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Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo with Dan Kuramoto, founding member of the band\xa0Hiroshima\xa0who have now played for 40 years and recently released their 19th album,\xa0J-Town Beat. They discuss what he sees around him in the Little Tokyo in transition today as opposed to the one he grew up in 40 years ago; what it means to play "Los Angeles music" in this multi-ethnic city; how the band's koto player June Kuramoto learned her classical instrument while growing up in a Los Angeles black ghetto; the question of whether you can build a modern, western band around the koto, which Hiroshima has always tried to answer; how musical traditions with deeper roots cooperate better together; making their musical mixtures work as, in microcosm, making America work; making the still mutable Los Angeles work as, in microcosm, making America work; his time as an Asian-American Studies department chair at CSU Long Beach, and what he found out about Japanese-Americans there; music as a "way of healing" from the self-hate he once took from the media; his lunch with Ridley Scott and Hans Zimmer; how it felt to become part of a group considered "the bad guys" again in the 1980s, just as Hiroshima really took off; the band's first trip to Japan, and the visceral feelings it brought about; the universality of craft as an integral part of Japanese identity; the difficulties companies have had categorizing Hiroshima, and the \xa0special problems of the "smooth jazz" label; his lack of desire to play music for secretaries who just need their afternoons to pass more quickly; how they honed their chops in the Los Angeles black communities, and how black radio gave them their first big push; and the composition and meaning of\xa0the striking cover\xa0of their second album,\xa0Odori.