The History of Little Tokyo, Amerasia Bookstore and dIS•orient Journalzine: 

Asian American Pacific Islander Resistance 

By D Hideo Maruyama (90s editor of dISorient Journalzine) 

Everything has a start. Everything will eventually end. How did dIS•orient Journalzine get started? How did it end? All narratives have a beginning, middle and end. We could start with the beginning. It can trace its roots to the 60s but let us begin in the middle, which would be the 90s decade.  

Little Tokyo in Los Angeles has been an unknown farmland of intellectual and artistic minds that has been under the radar for decades outside of the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Community.  During the 1990s, various AAPI Groups centered around Little Tokyo including Amerasia Bookstore, PAAWWW (Pacific Asian American Women Writers –West), East West Players and other ad hoc artist organizations.  The spirit of these organizations was directly connected to the activism that emerged out of the 60s and 70s in Little Tokyo.  

As noted in Jaeah J Lee in the Topic.com article, “The Forgotten Zine of 1960s Asian-American Radicals,” things like JACS-AI (Japanese American Community Services-Asian Involvement), Asian-American Tutorial Project and Amerasia Bookstore were not just only Japanese American in spirit, but rather more Pan-Asian in terms of their roles.  Other groups from this era still exists like SIPA (Search to Involve Pilipino Americans) and Visual Communications.[i]  East West Players had moved from Santa Monica Boulevard near Silverlake into a space in Little Tokyo in 1998 into the renovated historical Union Church Building, which would be transformed into the Union Center for the Arts.  Joining East West Players would be Art Core and Visual Communications, the leading AAPI group focusing on the visual arts.  One of these groups began in the 70s and eventually would fade in the 90s, and it was the Amerasia Bookstore.   

This was one of the original artistic spaces in Little Tokyo that can trace its roots to the activism of the late 1960s. Ethnic enclaves are not just areas that nurture and build up businesses, but they are often areas that allow for the marginalized to make space to create art, theater, and literature.  Without Amerasia Bookstore, there would have never been a dIS•orient Journalzine.  Without Gidra, there would also never been a dIS•orient Journalzine.  In fact, without the zine culture of the 70s, many writers would never emerge on the radar by getting published.    

According to DiscoverNikkei.org, Amerasia Bookstore was a major arts institution in Little Tokyo during the 70s, 80s until the early 1990s.  It notes that it was founded on August 15, 1971 on the second floor of a 1st Street building (A Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo.)  Evelyn Yoshimura of Gidra fame would help to found it.  Many of the people remember it as being the center of the Japanese American writer's scene in LA during the 60s, 70s and 80s. Activist singers like Charlie Chin, Nobuko Miyamoto and Chris Ijima would perform in the space. It was the byproduct of 60s AAPI activism.  Concurrently with the development of such creative spaces, Mike Murase’s Gidra would define the zine-based activism that would define much of Little Tokyo's artist community during this time period.   

As noted in Yoshimi Kawashima’s article in DiscoverNikkei, this forgotten zine was started in 1969 by 5 UCLA students, Mike Murase, Dinora Gil, Laura Ho, Tracy Okida, and Colin Watanabe.  It has the distinction of being a zine that officially made notoriously conservative SI Hayakawa mad about the “rubbish” in it. This was the man who thought Japanese American Reparations was unnecessary. Much of what was unique about Gidra was the use of art, which heavily influenced the evolution of dIS•orient Journalzine in the 1990s.  There is a direct lineage of Gidra to dIS•orient Journalzine.  The integration of graphic arts into the core of dIS•orient Journalzine can be linked to the influence of Gidra.  (Gidra: The Voice of the Asian American Movement) 

