Terminal Island: 'Furusato,' the Japanese fishing village the war erased

There is a strip of land in Los Angeles Harbor, between San Pedro and Wilmington, that for the first half of the 20th century held one of the most distinctive immigrant communities in California — and then, in a matter of days in early 1942, it didn’t, and it never did again. Terminal Island’s Japanese fishing village is one of the few LA food cultures you can only write about in the past tense. It is worth writing about anyway, because what was there was extraordinary, and because what replaced it — nothing; the houses were bulldozed — is part of the story.

A fishing town built around the canneries

Terminal Island (the part the residents called East San Pedro) grew up around the harbor’s tuna and sardine canneries — Van Camp, French Sardine (the company that became StarKist), and the others that turned San Pedro into one of the great fishing ports of the Pacific coast. Japanese immigrants, many of them from fishing villages in Wakayama and the Kii Peninsula, came to crew the boats and work the lines, and by the 1920s and ’30s a self-contained town of roughly 3,000 people had formed on the island: company housing, a Shinto shrine and Buddhist temple, Japanese-language schools, a baseball field, fish markets, tofu and senbei shops, udon counters, a main street the residents knew as their own ^[1][2]. They had their own dialect — a blend of the Kii fishing vernacular and harbor English that other Japanese Americans found half-unintelligible — and their own name for the place, Furusato, “hometown.”

The food culture of a cannery town

The diet was a fishing village’s diet, transplanted: whatever came off the boats — bonito, mackerel, yellowtail, the tuna the canneries couldn’t use — eaten fresh, grilled, in sashimi, in soups; rice; pickles; the tofu and miso and udon of the shops along the strip; and the cannery rhythm, which meant a town that ran on shift work and ate on shift schedules, the women working the lines while running households. It was a working-port food culture, blue-collar and Japanese and specific to that island — closer in spirit to the Croatian and Italian fishing families across the channel in San Pedro than to the Japanese-American truck-farming communities elsewhere in LA. None of it was written down as cuisine. It was just how the village ate.

February 1942

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Terminal Island’s location — a fishing community of Japanese immigrants sitting next to a U.S. naval facility and the harbor’s shipping — made it a target of official suspicion immediately. The men with commercial fishing licenses, the Issei community leaders, were rounded up by the FBI within days of December 7. Then, days after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, the rest of the residents got an official notice — dated February 25, 1942 — ordering them to vacate within roughly 48 hours ^[3]. Families sold what they could to the buyers who descended on the island knowing exactly how little time the sellers had, packed what they could carry, and were gone. The village was emptied, and within a couple of months it was demolished — the houses, the shops, the temples leveled, the land absorbed into the harbor’s industrial and military footprint ^[2][3]. The Terminal Islanders were the very first Japanese-American community forcibly removed in the wartime incarceration, and — almost uniquely — the only one razed to the ground: they had no community to come back to, because there was literally nothing left.

What survives

What survives is memory, kept deliberately. The Terminal Islanders Association — the descendants of the village — has held reunions for decades, compiled oral histories, and worked with the Japanese American National Museum to document what was there. On Terminal Island, on Seaside Avenue, stands a memorial established in 2002 by children of former residents: a sculpture of two fishermen, with plaques naming the families and the streets — a small monument on an industrial road, easy to miss, marking a town that was here. (A few cannery-era buildings on Tuna Street also still stand, weathered and disused; preservation advocates have sought historic-monument protection for them.) That, plus the place-name itself — Furusato, the “old village” — is essentially all that’s left of a community of three thousand.

Why it’s in the directory this way

Terminal Island has no living food anchor to carry — the village is gone, and the working harbor that surrounds it now is the Croatian-Italian-Mexican San Pedro port scene (see san-pedro-croatian-fishing-community-la), not a Japanese one. So this is a lost-community cultural note, not a place profile: the pre-WWII Japanese fishing village of East San Pedro (~3,000 residents, the canneries, the Furusato name), erased by the February 1942 forced removal and never rebuilt, remembered now by the Terminal Islanders Association and the harbor memorial. It pairs with the broader Japanese-American-incarceration history that also runs through Boyle Heights and Sawtelle (sawtelle-japantown-incubator-strip, boyle-heights-food-layers) — the difference being that those neighborhoods regrew after the war, and Terminal Island couldn’t.

Draft — Search session, 2026-05-11. Fact-check done: the 3,000+-resident figure, the “Furusato” name (“old village” / “hometown”), the Wakayama origin of many families, Tuna Street as the commercial heart, the FBI roundup of Issei fishing-license holders right after Pearl Harbor, the Feb 25, 1942 notice / ~48-hour eviction (after EO 9066, Feb 19, 1942), the demolition within months, and the village being the first Japanese-American community forcibly removed and the only one razed to the ground — all corroborated by Discover Nikkei, the Densho Encyclopedia, the LA Conservancy, and the Terminal Islanders’ own site. The memorial: a “two fishermen” sculpture on Seaside Avenue established in 2002 by children of former residents — the draft’s earlier “dedicated in stages from the early 1970s into the 2000s” wording has been corrected to the 2002 date (founder may confirm whether an earlier marker also exists). Citations hardened to public URLs. Companions: san-pedro-croatian-fishing-community-la, sawtelle-japantown-incubator-strip, boyle-heights-food-layers, and the South Bay neighborhood note.