For many of those being forcibly relocated from Little Tokyo, the original site of JANM was a place of makeshift refuge. The museum’s birthplace was in one of the buildings where Japanese Americans were instructed to line up before being forced onto the buses that took them to the incarceration camps: the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, constructed in 1925 as the first Buddhist temple in Los Angeles. Because detainees were only permitted to take with them what they could carry, the building was used as a storage facility for its members’ property. And in 1945, when the government began releasing Japanese Americans from the camps as the war came to a close, it served as a hostel for those returning home.
Forty years later, the museum was founded in that building, and the day before it officially opened its doors to the public in May 1992 was also the same day a jury acquitted four Los Angeles Police Department officers charged with using excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King — an action that precipitated the LA Uprising. Ann Burroughs, the current president and chief executive officer, explains that the museum “came out of this history of discrimination, dispossession, forced removal, suspension of Constitutional rights … birthed in this crucible of racial tension within the city.”
“Our plaza [is] one of the ground-zero points in the civil rights history of this country, and it’s from our plaza that we get our power of place,” Burroughs continues, emphasizing the significance of location to the museum’s identity. “We’ve become a point of pilgrimage.”
The Japanese American National Museum has become a touchstone for telling this story in all its harrowing and triumphant details, particularly since the 1999 opening of its modern 85,000-square-foot Pavilion just next door to the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple. The museum’s debut presentation was the long-running Common Ground: The Heart of Community, a chronological exhibition that profoundly retold Japanese-American history through personal accounts, artwork installations, rare artifacts, photographs, textiles, home movie footage, and scale models. Though Common Ground closed in January as the museum undergoes renovations until late 2026, one particularly poignant aspect of the exhibition was a portion of the barracks originally erected in the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming. JANM staff acquired the building (which was on privately owned land), disassembled the structure, and then fully reassembled it in the museum’s plaza, where it stood for several years. When the Pavilion opened, it was brought inside and a portion was displayed without a ceiling or cover due to fire codes. Exhibited this way, it may have had even more resonance than it did in the courtyard. For years it stood as a moving metaphor for the porosity of our collective ethics, the gaps that exist in the network of legal, political, and practical protections for those with no roof over their heads.