Urban Renewal and the Origins of the Japanese American Redress Movement

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

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