The Second Removal: Urban Renewal and the Origins of the Japanese American Redress Movement

By

Katelynn Pan

Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts

In the Department of History at Brown University

Thesis Advisor: Naoko Shibusawa

April 6, 2018

Acknowledgements

This thesis would not have been possible without the expertise and generosity of many. Thank you to my advisor, Professor Shibusawa, who has been an invaluable source of guidance throughout every step of this project. To the members of my writing group, Nicole Sintetos, Erin Aoyama, Takuya Maeda, Mark Tseng-Putterman, Miriam Laufer, Ida Yalzadeh, and Jessica Jiang, thank you for your incredibly thoughtful insights and suggestions, as well as for your constant support. Working in a collaborative setting with you has been one of the most memorable experiences of completing this thesis. To the Japanese American community members in San Francisco and Los Angeles, thank you for allowing me to visit your cities and sharing your experiences with me. Thank you to Karl Matsushita at the Japanese American National Library and Jamie Henricks at the Japanese American National Museum for your patient direction in working through archives. To Professor Sandy Zipp, thank you for your guidance in framing the context around postwar urban renewal. To Bruce Boucek at the Rockefeller Library, thank you for making the spatial visualizations in this thesis a possibility. To my previous instructors in the History Department, notably Professor Jeremy Mumford and Professor Kerry Smith, thank you for welcoming me as I ventured into studying history, and educating me with the analytical tools I have today. And finally, thank you to my friends and family, for being a never-ending source of encouragement and strength to finish this thesis.

1

Introduction

On a quiet Monday morning in June 2017, San Francisco Japantown is calm.1 Covering six city blocks intersected by Post Street, two miles west from downtown, Japantown—or

Nihonmachi, as it’s known by its Japanese name.2 The shopping mall on the south side of Post

Street has unlocked its doors, but employees are still cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming the floors. On the north side of Post Street, the storefronts of small organizations will be shuttered for another hour. By the mall on Buchanan Street, a large board in front of the shopping mall displays a map of Japantown and a list of ramen, sushi, and other restaurants. The two brothers who own Benkyodo Company prepare mochi for the day, following an old family recipe in a shop established by their grandfather. Except for the war years of incarceration when neighbors watched the store for them, the mochi shop has been open since 1906. Here, a tight-knit community of Japanese Americans and Asian Americans lead organizations and preserve this

Japantown for both what it is today and what it once was.3

Japantown dates to the end of 19th century when Japanese immigrants settled in the area and began to establish businesses and services catering to the ethnic community. Japantown, however, has witnessed significant changes since its initial founding. At its greatest expanse,

Japantown comprised thirty-six city blocks according to locals, but both internal pressures within

1 Also referenced to as “Nihonmachi,” a direct translation of Japantown in Japanese. 2 These borders of Japantown according to its modern understanding. “Discover San Francisco Japantown,” Japan Center Garage Corporation, published 2014, accessed on March 27, 2018, http://sfjapantown.org/gettinghere/. 3 On terminology, “Japanese Americans” will describe the Japanese immigrants who arrived to the American West Coast in the late 19th-early 20th century and their ensuing descendants. While the term can also describe Japanese immigrants to the United States after World War II, the discussed Japanese American community refers mostly to the original pool of Japanese immigrants and their families. 2 have shaped Japantown into what remains of it today.4 Japantown experienced its first big upheaval during World War II when all of its Japanese American community members were cleared out and sent to incarceration camps. But a second, traumatic change came with the large scale urban renewal of San Francisco’s Japantown starting from the mid-1950s. While most of

Japanese American history focus on their wartime incarceration and the later Redress Movement during the 1970s and 1980s, the challenges that Japanese American communities faced on a more local level between these two periods remain understudied.5 Urban renewal after World

War II was not unique to San Francisco, nor to Japanese Americans. For instance, scholars like

Samuel Zipp have studied how urban renewal affected the African American and Latinx communities in New York City and Chester Hartman has studied the Yerba Buena redevelopment project in San Francisco.6 Some scholars have also examined the inequalities of

4 Steve Nakajo, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 10, 2017, transcript. 5 The following overview is not exhaustive, but highlights the general shifts in the historiography on Japanese American incarceration and its aftermath. Works by historians, journalists, authors on Japanese American internment mostly emerged after a few decades of silence, including the popularized memoir by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience during and after the World War II Internment (New York: Bantam Books, 1974); Allan R. Bosworth, America’s Concentration Camps (New York: Norton, 1967); Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: the Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Publications also began to tell the history of the Nisei soldiers in the 100th Battalion and 442nd Regiment as well as the linguists in the Military Intelligence Service, in Chester Tanaka, Go For Broke: A Pictorial History of the Japanese American 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (San Mateo: JACP, 1982); Lyn Crost, Honor by Fire: Japanese Americans at War in Europe and the Pacific (Novato: Presidio, 1994). In the following decades, some works have also come under criticism for perpetuating a narrative of Japanese American success and assimilation. To counter this, other historians and authors have tried to highlight the stories of Japanese American wartime resistors and the broader causes behind the incarceration beyond wartime hysteria, like the novel by John Okada, No-No Boy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, [1956] 1981); Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Greg Robinson, The Great Unknown: Japanese American sketches (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016). More recent publications have started to characterize the Redress Movement from the 1970s and 80s that led to the reparations in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, like Alice Yang Murray, Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Mitchell Maki, Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress (Indianapolis: University of Illinois, 1999); A. Naomi Paik, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 6 Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Chester Hartman, Yerba Buena: Land Grab and Community Resistance in San Francisco (San Francisco: Glide Publications, 1974). 3

San Francisco’s Japantown in the Years Since Urban Renewal (1953-Present)

Figure 1.1 - Japantown 19537

Figure 1.2 - Japantown 19638

Figure 1.3 - Japantown 20189

7 Map by Katelynn Pan, Tableau 10.4.2 Software, based off of findings by David Okita, “San Francisco Japantown Redevelopment” (Master thesis, California State University, 1980), Map 5-1, 78. 8 Map by Katelynn Pan, based off of findings by David Okita, “Japantown Redevelopment,” Map 5-7, 84. 9 Map by Katelynn Pan, borders of Japantown according to its modern understanding. “Discover San Francisco Japantown,” Japan Center Garage Corporation, published 2014, accessed on March 27, 2018, http://sfjapantown.org/gettinghere/. 4 urban renewal for African Americans, but we know less about how Asian Americans have been affected by urban renewal.10 As in San Francisco, Japanese communities in cities like Los

Angeles and Seattle faced similar pressures from their city governments. Through an analysis of archival material, newspapers, and oral histories, this thesis will focus mostly on San Francisco

Japantown but will also include a discussion of Japanese American activism in Los Angeles’

Little Tokyo.

My thesis examines Japantown’s second upheaval to suggest that we can locate the origins of the Redress Movement also in Japanese American opposition to urban renewal in

California. That is to say that the Redress Movement did not simply originate from young

Japanese Americans in the 1960s and 1970s becoming more aware of the historic injustice of incarceration through Ethnic Studies courses and Third Worldism. The idea for redress also came off college campuses such as San Francisco State, Berkeley, and UCLA but also from Japantown and Little Tokyo. I also demonstrate that studying urban renewal in Japantown is a good way to show how the tensions among Japanese Americans continued to play out after resettlement.

Contrary to popular belief, the Japanese Americans were not a homogeneous group. They were divided by class, generation, gender, and politics. There were Japanese Americans who embraced assimilationist goals, and there were others who questioned respectability politics. And finally, I identify the importance of Japanese capital in the Japantown urban renewal project to show how once again, the fate of Japanese Americans was tied to Japan.

10 Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). The works by Charlotte Brooks also examines Asian American relations in California through land use and housing, but focuses more on Chinese American communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles than Japanese Americans. Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Charlotte Brooks, “Sing Shen vs. Southwood,” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 3 (August 2004): 463-494. 5

This thesis is divided into two parts. The first part, “Redlining, Removal, and Renewal,” will provide the historical context within Japanese American history and the local history of San

Francisco. This will identify the formation of Japantown in the Western Addition alongside the

African American community on Fillmore Street, as well as the discriminatory policies that enforced its boundaries both before and after World War II. This section will then discuss the

Japanese American incarceration in the context of the San Francisco Japantown residents, and their resettlement after the war. Finally, this part will provide an overview of urban renewal in

San Francisco, and how it specifically took shape in Japantown.

The second part, “Resisting Redevelopment and the Origins of Redress,” features my main intervention: demonstrating that urban renewal was a major moment in Japanese American history. This section will identify a continuation of tensions within the Japanese American community throughout the period of urban renewal. It will also point out the significance of foreign Japanese capital in the redevelopment of Japantown. Finally, this section will locate the origins of the Redress movement within urban renewal and the community resistance against it.

6

Part I: Redlining, Removal, and Renewal

The Creation of SF Japantown

Japanese immigrants to the continental United States at the end of the 19th century formed Japantowns along the West Coast. Many of the initial Japanese immigrants, known as

Issei (lit. “first-generation”) landed in San Francisco as students. They hoped to eventually return to Japan after learning English and new job skills. To support themselves, they worked as domestic servants in upper class families in San Francisco, while lodging in Christian institutions like the Golden Gate Gospel Society or clustered in small and dirty houses.11 Apart from the students, many first went to Hawai’i before going to the West Coast. From 1885, contractors in

Hawaii recruited thousands of Japanese workers to work in sugar plantations. Japanese immigration to the West Coast gained momentum about a decade later, and by 1907 around

150,000 Japanese were in the United States. On the West Coast, many Issei initially worked in agriculture as a cheap labor source as a replacement to Chinese laborers, whose immigration had been barred by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.12 The Issei immigrated from mainly agricultural areas in Japan that were hurt by recent industrialization and the deflation of agricultural prices by the Meiji government.13 Japanese immigration to the West Coast gained momentum about a decade later and by 1907 around 150,000 Japanese were in the United States. At the time of Issei

11 While some students were of elite backgrounds in Japan and received government-scholarships, others had to support themselves as student-laborers. Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924 (New York: The Free Press, 1988), 8. 12 The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act did not affect the Territory of Hawai’i, allowing the Chinese population in Hawai’i to reach its height in 1900. Eventually though, sugar planters recruited Japanese and later Filipino workers as a counter-balance to Chinese workers. Eleanor C. Nordyke and Richard Lee, “The Chinese in Hawai’i: A Historical and Demographic Perspective,” The Hawaiian Journal of History 23, (1989), 202. 13 The majority of Issei left from the same coastal prefectures in Japan, Hiroshima and Yamaguchi. The others came from Kumamoto and Fukuoka Prefectures in Kyushu. Yuji Ichioka, The Issei, 40. 7 immigration, the U.S. government granted citizenship only to “free white persons” as stipulated by the Naturalization Act of 1790, which was amended to include “aliens of African descent” after the Civil War.14 U.S. law thus classified the Issei as “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” This racist law was challenged in 1922 in Ozawa v. United States, but it was upheld by the Supreme

Court as constitutional.

A reason why Takao Ozawa challenged this law was because the legal category “aliens ineligible for citizenship” was used as the basis for other restrictive legislation against the Issei.

It served as coded means to discriminate against Japanese immigrants, notably in California’s

1913 Alien Land Law which forbade “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from owning or leasing land. While they first worked on farms and some factories, many Issei laborers eventually saved enough money to buy or rent their own farms, orchards, and businesses. Issei success in growing and selling labor-intensive crops like strawberries provoked the resentment of white farmers who saw the Issei as unwanted competition.15 The Alien Land Law was thus enacted as an attempt to keep the Issei as wage laborers. Issei business owners, however, circumvented the Alien Land

Law by purchasing and leasing land through corporations they formed, white representatives, or their American-born children, the Nisei (lit. “second-generation”).16

Not all Issei became successful farmers, of course. Other Issei settled in West Coast cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, and many opened other businesses or remained wage laborers. In the cities, Issei opened businesses like restaurants, shops, and hotels, or worked as houseboys and gardeners to elite white families.17 The Alien Land Law also affected city-

14 Ichioka, The Issei, 1. 15 Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), Chapter 1. 16 Ichioka, The Issei, 153. 17 Ichioka, The Issei, 5. 8 dwelling Issei, but they managed to continue running and opening businesses like restaurants, hotels, and grocery stores. Whether in large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, or in smaller ones like Sacramento, San Jose, or Portland, the Issei established pockets of Japanese community that provided bilingual professional services, Japanese language education for their

Nisei children, and stores providing Japanese groceries and goods.

Along with Los Angeles, San Francisco was home to the largest Japanese American community on the continental United States. Before the Great 1906 Earthquake, Japanese

Americans in San Francisco lived in three areas: South of Market, Chinatown, and the Western

Addition. After the earthquake devastated both South of Market and Chinatown, the Japanese

American community centralized in the Western Addition an area that became identified as

Japantown or Nihonmachi, the Japanese name for it. Other poorer laborers and families also took refuge in the Western Addition after the Great Earthquake. Despite restrictive immigration policies that barred the entry of new Japanese immigrants, Japantown continued to expand with

Japanese American commercial and residential property owners.18 White hostility and nativism enforced this Japanese American centralization around Nihonmachi as well. For example, arsonists torched the home of a Japanese American family that moved to a white neighborhood of Russian Hill.19 Japantown also housed places of gathering for the Japanese American community such as Buddhist temples, Christian churches and daycare centers. Issei leaders of the community formed activist and political organizations with meeting places in Japantown.

The U.S. government’s relationship with Japan affected the treatment of Japanese

Americans in San Francisco. By the 20th century, nativists took notice of the Japanese presence

18 Sheridan Tatsuno, “The Political and Economic Effects of Urban Renewal on Ethnic Communities: A Case Study of San Francisco’s Japantown,” Amerasia Journal 1, no. 1 (1971): 35. 19 Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 29. 9 and pushed the federal government to limit Japanese immigration. On October of 1906, with support from white families and nativist groups, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed legislation to segregate Japanese American children in public elementary schools.20 The

Japanese government responded to this angrily, leading to an international incident. In recognition of Japan’s growing power and its recent victory over Russia in 1905, the U.S. government negotiated with the Japanese government to re-integrate Japanese American students in San Francisco schools in exchange for a drastic reduction of Japanese immigration in 1907.

Rather than enacting a unilateral immigration ban, this negotiation became known as the

“Gentlemen’s Agreement,” to preserve the relationship between the United States and Japan.

Meanwhile, some Nisei founded organizations that promoted the politics of respectability, believing that assimilation within American society was the key to combating racism the they faced. Eventually the Nisei also formed political organizations like the Japanese

American Citizens League (JACL), with its headquarters in one of the Victorian houses along

Sutter Street in the Western Addition. The JACL originated from a smaller organization called the American Loyalty League. In 1918, six Nisei established the American Loyalty League in

San Francisco to “advance the interests of all Nisei living in the city” by focusing on loyalty and patriotism.21 In 1930, the American Loyalty League absorbed similar groups around California and Seattle, which formally established the JACL at a convention in Seattle. Throughout these

20 At this point, the San Francisco government already segregated Chinese students to San Francisco’s Oriental School. This demonstrates how the treatment of Japanese Americans in urban West Coast cities like San Francisco was built off of nativist and anti-Chinese sentiments from a few decades earlier, in the late 1860s and 1870s before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In reaction to hostile and violent treatment elsewhere in the city, the Chinese immigrants concentrated out of necessity in Chinatown. Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 27. 21 “American Loyalty League records, 1924,” University of Washington Libraries: Overview of the Collection, http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv49340. 10 early years, the JACL attracted Nisei doctors, lawyers, and other professionals.22 Membership in the JACL was only open to Nisei and barred their noncitizen Issei parents.23

By the end of the 1920s, San Francisco Japantown had developed into an all- encompassing neighborhood for Japanese Americans. Born in 1925 and raised on Post and

Buchanan Street, Hatsuro Aizawa remembers attending Japanese after school programs, hanging out at Japanese-owned soda fountains and Japanese sweet shops, and shopping at Japanese grocery stores. Although this ethnic community was formed out of necessity against the discrimination they faced, Aizawa felt insulated “like there was a barrier around the area.”24

This insulation, in fact, was a product of segregation as restrictive covenants prohibited

Japanese Americans and African Americans from renting and buying houses outside of this area.

