The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco

The Gateway to the Pacific

Edited by Lilia Fernández, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Becky M. Nicolaides, and Amanda I. Seligman

James R. Grossman, Editor Emeritus

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The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco

Meredith Oda

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK HAS BEEN AIDED BY A GRANT FROM THE BEVINGTON FUND.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-59260-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-59274-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-59288-6 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226592886.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Oda, Meredith, author.

Title: The gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the remaking of San Francisco / Meredith Oda.

Other titles: Historical studies of urban America.

Description: Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Series: Historical studies of urban America

Identifiers: lccn 2018019707 | isbn 9780226592602 (cloth: alk. paper) | isbn 9780226592749 (pbk: alk. paper) | isbn 9780226592886 (e-book)

Subjects: lcsh: Japanese Americans—California—San Francisco—History—20th century. | Urban renewal—California—San Francisco—History—20th century. | Ethnic neighborhoods—California—San Francisco—History—20th century. | San Francisco (Calif.)—History—20th century.

Classification: lcc f869.s39 j3586 2019 | ddc 979.4/6104956—dc23

lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019707

This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Japan and Japanese Americans in the Pacific Metropolis through World War II

CHAPTER TWO

Orienting the Gateway to the Pacific: Reconsidering Japan and Reshaping Civic Identity

CHAPTER THREE

Redeveloping Citizens: Planning a New Japanesetown

CHAPTER FOUR

Pacific Crossings: Japan, Hawai‘i, and the Redefinition of Japanesetown

CHAPTER FIVE

Intermediaries with Japan: The Work of Professional Japanese Americans in the Gateway

CHAPTER SIX

Local Struggles: Japanese American and African American Protest and Cooperation after 1960

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

My scholarship and thinking for this book have been shaped by so many people and institutions along the way. There is no way I can possibly do justice to the tremendous debts I have accumulated, but I am grateful for the opportunity to at least acknowledge some here.

The University of Chicago has been a source of wonderful mentors and colleagues. Mae Ngai prodded a microstudy of redevelopment into a more expansive story of San Francisco’s transpacific history. Her incisive feedback and her own model of scholarship improved this project in immeasurable ways and continue to inspire me. Kathleen Conzen was a kind and able guide through urban and ethnic history, while Thomas Holt’s acute thinking on race and racism has shaped my understanding of race, difference, and power. George Chauncey, Kyeong-Hee Choi, Bruce Cumings, James Grossman, and Amy Dru Stanley have all helped make me a better historian. I also had the pleasure and privilege to learn among a cohort of excellent scholars and friends: Thomas Adams, Melissa Borja, Michael Carriere, Kornel Chang, Jessica Graham, Allyson Hobbes, Molly Hudgens, Gwennan Ickes, Kouslaa Kessler-Mata, Kelly King-O’Brien, Alison Lefkovitz, Jon Levy, Jason McGraw, Arissa Oh, Sarah Potter, Gautham Rao, David Spatz, Timothy Stewart-Winter, Ellen Wu, and Ryan Yokota.

A number of people have been instrumental in helping me tell this story. First, I would like to thank all those who generously shared their memories and time in sometimes quite lengthy interviews: Masao Ashizawa, Richard Hashimoto, Uta Hirota, Steve Nakajo, Noboru Nakamura, Victor Ona, Sam Seiki, Marshall Sumida, Tomoye Takahashi, Franklin Tokioka, Lionel Tokioka, Marvin Uratsu, George Yamasaki Jr., and Mas Yonemura.

Archivists and librarians are particular allies of historians, and my experience has been no exception. Marie Browning let me camp out at the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Central Records for months of research; the agency has since closed, its records transferred to the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library. Karl Matsushita lugged around boxes, provided invaluable information, and offered a little refreshing gossip at the Japanese American National Library. Tami Suzuki, Jeff Thomas, and the rest of staff at the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library were incredibly gracious with their time and knowledge. Sherman Seki at the Archives and Manuscripts Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Hamilton Library offered helpful suggestions and access. Rosalyn Tonai, Peter Yamamoto, Judy Yamaguchi, and Max Nihei at the National Japanese American Historical Society offered timely assistance. Kenji Taguma is not an archivist, but he was a cordial and informative host while I paged through decades of the newspaper he edited, the Nichi Bei Times (now reconfigured as the online Nichi Bei). I also thank the many archivists and librarians who have contributed to this project at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; California Historical Society; University of California, Berkeley, Ethnic Studies Library; University of California, Los Angeles, Young Research Library Special Collections; Hawai‘i State Archives; the Japanese American National Museum’s Hirasaki Resource Center; Manuscripts and Records Collection at the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University; and National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland. Finally, I would like to thank Mark Lucas and the staff at the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center Interlibrary Loan, who tracked down my avalanche of requests with good humor.