Concurrently UCLA would establish the Asian American Studies Center in 1969. This would be the key as students established their own version of Gidra, but it was an edition of Amerasia Journal, the center’s peer-reviewed journal that would seed dIS•orient. The editor of Amerasia Journal during the 90s was Russell Leong, who was a well-established poet. He also knew everyone in the AAPI writer’s world during the 1990s. Without Russell, there would be no “Burning Cane” edition of the journal, and then no Firecracker. If no Firecracker, dIS•orient Journalzine would never have been developed. So, we are part of a tradition of activism that resulted in other organizations like Visual Communications which was “founded in 1970 by Duane Kubo, Robert Nakamura, Alan Ohashi, and Eddie Wong (VCMedia.org). East West Players was “established in 1965 by Mako, Rae Creevey, Beulah Quo, Soon-Tek Oh, James Hong, Pat Li, June Kim, Guy Lee, and Yet Lock” (EastWestPlayers.org). Both of these arts organizations would eventually move into the old Union Church, which now is the main stage for EWP. Both of those organizations still exist but dIS•orient has been in hibernation since the early 2000s.   

Unfortunately, by the early 1990s, Amerasia Bookstore was having financial troubles especially when it moved from its original location into a less-than-ideal spot in the Japanese Village Plaza. The amount of space to allow for performances and readings shrank dramatically.  It eventually was closed in 1992 (Matsumoto).  But Amerasia Bookstore had a non-profit component called Aisarema (Amerasia spelled backward due to copyright issues).  The reactivation of the 501c3 nonprofit status would play out. Community activist, Lisa Hasegawa was drafted to produce a plan to keep it alive. Miles Hamada would help to connect it as he was also working for the Japanese American Cultural Center.  Irene Kurose would work tirelessly to try to keep the bookstore open. Sadly, because the bookstore lost its lease and shuttered, things began to collapse as owner Gary Sumida tried to extend its life as a traveling bookstore that would have booths at festivals.  It existed as a roving display that would show up at a few literary events.  Eventually, that too would be shuttered.  The spirit of the bookstore would become a journalzine (A concept of combining the aesthetics of a zine with a journal).  dIS•orient Journalzine would continue the spirit of Amerasia Bookstore as project of Aisarema.  It is important to consider that this was an era in which the concept of websites was still very basic, and the idea of an Amazon-style solution was not even possible.  There was no such thing as broadband Internet. You dialed things up with AOL. No, there was no online option in the 90s. We created an annual journalzine. Out of the ashes of the Amerasia Bookstore would emerge a journal that was spiritually the grandchild of Gidra.   

Where did dIS•orient Journalzine come from? Our journal existed as the result of a combination of a resurrection of Aisarema  and some AAPI student-driven projects out of UCLA and USC. Just as Gidra started with students, so did dIS•orient. I remember there was a photo of myself reading at the bookstore a long time ago as connected to “Burning Cane.”  What was “Burning Cane?” During my years at UCLA, I worked on a special edition of Amerasia Journal with Grace Hong, James Lee, Jim Soong, Gary Yee, and we called it “Burning Cane,” which was published in 1991. As young Asian Pacific American students, we wondered about access to new AAPI writers or AAPI writers in general. We decided to create a journal but had problems with funding. Eventually, Russell Leong of UCLA Amerasia Journal would let us take over an edition in 1991. The name, “Burning Cane,” evolved from the references to the protests in Hawaii. Much of this was sourced from a poem, “C&H Sugar Strike Kahuku, 1923“by Garrett Hongo on the subject. We got our inspiration from the line, "the burn has started." As a group of students, we viewed “Burning Cane” as a form of protest to allow for AAPI voices to be heard.  Largely at the time, it was felt that journals like the Paris Review, Poetry, and the New Yorker would never publish AAPI writers, as they tended to prefer the work of East Coast Mainstream writers.  This touched a significant nerve, as this edition of Amerasia Journal became one of the most popular editions, but I graduated.  At one point, I thought that was it.  The irony is that it would evolve into its own cultural force as a collaborative community-based project, which was how Amerasia Bookstore began in the past.  The spark would not come from UCLA, but rather USC.   

