If you close your eyes and listen to Joe Ide, you might think you were talking to a black man, a brother who knows his way around the neighborhood. The slang, the inflection. It's all there. But Joe Ide is 100% Japanese-American. And he has a simple explanation for why he sounds the way he sounds: "Most of our friends [growing up] were black," he says. A Colorful South LA Childhood Ide (pronounced "EEE-day") grew up in South Los Angeles, with his extended family. "My grandparents lived here because it was close to Little Tokyo," he explains. By that time, after World War II, other Japanese families had left for suburban cities like Torrance and Gardena. But not the Ides. They stayed on East Adams, a busy, noisy main artery that was home to a lot of working and barely-working families. "They couldn't afford to move," Ide says. His parents lived there, and raised their three boys there, too. "We were just scraping by, so it was three generations of us under one roof." Eventually the Ides
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