As Simon Yoon speaks in Korean about his father, he motions toward his heart with the left hand that usually rests on his cane and squints his eyes as if in pain. His father was an activist who fought for Korean independence from Japanese colonization, he explains, and at age 43, was caught by the Japanese and executed.

When Yoon, then a university student in Japan studying agriculture, heard the news, he returned to Korea to bury his father, with hatred in his heart for everyone and everything Japanese.

More than 60 years later, Yoon calls one of the oldest and largest Japantowns in the United States home. He regularly speaks the tongue of his historic colonizers with the immigrant and Nisei (American-born Japanese) residents of his Little Tokyo Towers apartment building in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. In fact, he mixes so easily with the Japanese residents that many look to him as a leader to approach with various tenant issues.

On a recent June afternoon, Yoon visits with three Japanese ladies assembling a 1,000-piece puzzle in the lobby and within minutes, he has them giggling.

If there is any hatred left in this 86-year-old, there is no trace of it now.

“I am the first and last generation who witnessed what happened during Japanese occupation and Korea’s struggle for independence,” says Yoon through a translator. “If I cannot give this forgiveness to the next generation, it will make more trouble for the second generation of Koreans and Japanese. This is my mission as a Korean who witnessed that era of Japanese occupation and as a Christian."

Yoon is trying to be a good neighbor in his adopted home.

And that is a gesture especially welcome now in a neighborhood that is experiencing dramatic changes on multiple fronts. Over the last several years, Little Tokyo, bordered by Los Angeles, First, Alameda and Third streets in downtown L.A., has been hot property. The downtown real estate boom has transformed the once-depressed ethnic hub into an attractive place for not only Korean American seniors, but also young professionals lured by new market-rate condos and apartments, as well as small businesses and large property investors looking for economic opportunities.

Although they are not the sole force behind these changes, Korean Americans have emerged as the most noticeable new neighbors entering this space, in perhaps the largest numbers and in a variety of capacities. Informal estimates posit that as many as 30 percent of the small businesses in Little Tokyo today could be Korean-run. The waiting lists for the area’s two major low-income housing complexes for seniors are dominated by Korean Americans. And in recent years, Korean American investors have purchased some major pieces of property in Little Tokyo.

In fact, the most recent sale of the Little Tokyo Shopping Center (formerly, Yaohan Plaza) prompted headlines like, “Is Little Tokyo Big Enough for Koreans?” in a Los Angeles Times blog, and “Sushi to Kimchi: Koreans Replace Japanese in Little Tokyo” in the Los Angeles Business Journal.