Terminal Islanders Club

The Terminal Islanders Club formed in the early 1970s as former residents of the Furusato village on Terminal Island returned from the wartime incarceration camps and rebuilt the community’s social ties. The club has met twice a year since, and the membership now includes second-generation and third-generation descendants of the families the federal government evacuated on February 25, 1942.

The club began collecting oral histories from surviving villagers in the 1970s. The project continues through two generations of interviewers, and the CSU Dominguez Hills Archives holds the transcribed collection as the Terminal Island Personal Histories. The recordings preserve the dialect, the schoolyard, the fishing season, the festivals at the Daijin-Gu shrine, and the everyday life of the village before the Navy ordered its residents off the island.

In 2002 the club dedicated the Terminal Island Japanese Memorial at Fish Harbor, with a bronze statue of two Issei fishermen, a replica of the shrine gate, and calligraphy by former club president Yukio Tatsumi. The club works with the Los Angeles Conservancy on the campaign to designate the two surviving Tuna Street commercial buildings, Nanka Shoten and A. Nakamura Company, as Historic-Cultural Monuments.