Terminal Island
— — the harbor a whole village was taken from.
Not only on a wall.
“A working harbor island between San Pedro and Long Beach, mostly cranes and container stacks now. Before the war it held Furusato, a Japanese fishing village of about three thousand people, a tuna cannery row, and a Japanese-language school. In February 1942 the residents were given forty-eight hours to leave and the village was cleared. Two storefronts on Tuna Street still stand. The Terminal Islanders, the surviving families and their descendants, return each year to the small memorial near the old village site. The container traffic moves through it all without slowing down.
Terminal Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Terminal Island is a man-made island of about 2,800 acres in the San Pedro Bay, divided between the cities of Los Angeles and Long Beach. It sits inside the combined Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach, the largest container-port complex in the Western Hemisphere. The island is reached by the Vincent Thomas Bridge from San Pedro and the Commodore Schuyler F. Heim Bridge from Long Beach. Before the Second World War the island held the Japanese-American fishing village of Furusato and a row of canneries on Tuna Street. Today it is almost entirely industrial: container terminals, a federal prison, and a Coast Guard base.
On February 25, 1942, the roughly three thousand Japanese-American residents of Furusato were given forty-eight hours by the U.S. Navy to leave the island. The village, the Japanese-language school, and the Shinto shrine were demolished in the weeks that followed. Two brick storefronts on the 700 block of Tuna Street — Nanka Shoten and A. Nakamura Co. — survived and were designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2002. The Terminal Islanders Club, founded in 1971 by surviving residents and their descendants, maintains a small memorial nearby and returns each year. The site is listed by the National Park Service as part of the Japanese American Confinement Sites story.
The island is open and reachable by car across the Vincent Thomas Bridge from San Pedro, but most of it is restricted port property and not for casual walking. The Tuna Street memorial and the two surviving storefronts on the 700 block are visible from the public sidewalk. The Battleship USS Iowa Museum, on the San Pedro side of the channel, is a short drive from the bridge and the closest cultural anchor for a visit. The Port of Los Angeles runs occasional guided tours of the harbor through its waterfront program. There is no visitor center on the island itself.