Racial covenants circumvented the Fourteenth Amendment by operating through privately owned properties.25 The privatization of racial discrimination allowed for it to endure almost insidiously throughout the 20th century. Also affected by racial covenants was a budding African

American community a few blocks away from Japantown. A 1937 report by the Federal Housing

Administration (FHA) noted the adjacent but distinct neighborhoods. While the “largest concentration of Japanese in the City” lived in the north-central part of the Western Addition,

African Americans predominated in the northwest section.26

22 Participation in the JACL at its formation and throughout the 20th century did not necessarily align with middle to upper-middle class professionals, although it tended to. JACLers were more likely to be men, Christian, and attended college. Lon Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival in Los Angeles, 1934-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 31. 23 Mike Masaoka, They Call Me Moses Masaoka: An American Saga (New York: Morrow, 1987). 24“Hatsuro Aizawa: Former Japantown Resident,” KQED 1999, http://www.pbs.org/kqed/fillmore/learning/people/aizawa.html. 25 Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2008), 27. 26 Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed March 10, 2018, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=15/37.7839/-122.4338&opacity=0.15&city=san-francisco- ca&sort=20&area=D3&adimage=3/75/-120&text=bibliograph. 11

It is important to understand that the federal and city government constructed and enforced this concentration of the people of color within the Western Addition. Amid the New

Deal legislation, the Roosevelt administration enacted the Federal Housing Act of 1934, which created the FHA and funded the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC). The HOLC worked to provide mortgages for homeownership to help American citizens to acquire housing during the Great Depression. While all New Deal programs were in name, race-neutral, liberal, and socially democratic, they created new avenues for racism because people of color consistently received less aid.27 As a result people of color were not given the same opportunities to build up equity as were white Americans, thereby widening the racial wealth gap. The FHA and HOLC particularly damaged the ability of nonwhites to accumulate wealth through a process known as redlining, in which urban neighborhoods would be characterized by not only their physical conditions but also their racial and economic make-up. The FHA created “confidential” city surveys that downgraded neighborhoods with larger nonwhite populations; this focus on race is why the FHA report cited above took note of where Japanese and African Americans lived.

Redlining was a large scale, national initiative that produced an extensive catalog of

“security maps” of US cities and area descriptions. A team of realtors, lenders and appraisers rated the value of land on a scale of A - “Best”, B - “Still Desirable”, C - “Definitely Declining”, and D - “Hazardous.”28 Those communities with more people of color, like Japanese and African

American populations, would receive lower ratings and not qualify for federally-backed mortgages. The FHA explicitly directed lenders to use “redlining” practices, which resulted in the federally backed loans being channeled to millions of suburban, white, homebuyers and away

27 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 5. 28 Robert K. Nelson, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” accessed March 10, 2018. 12 from communities of color.29 The downgrading of property values in “nonwhite” areas made them poor investments and led to “white flight” away from these areas, especially after World

War II, as will be discussed below. White flight further reduced property values. At the same time, racial covenants made it difficult for nonwhites, particularly African Americans, from being able to build up equity by purchasing homes in white, suburban neighborhoods that saw property values steadily rise over the decades. Instead, nonwhites were relegated to areas ineligible for federally-back loans, and those who were already property-owners saw the value of their properties plummet. The result was the further concentration of poorer peoples of color.

The HOLC gave the Western Addition, and Japantown, a D-rating in 1937. They shaded the area in red, describing it as the “melting pot of the West” and “a nearest approach to a slum district in San Francisco.”30 The racial makeup of the area was a “highly congested population consisting of Japanese, Russians, Mexicans, Negroes, etc. having a very-low income level.”31

Through this, the HOLC described the inferiority of Western Addition from three different angles. They pointed at the congestion or overcrowding of the area, the non-white or non-

Western European population, and the poverty of the people. The conglomerate stamp of inferior race, class, and living conditions mapped onto this area’s quality rating.

The HOLC also wrote how home-ownership was very low in the Western Addition, and about 50% of the area were used as businesses.32 Based on this reasoning and their resulting poor rating, the HOLC refused to back loans to the people in this area, perpetuating a system of low home-ownership in this area and in Japantown. And despite the bustling community of business,

29 Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race, 236. 30 Nelson, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” accessed March 11, 2018. 31 Nelson, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” accessed March 10, 2018. 32 Nelson, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” accessed March 10, 2018. 13 many Japanese Americans who lived in Japantown identified as low-income and lacked college degrees or college degree ambitions unlike the Nisei who tended to join the JACL. Many

Japanese Americans therefore did not have enough savings to buy their property. Aizawa remembered always being poor while growing up. His father’s business struggled to have customers at his bookstore. He waited for his father to come home at 11 pm every evening after another long day of poor sales, so that they would eat dinner together.33 Aizawa followed this routine until he was seventeen years old, when the start of World War II and Executive Order

9066 tore apart the world he once knew. The lack of home-ownership reverberated consequences particularly for the less wealthier members of the Japanese American community, as they lost all claims to their rental homes when forced to leave during the World War II incarceration camps.

The Japanese American Incarceration

The incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II was the first removal of

Japanese Americans from Japantown. Building off decades of discrimination against Chinese and Asian immigrants in California, anti-Japanese sentiment intensified in the years surrounding

World War II. U.S.-Japan relations deteriorated steadily as the United States enacted more and more stringent anti-Japanese immigration laws and Japan’s imperial conquests conflicted with

U.S. economic interests. Japan announced its departure from the League of Nations in 1933 and began the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Four years later, Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Quickly after news of Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested Japanese community leaders, including priests and organization leaders on the basis of suspected espionage and contact with the Japanese government. Two months later on February 19th, 1942 U.S. President

33 “Hatsuro Aizawa: Former Japantown Resident,” KQED 1999. 14

Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the exclusion of Japanese

American civilians from any area without trial or hearing.

On April 1, 1942, large posters titled Civilian Exclusion Order No. 5 went up around San

Francisco and Japantown. They read, “it is hereby ordered that all persons of Japanese ancestry, including aliens and non-aliens, be excluded from that portion of the City and County of San

Francisco, State of California, lying generally west of Junipero Serra Boulevard and thence on

Market Street to San Francisco Bay.”34 This exclusion order was signed by the Western Defense

Command leader General John Dewitt at his office in the Presidio of San Francisco, a twenty minute drive from the Western Addition. The Japanese American community began packing and selling their belongings. Merchants sold their stores if they could or arranged for neighbors to watch over their property, like the owners of the Benkyodo manju shop did. Japanese American farm owners throughout California did the same with their fruit and vegetable farms. The exclusion order took effect six days later, starting “after 12 o’clock noon, P. W. T., of Tuesday,

April 7, 1942.” Hatsuro Aizawa recalled helping his father pack up all of the books at his bookstore the day before they were to report. The wartime incarceration forced Aizawa’s family business to close, never to reopen. The boxes of books were left behind, as the Japanese

American families were instructed to pack only what they could carry.35 On the fateful spring morning of April 7, 1942, the Japanese American families like the Aizawas boarded buses along the sloping streets of San Francisco.

These buses accompanied by the U.S. Army took most of the San Franciscans to the

Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, some fifteen miles away. A former horse race track,

34 Civilian exclusion order #5, posted at First and Front streets, directing removal by April 7 of persons of Japanese ancestry, from the first San Francisco section to be affected by evacuation, April 1942, LOT 1801, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., https://www.loc.gov/item/2001705937/. 35 “Hatsuro Aizawa: Former Japantown Resident,” KQED 1999. 15

Tanforan was one of seventeen temporary detention centers set up for Japanese Americans until the War Relocation Authority (WRA) finished building more permanent incarceration camps.

Hastily prepared, the conditions in Tanforan were poor. The detained Japanese Americans lived in barracks made of old horse stalls and waited long lines to use latrines.36 By October 1942, the

Tanforan Assembly Center closed and the 7,816 Japanese Americans held there were sent to one of the ten incarceration camps set up at: Manzanar, Poston, Gila River, Topaz, Granada, Heart

Mountain, Minidoka, Tule Lake, Jerome, and Rohwer.37 The majority of Japanese Americans at

Tanforan went to the incarceration camp in Topaz, Utah. Here, the WRA assigned a single room barrack per family, measuring about sixteen by twenty feet.38 The incarcerated Japanese

Americans ate in mess halls and used communal bathrooms and showers, surrounded by barbed wire fences and the expanse of desert land around them.

These conditions exacerbated tensions within the Japanese American incarcees. The

JACL and its leaders were the primary contact for US government officials like General DeWitt to communicate information. The executive leaders, Mike Masaoka and Saburo Kido, asserted and encouraged a position of cooperation to JACL delegates and members of many regional chapters, while denouncing displays of Japanese American resistance.39 Animosity grew within the incarceration camps, where the JACL members started to be suspected of collaboration with the U.S. government. Anti-JACL Japanese Americans called them “inu,” meaning “dog” in

Japanese, intended as a slur for traitors and informers who sold out their community members.

36 Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy, ch. 3. 37Lewis Kawahara. "Tanforan (detention facility)," Densho Encyclopedia http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Tanforan%20(detention%20facility)/ (accessed Dec 2 2017). 38 Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy, ch. 4. 39 Forms of resistance were broad, but included select groups like the No-No boys, draft resisters, and Supreme Court test cases. Peter Irons, The Courage of Their Convictions, (New York: London: Free Press; Collier Macmillan, 1988); Brian Niiya, "No-no boys," Densho Encyclopedia http://encyclopedia.densho.org/No- no%20boys/. 16

These tensions boiled over in December of 1942 at the Manzanar incarceration camp, where

JACL leader Fred Tayama was beaten at his barrack and the subsequent arrest of Harry Ueno for the attack.40 When large crowds gathered in support for Ueno’s release, WRA officials eventually resorted to shooting indiscriminately into the crowd after failing to break it up. With two deaths and over ten casualties, this event became known as the “Manzanar Riot.” The JACL also promoted an image of all-American Nisei, filled with patriotism and loyalty to the United

States. When the idea of a segregated Japanese American battalion of soldiers was suggested, the

JACL pledged its full support for this decision.41

Returning to Japantown

By mid-1943, U.S. victory over Japan was assured, and U.S. armed forces were fighting a deadly and merciless war of attrition. Knowing that the war would come to an end, the WRA began to encourage Japanese American families to settle outside of Japanese communities along the West Coast, given they were determined as loyal. The WRA discouraged the Japanese

Americans from reforming ethnically homogenous communities, fearful of reactionary conflicts and violence from white West Coast residents and nativists. This led to some Japanese American settlement in cities and suburbs in the Midwest and East Coast. Eventually in December of 1944,

General Henry C. Pratt of the Western Defense Command issued Public Proclamation No. 21, which lifted the military exclusion orders and allowed Japanese Americans to return to their

40 Brian Niiya, "Manzanar riot/uprising," Densho Encyclopedia https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Manzanar%20riot/uprising/. 41 Alice Yang Murray, Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 112. 17 homes starting from January 2, 1945.42 Apart from the families who settled in the Midwest and

East Coast a majority of Japanese Americans returned to the West Coast.

The public reception to the returning Japanese Americans varied and in some extreme cases Japanese American families faced violence and destruction of property. Despite these several cases, Japanese Americans land owners were largely able to reclaim their property and belongings, although many had property missing or vandalized. A study published in 1986 cited a range of $2.5 billion to $6.2 billion when inflation adjusted of property and income lost because of the incarceration.43 Immediately after returning from incarceration camps, many of the Buddhist temples and churches in the area served as hostels for families until they could find new homes. Like the other Japanese Americans in Japantown, Aizawa’s family lost all claim to their home when the WRA officials forcibly removed them three years prior because they did now own the property. They not only found themselves returning to a continually segregated society but also without a stable asset to fall back on.

For those returning to San Francisco and other cities along the West Coast, they found that their respective Japantowns had evolved in their absence. While the Japanese Americans were in detention centers and incarceration camps, the war brought another major change to the

Western Addition of San Francisco. World War II created a significant number of high-paying jobs in shipyard and defense industries. African American workers left the Deep South as part of the second Great Migration (1940-1970) and arrived in industrial cities like Detroit and Los

Angeles. In the San Francisco Bay Area, this migration increased the African American

42 Brian Niiya, "Return to West Coast," Densho Encyclopedia http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Return to West Coast/ (accessed Dec 2, 2017). 43 Sandra C. Taylor, “Evacuation and Economic Loss: Questions and Perspectives.” In Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano, eds. Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 166. 18 population by 600 percent between the years of 1940 to 1945.44 Lured by the promise of industrial labor in the North and West Coast, many southern blacks were disheartened to discover the persistence of Jim Crow—simply by another name. Even in cities as far north as

Chicago, or as far West as Los Angeles, real estate brokers and developers of single family homes in the city and the suburbs denied black clients through explicitly racialized restrictive covenants.45 Many of the black workers found their housing options were limited to primarily segregated, black neighborhoods. This new population to San Francisco found affordable and vacant housing in the unused residences of Japanese Americans, adjacent to the already segregated black neighborhood of the Western Addition. As a result, Peter Yamamoto, a Sansei born in 1954, grew up in Japantown and remembers every single one of his friends was black.46

The overlap of the two communities also shaped the perspective of young Japanese Americans.

Steve Nakajo explained that Japanese American children growing up in the enclave of black communities developed hybrid identities, becoming “black Japs.”47

The double increase of Japanese Americans and African Americans led to shortages in housing in the Western Addition. The federal government in 1944 also established the G.I. Bill of Rights to help veterans obtain home mortgages, job training, and scholarships. But like the loans given by the HOLC, lenders denied home mortgages for people of color, including black veterans. The years following World War II saw a clear hardening of the racialization of urban space—through the growth of “white flight” from the urban center to the suburbs and the growing population of black and Japanese Americans in their ethnic enclaves. Some ripples were

44 Albert S. Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900-1954 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 6. 45 Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 34. 46 Peter Yamamoto, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 11, 2017, transcript. 47 Steve Nakajo, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 10, 2017, transcript. 19 also made by the NAACP in Los Angeles to combat racialized housing restrictions, building up to a Supreme Court Case Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948. Shelley outlawed court-enforced segregation in Los Angeles, but did not provide any mechanism to enforce white homeowners to sell homes and mortgages to black and Japanese Americans.48

The Japanese American population who returned to San Francisco, now a smaller group than the one that left, slowly tried to rebuild what they used to know. The Okumura family, fortunately, found their storefront the way they left it at the safekeeping of white neighbors.49 As they owned their property, landlords could not rent out the property in their absence. Others could not come back to the Western Addition, at least not immediately. Hatsuro Aizawa and his family moved into a different neighborhood after the war, while longing to return to Japantown.

After about five years, they saved enough to rent a new home in Japantown.50 Eventually, one block of Laguna Street was lined with storefronts that Mickey Imura remembered clearly, Roy

Abe’s barber shop, Mama Kintoki’s restaurant, Walden’s Deli run by a black family, and a family run auto repair shop Yamato Garage.51 The Japanese American families built up a new

Japantown out of the remnants of what was left behind after the incarceration.

The rebuilding of postwar Japantown not only included African Americans in Japantown, but also grew alongside the now expanded African American community. While the Japanese

American community centered around Post Street, the African American community centered just two blocks down, along Fillmore Street. The Fillmore District became famed as a cultural and entertainment hotspot in the city. Rhythm and blues singer Sugar Pie DeSanto recalled

48 Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race, 234. 49 Chris Hirano, interview by Katelynn Pan, February 21, 2018, transcript. 50 “Hatsuro Aizawa: Former Japantown Resident,” KQED 1999. 51 Mickey Imura, interview by Katelynn Pan, December 5, 2017, transcript. 20 getting discovered at the Ellis Theater by Johnny Otis. On a single night, Sugar Pie would go from one club to the next, dressed up from head to toe. She remembered, “When you said

‘Fillmore,’ you said it proud.”52 Along with jazz clubs, churches, and residences, African

American owned businesses thrived in the Fillmore District. Reggie Pettus owned the New

Chicago Barbershop, and recalled that years and years ago, the entire area from right to left were filled with African American businesses.53

While Japanese and African Americans shared similar experiences of racial discrimination such as in access to housing, their experiences also diverged in multiple aspects.

