Japantown’s Mission: To Re-Create Community
Inclusion of others seen as key
By Joyce Nishioka

Japanese Americans in San Francisco are on a mission: not only to revitalize the heart of the city’s Japantown but also to boost a sense of ownership among the increasingly diverse population.

“I think that for Japantown to exist, the [third and fourth generation] have to come back in some form,” said Allen Okamoto, leader of the renovation committee, called Friends of the Peace Plaza. “It will have to be a place where they, the hosei (new Japanese immigrants), and hapa (mixed-race) kids come back to visit, shop, and belong to a community center.”

Earlier this year, advocates and civic leaders gathered at the Peace Plaza off Geary Street for an official groundbreaking -- one which came a decade after Japanese Americans hatched plans to renovate the area. At the time, costs for the city project were estimated to be $1.9 million and renovation was expected to be complete by next spring. However, because of problems with the infrastructure discovered during the demolition, the price tag now may be as high as $2.8 million -- perhaps too costly for the city.

“City agencies have asked us to prioritize things in the plaza in case they can’t find the money,” said Allen Okamoto, who took over the Friends of the Peace Plaza after Mori was appointed to the Mayor’s Office.

While that work continues, Japanese American leaders continue to brainstorm ways to reinvigorate the neighborhood, whose civic groups are supported mostly by nisei (second generation) in their 70s and 80s.

“A lot of organizations have been heavily supported by the nisei community,” said Jon Osaki, executive director of the Japanese Community Youth Council. “They won’t be around much longer. As the generation transitions, there will be less connections to these organizations, which means less resources for these organizations.”

Okamoto’s Friends of the Peace Plaza hopes that the neighborhood’s facelift and other efforts will bring people back. “My role is to see if I can maintain the physical structure,” Okamoto said. “If we have a physical structure then the people will come.”

To counter that trend, the Japantown Planning, Preservation and Development Task Force and other organizations are trying to reach out to people who haven’t traditionally been in the Japanese American inner circle: recent Japanese immigrants, Korean business owners and biracial individuals.

It’s no small order. Over the past 50 years, Japanese Americans have gone from being widely stereotyped as spies to one of the most assimilated Asian ethnicities. Yet the pressure to “fit in” has taken a toll.

“During the war, the Japanese were the enemy,” explained Osaki. “After the war, a lot of families pushed their kids to assimilate, not to talk Japanese, and to be American as a way of easing a transition back to the community.”

Osaki added that Japanese Americans as a group are more assimilated because most immigration took place in the late 1800s and early 1990s -- unlike other groups who immigrated primarily after immigration laws were relaxed in 1965. In fact, the immigration of Japanese to the United States peaked in the period between 1901 and 1910, when 129,797 came to the United States.

“The reason other communities are not as assimilated is because they still have ongoing immigration,” he said. Most Japanese Americans, unlike Chinese Americans or Korean Americans, for example, were born in this country, and often, so were their parents.

Japanese Americans’ early immigration, though, meant that they endured much of the racism perpetrated on Asian Americans in the first half of this century. Before the 1940s, the area known as Japantown was little more than a ghetto, one of the few places that Japanese immigrants were allowed to settle. During World War II, many Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps, and in the late 1950s and early ’60s many dispersed to other parts of San Francisco under the city’s redevelopment plan.

Still, for many years, the area remained the cultural center for San Francisco’s Japanese Americans. Of growing up in Japantown in the ’50s, Okamoto recalled: “As a kid I went to the San Francisco Buddhist Church,” he said. “I played basketball and joined the Boy Scouts. I used to hang out on the streets, as they say.”

But over the past 20 years, the community in San Francisco has remained stagnant, with 12,046 in 1980 and 12,047 in 1990, according census statistics. And in the San Francisco Unified School district Japanese enrollment has never surpassed 2 percent.

Osaki also spent his childhood in Japantown during the ’70s and ’80s, attending church and participating in scouting. In the late 1980s, however, he saw his Boy Scout troop transition from a mostly Japanese American group to a Chinese American one.

“For decade, it had been predominately JA,” said Osaki, now in his 30s. “So it was shocking to see the rapid transition of the population -- not that it was a bad thing, but it was the first time I could really feel the difference in the decline of the population.”

“Once the issei and nisei moved out of Japantown, it’s almost impossible to return,” said Okamoto, who owns a real estate company. “Prices are astronomical.” Houses in the area, he said, can go for $800,000 or more, and like Osaki, most Japanese American families have left the city for more affordable housing in the suburbs.

The commercial area of Japantown has also changed. Through the 1980s, a lot of shops owned by first and second-generation Japanese closed, replaced largely by businesses run by Korean Americans and Japanese immigrants.

Min Pak is one of two Korean Americans who sits on the Japantown Planning, Preservation, and Development Task Force. Arriving in the United States in the 1970s, Pak said she and other Koreans were drawn to San Francisco’s Asian districts.

“When I came to the United States, I felt so isolated,” she said. “I didn’t feel a sense of belonging. I felt much comfort in Japantown and Chinatown, seeing people looking like me.

“Korean people went to Chinatown, but it was already overcrowded. But Japantown is in the avenues and people are attracted to that area.”

She estimates that there are 45 to 50 Korean businesses in the Japantown-Filmore Center area. However, she says, few own land and most “feel threatened. We don’t have a niche; there is no Koreatown. Many of the owners feel vulnerable because the landlords can kick us out.”

Having two representatives from Korean community on the Japantown Task Force is an improvement, says Pak. “We didn’t have anyone before. We didn’t know what’s going on. Now we are given an opportunity to work with the Japanese community. Everyone agrees with the name Japantown, the Japanese businesses, culture and icons, but Koreans have [also] contributed to building Japantown.”

The changes in Japantown’s demographics mean that eight of the 10 programs that Osaki’s Japanese Community Youth Council runs have no Japanese American participants -- most of the kids are African Americans, Latinos and other Asians.

Osaki stresses the “original intention” of his group: to organize young Japanese Americans and establish a place for them. Still, of one of the two Japanese American-oriented programs under the center’s umbrella, Japanese Americans themselves make up less than half the participants; in the other, a summer day camp, Japanese American attendance has declined dramatically, he said.

Osaki wonders “how Japanese American heritage will be passed to the younger generations” and concedes that heritage does not seem to be important for a lot of younger families. But he hopes that will change. “At some point people will feel the need to reconnect with their cultural heritage, their community,” he said.

One factor behind that apathy may be the high rate of Japanese American outmarriage, which among females may approach 75 percent. A 1989 study found that white-Japanese births are some 39 percent higher than Japanese-Japanese births.

Many hapas -- and not just those of Japanese descent -- have felt a sense of exclusion from the rest of Asian America. And some have found it easier to identify with their non-Asian roots.

Said Okamoto: “If the statistics hold, there will be a huge hapa population. They can assimilate easily and marry non-Japanese. Then only grandpa or great-grandma is Japanese. Pretty soon there may not be a Japanese community.”