Japantown
There
used to be dozens of Japantowns up and down California, but they've disappeared
due to the passage of time, internment of Japanese Americans during WWII,
urban renewal, and assimilation. Today, San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles
are the only three notable Japantowns in the mainland US.
There are some places with locally significant businesses -- San Mateo, CA (two or three Japanese grocery stores and a dozen restaurants), Gardena, CA (a dusty strip on Western Avenue); clusters of small businesses near Japanese supermarkts in Mountain View and Cupertino. But to find a dense, thriving, Japanse American business district is rare. Of the three survivors, each has its own character, strengths, and threats to their survival.
This page is mostly about San Francisco's Japantown, where I lead walking tours, help out at the Natioanl Japanese American Historical Society (NJAHS), and shop for octopus and burdock root at New Years.
San Francisco's Japantown has been at its current location, near Post and Buchanan Streets in the Western Addition, for about 100 years. Before 1906 it was at two other lcations: Japanese immigrants lived mostly in Chinatown and the alleys south of Market between Fifth and Seventh Streets. Both these neighborhoods burned in the earthquake and fire.
After the earthquake, the Western Addition was one of the few districts still standing. The Victorian dwellings, built in the 1870s and '80s, were cut up into apartments and hotels; many owners added storefronts in the former front yards. For several years, mansions served as department stores, and churches and synagogues doubled as courthouses; city hall moved into the IOOF lodge hall. As businesses moved back downtown and residents of means moved west to the Richmond District, Japanese Americans found this densely built, mixed-use, mixed-race neighborhood ideal for establishing a rich and vibrant community. By 1940, on the eve of WWII, nearly every business within a block of Post and Buchanan was Japanese American. There were also several Filipino and early African American businesses in the area. (Fillmore Street itself, just to the west, remained a mostly white, segregated business district until WWII).
During WWII, 5000 persons of Japanese ancestry were interened from San Francisco (a total of 120,000 across the western states, 2/3 of whom were US-born citizens). But shortly, the Western Addition became home to tens of thousands of African Americans who came from the South to work in wartime industries, swelling the city's existing, small Black population tenfold or more. After WWII the Japanese were able to reestablish themselves to a limited degree. The churches operated hostels in their gyms and basements for returning families and elders until 1951. No sooner had the Japanese Americans gotten back on their feet, and the African Americans settled in, than the city proposed to tear down their "blighted" neighborhood and build it back up with apartment towers and shopping malls. (Plans had been laid as early as 1943, but attracted attention in the late 1940s and finally got underway in the late 1950s). With more than a decade of delay, blight became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as homeowners were reluctant to invest in repairs. I've talked to people who said it was rather funky and run-down, but other people say many of the houses were in good shape and well-tended. There is probably truth in both assertions.
With all the changes to the Western Addition by Redevelopment in the 1960s and '70s, the district that remains most physically intact is South Park, which was home to a small but thriving assortment of Japanese hotels from 1906 to 1933. They moved back to Japantown when the steamships from Japan shifted from Piers 30-32 further north, and immigration restrictions cut traffic back and forth to Japan (South Park is ideally suited two blocks from the waterfront and two blocks from the old SP Depot). As you can imagine from today's seismic retrofit, the construction of the Bay Bridge in the 1930s also made the neighborhood less desirable. Anyhow, several of the old South Park hotels still stand today, and two are owned by low-cost housing cooperatives, so continue in some semblance of their old uses. As I wrote in San Francisco's Japantown, South Park went on to be a port of entry for successive waves of working class imigrants, including Filipinos, Latinos, African Americans, and Dot Com workers.
Much more can be said (and better than I've said it). But other sections of this website cry out to be uploaded, so I will pause this narrative and update it as time permits. If I can't find a comparable site I will add some more topics and maps and photos, maybe a draft walking tour. Meanwhile, check out the links below and let me know if you have any questions.