Unlike the Japanese American community, African Americans faced consistent police brutality, steeper rates of labor discrimination, fewer opportunities for educational advancement, and greater difficulty in obtaining financing with fair interest rates. Extant reports and statistics show a spike in crimes and arrests in the Fillmore District during the 1960s, and by comparison, crime appeared “virtually absent among the Japanese community in San Francisco.”54 Because African

Americans were more criminalized and under greater police surveillance than Japanese

Americans, it is likely that Japanese American crimes went undetected. Although they were under FBI surveillance for possible espionage before the war, the Japanese American community was perceived as a law-abiding community after the war, and Japanese Americans were able to capitalize on this perception. In contrast, their African American neighbors continually had to fight against a perception of criminality that hurt their opportunities for economic advancement.

While they resided within the same map of the Redevelopment Agency, the experiences of the

Japanese American and African American community differed.

52 “Sugar Pie De Santo,” KQED 1999, http://www.pbs.org/kqed/fillmore/learning/people/desanto.html. 53 “Reggie Pettus,” KQED 1999, http://www.pbs.org/kqed/fillmore/learning/people/pettus.html. 54 Broussard, Black San Francisco, 6. 21

Redevelopment: The Second Removal

In the years following World War II, cities from New York to Chicago to San Francisco faced their similar challenges. The influx of African American workers for World War II wartime industries swelled urban populations, pressing heavily against existing and often outdated city infrastructures that black neighborhoods were already segregated to. To make matters worse, wartime demands took away labor from public utilities, leaving cities without sufficient workers for normal maintenance and repair, much less a suddenly more overburdened system.55 With the return of 15 million veterans from World War II, the federal government and private enterprises built neat rows of suburbs to address the housing shortage while supplying white veterans with the home mortgages to purchase them.56 Postwar American prosperity became coded to domestic, suburban glory, and upper and middle class residents moved out to these newly created suburbs. Investors followed them as well, draining the capital going into the cities and their property values. Zipp points out that, ironically, “the affluence, and domestic glory of the postwar years was a product of urban decline.”57 While some Asian Americans followed upper class white families to the suburbs in California, many stayed in their urban ethnic communities, limited by finances or outright rejection from white neighborhoods.58

Federal and local officials felt an urgency to repair the industrial cities but also to compete with the suburbs, prompting a new vision of urban renewal that swept through America.

55 Tatsuno, “A Case Study of San Francisco’s Japantown,” 36. 56 Richard Freeman, “The 1949 Housing Act versus ‘urban renewal,’” Executive Intelligence Review 23, no. 50 (Winter 1996): 27. 57 Zipp, Manhattan Projects, 23. 58 Brooks, “Sing Shen vs. Southwood,” 463-494. 22

After the war, city governments put much municipal money into basic infrastructure upgrades like updating sewer systems, building highways, and reducing air pollution.59 But the efforts to rebuild cities were largely unsuccessful and halting as city governments struggled to attract private investors. In response, President Truman passed the Housing Act of 1949 that granted money for both public housing projects and redevelopment. Title 1 of the Housing Act specifically authorized $1 billion in loans to help cities acquire slums and “blighted land” for public or private redevelopment, making it less risky for investors.60 California State mirrored this federal initiative through the California Community Redevelopment Law of 1948, that gave city agencies the funding and authority to clear land for development, utilizing the legal doctrine of eminent domain. In 1954, President Eisenhower updated the Housing Act by placing a larger emphasis on urban renewal than previously stipulated in 1949, which was also where the term

“urban renewal” became introduced.61 The 1965 Housing Act under President Johnson established the “Model Cities” program, allocating $2.9 billion to urban renewal projects to relocate minorities out of deteriorating housing and allow developers to increase revenue.62

These new legislative measures allowed for the funding of local redevelopment agencies, such as the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (RDA).

The concerted effort by postwar policy makers and city planners to eradicate “urban blight” explicitly took aim at low-income communities of color. Ironically, through a systematic, self-perpetuating cycle, the leaders, landowners and developers of postwar cities effectively created these conditions of blight for Japanese American and African American

59 Zipp, Manhattan Projects, 7. 60 Freeman, “The 1949 Housing Act versus ‘urban renewal,’” 27; Alexander Hoffman, “A Study in Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949,” Housing Policy Debate 11, no. 2 (2000): 310. 61 Freeman, “The 1949 Housing Act versus ‘urban renewal,’” 28. 62 Freeman, “The 1949 Housing Act versus ‘urban renewal,’” 29. 23 residents, as well as other communities of color. When African American workers moved to San

Francisco as part of the Great Migration during World War II, landowners outside of black neighborhoods rejected them.63 Forced, then, to rent in the “redlined” neighborhoods of the New

Deal era, African Americans were relegated to paying up to 40% more than their white counterparts for the same quality of housing. Since much of their income went to housing, black residents often had to live with several families in a single residence and could not afford to repair the conditions of their homes, increasing their appearance as run-down and neglected. The

RDA listed these exact poor qualities of overcrowding and poor ventilation, summarized as

“urban blight,” as the basis for redevelopment in a report on the Western Addition of San

Francisco.64 While less understood, Japanese Americans were similarly excluded from home mortgage funding and lived in a neighborhood “redlined” by the New Deal HOLC, alluding that the manufactured conditions of blight affected Japantown as well. The mechanisms that kept

African American and ethnic communities inferior to white ones during the New Deal, as historian George Lipsitz calls, “a possessive investment in whiteness,” became the same tools to wreak havoc on Japantown and the Western Addition for urban renewal.65

At the same time, urban renewal was not simply a reactionary response to the broken parts of industrial cities and the rise of the suburbs after World War II. Postwar American life was a time of unprecedented economic prosperity. The U.S. government, emboldened by the

New Deal and World War II, embraced this time of plenty and reached into cities to push private

63 Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 34. 64 Report on the redevelopment plan for the Western Addition approved redevelopment project area A-2 by San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, 1964, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California, https://archive.org/details/reportonredevelo1964sanf, 10. 65 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). 24 production and consumption.66 Renewing cities meant gleaming glass and steel towers, freeways, and designs focused on modern styles and efficient function.67 The vision for urban renewal, to compete with the suburbs, also had to adopt its same ideals, ones that iconized domesticity, freedom, and happiness within single-family homes.68 And mostly, as Zipp emphasizes, urban renewal unfolded within the context of the Cold War. The U.S. government’s market-minded support of private developers to improve cities stood intentionally in contrast to government- planned public housing, for instance. City planners and government officials had to “project an image of modernization and prosperity to compete with the equally grandiose vision of progress simultaneously motivating the Soviet Union.”69 The use of urban renewal as a weapon in the

Cold War became more overt when West Coast city developers intentionally partnered with rising corporations in Japan to redevelop Japantown. Within this backdrop, urban renewal reached San Francisco and its postwar society.

Modernizing San Francisco

The City of San Francisco government thus began to pursue their long-term urban renewal effort in the decades following World War II. Although the RDA became known as the principal enemy of Japantown residents, the agency was not the first to push for renewal in

Japantown and was preceded by several founding organizations with its origins largely in business interests. The first municipal agency to plan and manage the city was the Metropolitan

Defense Committee during the war, which became the Bay Area Council in 1954.70 The

66 Zipp, Manhattan Projects, 22. 67 Zipp, Manhattan Projects, 4. 68 Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 8. 69 Zipp, Manhattan Projects, 5. 70 David Okita, “San Francisco Japantown Redevelopment” (Master thesis, California State University, 1980), 27. 25

Council’s mainly focused on managing transportation and industry location in the city, and both its leadership and funding came from companies like Bank of America, Pacific Gas and Electric, and Southern Pacific Railroad.71 In 1956 two council members Charles Blyth, a stockbroker and the director of Hewlett-Packard, and J.D. Zellerbach of the Crown Zellerbach Corporation, formed the Blyth-Zellerbach Committee to research and redevelop San Francisco’s wholesale market produce industry.72 After this project, the Blyth-Zellerbach Committee wanted to continue working in redevelopment and funded the creation of the San Francisco Planning and

Urban Renewal Association (SPUR). While SPUR referred to itself as a citizen organization, it consisted of overlapping members from the Blyth-Zellerbach Committee and the Bay Area

Council and had similar goals to promote business in San Francisco.

The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency itself consisted of a governing board of five commissioners who were appointed by the mayor, along with the employed staff. The commissioners and staff specialized in both urban design and economics.73 But in the decade after its start in 1948, the RDA was small and ineffective. Instead, the initiators of urban renewal were largely the other business-oriented agencies like the Bay Area Council and the offshoot organization SPUR. In 1959, the RDA gained momentum with the appointment of a new executive director, M. Justin Herman, an administrator at the San Francisco Regional Office of

Housing and Home Finance Agency, which preceded the Department of Housing and Urban

Development (HUD).74 Under Herman, the RDA grew to several hundred members and increased their urban renewal efforts. These efforts focused on the central neighborhoods and

71 Okita, “San Francisco Japantown Redevelopment,” 27. 72 Sarah Carnochan and Chester W. Hartman, City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 73 Okita, “San Francisco Japantown Redevelopment,” 25. 74 Okita, “San Francisco Japantown Redevelopment,” 29. 26 their iconic San Francisco-style Victorian houses. These central neighborhoods included Haight-

Ashbury, the Castro District, Noe Valley, Potrero Hill, Bernal Heights, the Mission District, and the Western Addition, the location of Japantown.75

Even in the early days of urban renewal, before the RDA became a large governing committee, San Francisco city planners set their sights on the Western Addition. The San

Francisco City Planning Commission published a report in 1947 at the request of the San

Francisco Board of Supervisors titled New City: San Francisco Redeveloped, envisioned a “new neighborhood in the formerly blighted Western Addition District.”76 Eventually the RDA created zones dividing the Western Addition in two sections labeled Area A-1 and Area A-2 that together encompassed Japantown. The Western Addition A-1 Project was established first in

1956 and affected a smaller part of Japantown. The Western Addition A-2 program began later in 1966, covered the rest of Japantown, and faced far more challenges from the community and a federal government more attuned to issues of racial discrimination.

While not overt, the terminology of “urban blight” meant a poor neighborhood, racialized by the discriminatory policies since before the war that funneled African Americans and

Japanese Americans into the Western Addition. The City Planning Commission’s 1947 report towards this ethnic community had a tone of benevolence, stating its objective to save families from “murky cubicles” and exposure to tuberculosis victims.77 But this early vision went beyond a public health initiative. The City Planning Committee also planned to eliminate “disreputable

75 Brian J. Godfrey, “Urban Development and Redevelopment in San Francisco,” Geographical Review 87, no. 3 (July 1997): 310. https://doi.org/10.2307/216033. 76 The report itself was authored by a consultant of the City Planning Commission named Mel Scott. Mel Scott, “New City: San Francisco Redeveloped” December 29, 1947, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California, 4, https://archive.org/stream/newcitysanfranci1947scot#page/6/mode/2up. 77 Scott, “New City: San Francisco Redeveloped,” 4. 27

joints,” pool halls, and the alleys--places they believed juvenile gangs plotted mischief.78

Essential, here, is that urban reform policies in the early years of planning assumed a behaviorist explanation for poverty instead of one grounded in structure. Said another way, these policies did nothing to alter wealth inequality or access to economic opportunities as a way to alleviate poverty, but assumed that poverty was a result of individual actions that created and perpetuated the “blight” of the Western Addition.

As the United States was shifting to a post-industrialist society, the City of San Francisco felt increasingly vulnerable as families moved to suburbs like Belmont, Walnut Creek, and

Pacific Heights. As capital in the form of white nuclear families, moved out of the city, city planners sought to entice them, their dollars, and their cars back to the urban core. The City

Planning Commission’s 1947 report therefore also suggested publicity that would counteract negative notions of a polluted, dark city by emphasizing the abundance of “light, air, and sunshine.” “This is urban living at its best – all the beauty and restfulness of the suburbs combined with the advantages of ‘the City.’” 79 This push to make San Francisco into an affluent, modern city, became coined as its “Manhattanization.” 80 Like Manhattan, San Francisco would become, they hoped, a metropolitan city through both physical and economic restructuring. The number of high rises, especially in downtown San Francisco, grew rapidly and became headquarters for large-scale corporations.81 The changed cityscape reflected a shift in San

Francisco’s economy from an industrial based one into a postindustrial one. The wartime industrial boom at the city’s shipyards, ports, and warehouses quieted as financial, corporate, and

78 Scott, “New City: San Francisco Redeveloped,”, 4. 79 New City: San Francisco Redeveloped by Mel Scott, San Francisco Public Library, 2. 80 “Manhattanization” also became a negative term used by critics against redevelopment, which invoked the problems of Manhattan like rising property values, traffic congestion, and disruption of scenery. Brian J. Godfrey, “Urban Development and Redevelopment in San Francisco,” 318. 81 Zipp, Manhattan Projects, 37. 28

commercial functions expanded.82 To transform the port and city into a major international center of commerce and business, the city implemented rapid change for both its businesses and residents.

A-1 Project

The RDA implemented their visions of urban renewal onto the Western Addition with

Project Area A-1. In April 1956, the RDA published The Redevelopment Plan for Western

Addition Approved Redevelopment Project Area A-1.83 The California Community

Redevelopment Law gave the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency the power to acquire this land if it was necessary for public purposes. The RDA planned to widen the two-lane Geary

Street into an eight-lane expressway, so that white families and shoppers could drive more easily from their residences in the west to the Financial District in the east. Along with the imagined

Geary Expressway, they outlined 108 acres as a predominantly residential area to be redeveloped, characterized by “conditions of blight,” such as high population density, inadequate ventilation, and buildings overall “unfit and unsafe for occupancy.”84 As earlier, their measures claimed saving costs in maintaining adequate police, fire and accident prevention and other public services and facilities.85

The RDA’s vision of renewal for Project Area A-1 continued both the implied and the explicit social planning of the poor, colored, communities of the Western Addition. According to their report, poor living conditions contributed “substantially and increasingly” to the social

82 Godfrey, “Urban Development and Redevelopment in San Francisco,” 309. 83 The Redevelopment Plan for the Western Addition A-1 Approved Redevelopment Project by San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, April 1956, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California, https://archive.org/details/redevelopmentpla1195sanf. 84 Okita, “San Francisco Japantown Redevelopment,” 32. 85 The Redevelopment Plan for the Western Addition A-1, San Francisco Public Library, 1. 29 problems of the area.86 In the long run, they claimed urban renewal would end up saving money for the city, by eliminating the need for “crime prevention, correction, prosecution, and punishment, the treatment of juvenile delinquency.” Emblematic of the first attempts of urban planning, the poor physical conditions of the Project Area A-1 residences again implied a behaviorist explanation for the poverty, crime, and deterioration of the Western Addition community while largely ignoring the white landowners and policymakers that guided their segregation.87 Historian Thomas Sugrue writes of a similar phenomenon in postwar Detroit, that

“to the majority of untutored white observers, visible poverty, overcrowding, and deteriorating houses were signs of individual moral deficiencies, not manifestations of structural inequalities.”88 Race existed as a constant throughout this story of postwar San Francisco, just as it was embedded in the larger postwar American society. While white, nuclear families began to leave industrial cities to the suburbs as non-white ethnic groups remained in largely inner-cities, the identities of the two became coded within spatial boundaries.89 The implications of race pervade this history of the Western Addition and Japantown and its people.

