Little Tokyo. Opened straight out of the camps in 1946, on the oldest Japanese address in LA.

Shop: Bunkado
Address: 340 E 1st St
Town: Los Angeles, United States
Established: 1946
Formats: Vinyl, CDs
Crates: World, Pop, Folk, Classical

Suye and Tokio Ueyama opened Bunkado in 1946, immediately after returning to Los Angeles from wartime internment, in the building that had held Kame Restaurant - opened 1885 and reckoned the first Japanese-owned business in the city. Bunkado means house of culture, which was the point: Tokio was a serious painter who worked alongside Diego Rivera, and the shelves went in filled with Japanese records, books, stationery and magazines. Their niece Irene Tsukada Simonian runs it now, third generation, and it has become the shop for Japanese goods, cutlery and classic Japanese music on First Street. PBS called it the first and last record store in Little Tokyo