LA Panel and Exhibit Explore Japanese Americans in the Import Car Scene

The Los Angeles Daily News reported on a panel held Saturday, August 30, 2025, at the Japanese American National Museum's Democracy Center in downtown Los Angeles, exploring how Japanese Americans helped shape Southern California's import tuner scene. The event was tied to the museum's exhibition "Cruising J-Town: Behind the Wheel of the Nikkei Community," shown at ArtCenter College of Design's Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery in Pasadena with free admission and reservations recommended through janm.org.

Curator and scholar Oliver Wang, who moderated the panel and spent nearly a decade developing the project, said young Asian Americans and Japanese Americans had been at the forefront of legitimizing Japanese imports as popular contemporary cars. The exhibit featured five vehicles, including Tod Kaneko's 1973 Datsun 510 and a 1989 Nissan 240SX from drift driver Nadine Sachiko Toyoda-Hsu, alongside archival material on Nikkei work trucks, hot rods, and landmarks such as Ascot Speedway, F&K Garage in Little Tokyo, and Irwindale Speedway.

Panelists included Terry Yamaguchi, a founder of the Japanese Classic Car Show, and Roy Nakano of LACar.com, who highlighted Doug Endo's role in building what was believed to be the first tuned Datsun 510 in Gardena. General admission tickets were $5; youth and JANM members attended free.

This is the history lesson Southern California car culture rarely gets in the mainstream.

The import scene did not arrive fully formed from Tokyo brochures. It was built in Gardena garages, Little Tokyo shops, and dry-lake weekends by Nikkei families who treated cars as livelihood and identity.

If you learned to wrench on a Datsun 510 because your uncle ran a body shop, or if your first car meet was Irwindale on a Friday night, Wang's framing lands personally.

The Daily News coverage makes visible what a lot of Asian American enthusiasts already know: Japanese Americans did not just buy Hondas and Nissans. They helped make those cars desirable to everyone else.

That story matters now when EVs and crossovers dominate the conversation and the tuner lineage gets flattened into a generic "JDM" aesthetic online.

"Cruising J-Town" is also a reminder that museums and community institutions can document car culture with the same seriousness as film or food.

The five-car roster spans hot rods to drift machines, which mirrors how diverse Nikkei car life actually is.

For younger SoCal drivers who inherit modified Civics or 240SX projects from older cousins, seeing Doug Endo's Gardena 510 credited as a founding tuned example is validation, not nostalgia.

You are part of a documented lineage, not a trend cycle.

Panel tickets at $5 and a free Pasadena exhibit also lower the barrier for families who might never pay museum prices for automotive history.

That access fits a community story about cars as shared culture, not gatekept hobby.