The implications of the RDA’s description of the Western Addition as a place riddled with dilapidated buildings and a host of crime and safety hazards, was not lost on the Japanese

American residents of Japantown. Although the Project Area A-1 report took an impersonal, neutral-sounding position, the process felt far from it for the people undergoing the immediate change. Steve Nakajo, who lived in Japantown during the 1950s remembered being angry hearing the Western Addition, his home, described as a ghetto by the RDA.90 For the Japanese

86 The Redevelopment Plan for the Western Addition A-1, San Francisco Public Library, 1. 87 Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 9. 88 Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 9. 89 Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 9. 90 Steve Nakajo, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 10, 2017, transcript. 30

American residents, the area outlined as Project Area A-1 was a place of community. Steve remembers walking every day after school to the intersection of Post and Buchanan Street, which can be seen on the Project Area A-1 map. There, he would go to the soda fountain, sit on the

Fig. 2 – Original Land Use Map of Western Addition Project Area 191

stairs with his friends, and try to talk to the older high school girls as they walked by. The feel of community life could hardly be captured in the Project Area A-1 map, of course. With neatly drawn blocks, the Project Area A-1 map was created for efficiency and modernity. The beginning of the Western Addition A-1 Project destroyed this idyllic scene of postwar San

Francisco that Steve once knew.

In the ten years during the A-1 phase, the Western Addition changed the size and composition of Japantown significantly. In order to pursue the A-1 project, the RDA outlined in

91 The Redevelopment Plan for the Western Addition A-1, San Francisco Public Library, Part II – A. 31 their A-1 plan how they would first acquire the property in this project area by “purchase, gift, devise, exchange, condemnation, or any other lawful manner.”92 Once the RDA acquired a property, they planned to manage it until it was demolished, removed, or sold.93 The number of residential units decreased from 1388 to 854 units in 1965 and decreased the population of the area from 6,112 to 3,724, presumably to commercial development.94 This consisted of more than four thousand households, mostly all of them low-income African American and Japanese

American families.95 In this clearance project, many of the properties that the RDA acquired from residents were demolished. For the residents who were not displaced by the A-1 Project

Area, redevelopment became a constant backdrop in their lives. The Japanese American children in the area--the Sansei [lit. “third generation”]--grew accustomed to playing in the rubble of torn down houses and building forts with the debris.96 Other Sansei played sandlot baseball in the empty lots that became a key feature of this changing Japantown.97

Many of the small considerations that the RDA set up for residents in Project A-1 fell short for the Japanese American community. Ostensibly, A-1 did not necessarily require residents to move. A section of the A-1 plan stipulated that owners could stay in their residence if they chose to do so by entering a binding agreement to clear, demolish, or develop the property in conformity with the Redevelopment Plan.98 While this “option” was available, many chose or were forced to relocate. If the owner failed to participate in the agreement, the Agency claimed the right to acquire the property and sell to a purchaser who would “alter, improve, modernize, or

92 The Redevelopment Plan for the Western Addition A-1, San Francisco Public Library, 1. 93 The Redevelopment Plan for the Western Addition A-1, San Francisco Public Library, 12. 94 Okita, “San Francisco Japantown Redevelopment,” 61. 95 Sarah Carnochan and Chester W. Hartman, City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 63. 96 Peter Yamamoto, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 11, 2017, transcript. 97 Chris Hirano interview, interview by Katelynn Pan, February 21, 2018, transcript. 98 The Redevelopment Plan for the Western Addition A-1, San Francisco Public Library, 10. 32 rehabilitate” in accordance with their Redevelopment Plan.99 Although the RDA outlined paying residents at fair market value for their property, they refused to negotiate prices with property owners and did not pay relocation costs.100 The RDA also stipulated a commitment to finding suitable housing for displaced residents at rents within their financial means, but often failed to do so.101 A 1971 case study lamented the “Japanese and black communities were virtually kicked out of the A-1 redevelopment area” with “non-negotiable eviction notices and court orders.”102 The area where at least 20% of occupants had Japanese surnames decreased from

Fig. 3 - Lot being cleared between Laguna and Octavia. 103

99 The Redevelopment Plan for the Western Addition A-1, San Francisco Public Library, 11. 100 Okita, “San Francisco Japantown Redevelopment,” 61. 101 The Redevelopment Plan for the Western Addition A-1, San Francisco Public Library, 12. 102 Tatsuno, “A Case Study of San Francisco’s Japantown,” 39. 103 Photograph of Lot being cleared at Octavia and Laguna streets, August 1971, AAC-1915, Folder: S.F. Districts- Western Addition-Redevelopment, San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California, http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/record=b1016811. 33

13.25 blocks to 8.25 in 1965.104 While Japantown and Fillmore Street was formed through housing segregation and institutionalized discrimination, they nonetheless became places of belonging that Japanese American and African American residents found difficult to move away from.

Despite the significant disruption caused by the A-1 project, the residents of Japantown did not form any organized resistance against the relocations. On the one hand, the Japanese community was “anxious for structural improvements” as urban renewal in name promised eliminating urban blight.105 At the same time, redevelopment caused general confusion among some community members. Steve Nakajo watched this moment of physical destruction during the 1950s and felt a sense of loss for all of the neighborhood houses where his friends lived.106

The change and confusion wrought by the project were largely suppressed by the dominant desire to cooperate and be amenable among Japanese Americans returning from incarceration camps because they feared further persecution and wanted acceptance by white Americans.

Following the form of respectability politics, Japanese American silence on the issue may have reflected a desire to fit in, or at the very least, to not stand out.

While Japanese American families recovered from the incarceration camps in a variety of ways, the majority of Issei and Nisei parents did not speak to their Sansei grandchildren and children about their experience. This period of little dialogue about the incarceration camps became known as “the silence” and has been interpreted in different ways. Some point to the silence of returning Issei and Nisei who had to raise families as a function of practicality: they were busy trying to rebuild and move past the jarring and painful experience of the incarceration

104 The Redevelopment Plan for the Western Addition A-1, San Francisco Public Library, 11; Okita, “San Francisco Japantown Redevelopment,” 61. 105 Tatsuno, “A Case Study of San Francisco’s Japantown,” 39. 106 Peter Yamamoto, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 11, 2017, transcript. 34 camps. Others point out another, more subconscious, cause of silence from the psychological trauma inflicted by the incarceration. It was within this local and ideological context after the mass incarceration that the San Francisco Japantown community did not explicitly resist the relocation of the A-1 project.

A-2 Project

A decade after the A-1 project, another urban renewal plan followed: the A-2 Project, which targeted an additional 277 acres in the Western Addition and encompassed the rest of

Japantown.107 Through the decade following the start of the A-2 Project, Chris Hirano, a Sansei, lived with his sister and parents at 1845 Buchanan Street. His father, Bobby Hirano, ran a crating and shipping business out of the single-car garage attached to their stucco house. The house was small with two bedrooms, and Chris often saw mice running around their rooms. While his father did own his business, their family struggled to make ends meet, often living paycheck to paycheck.108 In 1975, the RDA sent the Hirano family an eviction notice. The notice informed them that their family had until midnight on a certain day to leave their property before the sheriff’s office would forcibly remove them. The Hirano family moved to the southern part of the city in the Richmond District afterwards, another residential neighborhood. Steve Nakajo remembers many Japanese Americans families went to the Richmond District after eviction because it was well known as a “good” school district, with schools like the Presidio Junior High

School.109

107 Okita, “San Francisco Japantown Redevelopment,” 34. 108 Chris Hirano, interview by Katelynn Pan, February 21, 2018, transcript. 109 Steve Nakajo, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 10, 2017, transcript. 35

While the original Area A-2 plan was approved by the RDA Board of Supervisors in

1964, funding for the project was stalled by legislative battles over housing discrimination. In

1963, the California State legislature passed the Rumford Housing Act that prohibited landlords and property owners from denying housing based on ethnicity. To counter the effects of this act, the California Real Estate Association (CREA) introduced Proposition 14 to amend the

California constitution, guaranteeing the rights of landowners to decline renting or selling their land based on their discretion. Proposition 14 appeared on the General Election ballot on

November 3, 1964, and nearly 60% of Californians voted in support of continued discriminatory housing policy.110 After it passed, the federal government cut all housing funds to California until Proposition 14 was declared unconstitutional in 1967.111

With the Supreme Court ruling that Proposition 14 violated the Fourteenth Amendment, to the begrudging acceptance of the CREA, federal funding flowed again for the A-2 project.

The RDA faced another legislative roadblock, this time created directly by the Western Addition community. After ten years of living with the A-1 project, residents in the African American community began to organize resistance and collective objections to the redevelopment process.

They formed the Western Addition Community Organization (WACO) in 1967, but Japanese

American participation in it was low because they had formed their own organization as will discussed in the second part of this thesis. In 1968, WACO filed a lawsuit against the RDA for failing to provide an adequate relocation plan for evicted residents.112 The ensuing legislative debate delayed the RDA from carrying out the A-2 project for a few months until they RDA

110 Self, American Babylon, 168. 111 Okita, “San Francisco Japantown Redevelopment,” 50. 112 “WACO Attacks Redevelopment,” Found SF, http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=WACO_Attacks_Redevelopment. 36 could come up with a valid relocation plan.113 Once the RDA slightly revised their plan, the San

Francisco government lifted the injunction that blocked the RDA. While this was not a clear victory for the residents, WACO took a step towards enforcing community input to the plans of the RDA as well as stalling the execution of their plans.

The stirrings of the Western Addition community, reflected by regulatory measures in both the city and federal government, made the RDA execute the A-2 project differently than they did with the A-1 Project. Soon after in 1968, the federal Department of Housing and Urban

Development (HUD) required all redevelopment projects to guarantee safe residences for the

Fig. 4 – Western Addition Area Two114

113 Hartman, City for Sale, 77. 114 Report on the redevelopment plan for project area A-2, San Francisco Public Library, 4. 37 families and individuals evicted and that their rent be kept within their financial means.115 The

HUD also required redevelopment agencies to include a Project Area Committee, to give the residents of a project area a larger voice.116 The Western Addition Project Area Committee

(WAPAC) formed due to this new measure, allowing Western Addition residents to have a role in the planning and execution of the A-2 phase. These measures, like WACO’s lawsuit, also took a step towards giving residents more channels for opposition and easier transitions for residents after their eviction. They did not, however, effectively stem the RDA projects from occurring.

And although the community opposition guaranteed some publicly assisted housing projects in the new redeveloped area, the Western Addition overall lost a significant number of low-income residences. In addition, projects did not build quickly enough to immediately house displaced residents. This new regulatory safety net could not catch the 13,500 people displaced by the

Western Addition A-2 project.117

Even before the WACO lawsuit and new legislation, the large public wariness towards redevelopment after the A-1 project nudged the RDA to shift their stance on the Western

Addition residents. Following these new policies, the RDA did make some effort to understand and characterize their project area and its residents. Before the A-2 project, the RDA published a

Sample Survey of the Residents and their Relocation Needs. Here, they recognized “a high concentration of nonwhite ethnic groups.”118 This survey showed that African Americans comprised 48 percent of the survey area population, as compared to only 10 percent of San

Francisco overall. Asian Americans comprised 13 percent in the area, also as compared to six

115 Hartman, City for Sale, 62. 116 Okita, “San Francisco Japantown Redevelopment,” 44. 117 Hartman, City for Sale, 63. 118 The Population of Western Addition Area 2 San Francisco, California: A Sample Survey of the Residents and their Relocation Needs by The Project Service Company, April 1962, redevelopmentpla1195sanf, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California, 2, https://archive.org/details/redevelopmentpla1195sanf. 38 percent in the city.119 Yet, this recognition through research did not reflect a desire to preserve these ethnic communities. The report’s authors highlighted the concentration of nonwhites in the area as a way to articulate the perceived problems in the African American and Japanese

American area and their differences from the white population. The RDA concludes from the sample survey findings that in the Project Area A-2, larger families live in the most crowded quarters and that “these large families are predominantly non-white.”120 In a not so subtle repetition of racializing space, the RDA preparations for Project Area A-2 acknowledges the presence of the ethnic communities in order to mark it as a prime candidate for improvement and uplift.

The initial 1964 redevelopment plan for the area A-2, however, provided more concessions to residents. The RDA stated it would make “provisions of housing resources to meet the needs of present residents on a priority basis.”121 They also stipulated that a “portion of the Project” could be used to construct moderate priced private housing, and displaced families and persons from their present residences “will be accorded priority in such housing.”122 In accordance with these new RDA policies, Chris Hirano’s family received aid in their pending relocation. However, they found the aid insufficient to cover the costs of relocation and establishing a new home. Moreover, since they were put on a priority list for low-income housing, they were listed to be in a housing project not in Japantown.123 The Hiranos, therefore, found themselves in a logistical squeeze: if they declined low-income housing elsewhere in the

119 The Population of Western Addition A-2 by the Project Service Company, San Francisco Public Library, 2. 120 Report on the redevelopment plan for the Western Addition approved redevelopment project area A-2 by San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, July 21, 1964, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California, 14, https://archive.org/details/reportonredevelo1964sanf. 121 Report on the redevelopment plan for project area A-2, San Francisco Public Library, 23. 122 Report on the redevelopment plan for project area A-2, San Francisco Public Library, 25. 123 Chris Hirano, interview by Katelynn Pan, February 21, 2018, transcript. 39 city to wait for new low-income housing in Japantown, they would lose their spot on the priority list. The family decided they could not take that risk and moved, reluctantly, out of Japantown.

Despite the written goals of the RDA to make the A-2 project more inclusive towards residents, the redevelopment plan still functioned as a mechanism that destroyed the community, that separated children like Chris Hirano far from the neighbors he grew up with.

The RDA made some new efforts to keep residents within the same neighborhood. In their 1964 report, the RDA described their desire to make “provision for owner participation in the improvement and rehabilitation of property within the area,” similar to in the previous

Project A-1 Plan.124 In another mechanism, the RDA tried to ensure that residents could return once the redevelopment project finished. As Bobby Hirano qualified as a small business owner, the RDA sent him a Certificate of Preference. This certificate guaranteed a resident or business owner to have priority for new housing or rehabilitated housing in the Redevelopment Project

Area.125 But these concessions failed again to help the Hiranos. Despite this “priority” the RDA provided for them, the new building that replaced their housing was too expensive for them to afford. While struggling to raise two children with a small business income, the flexibility to buy into the property was unrealistic, forcing the family to leave their home.126 For the second time in thirty years, the Hiranos were moved by the government out of their home.

124 Report on the redevelopment plan for project area A-2, San Francisco Public Library, 23. 125 Photograph of Certificate of Preference from San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, 1972, SFP78-006-107, Folder: Shades of San Francisco, San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California, http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/record=b1041788. 126 Chris Hirano, interview by Katelynn Pan, February 21, 2018, transcript. 40

PART II: Resisting Redevelopment and the Origins of Redress

The Japan Cultural and Trade Center

Although the RDA pursued visions of redevelopment across San Francisco that championed shopping, entertainment, and middle-class housing, similar to projects sweeping across the urban centers of the country, urban renewal of Japantown was unique because it relied on funding from a foreign source. The RDA intended its final product as a specific tourist destination, with the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center as its focal attraction. As described in their 1968 report, this was an intentional, considered effort, spearheaded by the Executive

Director Justin Herman. Described as someone who loves Japan, a “Niponphile,” Herman believed “that the culture and national heritage of the Japanese people, if crystallized and preserved in a Japanese Cultural and Trade Center, would be of great value to San Francisco.”127

The value most immediately gained--and to a select group, not to all San Franciscans--would be tourist generated capital. However, as written in their report, the pursuit of the Japan Cultural and

Trade Center demonstrated how “a special objective of a community may be served through the process of cooperation between private developers and public agencies.”128 According to the

RDA publication, the imagination and execution of the Japan Cultural and Trade Center was driven by the local Japanese American community.

