“This section, to a greater extent than any other, is dependent on the automobile,” wrote novelist James M. Cain in “Paradise,” his 1933 essay on Southern California. “The distances are so vast, the waste of time so cruel if you go by bus or street car, that you must have your own transportation.” Many still believe this about the Los Angeles of eighty years later, sometimes wrongly, but sometimes rightly — or rather, in some places wrongly, and in other places rightly. Questions asked in and around Los Angeles, to continue Cain’s line of thinking, depend to a greater extent than anywhere else on where in particular you’ve come from and where you intend to go. When asking directions, you never hear the classic old New Englander’s response that “you can’t get there from here,” but you do hear quite often the equally frustrating response that “you can’t get there that way from here,” or in any case, that you certainly wouldn’t want to try.
So it has gone with my visits to Torrance, a town of just under 150,000 in the middle of the peninsular region known as the South Bay. Try as they will, the transit agencies involved have so far proven simply unable to get the trip from downtown to Torrance under eighty minutes or do it with fewer than three buses. The twenty-mile distance surely has something to do with this, although I can’t help but notice that you can quickly and easily hop a train in the developed swaths of Europe and Asia to make a similar trip. This holds especially true of one particularly developed bit of Asia: Japan. I have a more convenient transit experience going from Los Angeles to that country’s actual 47 prefectures than I’d have going from there to Torrance, which people used to jokingly call its 48th. The presence there of a number of branches of Japanese corporations has brought about a Japanese population of not quite ten percent (which, an unimpressive figure though it may seem, ranks second-highest in America), which in turn fosters in this quiet little city a surprising concentration of Japanese culture.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
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