I have found a wonderful and supportive home at the University of Nevada, Reno, in large part due to a brilliant bunch of friends and colleagues. Emily Hobson is a partner in crime, model of socially engaged scholar/teacher, and generous reader. Greta de Jong has hosted many a delicious summer solstice celebration and offered incredibly useful feedback and ideas. Jennifer Ng and Edward Schoolman have commiserated over food and drink. My chairs have been fantastic guides: Linda Curcio introduced me to the world of the tenure track, Bruce Moran was kind and supportive, and Dennis Dworkin—who took a fellow Maroon under his wing right away—offered crucial resources that helped me push to the finish line in a relatively timely manner. Jenni Baryol in the Department of History office is a lifesaver, time and time again. Chris Church, Marwan Hanania, Martha Hildreth, Renata Keller, Elizabeth Raymond, Bill Rowley, Hugh Shapiro, Kevin Stevens, Cameron Strang, Charles Tshimanga-Kashama, and Barbara Walker have all helped make the department a collegial and smart department. Outside of history, Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar provided regular writing deadlines (she did what she could) and fun reminders that there’s so much more than writing. Others, too, have made Reno a supportive, lively place: Debbie Boehm and Patrick Jackson, Katherine Fusco and Blake Watson, Jen Hill, Stephanie Gibson and David Rondel, Eunkang Koh, Jessica Nakamura, Amy Pason, and Daniel Enrique Pérez.

This book has also profoundly benefited from the feedback and assistance of a number of fellow historians. I cannot thank enough those who have read and commented upon versions of these chapters: Charlotte Brooks, Jason Chang, Grace Delgado, Mary Dudziak, Dennis Dworkin, Rámon Gutiérrez, Lisbeth Haas, Theresa Mah, Jennifer Miller, Amy Scott, and Naoko Shibusawa. Bill Issel generously read the entirety in an earlier version and offered sharp and constructive comments. Mariko Iijima and Yuki Oda kindly answered my questions about Japanese sources. Other scholars have also offered critical suggestions and ideas at crucial junctures: Eiichiro Azuma, Andrew Friedman, Madeline Hsu, Lon Kurashige, Scott Kurashige, Clement Lai, Meghan Mettler, Dennis Ogawa, Greg Robinson, Joel Tarr, Yujin Yaguchi, Henry Yu, and all the participants at the Race and Racial Ideologies Workshop at the University of Chicago and at conferences of the Urban History Association, the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, Western History Association, Association for Asian American Studies, Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, Society for the History of Foreign Relations, and the American Studies Association. Ayuko Takeda was an amazingly organized and diligent research assistant in the National Diet Library in Tokyo. Jennifer O’Donnell provided translation, as did my incredibly generous colleague Yoshie Kadowaki. Finally, the wonderfully careful and critical readers for Stanford University Press and University of Chicago Press helped me rethink and reshape the book in vital ways.

The University of Chicago Press has been absolutely marvelous to work with. My friend Charlotte Brooks and former professor Jim Grossman paved the way for me at the Press, for which I am truly grateful. Tim Mennel has been a gracious, supportive, and critical editor, while Rachel Kelly has been patient and responsive in moving the book toward publication. I thank the series editors, Lilia Fernández, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Amanda I. Seligman. I especially want to thank Becky M. Nicolaides, whose careful scrutiny of the manuscript produced insights, suggestions, and critiques that have vastly improved this book.