Eventually, Howard Hong from USC picked up on the Burning Cane vibe, and he created Firecracker at USC. This was also a popular student driven project, as during this time, there was extraordinarily little in terms of places that would actively publish AAPI writers.  Howard Hong noted to me that this was also a time in which AAPI Activism was ramping up at USC, as individuals like himself and the leadership of law student, Victor Hwang would push for more Asian American Studies classes at USC given that 20% of the student population was AAPI.  Eventually, a search committee was formed in 1994 to expand the offerings of Asian American Studies classes.  Howard would start dIS•orient Journalzine in 1993, which mirrored the zine poetry/fiction market at the time. I came into the picture with the 2nd edition of it. Howard Hong would leave the project as he decided to pursue theater.  Then I was locked into the editing role for over 10 years.  As noted with Gidra’s influence, we decided the journal had to be well designed, and itself needed to be an artwork. Allison Conner noted that Gidra’s “graphic design became an extension of their commitment to blunt and provocative commentary, their spirit of encouraging dialogue and holding nothing back.” We experimented with fonts, spacing and layout design.  People like Shiho Nakaza and Sky Kogachi would lend their design touches to the evolution of the journal.  Sky would eventually run a minimalist design philosophy that had Zen aesthetics during the later years of the journal.  We experimented with touch-sensitive cover stock. We developed a record of accomplishment of publishing new writers as well as well as known AAPI authors like Amy Uyematsu, Lee Herrick, Al Robles, Tony Robles, Joyce Nako, Eileen Tabios, I.H. Kuniyuki, Carol Lem among many others. It was during the 90s, cutting edge stuff.  

Gidra lasted for 5 years according to Connor, and dIS•orient Journalzine became a decade-long project.   Unlike Gidra, we focused on developing and publishing artists and writers instead of more political artwork. We felt like Linton Kwesi Johnson who stated that “Writing was a political act, and poetry is a political weapon.” Other journals would also exist like Curtis Chin’s Asian American Writer’s Workshop's journal in New York and MoonRabbit Review from Colorado during the 1990s.  The East Coast, Midwest, and West Coast had AAPI-focused journals in existence for several parts of the 90s.  Aisarema secured funding with the California Arts Council which ran small organization grants and individual grants.  We went to the CAC’s Aislomar Conferences frequently and networked with other organizations. As we developed a track record, we also secured funding from Los Angeles’s Department of Cultural Affairs, which further allowed us to continue printing. Aisarema also supported artist-writer projects like City Dialogues at Barnsdall Art Park, which focused on cross-cultural and interdisciplinary work between visual artists and writers. We supported a special edition featuring Filipino writers and artists. We published a few chapbooks for such writers as Irene Suico Soriano and Tony Robles.  In addition, there were multiple collaboration projects with other members of the AAPI community.  We helped to produce Seeds from a Silent Tree which was an anthology focusing on Korean adoptees.  This was edited by Tonya Bishoff and Jo Rankin.  At one point during the 90s, we collaborated on massive city-wide poetry festivals like the Long Beach When Words Collide Festival in 1995, and the multi-venue World Beyond Poetry Festival in the years 2000 and 2001 in which we actively collaborated with the World Stage, Self Help Graphics, Beyond Baroque. Some members of the dIS•orient Team would work with other groups like Khmer Girls in Action as Eric Wat and Diep Tran ran workshops for them.  It was an active creative period for the journal and for the city.  Many poets and writers still remember those days as being much more active in terms of poetry readings and journals.  But this was a period before the rise of YouTube and online journals and publications.  

Early submissions for the Journalzine came primarily from Japanese American, Chinese American, and Filipino American writers at first.  There were not too many artists of Vietnamese or Korean ancestry, but this would change by the time the journal was shuttered.  We actively tried to find fresh writing by underrepresented AAPI populations.  Vietnamese writers like Lan Duong and Viet Thanh Nguyen were part of the editorial board in 1998. I ran the journal using a simple formula.  We would publish new work by famous writers, but also locate and publish new unknown writers.  This would develop exposure for them, and my hope was that they would develop a career. 30 years afterward, this formula worked for many.   

