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Urban Renewal and Sacramento's Lost Japantown

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Urban Renewal and Sacramento's Lost Japantown Chicago-Kent Law Review Volume 92 Issue 3 Dignity Takings and Dignity Restoration Article 15 3-6-2018 Urban Renewal and Sacramento’s Lost Japantown Thomas W. Joo UC Davis School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cklawreview Part of the Housing Law Commons, Land Use Law Commons, Law and Race Commons, and the Property Law and Real Estate Commons Recommended Citation Thomas W. Joo, Urban Renewal and Sacramento’s Lost Japantown, 92 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 1005 (2018). Available at: https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cklawreview/vol92/iss3/15 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarly Commons @ IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Chicago-Kent Law Review by an authorized editor of Scholarly Commons @ IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. URBAN RENEWAL AND SACRAMENTO’S LOST JAPANTOWN THOMAS W. JOO* I. INTRODUCTION In the late 1950s, Sacramento, California demolished its Japantown in the name of “urban renewal.” Most of the neighborhood’s residents had been displaced to domestic concentration camps during World War II, and had returned just a few years earlier. By 1961, every resident of the neigh- borhood had been forced out again, and nearly every structure destroyed.1 Like many other cities of the urban-renewal era, Sacramento used eminent domain, or the threat thereof, to take inner-city property and transfer it to private real estate developers. In addition to state, local, and federal fund- ing, the costs of those transfers came from “vast, involuntary subsidies” from displaced residents.2 Those residents tended to be poor people and people of color,3 leading James Baldwin to famously deride urban renewal as “Negro Removal.”4 Carol Rose has cited examples of government property takings where “denial of property is denial of membership in a community; it is a part of a radical othering.”5 Bernadette Atuahene has attempted to formalize this notion by introducing the concept of “dignity takings,” in which “the inten- tional or unintentional outcome is dehumanization or infantilization.”6 * Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law. I thank the participants at the Chicago-Kent Law Review’s 2016 Dignity Takings and Dignity Restoration symposium, the law review, and especially Bernadette Atuahene for her insightful comments. Thanks also to the UC Davis School of Law Intellectual Enrichment Committee, Ashutosh Bhagwat, Andrea Chandrasekher, Mark Hoffman, Brian Soucek, UC Davis Shields Library Special Collections, and the UC Davis Mabie Law Library staff (especially Rachael Smith and Aaron Dailey). I gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support of UC Davis and the UC Davis School of Law. This research would not have been possible without the remarkable archives and staff of the Center for Sacramento History, particularly Patricia Johnson, Dylan McDonald, and Rebecca Crowther. 1. SACRAMENTO REDEV.AGENCY,SACRAMENTO REDEVELOPMENT 8 (1961) [hereinafter SR 1961]. 2. JANE JACOBS,THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES 5 (1961). 3. See, e.g., Kelo v. City of New London, Conn., 545 U.S. 469, 522 (Thomas, J., dissenting). 4. Kenneth B. Clark, A Conversation with James Baldwin, in CONVERSATIONS WITH JAMES BALDWIN 38, 42 (Fred L. Standley & Louis H. Pratt eds., 1989). 5. Carol M. Rose, Property and Expropriation: Themes and Variations in American Law, 2000 UTAH L. REV.1, 37 (2000). 6. Bernadette Atuahene, Dignity Takings and Dignity Restoration: Creating a New Theoretical Framework for Understanding Involuntary Property Loss and the Remedies Required, 41 LAW &SOC. 1005 1006 CHICAGO-KENT LAW REVIEW [Vol 92:3 Atuahene’s original case study focused on the South African apartheid regime’s expropriation of real property from nonwhites. Unlike those per- sons, Japantown’s displaced property owners received compensation through the same orderly legal process as others subjected to eminent do- main. There appears to be no concrete evidence of racist motivation. The stated, plausible purposes of urban renewal in Japantown were increasing property values and thereby tax receipts, as well as civic beautification. The taking of Japantown property therefore seems to satisfy the requirements of the U.S. Constitution. Many displaced residents, however, expressed the belief that their neighborhood had been singled out for unfair treatment because of their Japanese heritage. The takings were consistent with prior and contempora- neous anti-Japanese government actions, such restrictions on immigration, naturalization, property ownership, and, most egregiously, the incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II.7 In this context, unspoken or unconscious racism could have played a role in the decision to destroy Japantown despite community opposition. Moreover, regardless of the government’s motivation, displaced residents, as well as the general public, could reasonably perceive the destruction of Japantown as manifesting official disregard for the human worth of Japa- nese and Japanese Americans. Thus, although the destruction of Japantown was probably constitutional, it nonetheless inflicted dignitary harm. II. JAPANTOWN AND JAPANESE AMERICANS A. Federal and Californian Anti-Japanese Law and Policy Japanese laborers and farmers began immigrating to the U.S. in signif- icant numbers in the late nineteenth century. Japan’s rapid industrialization contributed to a surplus of unskilled farm labor while the U.S., having banned Chinese immigration in 1882, had a need for such labor. 8 As in many cities, Sacramento’s Japanese ethnic enclave developed in part as a defense mechanism against virulent racism.9 A 1911 report by the U.S. INQUIRY 796, 812 (2016) [hereinafter Atuahene, Dignity Takings and Dignity Restoration]; see also Bernadette Atuahene, Takings as a Sociolegal Concept: An Interdisciplinary Examination of Involun- tary Property Loss, 12 ANN.REV.L.&SOC.SCI.171, 178(2016). 7. The incarceration is commonly, and inaccurately, referred to as the “internment.” “Intern- ment” is a term of international law referring to the wartime detention of enemy aliens. During World War II, however, the U.S. also incarcerated non-criminal American citizens of Japanese descent with no proof of their disloyalty. See Yoshinori H.T. Himel, Americans’ Misuse of “Internment,” 14 SEATTLE J. SOC.JUST.797,797–98(2016). 8. KEVIN WILDIE,SACRAMENTO’S HISTORIC JAPANTOWN 15–16 (2013). 9. Id. at 38. 2017] URBAN RENEWAL 1007 Immigration Commission noted that many Japanese immigrants were self- employed in small businesses due in part to “race prejudice.”10 Urban un- ions created California’s Asiatic Exclusion League, and a Sacramento chapter opened in 1908; the Japanese Exclusion League was founded in 1920.11 V.S. McClatchy was an outspoken anti-Japanese activist who used his newspaper, the influential Sacramento Bee,as his mouthpiece. As the twentieth century progressed, nativists likened Japanese immigration to an “invasion” of America, foreshadowing the racial paranoia that led to mass incarceration during World War II.12 Like other Asians, Japanese immigrants were barred from American citizenship on the basis of their race until the mid-twentieth century. A 1790 statute permitted only “free white persons” to become naturalized citizens. After the Civil War, Congress considered lifting the racial qualifi- cation for naturalization. To prevent Native American and “Asiatic” natu- ralization, however, the statute was amended to include only white persons and “persons of African descent.”13 The Supreme Court later expressly held that this excluded Japanese aliens.14 The exclusion of Japanese from naturalization provided facially neu- tral euphemisms for racist state laws. State laws made citizenship a prereq- uisite for many occupations, including lawyers, accountants, physicians, and even funeral directors and barbers; a federal study attributed these laws to anti-Japanese discrimination.15 In the early twentieth century, several states, including California, also used the naturalization exclusion as the basis for statutes that forbade “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from own- ing agricultural land.16 All Asians were ineligible for naturalization, but Congress had already banned Chinese immigration in 1882; thus the “Alien Land Laws” mainly affected Japanese immigrants. The state attorney gen- eral who wrote California’s statute openly declared that it was intended to counter “race undesirability” by discouraging Japanese immigration and 10. Id. at 18. 11. Id. at 26–27. 12. Keith Aoki, No Right to Own?: The Early Twentieth-Century “Alien Land Laws” as a Prel- ude to Internment, 40 B.C. L. REV.37, 48 (1998). 13. See IAN F. HANEY LÓPEZ,WHITE BY LAW 43–44 (2006). 14. Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178, 198 (1922). 15. U.S. DEP’T OF THE INTERIOR,PEOPLE IN MOTION:THE POSTWAR ADJUSTMENT OF THE EVACUATED JAPANESE AMERICANS 33 (1947), https://ia802701.us.archive.org/4/items/peopleinmotionpo00unit/peopleinmotionpo00unit.pdf [https://perma.cc/BEN7-FRJ9]. 16. Aoki, supra note 12, at 55. CHICAGO-KENT LAW REVIEW>9RO HQFRXUDJLQJ UHSDWULDWLRQ7KH866XSUHPH&RXUWQRQHWKHOHVVUHMHFWHG (TXDO3URWHFWLRQFKDOOHQJHVWRWKHVWDWXWHLQDQG $QWL-DSDQHVHVHQWLPHQWLQWKHHDUO\WZHQWLHWKFHQWXU\SDUWLFXODUO\RQ WKH :HVW &RDVW ZDV VR LQWHQVH WKDW LW WKUHDWHQHG WKH 86 JRYHUQPHQW¶V DWWHPSWVWRHVWDEOLVKWUDGHWLHVZLWK-DSDQ$FWLQJXQGHUDVWDWHODZDXWKRU L]LQJ WKH VHJUHJDWLRQ RI
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