Finally, my friends and family have been my anchor throughout. My bestie, Michella Rivera-Gravage, is family, and her intelligence, creativity, and warmth are my consistent inspirations. Here in Reno, Emily H. and Felicia Perez first made Reno seem like an actual home. Lara Braff, Sandie Stringfellow, Heidi Duran, and Elizabeth Wayne are lifelong buddies. My late grandparents, Ethel and Takashi Paul Oda, Mildred and Masao Kato; my late Aunty Carol and Uncle Mel Teramoto; Uncle Roy and Aunty Lorraine; cousins Sherrie, Christine, and Elsa and their families; Aunty Laraine Oda; Uncle Cy, Aunty Jan, Angela, and Laurie Oda; Paul Teramoto; Don and Kathy Teramoto and the 5 Ts; Kurt, Dorothy, Chloe, and Haley Teramoto; Lance, Deana, Leah, and Caileen Teramoto; Aunty Linda Kalua; Aunty Amy and Uncle Wes Harano (who introduced me to foodie Honolulu!) and all of my aunties and uncles up and down California and in Hawai‘i make up my own Pacific world. The Stanleys, Levins, and Clauders welcomed me into their family and made me feel at home: Sandra Clauder; Fay and Myron Levin; and Zac, Kim, Stella, and Townes Stanley. My partner, Jared Stanley, is everything I could have thought to hope for. There’s no one who is as fun to be around. His wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, his own work, and his unwavering support of mine has sustained me for years and will for the rest of my life. Eleanor came into our life at the busiest time, just as I was going through the last series of revisions. She has been a hilarious, fun, troublesome, jaw-droppingly smart little addition to my life. While she has done nothing but hinder this book’s progress, she just makes life right. Finally, I can’t conceive of all the ways in which my parents, Frances and Terry Oda, have offered support and love over the years. There’s almost no sense in trying, so to them, as to everyone else, I can only say: thank you.

INTRODUCTION

Tomoye and Henri Takahashi were doing quite well for themselves by 1959. They owned a flourishing business, the Takahashi Trading Company, which sold imported Japanese housewares to eager San Franciscans. This was quite a step up for them. The Takahashis and their growing family had been incarcerated during the war in the desolate Topaz detention center in Utah. When they returned to San Francisco, Henri, a minister’s son and a journalist by trade, could find no newspaper willing to hire a Japanese American and so worked for a period as a dishwasher. Soon, however, the Takahashis started their business by sending care packages for Japanese Americans to relatives in war-devastated Japan and importing small, cheap, colorful trinkets such as origami paper, wooden toys, and brilliantly colored carp banners. From this, they moved on to custom-made lacquerware dishes, washi-paper lamps and screens, uniquely shaped bamboo baskets, and other items hungrily consumed by midcentury US shoppers enamored with Japanese design and seeking modern . . . goods that will fit into any home.¹ Their business responded to and fostered a growing US fascination with Japan, thriving at the intersection of Japanese and US commerce. Tomoye—who, unlike Henri, was fluent in Japanese because of determined migrant parents, twelve full years of language study, and a major at the University of California, Berkeley—negotiated with suppliers in Japan. This involved convincing dubious Japanese manufacturers to accept her authority as a woman, and to depart from centuries of established styles to experiment with bold new colors and designs. Tomoye and Henri’s work therefore brought innovative Japanese goods to US markets, made Japanese producers responsive to US consumer desires, and produced a highly successful company. By this point, the Takahashis’ profits had also bought them a spacious home with sweeping views of the surrounding mountains and bay in San Francisco’s residential Richmond district. The move had not been easy: they had desegregated a once lily-white neighborhood, leading to at least one racist episode in which a neighbor shot through a window one evening while Tomoye was at home alone. Shaken but undeterred, they remained. Indeed, Tomoye earned her real-estate license and assisted a veritable migration of Japanese and Chinese American families into the district. Their proceeds also eventually funded a charitable foundation to support Japanese American community organizations and Japanese cultural initiatives in the Bay Area.²