The 1990s to the early 2000s was a unique time period.  dIS•orient continued to be published annually, and periodically, we would run chapbooks for writers.  We even ran a special design-oriented version under the guidance of Sky Kogachi, our lead design specialist.  His minimalist style became a signature of the journal.  This was a period in which we would run regular readings at Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica.  These would become reunion events for the various AAPI writers.  Various editors would work on editions of the journal, and I eventually became more of a managing editor for the journal.  In 2001, dIS•orient ran a Filipino/a edition of the Journalzine with writers like Noel Alumit, Elena Domingo, R Zamora Linmark, Joel B Tan, and Irene Suico Soriano.  As I was a part of CSULB’s first creative writing MFA program, I worked to integrate some of the City Dialogues interdisciplinary projects into an Aisarema project which eventually resulted in a show at Barnsdall Art Park’s Municipal Gallery, which had a diversity of contributors from Long Beach to Leimert Park.  From the 1990s to the 2000s various artistic groups would emerge out of the ether of Little Tokyo’s community activists and artists.  dIS•orient would also play a role in creating cross-cultural dialogues, and readings during those 90s poetry years.  

 dIS•orient Journalzine basically ran for about a decade, and then died out as the State of California defunded the entire California Arts Program in the early 2000s.  In some ways, the journalzine had fit a particular need at the time, but the 2000s would mean drastic changes as the California Arts Council would effectively be gutted in terms of offering grants to small organizations like Aisarema in 2003.  Community-based arts organizations were defunded, due to the defunding of the California Arts Council, but the rebellious nature of dIS•orient Journalzine, Gidra and the spirit of Amerasia Bookstore would live on in Little Tokyo.  East West Players moved into a larger space in Little Tokyo; they would run maybe 4 to 5 plays a season.  What about other more edgy work?  As the arts journal slowly disappeared into this gap would emerge more edgy theater groups.  Lodestone Theater would step in, which could be considered like the theater version of dIS•orient Journalzine.  When Lodestone Theater shuttered, Artists At Play would continue the work of producing plays with an AAPI focus. Other artistic groups would later emerge like Tuesday Night at the Café, which would continue to run until today with spoken word and musical performances.  That group was established in 1999, and it would occupy the creative space of the Aratani Courtyard of the Union Center for the Arts.[ii]  In retrospect, the entire anchor of these creative projects has been Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. 

dIS•orient Journalzine’s goal was not just to publish established writers, but also to discover new voices. That has always been the cornerstone.  When the California Arts Council lost funding for groups like Aisarema, we shuttered the project.  But many now-established writers were first published in the covers of dIS•orient Journalzine.  Little Tokyo however would still play a role in terms of being a destination point for artists and writers.  The literary scene also changed demographically.  By the time of the demise of the journal, the Internet emerged on the publishing landscape.  This would allow for other zines to emerge in cyberspace like Angry Asian Man and You Offend Me, You Offend My Family. 

I went to J Town to see some writers from Pacific Asian American Women Writers West from that era. In fact, Joyce Nako was a retreat coordinator for us once. Amy Uyematsu often was published in the journal.  It's strange, but now I see that there is a legacy to all of this. I see former dIS•orient writers like Tony Robles publishing and doing community work. Many of the writers that we published in dIS•orient have fully established careers. We published plays, art, poems, and prose. We thought the zine itself must be a unified art piece.  But, the protest spirit of dIS•orient continued in a myriad of diverse ways. For example, our editorial advisor, Viet Nguyen, would eventually try his hand with writing fiction with his novel, The Sympathizer, which eventually won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. Although now shuttered, I continue to see new writers like Ocean Vuong being published and accepted. In the 90s, I am not sure if an AAPI LGBTQ author would be given a chance. We would have published him. In this sense, I think the country has evolved from those periods dominated by New York mainstream writers. Considering how long it took for the establishment to accept a writer from Los Angeles like Charles Bukowski says much about the publishing world at that time.  