Despite these statements, the actual role of the Japanese American community in this redevelopment project is less clear. And while its location was based in Japantown, the RDA’s references to the “culture and national heritage of the Japanese people” never clarified whether

127 Japanese Cultural and Trade Center by San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, February 1968, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California, 1, https://archive.org/details/japanesecultural1968sanf. 128 Japanese Cultural and Trade Center, San Francisco Public Library, 1. 41 they were describing the Japanese American community or Japanese nationals.129 Based on the business partnerships made to create the Japan Trade Center, the latter focus on Japanese nationals seems more realistic. To fund the 15 million-dollar venture, the RDA received approval from the Japanese government to invite investment from Japan. The United States benefited from their Asian allies like Japan against communist countries, and San Francisco became a main center for this Asian trade during the Cold War era. As Japan’s economy grew after World War II and the American-occupation, their partnership with the RDA became even more significant within the context of the Cold War. Japan had become an important American economic ally in East Asia and so was sought, fittingly, to be a partner in creating the new

Japantown. San Francisco and Osaka established sister city ties in 1957 during the midst of the

A-1 project, and by 1964, at the start of the A-2 project, Japan was now recognized as a top economic power. In 1964, Tokyo hosted the summer Olympics and was admitted as a member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The Japanese Trade Center was made to be a commercial district spanning three blocks from the intersection of Post and Buchanan Street, featuring the luxury Miyako Hotel, the

Japanese Consulate Building, the Peace Plaza, a towering Pagoda, and the Buchanan Shopping

Mall. It became a direct center of commerce between American and Japanese corporations, but also for Japanese companies to profit off of American shoppers. For example, a Japanese

Airlines (JAL) kiosk was built into the Miyako Hotel for ticket sales and customer service. The

RDA hoped that the Japan Cultural and Trade Center and attached Buchanan Mall would become a plaza for new businesses to rent out storefronts. The RDA proposed for this shopping area to have “banks, travel bureaus, offices, and shops offering a wide variety of Japanese

129 Japanese Cultural and Trade Center, San Francisco Public Library, 1. 42 products” as well as “cultural displays where Japanese craftsmen will demonstrate traditional arts.”130 Here again, the RDA specifically focused on the foreign and traditional display of

Japanese culture, as a token gesture to the Japanese American community of the area.

The RDA tied symbolic visions of a constructed Japanese world to the redeveloped

Japantown. This vision started to become realized as the 15-story Miyako Hotel opened, offering expansive views of San Francisco and Japanese-modeled furnishings. An ad placed in the Pacific

Citizen, a Japanese American newspaper, read: “NEXT TIME YOU’RE IN SAN FRANCISCO,

SPEND A NIGHT OR TWO IN JAPAN.”131 The developers of the Miyako Hotel and of the larger Japan Cultural and Trade Center, the National-Braemer and the Kintetsu Corporation, marketed an oasis of Japanese culture, a “new world of bonsai trees, rickshaws, and Oriental art.”132 Here, visitors could find comfort, entertainment, and shopping. However, the immersion in Japanese culture also did not lose sight of the American city it took place in, San Francisco.

Instead, the Miyako offered the “best of the Occident and the Orient. Apple pie and teriyaki.

Guest rooms will be Western style – accented by Japanese décor.”133 While headlining the authenticity of this hotel as akin to spending a night in Japan, the ad contradicts itself in touting a fusion of Japanese and American amenities in its text. Featuring an image of a well-groomed white couple dressed in professional attire, the ad imagines the customers of the Miyako as a white clientele. The emphasis on American fusion made Japanese cultural accessible and safe through commodification, while compromising the authenticity of the Miyako Hotel’s Japanese culture. In marketing the fusion of Japanese authenticity and American accessibility, the RDA

130 Japanese Cultural and Trade Center, San Francisco Public Library, 9. 131 Miyako Hotel, “Next Time You’re In San Francisco, Spend A Night Or Two In Japan,” Pacific Citizen, December 9, 1966. 132 Miyako Hotel, Pacific Citizen, December 9, 1966. 133 Miyako Hotel, Pacific Citizen, December 9, 1966. 43 created a new sense of a Japanese-American hybridity to attract white consumers, separate from the identity of the Japanese American people in the area.

Fig. 5 – Ad placed in the Pacific Citizen134

134 Miyako Hotel, “Next Time You’re In San Francisco, Spend A Night Or Two In Japan,” Pacific Citizen, December 9, 1966. 44

Japanese American businesses did not directly benefit from Japanese capital. Kintetsu

Enterprise Company of America, a subsidiary of Japan’s largest private railway owner, became owner of the Trade Center, along with American companies National-Braemer, Inc. and Dream

Entertainments, Inc.135 The corporate base of this project largely left out family-owned Japanese

American businesses. In a holiday issue of Pacific Citizen in 1972, businesses from around

Japantown filled up three pages with advertisements, likely purchased through donation.136 The

Japanese-owned businesses in the Japan Center bought the largest ads, like Kinokuniya Books,

Kikkoman Soy Sauce, and the Bank of Tokyo of California, along with Kintetsu Company and the Miyako Hotel. Japanese American businesses, like Benkyodo Co. and Yamato Auto Repair, bought smaller advertisements on the third and last page. These businesses advertised locations dotting the area around the Japan Center and included the names of many of the owners, the

Utsumis of Hokamp’s Bakery, or Mr. and Mrs. Kiysho Ashizawa of Soko Hardware.137 Like the advertisements of the newspaper, the Japanese American businesses existed alongside, but not necessarily within, the Japan Trade Center.

Throughout all of the ways that the RDA highlighted cultural influences from Japan, this did not translate into advocacy or action in favor of the Japanese American residents that the

Japan Center would displace. The RDA’s omission of the Japanese American community was not a mere oversight. They made this distinction in a 1968 report, clarifying that the local

“Nihonmachi” [Japantown] started at the block next to the Center and was distinct from the

Japanese Cultural and Trade Center.138 At most, the Redevelopment Agency wrote that the Trade

135 Okita, “San Francisco Japantown Redevelopment,” 34. 136 Season’s Greetings, Pacific Citizen: Special Holiday Issue, December 22-29, 1972. 137 Season’s Greetings, Pacific Citizen: Special Holiday Issue, December 22-29, 1972. 138 Japanese Cultural and Trade Center, San Francisco Public Library, 9. 45

Center would “stimulate the economic development of the surrounding area, especially the informal Nihonmachi.”139 The RDA’s use of the Japanese term “Nihonmachi” at this time was new. In previous reports, city planners tended to refer to the area around Japantown as merely populated by Japanese or “Orientals.” Using the Japanese name for Japantown may have been an intentional effort to lend more authenticity to the proposed Japanese Cultural and Trade Center.

In distinguishing Nihonmachi apart from the Japan Center, the RDA re-imagined themselves in mutually benefitting symbiosis with the Japanese American community. But in actuality, the construction of the Japan Center evicted Japanese American families who were in the way. To make room for the Miyako Hotel, Chris Hirano’s two-bedroom home and their single-family garage on 1845 Buchanan Street was demolished shortly after their relocation.140 Visiting his former home afterwards, Chris was depressed that their house had not even been replaced with a structure, but left bare for the back courtyard area for the Miyako Hotel.

The eviction of Japanese American families weakened the RDA’s argument that the

Japanese Cultural and Trade Center was a tribute to the Japantown community. Executive

Director Justin Herman wrote in sweeping statements his awareness “of the Japanese community’s longing for a means of identifying this area as one of Japanese origin.”141 Herman nor any of the involved parties recognized, of course, that area itself was not "of Japanese origin," but actually the ancestral home of the Ohlones, the Native American tribe on whose land

San Francisco was founded. Ignoring this first instance of eviction for the very creation of the city, Herman projected that this desire extended to all San Franciscans who wished “to commemorate the honorable part its Japanese-American residents played in Western Addition

139 Japanese Cultural and Trade Center, San Francisco Public Library, 9. 140 Chris Hirano, interview by Katelynn Pan, February 21, 2018, transcript. 141 Japanese Cultural and Trade Center, San Francisco Public Library, 3. 46 history,” and expected it to serve as a “focal point for the retention of unique Japanese cultural contributions to the City.”142 Herman’s words of liberal openness and sensitivity, however, did not change the fact that the RDA falsely projected onto Japanese community a desire for the

Japanese Cultural and Trade Center and failed to address the unique experience of the Japanese

Americans from the start of their Japantown, to the incarceration, and to the postwar American lifestyles they lived. The RDA’s position rested on a general conflation of the culture and trade with Japan and its relevance to Japanese Americans of Japantown, which masked the harmful effects they had for families like the Hiranos.

The perceived integration of the goals of Japanese nationals and of Japanese Americans allowed redevelopment to take this unique form in Japantown compared to the black community along Fillmore Street in the Western Addition. The RDA plans for the redevelopment of

Fillmore Street resembled the Japan Cultural and Trade Center. An architectural consulting firm,

Reid, Rockwell, Banwell & Tarics, sent a design for “The Fillmore Center” to the RDA in

1963.143 It mapped a central plaza that featured commercial recreational activities like a major theater workshop, cinema, nightclubs, and restaurants.144 The consultants made a particular emphasis on making the Fillmore Center accessible by all means of pedestrian, bus, and vehicle traffic, to “draw patronage from the entire City.”145 They also outlined in meticulous detail how a shopper would navigate the different parking lots and entrances of the center.146 Written more intentionally here, the RDA and the architectural consultants wanted to attract white shoppers

142 Japanese Cultural and Trade Center, San Francisco Public Library, 3. 143 The Fillmore Center: an urban design study for the Western Addition Area 2 by San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, Reid, Rockwell, Bankwell and Tarics, January 4, 1963, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California, 2, https://archive.org/details/fillmorecenterur1963sanf. 144 The Fillmore Center, San Francisco Public Library, 13. 145 The Fillmore Center, San Francisco Public Library, 13. 146 The Fillmore Center, San Francisco Public Library, 10. 47 who did not live on Fillmore Street.

To justify their plan, the RDA and consultants drew on the historical use of the land by white residents. They wanted to restore the major shopping area that was the Fillmore District prior to World War II.147 They wrote how the Fillmore District faced “changes in the population composition and income levels of residents,” once World War II started that “marked the beginning of a rapid decline in the Fillmore Commercial District.”148 Referring to the influx of

African American workers to the Fillmore neighborhood, the authors of this report described an inverse relationship between the black population and commercial development. The report described the present Fillmore commercial strip as a “picture of visual, structural, and economic deterioration,” a stark contrast from the busy storefronts and glittering music clubs that Sugar Pie

DeSanto remembered.149 After redevelopment, owner of the New Chicago Barbershop Reggie

Pettus referred to his former home as “Fillmore No’more.”150 The RDA replaced the Fillmore

District that existed, the one where the African American community centered on, with one friendly to white, affluent shoppers. In other words, there was no attempt to try to honor African

American culture in the redevelopment efforts at this time.151

The creation of Japan Cultural and Trade Center is a focal point to examine the difference in the redevelopment efforts of the African American and the Japanese American communities in the Western Addition. Although both communities lived and worked in the same area of San

Francisco at the same time period and were both under the jurisdiction of the RDA, the Japanese

American community held non-black privileges. Writing on postwar Los Angeles, historian

147 The Fillmore Center, San Francisco Public Library, 2. 148 The Fillmore Center, San Francisco Public Library, 3. 149 “Sugar Pie DeSanto,” KQED 1999. 150 “Reggie Pettus,” KQED 1999. 151 Today, however, the city celebrates the Fillmore District’s past as a vibrant African American community for commercial purposes. 48

Scott Kurashige states, “the postwar movement for integration brought about a reversal of Black and Japanese American fortunes.”152 In the 1960s, about two decades after the Asia-Pacific War with Japan, while white Americans increasingly exhibited acceptance of Japanese Americans, they reinforced their social and geographic distance from Black and Mexican Americans.153

Japanese culture, at least in its commercialized form, had become something that could generate capital from white consumers, while just two decades prior, white Californians had called for the large scale incarceration of Japanese Americans. Moreover, the increased acceptance of Japanese

Americans rested on international relations. Although devastated by US-Japan relations in the

1940s, Japanese Americans now benefitted from the improved bilateral relations and Japan’s emergence as economic power as well as a steadfast U.S. ally.

While some community members like Chris Hirano and Steve Nakajo felt pushed out and alienated by the Japanese Cultural Trade Center, not all Japanese Americans in the area saw this development unfavorably. Although most Japanese American ties to the Japanese government had been completely severed by this point, some still felt this form of indirect power through

Japanese capital benefited Japantown, something that the African American community did not have. Hatsuro Aizawa saw it as a positive development from the way Japantown looked when he returned from the incarceration camps after the war. It was lucky, he said, that Kintetsu

Enterprise decided to invest in Japantown. Aizawa was grateful that Kintetsu “decided that they were coming in to help us build this community plaza or center, that helped J-town get off the ground, it took quite a while, it was something that we all worked at and strived for.”154 Aizawa himself came from higher education, as he was able to leave the incarceration camp after

152 Scott Kurashige, Shifting Grounds of Race, 3. 153 Scott Kurashige, Shifting Grounds of Race, 3. 154 “Hatsuro Aizawa: Former Japantown Resident,” KQED 1999. 49 receiving a scholarship to go to college, perhaps contributing to his positive views on economic development. Historian Lon Kurashige tracks a similar embrace of Japanese capital by Nisei leaders in Los Angeles, arguing that “Japanese Americans recognized their strategic position between America and Japan and sought to benefit as a liaison promoting business and cultural exchange.155

The different reactions among the Japanese American community illuminated the divisions that existed within them. The ad of the Miyako itself was placed in the Pacific Citizen, a newspaper geared towards Japanese Americans run by the Japanese American Citizens League

(JACL). Then known as a group that promoted assimilation and the upward mobility of Japanese

Americans, they favored this economic development similarly to Aizawa.156 Bill Hosokawa, a columnist for the Pacific Citizen, published Nisei: The Quiet Americans in 1969, and in it he described Japanese Americans after the war with “characteristic determination and vigor, the same kind of single-minded purposefulness that enabled distant cousins in Japan to rebuild a viable nation out of the ashes of defeat.”157 Along the same lines of the RDA, Hosokawa emphasized the connection to the rebuilt Japan to characterize the similar recovery and success of Japanese Americans, breaking away from their all-American stance. The dominant JACL thinking, demonstrated by Hosokawa, followed the fluctuation of white Americans’ hatred to acceptance for Japan after World War II. This connection also distanced Japanese Americans from “the extremes of apathy and militancy among Negroes and Hispanos,” and Hosokawa identified their unique Japanese-ness that enabled them to pull themselves up by their own

155 Lon Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 138. 156 Today, the JACL espouses more progressive politics. In the past two decades, the JACL has put multiple stances against discrimination towards Muslim Americans. “JACL Continues Opposition to Newly Issued Immigrant Ban,” Japanese American Citizens League, September 25, 2017, https://jacl.org/jacl-continues-opposition-to-newly- issued-immigration-ban/. 157 Bill Hosokawa, Nisei: The Quiet Americans (Denver: University Press of Colorado [1969] 2002), 439. 50 bootstraps.158 Due to Hosokawa’s liberal racism against African Americans and Latinx, the publication drew criticism from community members for propagating the image Japanese

Americans as a “model minority” among the civil rights movements of other minorities.159

The new approval of Japanese Americans and the commercialization of Japantown alienated the Japantown community from its Western Addition counterparts. The actions of the

RDA to develop Japantown followed a familiar process of racial capitalism. Whether overt or not, the establishment of racial hierarchies by the RDA divided the ethnic groups in the Western

Addition, manipulating them, as historian George Lipsitz has put it, “to compete with each other for white approval, and to seek the rewards and privileges of whiteness for themselves at the expense of other populations.”160 Since they enjoyed nonblack privileges, Japanese Americans were discouraged from joining in solidarity with African Americans in the Western Addition despite their mutual interests regarding urban renewal.

At the same time, however, Japanese Americans found themselves denigrated by

Japanese nationals who came to San Francisco for the urban renewal projects. The Japanese expatriates brought with them centuries old Japanese notions of class and regional hierarchies.

As described in the introduction, the Japanese Issei who came to San Francisco mostly came from rural Japanese prefectures that were most hard hit from Meiji reforms. The urbanite

Japanese corporate representatives who came to the United States starting from the late 1960s viewed the Issei as poor, “country bumpkins” who had to leave Japan. The expatriate Japanese executives often extended this prejudice to the Issei’s Nisei children and Sansei grandchildren as being uncultured and less educated.

158 Hosokawa, Nisei: The Quiet Americans, 439. 159 Gil Asakawa. "Bill Hosokawa," Densho Encyclopedia https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Bill%20Hosokawa/ (accessed Mar 13 2018). 160 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 3. 51

In this way, the Japanese Americans were not only isolated from their black neighbors on

Fillmore Street and the white shoppers at the Trade Center but also from the Japanese nationals the RDA affiliated them with. Stuck straight into the middle of Japantown, the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center elicited both feelings of exclusion and inclusion in white America, depending on perspective. As Japanese Americans started vocally resist the RDA in the coming decade, the

Japanese Cultural and Trade Center became a major point of criticism against redevelopment.