The Takahashis successfully maneuvered transpacific networks to wealth and prominence, but those same networks, put to use by others, also presented them with a serious challenge. In 1959, they were forced to relocate their business, ironically, for the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center, built as part of the city’s first redevelopment project. This was a big change. It severed the business’s deep Japanese American roots—roots that had been important even if their customer base was primarily white: their enterprise had begun with family care packages, and their original location was in the Japanese American residential and commercial enclave in the Western Addition district, generally called Japanesetown or Nihonjinmachi by its residents. This location had meant they had to work hard to attract white San Franciscans, who did not view the neighborhood with the same touristic interest as Chinatown. Furthermore, Japanesetown had been transformed by the war. Its Japanese American residents were evicted into inland detention centers, and African Americans had settled in. It was one of the few neighborhoods available to nonwhites and before the war already had a small black community, although for decades black San Franciscans had found far fewer residential restrictions than Asian Americans. By the late 1950s, the area was bustling, crowded, and multiracial, with black barbers and shops squeezed alongside Japanese groceries and hotels, and altogether far more residents than originally intended. These conditions helped make the neighborhood the city’s first project of its new redevelopment program, and the Redevelopment Agency proposed a Japanese center as its crown jewel. As a result, the Takahashis, along with thousands of their neighbors, were once again uprooted by transpacific dynamics: this time, the close postwar US-Japanese alliance and the economic and political connections it generated.

Although the Takahashis would likely never have predicted it, US ties with Japan had moved to the heart of San Franciscan civic life. This was a far cry from their return from Topaz in the mid-1940s, when Henri was turned away from job after job because of lingering anti-Japanese sentiment. By the late 1950s, city boosters, municipal leaders, and ordinary San Franciscans had embraced San Francisco’s self-styled identity as the Gateway to the Pacific, the link between the United States and the Pacific region. The Gateway to the Pacific was a ubiquitous phrase in the Cold War metropolis. It bedecked phone books, Chamber of Commerce publications, municipal reports, festival banners, and newspapers, and accented the speeches of city officials and business leaders alike. It was also much more than a nickname or motto. As expressed by Mayor George Christopher in 1958, it was a kind of optimistic geography: as the gateway for trade, communication, and transportation with the Pacific nations, San Francisco was tied to, and could benefit from, the very rapid economic growth of the Pacific Coast States and the Pacific area.³ Anchoring San Franciscans’ imagined Pacific was Japan. The nation was beginning its period of high-speed growth, having reached a 10 percent rate of economic increase that would remain in place for well over another decade. This ‘unequalled’ Japanese boom was an irresistible lure to municipal and business leaders in a city long connected to Japanese and Asian ports.⁴

From its beginnings in the boosterism of a handful of civic leaders, the Gateway to the Pacific identity evolved into a transpacific urbanism that characterized San Francisco after World War II.⁵ As sociologist Louis Wirth defined it decades ago, urbanism is that complex of traits which make up the characteristic mode of cities, a way of life that distinguishes cities as a social, economic, cultural, and political whole.⁶ San Francisco’s Cold War iteration revolved around its relationship to the Pacific region and especially Japan. This was an urbanism—truly, an urbanity, according to the word’s dual definitions of sophistication and urban life—that described a cosmopolitan municipality shaped by Asian influences, a newfound embrace of the city’s Japanese and other Asian Americans, an economy naturally linked with Japan, and a physicality complementary to transpacific partnership. Expressions of this urbanity could be found in City Hall or a Western Addition apartment, downtown boardrooms or a small community shop, the modernized port or a neighborhood’s bulldozed plot of land. This transpacific urbanity built on the metropolis’s rich history of Pacific transportation and commerce as the West Coast artery between the United States and sought-after Asian markets, and it also responded to rising urban competition, especially from Los Angeles. Such competition encouraged boosters to develop all sorts of innovative, extra-market ways to naturalize and expand their relations with Japan. Amplifying a growing expanse of private and commercial Japanese-influenced institutions, these civic projects included informational organizations, business tours of Asia, a vibrant sister-city affiliation, a host of cultural activities, and, most significantly of all, transformations in the built environment. Together, these projects, institutions, events, and activities created a new way of life in San Francisco that contextualized and facilitated the city’s economic and political transpacific connections with historical precedent and popular support. City leaders and ordinary San Franciscans alike shaped the metropolis’s transpacific urbanity that framed a city oriented to Japan.

Japanese Americans, more than others, contributed to their city’s transpacific urbanity in symbolic and concrete ways. This urbanity in fact hinged upon their relatively small population, whose migratory antecedents and enclave grounded and justified the metropolis’s new relationship to the Pacific region. In ways that would have astounded the Takahashis as they returned from their inland incarceration, the development of San Francisco’s urbanity centered the once-marginalized group in civic life and invested them with a celebratory significance previously unthinkable. Their presence provided the foundation for the redevelopment of their enclave, but also the larger rehabilitation of the city’s transpacific economy, reorientation of municipal government, and celebration of their nation of origin.