Art also begins to evolve and change during times of crisis.  The decade of the publication of dIS•orient Journalzine was complicated. There was the 1st Gulf War, which would eventually lead to some of the longest wars in United States history triggered by 9/11, and the 2nd invasion of Iraq. Chinese and Korean immigration was increasing, and K-Town would emerge. The Rodney King Uprising/Riots in 1992 changed the very landscape of Los Angeles, refocusing on the nature of race relations in a diverse and complex city.  Saigu happened, but K-Town came roaring back. You would see the emergence of Korean American rapper, Dumbfounded, and bands like Far East Movement.  

Some of the same issues with government and race relations still exist today. We are increasingly seeing overt racially charged exchanges against AAPI and other people of color with the exponential growth of hate crimes.  Increasingly, there is a rise in homophobic behavior as the filter-lessness of Trumpism has taken over the psyche of some parts of America.  The Japanese American community is increasingly seeing the need to remind people of the Japanese Internment Camps of World War II.  Movements like #metoo and #Blacklivesmatter have been continuing to grow in the silicon seas of social media.  Within this context, I have been asked in the past if a website version of the journal could be published, but there is something about the printed word. Although the Internet allows anyone to self-publish, there is something about an edited journalzine.  

The printed word can be shared even if the power is turned off.  The printed word can be easily given to another person to read, and they can then give their copy to another person. The printed word had to be edited. This is the essence of books and printed work.  If it is not burned as in Fahrenheit 451, the word will last.  As such, printing another version of dISorient would be again a form of artistic protest.  It reaffirms the creative spring from which the common human experience can be recognized in our own capacity to create work. I am unsure if we can do this again, so as things go, you compromise. But I believe in the power that drove Gidra, and dIS•orient.  

This is the web version of dIS•orient Journalzine redux. You adapt to the times, and currently, the world exists in the electrical signals of zeros and ones transmitted over fiber optic cable. I intend to still follow the concept of the zine as being a form of artwork, but my experience with graphic design is very limited. What I can say is that I intend to scan all of the dISorient copies and produce PDF versions for review in the Archives section. This would also help people who wish to research the history of some of those writers who got kickstarted by a zine started by UCLA and USC students.  

My initial thoughts were to make this relaunch as a website zine with poetry, short stories, play excerpts and perhaps art reviews. The dawn of Generative AI has made me rethink of the idea of a web-based zine. I am pursuing the concept of going back to print, but I do not have a team for this to happen.

The end may be the start of another beginning.  

(Updated 7/31/2024)

Works Cited 

“A Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo.” Discover Nikkei, www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2016/11/9/cultural-community-center. Accessed 15 Apr. 2022. 

Conner, Allison. “A 1970s Provocative Magazine That Fought Anti-Asian Sentiment.” Hyperallergic, 22 June 2021, hyperallergic.com/652913/gidra-1970s-provocative-magazine-fought-anti-asian-sentiment. 

“GIDRA: The Voice of the Asian American Movement.” Discover Nikkei, www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2012/1/12/gidra. Accessed 15 Apr. 2022. 

“Herstory | Khmer Girls in Action.” Khmer Girls in Action, kgalb.org/about/history. Accessed 15 Apr. 2022. 

Lee, Jaeah. “The Forgotten Zine of 1960s Asian-American Radicals.” Topic, 15 Mar. 2019, www.topic.com/the-forgotten-zine-of-1960s-asian-american-radicals. (Link is broken as of 2024. PDF was kindly provided by Jaeah Lee. See below.) 

“Mission and History.” Visual Communications, Visual Communications, vcmedia.org/mission-history. Accessed 15 Apr. 2022. 

“Timeline.” California Arts Council, 11 Mar. 2021, arts.ca.gov/about/about-us/timeline. 

Wood, Ximon. “About.” East West Players, eastwestplayers.org/about-us. Accessed 15 Apr. 2022. 

The Forgotten Zine of 1960s Asian-American Radicals  

[ii] http://www.tuesdaynightproject.org/about-tnp/