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Japanese people began arriving in the United States in the late 1800s and have settled in places like Hawaii, Alaska, and California. Los Angeles has become a hub for people of Japanese descent for generations in areas like Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights. As of 2017, Los Angeles has a Japanese and Japanese American population was around 110,000 people.

History
After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese immigration to the United States increased drastically throughout the 1800s. From 1869-1910 Los Angeles became a prime location for Japanese immigrants to settle down. By 1910, Los Angels had the highest percentage of Japanese and Japanese decedents in the country. Japanese immigrants took on the low-wage jobs that were once held by Chinese Immigrants and settled in cities like San Francisco. Japanese immigrants were once recruited to come to the United States to take on jobs on railroads but quickly turned to agriculture as a means of work in Southern California.

In 1905, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner published an article on the “yellow peril” and related it to Japanese immigrants, as its original creation was against people of Chinese descent. The early 1900s saw an increase of racism and xenophobia in California to the point where Asian children were being segregated in public schools in San Francisco. After the 1906 earthquake in Northern California, around 2,000-3,000 Japanese immigrants moved to Los Angeles and created areas like Little Tokyo on East Alameda. As the community continued to grow, Little Tokyo extended to the First Street Corridor in Boyle Heights, in the early 1910s.

Boyle Heights was Los Angele’s largest residential communities of Japanese immigrants and Americans, apart from Little Tokyo. In the early 1910s, Boyle Heights was one of the only communities that did not have restricted housing covenants that discriminated against Japanese and other people of color. Boyle Heights was a bustling interracial community where people of different ethnic backgrounds lived amongst each other. In the 1920s and 1930s, Boyle Heights became the center of significant churches, temples, and schools for the Japanese community, “These include the Tenrikyo Junior Church of America at 2727 E. 1st Street (1937‐39), the Konko Church at 2924 E. 1st Street (1937‐38), and the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple (1926‐27), all designed by Yos Hirose, and the Japanese Baptist Church at 2923 E. 2nd Street (1926; extant but altered)  built by the Los Angeles City Baptist Missionary Society in 1926‐29”.

Rafu Chuo Gakuen
The Rafu Chuo Gakuen is a part time Japanese language school that is located Saratoga Street in Boyle Heights. Founded in February of 1929, under the name Tokiwa Gakuen but later moved that same year and was renamed Boyle Heights Chuo Gakuen. By 1932, Boyle Heights Chuo Gakuen,  to its present-day location in Boyle Heights and assumed the name Rafu Chuo Gakuen. Rafu Chuo Gakuen has served as a cultural and language center for children of all ages in the Japanese community .It is part of the Kyodo System of schools that focuses on fluency, cultural understanding, and history for children in elementary through high school.