This book traces the development of San Francisco’s postwar transpacific urbanity in order to tell the story of the city’s relations with and ideas about Japan in the decades following the Pacific War, and to argue that those were made within and remade the familiar, local sites of civic life, neighborhood, home, and identity. This urbanity took many forms, from attitudinal shifts among city leadership, new municipal institutions, celebrations, and expanded employment opportunities, but most intimately felt were transformations in the built environment. This, too, had varied expressions, but the axis was the construction in the Western Addition’s Japanesetown of the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center that uprooted the Takahashis. The Japanese Center brought together the myriad other economic, cultural, civic, and racialized elements of San Francisco’s urbanity into one institutionalized form. As such, the center and the urbanism it expressed was the result of choices and events in disparate places around the Pacific. In San Francisco, Pacific-trade businessmen rallied their city to revisit its long-standing Japanese commercial and cultural relations, while a sympathetic mayor and redevelopment officials turned to the tools of urban renewal to remake their cityscape along sympathetic lines. Japanesetown merchants, anxious to save their businesses from redevelopment’s bulldozers, offered up proposals for a Japan-themed shopping center that lent officials the inspiration and the location for a hub of Japanese exchange. These officials secured a developer from Honolulu, Masayuki Tokioka, who came to the Japanese Center on a well-worn path of capital and sugar linking San Francisco and Hawai‘i. Tokioka, a spectacled, slight Japanese American banking executive, exercised his connections with Japanese businesses and political figures—fostered in Hawai‘i’s shifting racial politics and pivotal location in transpacific travel—to build and tenant the center with Japanese companies. His ideas were considered in boardrooms and offices in Tokyo and Osaka, where Japanese executives strategized their own ways to secure international opportunities in the heady domestic context of rapid economic growth.

These decisions and partnerships precipitated transformations that reverberated throughout San Franciscans’ everyday lives. Most directly, the Takahashis and thousands of their Western Addition neighbors and businesses were forced to move in order to make way for the Japanese Center and the surrounding developments. What places were open to them and what kinds of resources they could draw on for assistance, though, were also affected by the city’s transpacific ambitions. Japanese Americans, who had struggled to make inroads into jobs long closed to them, found newly receptive employers and fresh business opportunities at the crux of white American interest in Japan. The context of friendly relations between Japan and the United States transformed Japanese American status, providing them new, if highly constrained, prospects in work and residence just as their African American neighbors struggled against rising barriers. Black San Franciscans reclaimed their homes in the Western Addition and their place in the city without the lubrication offered by valued migratory connections and while disproportionately burdened by renewal efforts. African Americans’ strategies and proposals, even though they overlapped to a significant degree with those of Japanese Americans, therefore took on an opposing valence in the context of the city’s transpacific priorities. The process of redevelopment and the broader regional context amplified racialized divergences while it drowned out commonalities in goals and strategies between the neighboring communities. The construction of San Francisco’s transpacific urbanity—which shaped the homes and livelihoods of thousands of people living in the Western Addition, reshaped municipal priorities, reframed city business, and created new routes to prosperity and careers across the city while closing off others—was the product of events, policy, and decision-making across the Pacific as much as local conditions and ideas.

San Francisco’s story is an inherently local one, in which planners, officials, and residents used new urban tools to carve out solutions to perceived problems in their streets, communities, and services and to connect their city to the Pacific world. These bifurcated goals were of entirely different scales yet were understood as inextricably linked. For San Francisco city officials, executives, and planners, the infrastructure of daily life and metropolitan functioning were expressions of and facilitators for their city’s status, which in turn hinged upon exchanges with Japan and other places around the Pacific Ocean. These local actors therefore worked to deepen, extend, or at least publicize those transpacific exchanges. At times, this work meant aligning municipal goals with national foreign policy; at other times it meant departing from national agendas for more agreeable local priorities. It also required cultivating links that could elevate the city’s economy while reallocating resources throughout the population. For Japanese American residents, the commercial, political, and even social links traversing the ocean were currents upon which they could navigate toward better homes, jobs, or civic position. Their activities both furthered the city’s transpacific economic and cultural exchanges and reaffirmed their own vulnerability to international relations. In turn, the transnational networks cultivated by both elite and ordinary San Franciscans were informed by conditions close to home, such as the city’s changing population, the shifting status of Chinatown in city life, and urbanist ideas produced in municipal offices and the academy.