Resistance and Redress

The concessions that the RDA made for the Japantown residents were largely responses to the demands made by the newly organized and motivated Japanese American residents and business owners. The Japanese American community did not form organized resistance to the A-

1 phase of redevelopment, not only because of lack of awareness to the long-term consequences of redevelopment, but also because of psychological effects of the wartime incarceration. How did this change for the Japanese Americans to resist the A-2 project? For one, the Japanese

Americans now directly experienced the loss of community after the A-1 project, leaving “deep scars of resentment and hostility against urban redevelopment projects.”161 But another significant factor was the changing composition of the community as the Sansei generation came of age and participated as young advocates for Japantown.

The first opposition to redevelopment began through more formal organizations in response to the start of the RDA’s A-2 project. As mentioned earlier, the African American community did so through the Western Addition Community Organization (WACO) and the

RDA facilitated Western Addition Project Area Committee (WAPAC) towards the end of the

161 Sheridan Tatsuno, “A Case Study of San Francisco’s Japantown,” 39. 52

1960s. Within Japantown itself, Japanese American residents and business owners formed an organization a few years earlier: the United Committee for the Japanese Community (UCJC) in

1962.162 UCJC had approximately 200 members and published a policy statement in 1962 to

“encourage in every way possible all Japanese American businessmen and residents to remain in this area.”163 UCJC wanted to form a development corporation that would work with the RDA in preserving Japanese American ownership in a four-block area bounded by Post, Webster, Bush and Laguna. Notably, as evident in the organization’s name, this organization was conceived to be exclusively Japanese American. More research needs to be done, but it does not appear that any of the African Americans living and working in Japantown were invited to be part of the organization.

By 1964, UCJC became the Nihonmachi Community Development Corporation

(NCDC), in a partnership with the RDA. NCDC produced a brochure titled Nihonmachi

Community, identifying themselves as a bridge between the Japanese American community and the Redevelopment Agency.164 Nihonmachi Community included pictures of the participating

Japanese Americans standing in front of participating offices and businesses. By their age in the photographs they are likely Nisei.165 Informed by respectability politics, NCDC “wished to participate and invest in the new Nihonmachi” that blended “deeply-rooted traditions and values with the vitality of an attractive, modern environment.” In other words, the NCDC aligned itself with the RDA’s goals of renewing Japantown in order to have a seat at the table.166 Through this

162 Nihonmachi Community by San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, 1964, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California, 1, https://archive.org/details/nihonmachicommmu1964sanf. 163 Nihonmachi Community by San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, 1964, 2. 164 Nihonmachi Community by San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, 1964, 2. 165 Because of the distinct pattern of Issei immigration, which ended in 1924 with the Johnson-Reed Act, most second-generation Nisei were born between 1910-1940. The men and women in the 1964 brochure appear to be at least in their mid-twenties and above. 166 Nihonmachi Community by San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, 1964, 2. 53 compromise, NCDC secured the outlined four-block area for Japanese American ownership and residents. The authors of Nihonmachi Community proclaimed that “in a world of giant conglomerates this miniscule oasis of free enterprise is refreshing,” proudly pointing to their small businesses without explicitly criticizing the large corporations moving into Japantown like

Kintetsu and National-Braemer.167 While the NCDC did achieve this concession by the RDA, the area surrounding the outlined area remained at risk. Therefore, the select group of Japanese

American business owners included in NCDC did not represent the security of the entire

Japantown community.

The RDA welcomed partnerships with the Japanese American business community and made an effort to build more partnerships with them. In 1968, the RDA announced in a document for immediate release that “the first formal step toward the creation of a striking new

Nihonmachi in the Western Addition was taken today.”168 This report outlined the collaborative planning between the Redevelopment Agency and the Nihonmachi Community Development

Corporation, that would lead to “bright new Japanese shops, townhouses and apartments, two major shopping malls” as well as a “community center, typifying the spirit of cooperation that distinguishes the neighborhood.”169 This community center became the Japanese Cultural

Community Center of Northern California (JCCCNC), that was incorporated as a 501(c)3 organization. Their founding group of board members included community members and leaders like the more conservative-leaning Hatsuro Aizawa and prominent JACL leader Dr. Clifford

Uyeda, as well as more progressive Nisei like Edison Uno and Kaz Minawa.

167 Nihonmachi Community by San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, 1964, 14. 168 More collaborative planning: Nihonmachi by San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, March 19, 1968, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California, 1, https://archive.org/details/morecollaborativ1968sanf. 169 More collaborative planning: Nihonmachi by San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, 1968, 1. 54

Meanwhile, several other community organizations began in these few years, largely started by the Sansei generation. Sansei Japanese Americans came of age in the world of the

1960s, setting apart their perspectives and actions from Nisei parents and bringing another force of change in the Japantown community. With the advent of Ethnic Studies and Asian American

Studies first at San Francisco State in 1968 and then at universities around the Bay Area and the

West Coast, the Sansei became more thoroughly schooled the history of the Japanese American incarceration and persecution. For some, this was their first time learning about their family’s history due to the self-imposed silence of their Nisei parents and Issei grandparents about their experiences. The anti-Vietnam War protests contributed to Sanseis identity not only as Japanese

Americans, but also as Asian Americans who allied themselves Asian peoples of Vietnam and protested against the US war in Indochina. Many Sansei joined with the Third World Liberation

Front, and some even joined the Black Panthers. They held signs with slogans such as “The

Yellow Peril Supports Black Power.” Unlike Japanese Americans who upheld assimilationist politics, these radicalized Sansei (as well as more radical Nisei like Yuri and Bill Kochiyama) embraced solidarity with other nonwhites both within the United States and abroad.170

For the Sansei of San Francisco Japantown, most of whom could not remember or were born after the incarceration, redevelopment became a direct experience of infringement of their civil liberties by their government. As Sansei activist-scholar Karen Ishizuka writes, “When tangible problems emanating from the Little Tokyos, Chinatowns and Manilatowns across the country were uncovered, community needs overtook campus concerns and the locus of activism

170 After their incarceration, Bill and Yuri Kochiyama moved to Harlem, where Yuri formed a friendship with Malcolm X. It is she who is cradling a dying Malcolm X’s head in the famous published photograph in Life. magazine. Diane Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 55 shifted.”171 In this evolution from of theorizing revolution to real-life activism, San Francisco’s urban renewal became a tangible way for Japanese Americans to apply their solidarity to movements like the Third World Liberation. Bryan Yagi, a Bay Area Sansei who lived in San

Francisco at the time of the A-2 project, mocked the term “urban blight” that was often used by the RDA: “Those guys with redevelopment it was supposed to be improving blighted areas.

Well, to the powers that be, blighted areas were like, minority communities.”172 For the Sansei, redevelopment represented a framework for understanding Japanese American identity as minorities in their city, and the Asian American movement gave them the tools to make the changes they wanted. The Asian American movement gave the Sansei a powerful wave of self- determination, propelling them forward to fight redevelopment.

In a form of resistance, Sansei activists created organizations that would root the

Japanese American community to Japantown even though it was now bereft of a strong residential community. They had a similar mission and determination to preserve Japantown.

The visionaries of these organizations coded Japanese Americans as an ethnic minority that needed adequate representation. All of these organizations claim their history to begin in this time period. Their idealism and activism manifested in two routes. First, the organization founders wanted to provide services with specificity to Japanese Americans, acknowledging the roots of Japanese culture as well as their history following their incarceration. Second, the Sansei wanted to address the institutional discrimination that Japanese Americans faced, like in immigration or housing policy. They intentionally swung away from the perception of Japanese

Americans as model minorities with very little barriers to social and economic success.

171 Karen Ishizuka and Jeff Chang, Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties (London: Verso, 2016), 116. 172 Bryan Yagi, interview by Katelynn Pan, February 21, 2018, transcript. 56

This trend of centralizing the community within the location of Japantown continued with the creation of a youth council by several Japanese American youth organizations in 1969. This youth council was led by Kaz Minawa, Richard Jue, and Reverend Kobata, and eventually became incorporated in 1970 as the Japanese Community Youth Council (JCYC). The JCYC still exists today, and current program director Jon Osaki recently emphasized that the founding mission of JCYC was to give Japanese American children who were forced out of the area not just a place, but a reason to come back to Japantown. Jon Osaki and his three brothers’ first involvement with Japantown were as members of the nearby Christ United Church and with the

Boy Scouts. They then enrolled in the first JCYC summer camp class in 1976.173 Ever since,

Osaki spent every summer immersed in Japantown. Chris Hirano felt a similar tug by JCYC to

Japantown after his family had moved away. He participated in the after school and summer school programs and had his first job as a camp counselor at JCYC.174 He returned to Japantown with his family every week to attend the Buddhist Church, cub scout meetings and basketball practices. For him, “driving to Japantown was like driving home.”175 JCYC successfully established permanence for the children of the Japanese American community that extended into their young adult and adult lives.

Kimochi, Inc. started in 1971 was another Sansei organization devoted to preserving

Japantown by focusing on helping Issei not only obtain adequate care and food security, but also resist redevelopment evictions. The Sansei founders, Steve Nakajo and Sandy Mori, emphasized that the ethnic minority community needed specific, culturally appropriate services, with

173 Jon Osaki, interview by Katelynn Pan, July 28, 2017, transcript. 174 Chris Hirano, interview by Katelynn Pan, February 21, 2018, transcript. 175 Chris Hirano, interview by Katelynn Pan, February 21, 2018, transcript. 57

language capacity.176 The name itself, Kimochi, was a play on the Japanese word for comfortable, kimochii, and the well-known Japanese rice confectionary, mochi, making Ki-mochi. This unique construction of Japanese words emblematizes the conglomeration of Japanese and American experiences that shaped the perspective of Sansei. Both Nakajo and Mori cite the Asian

American movement as the reason behind their motivation to build Kimochi, Inc. The movement instilled in them as a generation an urgent energy to create, build and get things done. More specifically, the services provided by Kimochi, Inc. aimed to fill a void: to set up care for elderly

Issei from people who understood “the Japanese cultural traits as ‘haji, gaman, and enryo

(shame, perseverance and restraint)” and could understand the Japanese language. Contrary to popular belief by the early 1970s that Japanese were middle class and that very few were poor, most Issei received Social Security checks around $70 dollars in 1972, compared to the then

$216 monthly maximum.177 To compound the problem, the Issei’s sense of “haji” (shame) and

“gaman” (perseverance) made Issei unwilling to receive extra welfare. Kimochi tried to step in by providing services like a daily Japanese bento lunch, language translators, and activities specifically to fill the gaps in senior care for Issei. The creators of Kimochi, Inc., then, demonstrated the dual approach of highlighting Japanese American identity and culture while simultaneously dispelling the idea that they had successfully assimilated into the middle class.

Japanese American resistance to redevelopment became more directed when a group of residents, shopkeepers, and younger activists formed the Committee Against Nihonmachi

Evictions (CANE) in February of 1973. With the RDA A-2 Project in full swing, CANE formed as a grassroots organization to protect the tenants and business owners of Japantown. Twenty-

176 Sandy Mori, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 1, 2017, transcript. 177 “Plight of Issei Living Below Poverty Level Raises Questions,” Pacific Citizen, December 9, 1966. 58 one years old when CANE was formed, Mickey Imura joined the organization as a natural extension of his work with the anti-Vietnam war effort. While a student at San Francisco State,

Imura attended anti-war meetings through which he met and formed friendships with the young activists around Japantown, who were starting focus on the problems within their own community. At the time, Imura recalled, “The whole issue was redevelopment.”178 CANE emphasized supporting the needs of the community and decided their main goals were in both tenant advocacy and education. They developed two guiding principles:

1. TO STOP THE DISPERSAL & DESTRUCTION OF NIHONMACHI & KEEP IT

A SMALL-BUSINESS & RESIDENTIAL AREA

2. TO UPHOLD THE RIGHTS OF RESIDENTS & SMALL BUSINESSES179

One of CANE’s publicity posters poses the RDA as a bulldozing wrecking ball, knocking down walled structures. In the image, the words “CANE” stands as a bulwark, with a few, stalwart male figures facing a crowd as their protectors (See fig. 6).

The actions of CANE took several forms to counteract what the organization believed to be the deleterious effects of NCDC and the RDA. One of their efforts was to work directly with the tenants through a Tenant Outreach Committee to keep tabs on who received notices from the

RDA in order to represent and protect the residents from eviction. In the last years of redevelopment, CANE members set up a 24-hour watch, and in some cases a few younger members moved in with the few remaining Japanese American residents in the area.180 Mickey

Imura, just out of college and recently married, moved with his wife into 1869 Buchanan, which

178 Mickey Imura, interview by Katelynn Pan, December 5, 2018, transcript. 179 Committee against Nihonmachi eviction (cane) principles, RDA, Item #4756, Digital Collections, Kearny Street Workshop Archives (CEMA 33), California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, Department of Special Collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library, Santa Barbara, California, http://digital.library.ucsb.edu/items/show/4756. 180 Mickey Imura, interview by Katelynn Pan, December 5, 2018, transcript. 59

Fig. 6 – Committee Against Nihonmachi Evictions (CANE) Principles181

had two or three tenants left. They stood ground there for an entire year waiting to see if the sheriff’s department would forcibly remove them and the other Japantown residents from their

181 Committee against Nihonmachi eviction (cane) principles, University of California, Santa Barbara Library. 60 houses, as threatened in RDA eviction notices.182 While Imura and his wife squatted as a strategy, other CANE members used other methods. On the day written on his family’s eviction notice, Chris Hirano vividly remembers CANE members chaining themselves to his house and camping outside of his house, holding vigil to prevent his family from being evicted that night.183

For Hirano, this was a defining moment to see the community support for his family. While they could not put a full stop to redevelopment, CANE helped delay evictions for one or two years for residents and business owners to at least have more time to ease the transition. Staying true to their grassroots campaign, CANE worked directly with tenants in immediate threat.

Protests against the Vietnam War and for Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State and UC

Berkeley provided a foundation for Japanese American opposition to redevelopment, which also took the form of organized protest. The principle oppressor, to CANE and the protesters, was the

RDA. CANE aimed to build publicity for the Japanese American community through massive leafleting, petitions, rallies, and demonstrations. Wanting more local and national attention brought to the crisis of Japantown, CANE members held demonstrations and protests. One occurred in front of the RDA in 1976, with some of CANE members chaining themselves in the office and refusing to leave until they were arrested. CANE wanted more local and national attention brought to the threat to Japantown. Another happened earlier in August 1975 when

CANE organized the tenants of Sutter to Laguna St. to hold signs and chant in the streets: “RDA should pay...we’ll fight you all the way.”184 CANE posted flyers that read: We won’t move,

Defend the rights of the Sutter-Laguna Tenants!

182 Imura and his wife were forced to move away when the residents of 1869 Buchanan were indeed evicted. Their effort was therefore unsuccessful, and in hindsight they admitted that many of CANE’s actions were not successful. 183 Chris Hirano, interview by Katelynn Pan, February 21, 2018, transcript. 184 Lynne Joiner, “KPIX Eyewitness News,” KPIX-TV, CBS5, San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive, San Francisco, CA, August 26, 1975, https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/190413. 61

Such efforts were meant to bring local and national attention to Japantown, and it appears that CANE had some success in doing so. A CBS 5 Eyewitness News Report about Japantown aired on September 9, 1974 during the midst of their publicity campaign. Standing in front of a demolished building, TV reporter Lynne Joiner states, “The people who used to live here were evicted seven years ago, it’s just now being rebuilt, they’ll never live here again and that’s part of the problem.”185 Joiner’s description of the slow and ongoing twenty-year process of a community being destroyed through redevelopment televised the story to San Francisco viewers from a perspective sympathetic to CANE’s position. This included an increasingly resentful view of the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center.

