L.A.'s Little Tokyo looks to save struggling newspaper

This newspaper has the story of the Japanese community in the city, it will be sad if it goes away. - - Donna Poisl

The Rafu Shimpo, a 'community treasure' that has covered the Japanese American experience for over a century, is facing declining readership. Community members have started a campaign to revive it.

By Teresa Watanabe

Mickey Komai opens one of the leather-bound books stored in his Little Tokyo office and delicately turns the yellowed pages filled with Japanese and English script. Here in the pages of the bilingual newspaper his family has run for most of a century is the tumultuous story of Japanese Americans in Southern California.

The Rafu Shimpo covered acts to ban Japanese from owning land, bringing over brides and eventually immigrating at all. "Why do people hate the Japanese?" the paper plaintively asked in one 1926 issue.
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