This study of San Francisco’s transpacific linkages parallels David Eltis’s characterization of places in the Atlantic world, another oceanic region created in the movement of people, commerce, and ideas, which is far more studied than the Pacific: San Francisco was fundamentally different from what [it] would have been without participation in Pacific networks.⁷ The Gateway to the Pacific therefore builds on emerging scholarship that has excavated these networks to show how disparate, multilingual, and multicultural countries, polities, and colonies, fractured by empire and only minimally unified by settlement, could be configured into, if not one, then a connected set of regions. Historians have begun to outline the Pacific Ocean in analytic terms analogous to the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean worlds, terms that argue for the Pacific’s long underexamined importance in shaping the contours of US history.⁸ Most of this historical work, however, focuses on earlier periods, from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth, as trade, migration, and ideas consolidated into established rhythms and the United States had not yet made the ocean the postwar American lake, as one British ambassador sardonically described it.⁹ The Cold War period, in contrast, was a time of global US power that was partly solidified through the definition and control of large parts of the Pacific region. The Pacific world of this book, on one hand, was a consequence of movements and transits that connected far-flung places and, on the other, consisted of frameworks of knowledge and interpretation through which the Cold War United States understood and therefore acted in the region.¹⁰

This, then, is a story of the making of the US Pacific after World War II, an imperial process in which Americans selectively mapped the region, magnifying the significance of some parts while suppressing the importance of others to create a Pacific world defined by foreign relations and economic interests. This mapping was an [invention] and [construction] of the powerful that helped justify increasing US intervention in Asia and supported the consolidation of US power in the postwar years.¹¹ This process can be seen, for instance, in Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1966 speech rallying Americans behind the growing US involvement in Vietnam. Johnson argued that the United States as a Pacific power had an obligation to foster the international trade, free flow of peoples and ideas, and full participation by all nations that would sustain the peace we seek in Asia.¹² In many ways, his position was a culmination of the Pacific Era predicted in 1903 by Theodore Roosevelt—whom Johnson referenced in his speech—in which the United States gained global status through the commerce and the command of the Pacific.¹³ But clearly, Johnson’s was also a specific interpretation of a region articulated by a US president seeking to balance Chinese and Soviet competition and prop up Japan, a critical US ally whose booming economy knit economic relations together throughout Asia and relied on resources from Indochina.¹⁴ As a result, Johnson’s Pacific was one in which the thousands of Pacific islands were relegated to, at most, a poignant memory of World War II battlefields and stratagems, Pacific islanders had been all but forgotten, and the Pacific was now largely defined by a handful of geopolitically important nations and colonies north of the equator. San Franciscans were a part of this redefinition as they reimagined Japan and Hawai‘i, and other places around the ocean, in ways that made them more porous to US trade, migration, politics, and ideas.¹⁵

Exploring the transpacific history of San Francisco requires attention to the everyday realms of streets and neighborhoods, sites underexplored in most studies of the United States in the world more broadly yet precisely telling of the ways in which movements across borders and around oceanic worlds reshape people’s everyday lives.¹⁶ As sociologist and historian Charles Tilly reminds us, cities have been the historic juncture for transborder mobilities in goods, people, and ideas and so are, in many ways, an ideal subject for investigation into the local, intimate consequences of these global processes.¹⁷ In San Francisco, transpacific networks and goals both emerged from and reshaped where and how people lived, in elemental ways.

