Quick answer
Japantown is a six-block district in San Francisco's Western Addition. By 1940 it held over 5,000 Japanese residents and more than 200 Japanese-owned businesses. Executive Order 9066 emptied it in 1942, and redevelopment in the 1960s cleared much of what remained. The Peace Pagoda, a gift from Osaka designed by Yoshiro Taniguchi, opened in 1968.
Full transcript
Ginza, Six Blocks Wide
Before the war, people compared these streets to the Ginza. By 1940 the Japantown in the Western Addition held more than five thousand Japanese residents and over two hundred Japanese-owned businesses — grocers, bathhouses, printers, doctors, a newspaper. San Francisco had been the main port of entry for Japanese immigration to the United States, so this was not a curiosity district built for visitors. It was where a community banked, worshipped, argued and buried its dead. Walk the length of Post Street and hold that number in your head: two hundred businesses, on a footprint you can cross in ten minutes.
Nineteen Forty-Two
In February of 1942 President Roosevelt signed Executive Order nine thousand and sixty-six, and everything above stopped. The order applied to anyone of Japanese birth or descent on the Pacific coast, American citizenship included. People were given days. Shops were sold at whatever price was offered, or shuttered and left. By 1943 large sections of these blocks were simply vacant. Meanwhile the shipyards were hiring, and thousands of African American families arriving in the Great Migration moved into the housing that force had emptied — one displaced community living in the rooms of another. Stand at Post and Buchanan and look at how ordinary the street is. Nothing here announces it.
Cleared Again, Then Rebuilt
Most of those who were removed did not come back. Those who did found a neighbourhood that the city was about to clear a second time: under redevelopment in the nineteen sixties, housing was razed and roads were widened, largely without asking the people living there. What stands now was substantially rebuilt on top of that. In the middle of it, in 1968, Osaka gave the city a five-tiered concrete pagoda designed by Yoshiro Taniguchi, and it went up while the bulldozers were still working nearby. Three of the original Japantowns in the United States survive, and this is one. Walk into the plaza, find the pagoda, and then go and look at the Nihonmachi peace plaza plaque — the dates on it are the whole story.