2026 OCT | A Japanese View from American | PRI | Why Is Ninomiya Kinjiro Standing in Little Tokyo? — A Monument to the Pioneering Spirit of the Issei
By Tato Takahama
Pacific Research Institute
October 5, 2026
If you walk through Little Tokyo today, you may be surprised to learn that a bronze statue of a Japanese boy named Ninomiya Kinjiro has been standing there for more than four decades.
Many Japanese visitors come to Little Tokyo these days, drawn in part by the enormous popularity of Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. They come for sushi, ramen, matcha and izakaya, and for the increasingly familiar experience of seeing a part of Japan in the middle of Los Angeles.
Yet at the southeast corner of San Pedro Street and Second Street, near 200 S. San Pedro St., stands a ten-foot bronze statue that tells a very different story about Little Tokyo.
It is a statue of Ninomiya Kinjiro, also known as Ninomiya Sontoku, who is remembered in Japan as the boy who carried firewood on his back while reading a book. For generations of Japanese children, Kinjiro represented diligence, self-education and the determination to learn despite hardship. Thousands of statues of him were once found at elementary schools throughout Japan.
But the statue in Little Tokyo was never meant simply to celebrate Japanese diligence.
It was intended as a tribute to the Issei—the first generation of Japanese immigrants who came to America, endured discrimination and exclusion, survived the trauma of World War II and incarceration, and nevertheless built businesses, families and a community in Los Angeles.
That history is easy to miss today.
A 1983 article in the Pacific Citizen, the English-language newspaper of the Japanese American community, described the controversy that surrounded the statue when it was installed. The headline was “Little Tokyo statue to stay.” The Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, or CRA, initially objected to the statue because its officials did not consider it “fine art.” Little Tokyo residents and businessmen, however, saw something else: a monument to the hard-working spirit of the Issei.
The dispute became serious. CRA Administrator Edward N. Helfeld threatened to declare developer Albert H. Taira in breach of contract unless the statue was removed and replaced with a work of art approved by the agency. On March 30, 1983, however, the CRA board approved a motion allowing the statue to remain.
The statue cost $25,000.
Taira, one of the developers involved in the project, had commissioned the statue from the Tokyo sculptor Junichiro Hannya. According to Margaret Narumi, whom I recently interviewed, Taira personally searched for the sculptor. He wanted the statue to stand as a tribute to the pioneering spirit of the Issei.
The 1983 Pacific Citizen account records both the commission and the controversy over the statue. Public-art records identify the work as a 1983 bronze sculpture by Hannya, located at the southeast corner of San Pedro Street and Second Street.
Three Japanese American businessmen—Albert H. Taira, Joseph Ito and Yoneo Narumi—were involved in the development of this part of Little Tokyo. The redevelopment required substantial investment, including approximately $2.6 million in development-related expenditures and $386,000 for land acquisition, alongside the $25,000 spent on the Kinjiro statue.
Yoneo Narumi, Margaret’s father, was himself part of the history that the statue was meant to honor.
Beginning in 1958, he operated L.A. Sporting Goods in Little Tokyo for about forty years. The store was more than a sporting-goods business. It became a place where Japanese athletes and other prominent visitors from Japan could find a familiar face in Los Angeles.
Narumi was a Kibei Nisei who had been educated in Tokyo. During the war, he and his older brother remained in Japan and at one point went to Arida, Wakayama Prefecture, his father’s hometown. Margaret believes that he may have encountered a statue of Ninomiya Kinjiro in rural Japan during those years. She remembers that her father had a deep respect for Kinjiro.
People from the world of baseball were frequent visitors to L.A. Sporting Goods, including Shigeru Mizuhara, Tetsuharu Kawakami and Sadaharu Oh. But, Margaret told me, the visitors were by no means limited to baseball. Japanese professional golfers and tennis players, politicians and entertainers also came through the store. Seeing well-known Japanese figures there was, as she put it, an everyday occurrence.
