San Pedro fishing legacy honored in new painted crosswalks

There's a new public art piece in San Pedro, and it's not just for viewing; it's meant to be walked on and driven over.  The crosswalks on Mesa and Sixth streets have a special connection to a long-lost fishing village.

These crosswalks replace the typical white strips atop blacktop with schools of tuna crossing on a red background.

Artist Lua Kobayashi is a 28-year-old Uruguayan, Japanese, American artist who created the street art as a nod to San Pedro's Japanese Fishermen of the early 1900s.

"I thought it was really that they had started the tuna industry, and it was a history that wasn't always talked about," Kobayashi said.

Before giant cranes and shipping containers lined Terminal Island, it was called East San Pedro.

"Chicken of the Sea, Starkist Tuna, operated right here, and we had a community before the war of 3,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans," Terry Hara, Terminal Islanders Association president, said.

Hara said islanders rode the ferry every day to San Pedro to attend school and sell their catch. They celebrated Japanese traditions while embracing American culture. During World War II, they were sent to internment camps, and the U.S. government bulldozed the village.

Kobayashi said that since taking on the project, she's learned a lot more about herself. She always knew her grandmother ran a nursery in Hawthorne, but only recently discovered her great-grandfather was a Terminal Islander.

"There was this FBI document that my aunt uncovered, and we know for sure that he was a fish peddler," Hara said. The connection, she says, made the project even more special.

Inspired by the traditional fish-pressing art called gyotaku and the colorful carp streamers in a historical Terminal Island photo, she titled her piece "Furusato: Home Sweet Home."

Furusato is also the name of the project Hara has been working on with the Port of Los Angeles for years. Of the hundreds of buildings from the Japanese fishing village, only two remain.

"The buildings are in disrepair, but they are still there. And today, we have the chance to designate them as a historical monument," L.A. Councilmember Tim McOsker said. 

Last August, the L.A. City Council voted to approve the Terminal Island Furusato Tuna Street buildings as historical monuments.

Kobayashi and Hara both hope the Furusato crosswalk and buildings not only spark curiosity but also resurrect a long-lost memory.