Most likely drawing from Third Worldist critiques of multinational companies, the Sansei and other Japanese Americans began seeing the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center as a symbol of corporate takeover of their community. Lynne Joiner’s CBS 5 report includes a clip of an unnamed man from the neighborhood criticizing the redevelopment of the area with the Japanese

Cultural and Trade Center as a tourist trap. “We feel this is wrong,” he says, “because it drives out residents and small business people and puts a price tag on our culture and heritage.”186 To the interviewee, this commodification of the Japanese culture ran counter to the authenticity of

Japantown for Japanese Americans. The offense, then, was allowing business and the promise of money to hold priority over Japanese American tenants, capital over people.

CANE members and Sansei activists could not help noticing the similarity of redevelopment and urban renewal to the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. It seemed a repetition of the violation of their property and freedoms. This second traumatic

185 Lynne Joiner, “KPIX Eyewitness News,” KPIX-TV, CBS5, San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive, San Francisco, CA, September 9, 1974, https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/190408. 186 Lynne Joiner, “KPIX Eyewitness News,” September 9, 1974. 62 removal continues to resonate within the San Francisco Japanese American community, according to Jon Osaki, a community leader in Japantown today. He reflected:

So this community, what it’s really known for, is, the families in this community were moved out twice. And that’s a very unique set of circumstances and people are still, you know, are very unhappy about that. That is really something that has not been adequately acknowledged. So, yeah there are a lot of people who remember that bitterly.187

According to Osaki, urban renewal, the razing of their community, and the large-scale removal of Japanese Americans re-opened the barely healed scars of the incarceration. In sum, the experience of a second removal, the newer understanding of Japanese American history in the context of U.S. racism and Third Worldism, and community organizing by Sansei thus cultivated a fertile ground for the Redress Movement to grow in the years after the struggle against urban renewal.

The Redress Movement

In 1988, US President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, issuing a formal apology and monetary reparations to all surviving Japanese Americans incarcerated by the US government during World War II. The legislation was the result of a long effort in the Redress

Movement by Japanese Americans around the country and their supporters.188 Organizations like the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and National Council of Redress Reparations

(NCRR) became the center for Japanese Americans participating in this movement on both grassroots and legislative levels. Meanwhile, an organization called the National Council for

Japanese American Redress (NCJAR) formed to pursue a lawsuit against the United States for

187 Jon Osaki, interview by Katelynn Pan, July 28, 2017, transcript. 188 Non-Japanese American supporters included members of the International Longshoreman’s Warehouse Union (ILWU), representatives and senators in Congress, friends and neighbors of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during the war. Support from the ILWU may have had something to do with the fact that ILWU leader Harry Bridges’ wife, Noriko Sawada Bridges, became a redress activist at this time. 63 obscuring information during World War II that proved the innocence of Japanese American citizens. The combined efforts of these three organizations throughout the 1970s and 1980s led to the eventual passage of the Civil Liberties Act.189

The Redress Movement, and the ensuing Civil Liberties Act, is more well-known at its legislative level. Senator Daniel Inouye stood in front of Congress and famously professed his experience losing an arm fighting for the United States during World War II while his family lived behind barbed wire in Utah.190 Japanese American legislators like Senator Daniel Inouye and Representative Norman Mineta worked to accrue votes for the legislation. The JACL and

NCRR also sent lobbying campaigns to Washington D.C. to speak to their senators and sit in the audience of the Capitol building to watch votes get made.191 While these efforts in D.C. were vital to the conclusion of the Redress Movement, they are often described in a vacuum apart from the rest of the experiences of Japanese Americans. The initial driving force behind the movement came from the local Japanese American communities like in Seattle, San Francisco,

Los Angeles and others in the Midwest or East Coast. These community-based efforts extended from earlier organizations and activist frameworks that developed to resist urban renewal.

The Origin of Grassroots Redress Groups in SF and LA

In San Francisco Japantown, redevelopment gave the Japanese American community a heightened awareness to their oppression as an underrepresented minority. Most Sansei who had been born in the camps or after the war ended found redevelopment as their immediate and tangible form of government oppression. To resist urban renewal and the destruction of

189 Alice Yang Murray, Historical Memories of Redress. 190 Mitchell Maki, Harry Kitano, Megan Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 191 Mitchell Maki, Achieving the Impossible Dream. 64

Japantown, efforts by organizations like Committee Against Nihonmachi Eviction (CANE) provided, moreover, a unifying goal for all three generations of Japanese Americans to work together. Sansei members worked directly with the Nisei and Issei of the community for CANE, learning more about their stories both in Japantown and in the incarceration camps. As the struggle against the A-2 Project began to phase out by 1978-1979 and the tenants whom CANE worked with had relocated, CANE members had new goals in mind.

In 1978, CANE initiated the first Tule Lake Pilgrimage and encouraged Issei and Nisei in the area to join.192 After their heavy outreach efforts, over three hundred Japanese Americans boarded buses that drove out six hours to the nearest incarceration camp, Tule Lake. Throughout the experience, those who were incarcerated shared their stories to the eager audiences of Sansei.

While some of the formerly incarcerated were simply reminded of their experience by the desert setting and barracks, others felt a stronger meaning in Tule Lake, where the WRA directed

Japanese Americans classified as disloyal.193 CANE activist Mickey Imura felt the need to get closer to more Issei and Nisei after this trip. By this time, the Issei generation were septuagenarians, octogenarians, and even nonagenarians who were passing away in greater numbers. CANE worked to stimulate dialogue between the different generations in Japantown, breaking the “silence” about the incarceration camps in the years after the war before it was too late.

192 Mickey Imura, interview by Katelynn Pan, December 5, 2018, transcript. 193 These classifications mainly followed the distribution of the WRA loyalty questionnaire in 1944. Some questions on this questionnaire were whether the individual would renounce Japanese citizenship, serve in combat duty, or renounce allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. Men from Tule Lake intentionally resisted this loyalty questionnaire by answering “no” to the questions and became known as the “No-No Boys.” Others who answered “no” or resisted camp authorities, became labeled as disloyal as well and were transferred to Tule Lake by the final years of the incarceration camps. Many of the Japanese Americans labeled disloyal were shamed by the community, as well as by the JACL, during and after the war. 65

The transition from activism against redevelopment to the Redress Movement followed a similar path in the Japanese American community of Los Angeles. Like CANE, an organization called Little Tokyo People’s Rights Association (LT-PRO) was founded by young Japanese

Americans who were galvanized to embrace their newfound Asian American identity after taking their first Asian American studies classes or returning from the Vietnam War. LT-PRO members like Kathy Masaoka and Janice Yen found a centralized hub for community organizations and group classes at the Japanese American Community Services (JACS) office.194 When tides of redevelopment reached Los Angeles, the threat felt immediate. Masaoka remembers a Japanese company called Kajima Corporation bought the property that the JACS office stood on.195 And as the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles adopted the Little Tokyo

Redevelopment Project in 1970, over a decade after the A-1 phase of San Francisco’s Western

Addition project, the community members heard what happened in San Francisco, adding to their anxiety for Little Tokyo’s fate.196Again, similar to CANE, LT-PRO engaged in community activism challenging evictions, demanding tenant rights, and drawing media attention to the threat to Little Tokyo. Like CANE, LT-PRO members folded in the history of the incarceration into the struggle against urban renewal, declaring that both removals were caused by racism, economic greed, and government disregard for minority rights.197 Along with their goals of opposing redevelopment, LT-PRO organized the community in Little Tokyo.198

By the late 1970s, LT-PRO began to shift their sights to the issue of redress as anti- eviction work started to cool down. LT-PRO made some concessions to the Redevelopment

194 Kathy Masaoka, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 8, 2018, transcript. 195 Kathy Masaoka, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 8, 2018, transcript. 196 “Project Area Overview,” CRA/LA: A Designated Local Authority, http://www.crala.org/internet- site/Projects/little_tokyo/index.cfm 197 Murray, Historical Memories of Internment, 205. 198 Kathy Masaoka, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 8, 2018, transcript. 66

Agency while securing their goals like housing for seniors and a Japanese American community center.199 However, the transition to the Redress Movement was not immediate and clearly defined. Rather, the transition was gradual and organic. Masaoka describes how the topic “would pop up every now and then, but in terms of our consciousness it didn’t take an organizing form.”200 Similar to Mickey Imura’s experience in San Francisco with the Tule Lake Pilgrimage,

Janice Yen from LA also cites the start of the Manzanar Pilgrimage as an important moment for gathering the Japanese American community in Los Angeles around redress.201

The issue of redress was, however, was fraught in the Japanese American communities in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, with a split mostly along a generational divide. Sansei began to question the silence of their Nisei parents about the incarceration, wondering if their silence made the injustice invisible. They also disagreed with the assimilationist strategy and criticized as not only cowardly but also perpetuating the depiction of Japanese American as a

“model minority.” Their Issei and Nisei elders branded the Sansei as not only naive about the obstacles the Nisei and the Issei had faced during the war, but also ungrateful about the sacrifices and struggles made.202 Nakajo recently recalled one Issei scornfully said to him, “You stupid fool, bakatare, I’ve got four kids. [We didn’t] know what the future [held] for us. You think you could have been a badass and go out there? We were afraid, man! It’s called survival.”203 But at the time, the Sansei relentlessly continued their critique, arguing that the Issei and Nisei strategy of being the “quiet Americans” had hurt their community. In fact, some Sansei blamed their

199 The Little Tokyo Service Center was formed in 1979 by Japanese American activists, including LT-PRO members. Their purpose was to provide culturally sensitive social services to the Little Tokyo community. Janice Yen, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 8, 2018, transcript. 200 Kathy Masaoka, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 8, 2018, transcript. 201 Janice Yen, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 8, 2018, transcript. 202 Murray, Historical Memories of Internment, 186. 203 Steve Nakajo, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 10, 2017, transcript. 67 elders for allowing themselves to be herded into the incarcerations camps. They wondered,

“Resist, resist, you stupid, cowardly, Niseis how come you just voluntarily went?”204

Steve Nakajo also remembered that his generation asked their elders: “for redevelopment, just like for the camps, why didn’t you resist?” By the time of the A-2 phase, it was the Sansei in

San Francisco and Los Angeles who shouted the demands on behalf of the Issei and Nisei tenants and merchants facing eviction. Remembering how their Nisei community leaders were unable to effectively oppose the A-1 redevelopment phase in San Francisco, they were determined not to let this happen again. To these Sansei, some Nisei leaders were even guilty of abetting the destruction of their community by compromising with the RDA through NCDC and the Japanese

Cultural and Trade Center. It seemed a repetition of how the JACL too willingly cooperated with the WRA during the war. The second removal of the Japanese American community therefore catalyzed discussion of the larger injustice that occurred with incarceration during World War II, which led to a discussion about redress that the now experienced Sansei activists could rally around.

But it was not just the Sansei who began to push for redress. The earliest explicit call for redress came from Edison Uno at a JACL conference, who called for individual compensation based on the time spent in the incarceration camps. While the JACL endorsed his call, no viable efforts or resources were put into its execution. More conservative JACL leaders, like Mike

Masaoka, quickly argued against Uno’s call, claiming that monetary compensation would compromise the honor of Nisei veterans.205 In April 1975, the Nisei membership of the San

Fernando Valley JACL Chapter took matters into their own hands and formed E.O. 9066, Inc.

204 Steve Nakajo, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 10, 2017, transcript. 205 Alice Yang, "Redress movement," Densho Encyclopedia https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Redress%20movement/. 68

(named after Executive Order 9066), one of the first groups to discuss redress for Japanese

Americans.206 The national JACL did not support redress until a few years later in 1978 and were initially adamantly opposed to redress. E.O. 9066, Inc. surveyed Japanese American residents in the Los Angeles area to determine their amount of support for redress and the form it should take. In so doing, E.O. 9066, Inc. sought to educate the public about the Japanese American wartime incarceration, to propose legislation to compensate the affected Japanese Americans, and to have the Supreme Court review the constitutionality of the evacuation order. In a tally of

202 survey responses, 99.4% were in favor of reparations for the World War II incarceration.

The opinions on the allocation of these reparations, however, varied widely. For example,

31% of the responses wanted to give payments to Japanese American community organizations;

48% wanted a lump sum given to the Issei and then to the Nisei on an individual basis; and 24% wanted a fund established for memorial scholarships.207 The 31% who wanted support for community organizations may have been thinking of ones like LT-PRO at the JACS center in mind. One respondent even hand-wrote, “Have funds made available for low cost housing of all

Japanese.”208 For many in the Japanese Americans in areas that faced redevelopment, preservation of the community was still on many of their minds at the beginning of the call for redress.

The shift in focus of Japanese American activism became formalized in the establishment of redress-based organizations. In 1979, CANE reorganized as the Japanese Coalition of

Progressive Action (JCPA) to pursue activism for the Japanese American community. Eventually the two parallel organizations San Francisco’s JCPA and Los Angeles’ LT-PRO converged at a conference in Los Angeles in 1980, along with other organizations like the Tule Lake

206 Phil Shigekuni, interview by Katelynn Pan, November 2, 2017, transcript. 207 Survey Tally, E.O. 9066 Inc, Records, 2006.190, Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA. 208 Survey Responses, E.O. 9066 Inc, Records. 69

Committee, the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee of San Jose, and the Asian/Pacific Student

Union also joined in the formation of the NCRR. The National Coalition of Redress and

Reparations (NCRR) formed out of this conference.209 As the NCRR pursued redress, it drew from the grassroots approach that a significant number of their members learned from their tenant activism against redevelopment. While not all NCRR members were Sansei activists, many were guided by similar political ideologies, marching against the Vietnam War and redevelopment in San Francisco and Los Angeles, denouncing capitalist oppression of minorities, and joining Marxist organizations.210

The same divergences among Japanese Americans during urban renewal flowed into the

Redress Movement. As a component of the call for reparations, JACL lobbyists pushed the federal government for a commission to accept testimony on behalf of the Japanese American experiences of the incarceration. This sparked another debate between the JACL and NCRR, as

NCRR members felt that Japanese Americans should not have to prove the traumatic effects of the incarceration and that the wholesale incarceration of a people without trial was enough. Even if theoretically there was no trauma, the lack of due process was unconstitutional. The U.S.

Congress passed Public Law 96-317 on July 31, 1980 that established a commission “to review the circumstances surrounding Executive Order 9066 and its impact.”211 For the NCRR members, the debate against the hearings dissolved after it seemed fruitless to continue arguing against it after the commission was established through Public Law 96-317.212 Dean Ito Taylor

209 Mickey Imura, interview by Katelynn Pan, December 5, 2018, transcript.; National Coalition for Redress/Reparations," Densho Encyclopedia http://encyclopedia.densho.org/National%20Coalition%20for%20Redress/Reparations/. 210 Murray, Historical Memories of Internment, 315. 211 "CWRIC hearing dates announcement, 1981.," Densho Encyclopedia https://encyclopedia.densho.org/sources/en-denshopd-p102-00038-1/. 212 Alan Nishio, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 9, 2017, transcript. 70 was working with Nihonmachi Legal Outreach at the time, a non-profit legal firm for the

Japantown community, and remembers saw how the commission galvanized the community, because for the first time, there was a platform that US government representatives agreed to listen to the experiences of the Japanese Americans.213 So the struggle against the JACL shifted as Nihonmachi Legal Outreach, the NCRR, and other grassroots organizations lobbied and wrote letters to Congress to push for local hearings instead of one national hearing in Washington D.C.

These groups wanted hearings in the communities where Japanese Americans actually lived and could attend. Through persistent phone calls, telegrams, letters, and petitions, the activists in this campaign secured local hearings.214

From July to September of 1981, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) held hearings in eight different cities, including Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. NCRR and JCPA members dove into outreach to try to convince the Nisei and

Issei in the area to come forward and share their experiences, true to their grassroots approach.215

The question of who should testify became another point a divergence for the NCRR from the

JACL, as JACL leaders planned for more well-known Japanese Americans to testify, like scholars, officials, veterans, and community leaders.216 Instead, JCPA and NCRR members wanted to reach out to the ordinary, if not disadvantaged, Japanese Americans to participate.

