Nisei Week is an annual festival put on by the Nisei Week Foundation in Downtown Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo District. The nine day festival features everything from a parade, to a film festival to a competitive eating competition with pretty much everything else in between. A full schedule of events can be found on Nisei Week’s official website.

Today, #DamienTalks with Midori Mizuhara with Community Arts Resources and Cory Hayashi with the Nisei Week Foundation about this year’s festival which begins at the end of next week. Hayashi does a great job of briefly laying out the history of the event and highlighting some of his favorite parts of this year’s festival.

Mizuhara works on the Go Little Tokyo campaign, a project of the Little Tokyo Community Council and Metro. This campaign is designed to help the community thrive during construction of the Regional Connector in the area and to preserve cultural events and places that help make Little Tokyo a unique place to live, work and visit. The campaign provides transportation options – beyond the car – for people visiting the festival. Read more about that effort at Go Little Tokyo’s campaign website.

A quick programming note, we are not going back to the #DamienTalks format for our podcast in the San Gabriel Valley. #SGVConnect will return in the next week or two with the promised podcast on mobility for horse riders.

(Disclosure: This is a sponsored podcast that Metro pitched to us and agreed to sponsor. No discussion was made as to any editorial comments made by me nor did Metro receive any questions from me ahead of time. If you would like to sponsor a podcast, email me at damien@streetsblog.org)