That is another part of Little Tokyo’s history that can disappear from view if we see the neighborhood only as a destination for food and tourism.
Margaret Narumi, an American-born Sansei, followed a different but related path between Japan and America. She graduated from UCLA and later earned a master’s degree in political science at Waseda University in Tokyo. While at Waseda, she interpreted for the U.S.-Japan Collegiate Championships, which became her first connection with baseball. She later joined NHK and went on to become a producer at NHK Cosmomedia America. For two decades, she produced Major League Baseball broadcasts for Japanese audiences featuring players such as Hideo Nomo, Hideki Matsui, Yu Darvish and Ichiro.
Her father connected Japan and America through a sporting-goods store in Little Tokyo. His daughter connected the two countries through television, bringing the careers of Japanese baseball players in America into Japanese homes.
The Kinjiro statue belongs to that same history of connection.
There was another condition surrounding the statue’s place in the building, according to Margaret. A metal sculpture of a folded crane by an artist was placed in the lobby.
The Kinjiro statue also lost something important over the years. The bronze identification plaque that once stood on the front of its granite pedestal was stolen decades ago and has never been restored. The loss of the plaque removed the very words that told passersby why the statue was there and what it was meant to represent.
The statue survived. What disappeared was the explanation.
That matters.
For a Sansei or Yonsei Japanese American who grew up in Los Angeles, the statue may look like nothing more than an unfamiliar Japanese figure. For someone whose grandparents or great-grandparents lived and worked in Little Tokyo, it may carry a more immediate connection to family history. But for many fourth-generation Japanese Americans who do not read Japanese, there is no obvious way to know who Kinjiro was, why an Issei community chose him as a symbol, or why a Japanese statue became the subject of a dispute with a Los Angeles redevelopment agency in 1983.
Without an explanation, the statue is simply something standing there.
With an explanation, it becomes part of their history.
That is why I believe the answer is not to move the statue. The fact that it has remained in Little Tokyo for more than forty years is precisely what gives it meaning.
Little Tokyo itself has changed. It has become more accessible to tourists, more diverse and, in many ways, more vibrant. That transformation should not be regarded simply as a loss. The continued existence of a thriving Little Tokyo is itself evidence that generations of Japanese Americans succeeded in preserving and rebuilding a community through enormous changes.
What can be lost, however, is the memory of how that community came to exist.
Ninomiya Sontoku is often reduced in Japan to the familiar image of a boy carrying firewood while reading. His actual legacy was much broader. He was concerned with rebuilding rural communities, managing agriculture, helping people in poverty and restoring the ability of communities to sustain themselves.
American scholars recognized this broader significance long ago. Canadian-born Methodist missionary Robert Cornell Armstrong published Just Before the Dawn: The Life and Work of Ninomiya Sontoku in 1912. In the 1970s, Thomas R. H. Havens examined Sontoku and the Hotoku movement. Eiji Takemura’s 1997 study, The Perception of Work in Tokugawa Japan, examined Ninomiya Sontoku alongside Ishida Baigan and considered work, agricultural management, social welfare and community solidarity.
To reduce Kinjiro to a lesson about working hard, therefore, is to miss much of what made him significant.
The same is true of the statue in Little Tokyo.
It is not simply a piece of Japanese decoration. It is a work of public art created at a particular moment in the history of the Japanese American community, when Little Tokyo was undergoing redevelopment and when people who had built their lives there wanted the pioneering spirit of the Issei to remain visible.
That history deserves to be told in the language of the people who live in Little Tokyo today.
I would therefore like to see a new bilingual plaque placed beside the statue, in English and Japanese. It need not be elaborate. It should tell visitors who Ninomiya Sontoku was, and why Albert H. Taira and his fellow developers commissioned the statue in 1983, who sculpted it, what the statue was intended to represent, and why the CRA initially tried to have it removed.
Most importantly, the plaque should explain the connection between Kinjiro and Issei.