After convincing less privileged Japanese Americans to testify, Imura and other JCPA members worked hard to prepare these Issei and Nisei to testify in front of the committee. Many were still reluctant to testify to an audience and a committee of government authority figures. Mickey

213 Dean Ito Taylor, interview by Katelynn Pan, July 31, 2017, transcript. 214 Murray, Historical Memories of Internment, 319. 215 Mickey Imura, interview by Katelynn Pan, December 5, 2018, transcript. 216 Murray, Historical Memories of Internment, 314. 71

Imura recalled translating testimonies from Japanese for the Issei and coordinating buses to take people to the commission hearings.217 The CWRIC hearings were held in San Francisco,

California on August 11, 12, and 13, 1981.218 Six members of the CWRIC sat in front of a large crowd at the Golden Gate university auditorium for these public hearings.219 The commissioners included Judge William Marutani, a Nisei JACLer, and Representative Daniel E. Lungren, who listened to over 750 witnesses testify of their experiences in the incarceration camps.220

The nature of the testimonies themselves echoed the different principles of the JACL and

NCRR. In helping community members prepare testimonies, the NCRR encouraged witnesses to take a more confrontational approach and demand financial reparations for redress. Testimonies guided by the JACL and more of the Nisei “Old Guard” leadership gave accounts of patriotism and Japanese American assimilation in the post-war society.221 In stark contrast, Sansei activists testified specifically along lines of the larger narrative of American racism, integrating images of slavery and the American genocide of Native Americans. Similar to the driving force between

CANE and anti-redevelopment campaigns, the NCRR tried to foster political alliances between people of color.222 The lack of the JACL connections to other people of color was fitting, as these

Nisei JACLers often held African American or Latinx communities and protests at an arm’s length, if not criticizing them. This perspective also served the JACL legislatively, as they felt

217 Mickey Imura, interview by Katelynn Pan, December 5, 2018, transcript. 218 "CWRIC hearing dates announcement, 1981," Densho Encyclopedia https://encyclopedia.densho.org/sources/en- denshopd-p102-00038-1/. 219 “Redress Argued on Civil Rights Grounds,” Nichi Bei Times, August 15, JACL Redress Collection, JANL Archive, San Francisco, California. 220 Sharon Yamato, "Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians," Densho Encyclopedia https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Commission%20on%20Wartime%20Relocation%20and%20Internment%20of%20 Civilians/. 221 Murray, Historical Memories of Internment, 320. 222 Murray, Historical Memories of Internment, 321. 72 that redress legislation would pass more easily if the idea of reparations excluded other injustices of the American government, like slavery and Native American genocide.

In fact, many Nisei argued against reparations for themselves, believing it appropriate only to ask for an official apology from their government for incarcerating them without due process. Sansei like Dean Ito Taylor disagreed in his testimony.223 As a lawyer, he insisted that the

American system measured justice by money. As a Sansei, he explained how his grandfather went from owning a grocery store to becoming a gardener, and his grandmother from owning a sewing school to working as a maid. He evoked the larger framework of American society in the

20th century that constantly limited Japanese Americans. Ito Taylor remembered that some Nisei criticized his testimony, asking him to not embarrass Japanese Americans by asking for money.224

Thus again, familiar divisions among the Japanese American community as seen during the redevelopment phase arose again during redress as some wanted to promote an image of assimilation while others called for confrontation and reparations.225

The CWRIC published Personal Justice Denied in 1983 based on their findings from the testimonies. This 467-page report stated that “Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity” and “the broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”226 Based on these findings, the

CWRIC made recommendations that Congress pass a public apology and $20,000 be given in reparation to all 60,000 surviving Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during the war.

The CWRIC report was one of the first acknowledgements of the injustices of the incarceration

223 Dean Ito Taylor, interview by Katelynn Pan, July 31, 2017, transcript. 224 Dean Ito Taylor, interview by Katelynn Pan, July 31, 2017, transcript. 225 Murray, Historical Memories of Internment, page 320. 226 Personal Justice Denied, 459. 73 camps and set the basis for the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. After the CWRIC hearings, most of the Redress Movement centralized within the halls of Congress, where JACL lobbyers and

Japanese American representatives worked to acquire enough votes for the House and Senate bills. Simultaneously, the NCJAR filed a class action lawsuit in 1983 against the U.S. government for $27.5 billion, to address the property losses and the constitutional violations of the incarceration camps.227 This lawsuit was vital in the passage of the reparations payment in a

Republican Congress and a budget deficit, as the passage of the Civil Liberties Act stipulated the

NCJAR dropping their lawsuit. After the commission hearings, the majority of redress legislation became out of the hands of most Japanese American community members.

For the community members, the commission hearings not only provided a formal setting of dialogue between the community and the US government, but it also solidified the intergenerational dialogue that began with resisting their evictions. Jon Osaki remembered his father, who went to the incarceration camps when he was seventeen, went to Golden Gate

University and sat in the audience. Usually stoic, he started crying simply listening to the testimonies. Osaki was startled by his father’s spontaneous release of emotions. The public hearing, Osaki recently concluded, may have been one of the most powerful things that came out of redress. Osaki sat at the kitchen table with his father when he opened his reparations check.

He remembered that his father immediately wanted to give the money away until his mother convinced him to keep it. Like Nisei who criticized Ito Taylor, he feared that reparations might appear to other Americans as simply a money grab. Thus even after the Civil Liberties Act of

1988, the formal apology, and reparations checks, divisions and tensions among Japanese

Americans about strategy and action continued.

227 Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga, interview by Katelynn Pan, August 7, 2017, transcript. 74

Conclusion

The Japanese American incarceration, between 1942-1945, remains a well-remembered example in American history of a wholesale discrimination against a group of people. Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, a member of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition team advocated for a national registry for immigrants from majority-Muslim countries.228 A spokesman for Great America PAC, an independent fund-raising committee that supports

President Trump, came to the defense of the national registry by citing the Japanese American incarceration during World War II. It set a precedent, he said, for politically unpopular decisions in the name of national security.229 Most recently, in January of 2017, President-elect Donald J.

Trump signed an executive order that banned immigrants and refugees from seven majority-

Muslim countries to enter the United States. This action sparked domestic and international criticism against the discriminatory “Muslim ban.” These critics included Japanese Americans like Karen Korematsu, daughter of Fred T. Korematsu of Korematsu vs. US, and actor-celebrity

George Takei. They warned of the chilling parallels between the “Muslim ban” and the Japanese

American incarceration, both threatening to stigmatize a group of people based on race or religion.230 Younger activists and progressive academic organizations have also taken a stance on

228 Mica Rosenberg and Julia Edwards Ainsley, “Immigration hardliner says Trump team preparing plans for the wall, mulling Muslim registry,” Reuters, November 16, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump- immigration/immigration-hardliner-says-trump-team-preparing-plans-for-wall-mulling-muslim-registry- idUSKBN13B05C. 229 Jonah Engel Bromwich, “Trump Camp’s Talk of Registry and Japanese Internment Raises Muslims’ Fears,” New York Times, November 16, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/us/politics/japanese-internment- muslim-registry.html. 230 George Takei, “They interned my family. Don’t let them do it to Muslims,” The Washington Post, November 18, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/18/george-takei-they-interned-my-family-dont- let-them-do-it-to-muslims/?utm_term=.9dcd4e6066bd; Karen Korematsu, “My father resisted Japanese internment. Trump’s travel ban is just as unfair,” The Washington Post, December 4, 2017, 75

this issue.231 Across the spectrum of political and social perspectives, the Japanese American incarceration is connected to the wholesale discrimination of a people by the U.S. government.

Japanese American historiography on the other hand continues to be revised and approached from different angles. Personal Justice Denied outlines the broad historical causes of

Executive Order 9066 and the incarceration camps as racism, war hysteria, and failure of political leadership.232 While this was a significant validation of the Japanese American community and their injustices when it was published in 1983, it can mislead the history in pocketing Japanese American oppression only within the hysteria of World War II. In the greater acceptance of Japanese Americans in postwar America, the rise of more middle-class Japanese

Americans, and the victories of the Redress Movement, Japanese American history told both outside or within the community risk perpetuating Japanese American exceptionalism. If existing solely within a “model minority” narrative, Japanese American history removes itself from the framework of the long-standing, and perhaps permanent, othering of Asian Americans in

America. Without understanding this larger framework, Japanese American history also becomes isolated from both points of solidarity and comparison from the history of black Americans,

Latinx Americans, and other people of color.233

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/12/04/my-father-resisted-japanese-internment- trumps-travel-ban-is-just-as-unfair/?utm_term=.4dff57c2ddfd. 231 Nina Wallace, “The Muslim Ban Is Racial Profiling-And We’ve Seen It Before,” Densho Blog, September 22, 2017, https://densho.org/muslim-ban-racial-profiling-seen-it-before/. 232 Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (San Francisco: Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, 1997), 459. 233 Scott Kurashige and Diane Fujino, both cited above, have brought this widened perspective into their published scholarship on Japanese American history. Current Brown graduate students, Nicole Sintetos, Takuya Maeda, and Erin Aoyama, have begun research that also looks beyond Japanese American relations with the larger white American society in order to contextualize Japanese American history within the frameworks of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. 76

From the very formation of Japantown, Japanese American immigrants faced hostile white neighborhoods and legal racial discrimination by the government. They formed an ethnic community out of necessity that became their home, including schools, Japanese American owned businesses, and restaurants. The U.S. government then incarcerated the entire West Coast

Japanese American community during World War II, uprooting them from Japantown, Little

Tokyo, and other communities, shipping them far away from their homes to live in barracks in remote, inland, locations. Once the war with Japan ended and the incarceration camps closed, only half of the original Japanese American community returned back to Japantown or Little

Tokyo to rebuild their communities. Although no longer enemy aliens, Japanese Americans continued to be largely excluded from postwar housing subsidies and white suburban life.

Instead, federal and city governments pushed on the Japanese American communities during urban renewal, uprooting them from Japantown and Little Tokyo again.

This history of the second removal still remains understudied. Histories, novels, and popular understanding on the Japanese American experience mostly cluster around two major moments of its timeline: the incarceration during World War II and the Redress Movement during the 1980s. Both events arguably require such attention. The Japanese American incarceration involved over 120,000 people being detained in government-made camps without due process. The Redress Movement achieved landmark legislation driven by Japanese

Americans to receive reparations for the incarceration as well as to set a precedent to the U.S. government, that incarceration camps based on prejudice cannot occur again. Yet, in local

Japanese American communities like Japantown and Little Tokyo today, Sansei and now fourth- generation Yonsei Japanese Americans share a lesser known part of their history--between incarceration and redress--of how urban renewal changed their community in postwar America. 77

A short decade after returning from the incarceration camps, the Japanese Americans in San

Francisco were ordered to pack up their homes again for the redevelopment of the area from the

1950s to the 1970s. This second removal, instilled in the Japanese Americans yet another reminder of their social and political inferiority. In resisting urban renewal efforts, community members in Japantown and Little Tokyo, formed a basis of activism that was foundational to the

Redress Movement. By shifting focus to this intermediary point of the historical timeline, the surrounding events become visible in a new light.

This temporal frameshift in studying urban renewal of the 1950-1970s also allows a magnification to examine smaller details and complexities within the Japanese American communities and helps us defy notions of Japanese American homogeneity. The Japanese

American communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles, while unified in some ways, have always been marked by internal controversies and divisions. There were Japanese Americans who embraced assimilation into white society through obtaining successful markers like education and class. Then there were Japanese Americans who took a more resistant stance against the structural powers that discriminate against them and stood in solidarity with other oppressed people of color. These divisions remained relatively constant throughout the events in

Japanese American history and usually mapped onto demographic differences among the community as well, like those of class, education level, and generation.

Once the Japanese American community is examined through these cracks, a clearer image of the relationships it held with others also forms. With the federal and local government,

Japanese American communities have divided on how to approach the obstacles placed upon them. Throughout the World War II incarceration, urban renewal, and the Redress Movement, conservative-leaning Japanese Americans, identified with groups like the JACL and Nisei 78 generation, have taken stances of compromise. More polarized Japanese Americans, like the No-

No boys draft resisters in World War II and the Sansei CANE activists during urban renewal, found resistance in protests, rallies, and grassroots organizing. And through these divisions, the intersections of U.S.-Japan relations and Japanese capital into the experiences of Japanese

Americans have also been revealed. The identification of Japanese Americans with the Japanese nation fluctuated throughout the 20th century. During World War II, identification with Japan was the basis of the wholesale incarceration of Japanese Americans. During the postwar era of urban renewal, a perceived tie to Japanese capital led city planners to embrace Japantown and

Little Tokyo, albeit for their potential capital. Japanese Americans in San Francisco and Los

Angeles have been inextricably linked to Japan, both with and without their consent.

Although this thesis studied Japanese American history with a new lens, some topics that arose during its research and analysis that I was unable to address. First is a more thorough investigation of the relationship, or the lack of, between Japanese Americans and African

Americans. Made evident through the Western Addition in San Francisco, Japantown and the

Fillmore District experienced overlapping city policies and discrimination from redlining to urban renewal, shared through adjacent neighborhoods. Yet, at the same time, these commonalities did not translate into a comparable shared experience. It is reasonable to presume that many Japantown community members either knowingly or unknowingly exhibited anti- black racism, embraced existing racial hierarchies, and tried to curry white favor. At the same time, there were friendships, as Yamamoto recalled. What were the possibilities, if any, of solidarity against the RDA, for instance?

Second, further study of the divisions within the Japanese American community is needed. For example, in terms of generational differences, while Nisei tended to follow a more 79 liberal, assimilationist position and Sansei a more radical one, there were radical Nisei and liberal Sansei as well. Moreover, as generations grew older and new ones emerged, perspectives shifted. Dean Ito Taylor, who once identified as a radical Sansei activist, chuckled, “We thought we knew everything back then,” and looking pointedly at a twenty-one-year-old me, “just like you think you know everything now.”234 I also left unaddressed how gender roles and dynamics intersect with other aspects of Japanese American identity during urban renewal. Although I interviewed Sansei women like Sandy Mori and Kathy Masaoka, I did not have them reflect on their gendered roles. Nor did I look into the machismo of the Sansei activist men, although that, too, was evident.

Third, had I the time, I would have delved more deeply into the role of Japanese capital in the Japantown and Little Tokyo urban renewal projects. As I indicate above, Lon Kurashige does mention how Nisei were able to tap and Japanese capital at certain times. But how this relationship between Nisei and Japanese businesses--and perhaps even the Japanese government-

-needs more study. Was this a continuation of the relationship that some Issei merchants had in their import-export businesses? Or were most of the relationships forged after the war? To what degree did Nisei facility in the Japanese language--or not--play in this relationship with Japanese nationals?

Although my family immigrated to America after World War II, I began this project identifying as a Japanese American and thinking that Japanese American history would help me understand my own place in American society. In the wake of polarized, race-charged rhetoric of the 2016 Presidential election of Donald J. Trump, I entered into this thesis research with perhaps a predictable goal. I thought that I could better understand how to challenge American

234 Dean Ito Taylor, interview by Katelynn Pan, July 31, 2017, transcript. 80 racism through the Japanese American incarceration and the fight for justice through the Redress

Movement. Little did I know that my thesis would end up being about housing policy, urban renewal, and the geography of racial capitalism. I came to this focus as I reflected on how Osaki said, “They moved us out again.” And I discovered the irony that Japanese Americans were uprooted from their homes again because of Japanese nationals seeking economic opportunity-- the second time with full approval of Americans.

Now when I walk around my home city of New York, I wonder about what discriminatory housing policies must have shaped the neighborhoods presently called “unsafe,” a short stop away from “blighted.” Researching this thesis has made me realize the pervasiveness of white racism, often exempt from charges against white supremacy, built into the structures of our “post-racial” society. I discovered in my research last summer in San Francisco that the

Sansei activists were most concerned about keeping the community connected to each other.

They want to preserve Japantown to keep the memory of the past alive while looking forward to the future of the Japanese American community. The achievements of the Redress Movement then take on a significance beyond reparations for past injustice: it was part of an ongoing process of struggle for future generations.

81

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