As I update this site in early 2006, Japantown is turning 100 years old. There will be many celebrations, starting March 24, 2006 at City Hall. Visit www.jtowntaskforce.org, www.sfjapantown100.org, and the National Japanese American Historical Society for events, books, and links. Meanwhile, the AMC Kabuki Theater (home of the Asian American Film Festival and the annual Day of Remembrance ceremony) is for sale; Kintetsu is selling the Miyako Hotel, Miyako Inn, and two of the three Japan Center buildings. By some counts, half to two thirds of Japantown is up for sale. Efforts are being made to find responsible buyers who will keep Japan Center going "for a period of time" but time flies and it will take much vigillence, much communication, and working with allies, to ensure these sea changes don't sink the community's gathering places, shopkeepers, cultural institutions. Hang in there guys!
Note: Maps are copyrighted 2006 by Ben Pease, Pease Press. Personal use is permitted; please let me know about academic use (I'm pretty open to folks using these; thanks in advance for letting me know). Commercial use prohibited without permission, due in part to a complicated copyright situation -- note the Sanborn base maps I worked from are copyrighted by EDR.net, so you should check with me and check with them. Details on request.
Origins of my Obsession:
I come at Japantown history from the perspective of a white guy with a sansai (3rd genration) Japanese American girlfriend. Shizue came into the local JA community only a decade ago herself, having been involved with raising her kids in the suburbs and working in the commercial advertising world then social work for many years. So at first the main connection to the local community was her mother's New Year's feasts, and occasional trips to the Buddhist Church. (Not that she doesn't have deep roots; but they stretch to Stockton, San Luis Obispo, San Jose, Baltimore, Tokyo, and San Francisco's Haight Ashbury and Richmond Districts, more so than Japantown proper.
In 1996 Shiz started editing Nikkei Heritage, the quarterly magazine of the National Japanese American Historical Society (NJAHS). So we started to attend all sorts of events --tributes, festivals, film screenings, funerals, concerts, etc. and met many wonderful people. Then she also took up a job as managing editor of the Beam, a free, bilingual monthly paper for the Bay Area (now gone). More events, more deadlines (up from 4 to 16 per year). After the paper came out Shiz would be wiped out, so I'd load up my car and help deliver it down the Peninsula and San Jose, which gave me a new perspective on grocery store geography. About that time, I started mapping Japanese American neighborhoods and leading walking tours. Obviously it's a different perpsective than from someone who grew up in the neighborhood but I do my best to tell people's stories as well as put it in context of city politics and architectural change.
What got me started mapping Japantowns was a visit to Stockton, Shiz's dad's hometown. Shiz had told me about visiting her grandparents' hotel in the '50s and '60s; it was a bit of a skid row by then, sort of like San Francisco's Sixth Street, but her grandmother Saiki took good care of her guests. In the late 1960s the Crosstown Freeway was built right through the commercial core of Japantown/Manilatown Shiz said there wasn't much left anymore. How little I realized! I expected to see something of the old urban fabric amidst the new (as in San Francisco), but Stockton's old district has ben almost completely erased. A new Day's Inn stands on the site of the old family hotel. Big civic buildings and parking lots sprawl outward from downtown, and there are still a lot of vacant blocks. Somewhere nearby is a block or two of surviving Manilatown, which Filipino-American activists are fighting to save, but the city is intent on tearing it down even as you read this, replacing it with Pizza Huts and gas stations to create a better "Gateway to Stockton" (as if erasing all traces of the past and ethnic heritage will make Stockton appear in tourist guidebooks).
What's a geographer to do? Mourn, document, tell stories. I decided to map out what used to be. How big were they? What were the buildings like? How many businesses were there? How dense were they? How did these ethnic communities fit into the cities around them? I started mapping San Francisco's Japantown (it was closer to home) but have gone on to map Stockton and LA's Little Tokyo. I have another dozen cities and towns on my "wish list."
A natural starting point was old Sanborn Insurance maps, which show every building and include some general notes on use (dwellings, stores, saloons, hotels, factories, lumber yards, etc.). They're copyrighted, but widely available at libraries on microfilm (and now on the web).