A second-, third- or fourth-generation Japanese American should be able to stand there, read the plaque in English, and understand that this statue was placed here by people whose lives were not so different from those of their own grandparents and great-grandparents.
That is why I believe restoring the plaque is worth supporting.
A new plaque would not simply identify a statue. It would restore the missing part of a story that belongs to Little Tokyo and to the Japanese American community of Los Angeles.
It would also be a small but meaningful gift from the present generation to those who came before us.
If you are a Sansei or Yonsei who has wondered what remains of the Japanese American history that your grandparents and great-grandparents helped create, this statue is one place to begin. If you are a visitor from Japan, it offers another way of understanding Little Tokyo—not simply as a place where Japanese food is served, but as a neighborhood built by people who crossed an ocean and started again.
And if you are willing to contribute to the restoration of the plaque, your donation would do more than pay for a piece of metal and stone. It would help put the history back beside the statue so that the next generation will not have to wonder why Ninomiya Kinjiro is standing there.
I would like to ask the young Japanese Americans and Japanese visitors who walk through Little Tokyo today to stop for a moment when they see him and ask a simple question: Why is Ninomiya Kinjiro here?
The answer leads back to the Issei, to the businesses and families they built, to the struggles they endured, and to the people who believed that their story deserved a place in the public landscape of Los Angeles.
The statue has been standing there since 1983. What is missing is the story, and restoring that story is something the generations who inherited Little Tokyo can do together.
Perhaps the most fitting tribute to the Issei would be to make sure that the next generation can still ask why Kinjiro is standing there—and can find the answer.
Note: English translation was prepared by the author. Translation assistance tools may have been used.
2026 OCT | A Japanese View from America | PRI | 二宮金次郎がリトルトーキョーに立っていることをご存じか――一世の開拓精神を称えた公共美術はいま
Reference
- Pacific Citizen. “Little Tokyo Statue to Stay.” April 8, 1983.
Japanese American National Museum / Pacific Citizen Digital Archives.
— The principal contemporary source for the 1983 controversy over the Ninomiya Kinjiro statue, including the CRA’s objection, Albert H. Taira’s role, the $25,000 cost, and the statue’s intended tribute to the Issei. - Pacific Citizen. “Statue Dedicated to Issei Pioneers Becomes Controversy.” April 1, 1983.
Japanese American National Museum / Pacific Citizen Digital Archives.
— Contemporary reporting on Taira’s commissioning of Tokyo sculptor Junichiro Hannya and the CRA’s argument that the statue did not qualify as “fine art.” - Rafu Shimpo. “Letter to the Editor: Time to Fix Ninomiya Sontoku Statue.” February 10, 2014.
— Documents the theft of the bronze nameplate from the statue and the continuing call for its restoration. - Armstrong, Robert Cornell. Just Before the Dawn: The Life and Work of Ninomiya Sontoku. New York: Macmillan, 1912.
— An early English-language study of Sontoku that discusses not only diligence but also agriculture, community reconstruction, Hotoku thought, moral philosophy and social organization.
- Havens, Thomas R. H. “Religion and Agriculture in Nineteenth-century Japan: Ninomiya Sontoku and the Hotoku Movement.” Japan Christian Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 2, Spring 1972, pp. 98–105.
— Useful for understanding Sontoku in the broader context of nineteenth-century Japanese agriculture, religion and community organization. - Takemura, Eiji. The Perception of Work in Tokugawa Japan: A Study of Ishida Baigan and Ninomiya Sontoku. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997.
— Places Sontoku within the intellectual and social history of work, agricultural management, social welfare and community solidarity. - Narumi, Margaret. Personal interview with the author, October 4, 2026.
— Oral-history source for Yoneo Narumi’s background, his connection to Little Tokyo and L.A. Sporting Goods, his respect for Ninomiya Sontoku, Albert H. Taira’s search for the sculptor, the role of the statue, and the metal folded-crane sculpture in the building lobby.
The views expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cultural News.