japanese Cultural Institute, 1964 W. 162nd Street. Its roots reach back to the Moneta Gakuen language school of the early 1910s. After the war the site sheltered returning families, and in 1971 the Compton, Gardena, and Moneta schools merged into one institute. Today the GVJCI is the cultural heart of Nikkei Gardena, running classes, taiko, senior programs, and an annual summer festival.
The Nisei Veterans Memorial Hall, at the GVJCI. Here Nisei VFW Post 1961 holds its Memorial Day service each spring, honoring the Japanese American soldiers of the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The hall is a deliberate answer to history: an earlier Gardena VFW chapter once barred Japanese American names from its plaque.
Tokyo Central, 1740 W. Artesia Boulevard. This is the Gardena flagship of what began as Marukai, founded in the United States in 1965 and opening its Gardena wholesale mart by 1980. The 1996 Marukai Forum held the largest selection of Japanese products in the country, and under the Tokyo Central name since 2015 it remains one of the biggest Japanese supermarkets in America.
Strawberry Park. The neighbourhood name is the city’s own memory of Berryland, the streets laid where the strawberry rows once ran. It is a quiet reminder that the houses sit on what was farmland the Issei made productive.
The Moneta Gakuen legacy. Though the original schoolhouse no longer functions as it did in 1916, the language-school tradition it began runs unbroken through the Buddhist church and the cultural institute, a thread connecting the Issei to children studying Japanese in Gardena today.
Where the Gardena Japanese Came From
The Issei of Gardena came overwhelmingly from rural southwestern Japan. The prefectures of Wakayama, Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Kumamoto, and Fukuoka sent the most, regions of small farms and fishing villages where younger sons had little land to inherit and every reason to cross the Pacific for a dollar a day.
Word of mouth shaped the flow. A man like Joe Kobata from Wakayama would establish himself, then sponsor relatives and neighbours from the same district, so that whole stretches of Gardena traced back to a handful of Japanese villages. The same southwestern roots fed the other great Japanese American enclaves of the city, from the founding generation of Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles to the gardeners and nurserymen who built Sawtelle on the Westside. Up the coast, the merchants of San Francisco’s Japantown drew from the very same prefectures.
Gardena Today
Gardena today is layered rather than faded. The Japanese American community is older now, the Nisei generation thinning, but it remains visibly present in the temples, the cultural institute, the markets, and the names on the war memorial. New arrivals from Japan and Japanese-speaking newcomers shop the same aisles at Tokyo Central as third- and fourth-generation locals.
The city it shares has changed around it. Gardena is now a mixed community, with large Latino and Black populations and a broader Asian American presence, and it has long been a place where neighbours from many backgrounds, including the Pacific Islander families profiled in nearby Carson’s Samoan community, live side by side. The Japanese imprint is the foundation the rest was built on.
That imprint runs through its leaders too. Kiyoto Ken Nakaoka became Gardena’s first Nisei city council member in 1966 and its mayor in 1972. The city raised Medal of Honor recipient Kiyoshi K. Muranaga, killed with the 442nd in Italy in 1944, and decorated Vietnam veteran and judge Vincent Okamoto, who grew up here and led his class at Gardena High. The fields are gone, but the people who worked them left a city that still knows their names.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Japanese immigrants settle in Gardena, California?
From the 1890s, Japanese immigrants came to Gardena to work its strawberry and flower fields, which needed little capital but intensive labor. The fertile soil watered by the Dominguez Slough made the valley ideal for berries, earning it the nickname Berryland. The Japanese in Gardena, California moved from field labor into leasing and farming the land themselves.
Is Gardena still Japanese today?
Yes, though the community is smaller and older than it once was. Japanese Americans made up around 8 percent of Gardena’s roughly 61,000 residents at the 2020 census, down from about 21 percent in 1980. The temples, the Japanese cultural institute, and major markets keep the community visibly anchored.
What are the most famous Japanese landmarks in Gardena?
The best known are the Gardena Buddhist Church on West 166th Street, founded in 1926, and the Gardena Valley Japanese Cultural Institute on West 162nd Street, whose roots reach back to the Moneta Gakuen of the 1910s. Tokyo Central, the former Marukai, is the landmark Japanese supermarket. The Nisei Veterans Memorial Hall honors the city’s wartime soldiers.
Where in Japan did the Gardena Japanese come from?
Most Issei in Gardena came from rural southwestern Japan, especially the prefectures of Wakayama, Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Kumamoto, and Fukuoka. These were regions of small farms and fishing villages, and chain migration meant whole districts of Gardena traced back to a few home villages.
When did Japanese people first arrive in Gardena?
Japanese laborers began working the Gardena fields in the 1890s, and by 1905 settlers such as Joe Kobata of Wakayama were living and farming here with families. The community built its first language school in 1916 and the Gardena Buddhist Church in 1926, marking it as one of California’s earliest Japantowns.
If your family’s story passed through Gardena, through the strawberry rows and flower fields of Berryland, or any of the places the Japanese made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a fishing village in Wakayama to a South Bay farm to wherever you are now. Explore your story →
Sources: Gardena, California (Wikipedia) and Kiyoshi K. Muranaga (Wikipedia).