Back in the 1990s, San Francisco's Japanese American History Archives (JAHA, now defunct) had done a set of maps showing the locations of JA businesses all over the city in 1900, 1910, 1940, 1950, 1970, and 1990. Japantown Arts and Media (JAM) Workshop did them in 1990, using old JA business directories (sort of like the ethnic Yellow Pages). The only drawback with how they did the maps was that you had to look from the number on the map to the list of businesses in the margins to read what it was. And go back and forth to determine what was next door to that business.
For my
maps, I started with Sanborn maps, drawing building, and scaled them so I
could list the businesses right on the buildings. Then rather than color-coding
construction type (as on the original Sanborns) I coded for use. So you can
see whether businesses were spread out (as in Stockton) or solid (as in LA
or San Francisco). If spread out, are they separated by other, non-JA stores?
Or by dwellings, or factories? Sometimes you'll find a parallel resource,
such as an African American business directory, or another obscessed historian
willing to share notes.
We're starting to move farther afield. If you get too rural, the Sanborn company
saw no fire risk from closely packed buildings; hence no good maps. Also,
many of the farmers were on Rural Federal Delivery routes, so there's no street
address to map. There are, however, many satellite towns with 2-3 pages of
Sanborn maps and a handful of businesses downtown. We'd like to see what they
looked like. Ask how we're coming.
Ideally, the maps will serve as a framework on which to arrange people's recollections,
stories, and photographs. "Book learnin' is no substitute for stories of people
who grew up in the neighborhood, or who shaped history. But time is wasting!
The really informative old timers are passing away,* whereas the maps and
directories will be in libraries years from now. The time to gather stories
and memories is now .
*Map
Memories
Nelson Nagai of Stockton brought my draft Stockton maps to a Japanese
American Citizen's leaguepicnic several years ago. He said a lot of old guys
sat around and talked story over the maps; "This family's store -- what
ever happened to them?" "Oh, they relocated to Chicago..."
Nelson asked: So you guys never wondered about those guys until now? They've
been gone 50 years!" "No," they replied, "I forgot about
them until I saw their name again on the map." One
family came by his table with their elderly father/grandfather, who had been
afflicted with Alzheimer's for several years. On seeing the maps, he pointed
to a spot on the map and said: "We used to live HERE." And the so-and-sos
lived across the street, and these other families lived around the corner.
And for a few minutes he was quite lucid, in a way he hadn't been for a long
time. His family was amazed. Of course, nobody thought to write down what
he said...
But it does hint that we store our memories in different places; that geographic memory is a different kind of data than, say, what happened yesterday or what's that fellow's name. (Or at least is stored in a different filing cabinet). Whether as young children, young adults, parents, or older (well-seasoned) folks; whether negotiating a busy downtown or leafy suburb, by foot, by bike, in a car, for a paper route or to buy groceries and go to church... we construct a view of the world, or a web of relationships, in our heads, and refine it with practice.
If you're a crazy historian, you might wander around with a construction of how things used to be, overlaid on how things are, and what happened on such and such a date on this spot; and if the wind is just right you can see everything sort of melded together. It's a weird, wooly feeling. There are also things that happened in places you know well (today) that you haven't a clue about. Then one day you learn about them; someone tells their story, and your world shifts again. Maps are the framework I use to organize all those stories; for others it's old photos, or just stories plain and simple.
In early
February, for instance, I picked up a copy of Elizabeth Pepin and Lew Watt's
book Harlem of the West. I listen on KALW and KPOO to many of the great Jazz,
blues, and R&B musicians; but here are their pictures, and stories of
the clubs that dotted the Fillmore. A good half-dozen of the clubs were in
Japantown. Once I showed a picture of Jimbo's to a friend who used to live
where Japan Center is today and she said:
"Oh, Jimbo's. They were so loud. They kept us up all night!". Now
I now the names and faces of the greats who kept everybody up all night.
Whether my maps help you revisit your childhood or appreciate how big and diverse the Japanese American community was, or take a look at your own community with new eyes, I hope you enjoy them.
