Nisei Week Grand Parade 2026

“The parade that has closed Nisei Week since 1934. Little…”

The years it did not happen are the reason to go. From nineteen forty-two to nineteen forty-eight the parade stopped — the exact years the community was being incarcerated by its own government. It came back afterward, and it has not stopped since.

So when the floats and the marching bands and the dancers spill out of the festival grounds and into the actual streets, that is not pageantry. It is a neighborhood counting out loud. This is one of the largest Japanese American cultural events in the country, winding through Little Tokyo and the downtown blocks around it, carrying the community organizations and cultural groups that have marched in it from the beginning.

Free to watch from the sidewalks along First Street. Take the Metro; parking goes early.

Send it to the person in your family who still keeps the old photographs. Then go stand on the curb next to them.