The crucial lever for these transformations was urban redevelopment. The program was conceived as a way to correct the city’s postwar challenges of infrastructure, economy, and population, difficulties shared with postwar cities across the country. City leaders exuberantly responded to the legislation and money emerging from Washington as well as the ideas about the built environment and civic health sprouting up in new planning departments in cities in the United States and, indeed, around the world. This optimistic moment refined ideas about urban environments promoted at the turn of the century by Progressive reformers, and sharpened them into financial, legislative, and aesthetic tools to both define and address postwar problems. These tribulations included aging infrastructure, a shrinking tax base, changing local economies, overcrowding, overburdened social services, and suburbanization. As the encapsulation of them all, in many senses, officials focused on the issue of blight to direct intervention. Planners rendered blight as objective and quantifiable, easily distilled into statistics and visualized on maps. As historians have shown in other cities, however, its definition and measurement were suffused with assumptions about race and class. It was no coincidence that city planners’ ideas met with newly honed federal tools and willing municipal implementation at the same time that northern and western US cities saw a massive migration of millions of African Americans from the South. This response was more complex than blunt racism, although certainly in San Francisco as elsewhere that could be found. More pervasive and ultimately more consequential was how race and class shaped ideas about who was deserving of social services, how tax burdens were understood, who was San Franciscan and who was alien, what financial pressure was debilitating and what was an accepted part of urban life, what economic growth meant and where to look for it, and what defined community. As elsewhere, rapid demographic change—in which a small population of about 5,000 African Americans grew to over 40,000 in just ten years, and continued to grow into the largest nonwhite population in the city—informed how urban problems and goals were conceived.¹⁸ Furthermore, redevelopment programs were not only informed by ideas about race. They produced intensified if uneven racial segregation, heightened boundaries of class and income, and new definitions of urban desirability and cooperation that in turn shaped terms of inclusion and forms of racial thinking with lasting effects.¹⁹

San Francisco’s racial terrain, however, was fundamentally different from that of the midwestern, southeastern, and northeastern cities that form the core of postwar urban scholarship. Historians have evocatively demonstrated that the color of California and other parts of the West was dissimilar in its multiracial hue from much of the country—indeed, prophetically so—and this condition shaped different kinds of politics.²⁰ In San Francisco, people of Asian descent had long been defined as the principal social problem, and the city had been the headquarters of the anti-Asian movement through World War II. Therefore, when the city sought to reshape its built environment, the legacy of Asian exclusion as much as black migration and transpacific ambitions imprinted the infrastructure, buildings, designs, and resultant social geography. City leaders as well as district residents understood urban problems and possibilities in the Western Addition in the context of Chinatown and historical Asian segregation, the ethnic diversity of the white population, the in-migration of black southerners, and even the growing Latino community in the Mission district.

San Francisco’s multiracial context informed the development of the city’s transpacific urbanism and Japanese Americans’ place in it. This is a story of the built environment in which Asian Americans play a pivotal role.²¹ In planning discussions, ideas about design, and choices in residence, they reshaped what the city looked like and how civic inclusion functioned. Japanese American small-scale proprietors, working-class renters, property owners, developers, and wealthy financiers from the mainland and Hawai‘i not only reinterpreted what the ethnic residential and commercial enclave in San Francisco could be, but also what being Japanese American meant. This book therefore does what historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz has done for Latinos: centers Asian Americans in postwar urban history.²² This demographic group is currently the most urbanized in the nation, which should have, but largely has not, forced historians to consider the ways in which, beyond the creation of enclaves, they reshaped US urbanism.²³ The creation of San Francisco’s transpacific urbanity is just one example, as we will see; many cities along the West Coast crafted their own contemporaneous variants. The impact of Asian Americans therefore went far beyond what their relatively small numbers might imply; in 1950 San Francisco, for example, Japanese Americans were less than 1 percent of the population, compared to 6 percent for African Americans. Nonetheless, their participation, and their very presence, was the axis for the city’s new urbanity that connected San Francisco to a geopolitically critical region and nation.

The story of redevelopment in Japanesetown also adds to the recent work of historians investigating the rapid postwar shift of Asian Americans from, as historian Ellen D. Wu describes it, unassimilable aliens unfit for membership in the nation to the United States’ most exceptional and beloved people of color, its ‘model minority.’²⁴ This literature locates causation for this shift in the pressures of Cold War foreign policy in Asia. Competition with the Soviet Union impelled the United States to appeal to Asian countries and intervene in them in new ways. This motivated white Americans to accept Asian Americans as neighbors and coworkers to an extent previously unthinkable, especially in the US West, a mere decade or two before. Abstract relations with peoples in Asia took on a concrete urgency during the Cold War as ordinary Americans embraced the global struggle in their everyday choices about mundane, yet consequential, aspects of their lives. White Americans, assuming that Asians abroad cared about Asians in the United States, adapted their segregation and discrimination practices accordingly. These reduced constraints still depended on perceptions of Asian American foreignness and conflation with their nations of origin, however; this continuation of alien citizenship, created by a host of prewar legal and social exclusions, now supported