The Gateway to the Pacific

Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco

Meredith Oda

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226592886
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the decades following World War II, municipal leaders and ordinary citizens embraced San Francisco's identity as the "Gateway to the Pacific, " using it to reimagine and rebuild the city. The city became a cosmopolitan center on account of its newfound celebration of its Japanese and other Asian American residents, its economy linked with Asia, and its favorable location for transpacific partnerships. The most conspicuous testament to San Francisco's postwar transpacific connections is the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in the city's redeveloped Japanese-American enclave.Focusing on the development of the Center, Meredith Oda shows how this multilayered story was embedded within a larger story of the changing institutions and ideas that were shaping the city. During these formative decades, Oda argues, San Francisco's relations with and ideas about Japan were being forged within the intimate, local sites of civic and community life. This shift took many forms, including changes in city leadership, new municipal institutions, and especially transformations in the built environment. Newly friendly relations between Japan and the United States also meant that Japanese Americans found fresh, if highly constrained, job and community prospects just as the city's African Americans struggled against rising barriers. San Francisco's story is an inherently local one, but it also a broader story of a city collectively, if not cooperatively, reimagining its place in a global economy.

CHAPTER ONE

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

San Francisco’s northern edge sparkled with acres of lights, bejeweled buildings, monumental statuary, and displays from all corners of the globe. Seamlessly integrated into the city’s grid, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal, the “greatest physical achievement in history,” and US transoceanic power. The canal heralded “a new era in commerce,” even “a new era in civilization” in which the “circle is now fully circled; the West has met the East.”1 This referred to the west and east coasts of the nation, but it also referred to new US connections with the “nations of the Pacific area.” For its San Francisco organizers, the fair showcased their city’s “renaissance” after the earthquake and fire of 1906 and its capacity to be the “great gateway opening toward the newly-awakened Orient.”2 City boosters had therefore leapt at the opportunity to host the exposition and show that not only would the United States “dominate the politics and commerce of the Pacific,” but that their city was integral to this supremacy.3 Lawmakers agreed. Senators held that “one of the most cogent reasons” to award San Francisco the exposition was the “growing oriental trade,” a “great field for exploitation” in which the United States should “occupy first place.” San Francisco, the “greatest port on the Pacific,” could facilitate such exchanges with the “greatest ease and facility” and “cement the ties of cordial friendship between America and the nations of the Far East.”4 The exposition flourished the United States’ Pacific role, and it proclaimed San Francisco’s as well.5

San Francisco boosters’ transpacific vision of their city, however, crossed troubled waters. San Francisco had by this point sizable Chinese and Japanese migrant populations, enjoyed a rich trade across the Pacific, and was buoyed by military and political interventions in Asia. But transpacific relations could also bring complications. The two Asian nations with the largest diasporas in contemporary San Francisco, China and Japan, demonstrated this. The robust presence of both nations was critical for the city’s Oriental bona fides. Yet anti-Asian sentiment hobbled boosters’ demonstrations of their city’s transpacific fluency, while underscoring Japan’s marginal place in the metropolis.6

China and the Chinese diaspora in San Francisco confirmed the growing importance of Chinatown for San Francisco. For example, fair organizers created a Chinese Committee to ensure communication with Chinatown’s elite. Committee members guided prominent, wealthy Chinese business owners and community leaders through the grounds to assuage any concerns. The majority of the Chinese population, certainly, still drew moral approbation, fears, and racism. But Chinatown’s exotic presence was critical to the city’s claim to Pacific cosmopolitanism. Promotional materials lauded a visit to Chinatown as “the trip most interesting to the tourist” and conspicuously featured the neighborhood’s ornate facades in fair publicity.7

The exposition was important to Chinatown boosters, as well. This was an opportunity to revise their neighborhood’s much-maligned status as well as that of the newly established Republic of China. They therefore carefully monitored representations of China and the local Chinese diaspora. China’s official contributions included exhibits on education, art, and a reproduction of part of the Forbidden City.8 However, the concession Underground Chinatown in the commercial Zone was far more popular. The tunnel-like exhibit imagined a dangerous, slum-like, and exotic Chinatown populated with opium dens, prostitutes, hatchet men, and gamblers. Chinatown leaders and Chinese officials were outraged and demanded that organizers “suppress the concession” as “a disgrace to the exposition and a slander upon the Chinese people.”9 The exposition organizers needed their participation, and so briefly closed the well-attended attraction in order to remove Chinese actors and rename the enterprise Underground Slumming. The deracinated exhibit remained a clear proxy for Chinatown, something attendees indicated with their continued good business. Yet, as historian Abigail Markwyn has noted, such actions indicated the organizers’ willingness to address the concerns of foreign and local Chinese representatives.10

Japan’s participation was complicated by geopolitics, local politics, and a much smaller and less visible diasporic population. Japanese officials had to grapple with the contemporaneous Alien Land Law, debated in 1913 just as Japan was committing to the fair. The bill would prevent “aliens ineligible to citizenship”—a euphemism for Asian migrants, the only group prevented by law from naturalizing—from landownership and long-term tenancy; it aimed to halt the Japanese ascendance in agriculture that threatened white industry dominance. In response, Japan’s foreign representatives wielded the upcoming exposition as a weapon, threatening to retract their participation if the bill passed. This prompted organizers, joined by President Woodrow Wilson, to vigorously lobby against the California bill, although they lost to proponents who prophesied miscegenation and social upheaval. The passage was a severe blow in Tokyo, where some newspapers even urged war. Nonetheless, the diplomacy of fair organizers helped keep Japan involved.11

The exposition organizers thereby ensured Japan’s participation, but the episode revealed the troubled position of Japan’s diaspora. This was reflected in the fair itself, where Japanese in the United States were absent. The Zone’s Underground Slumming concession drew attention to Chinese in San Francisco, albeit in racist ways, and urged visitors to venture into the real Chinatown. In contrast, the Zone’s Japanese concession, Japan Beautiful, represented a positive but strictly foreign portrayal.12 There was, after all, no Japanese analog to Chinatown for the fair to caricature. As the Panama-Pacific International Exposition suggests, the Orient was central to San Francisco’s identity as a Pacific city. But it was also unevenly represented.

This chapter explores the changing meanings of San Francisco’s Pacific identity and its varying relationship to Japan and Japanese. In the early twentieth century, this remained a meager relationship. Overshadowed by China and Chinatown, both Japan and Japanese migrants had a slight imprint on both city identity and landscape. Japan would move to the center of civic life in the postwar metropolis, but this was little presaged in San Francisco until the end of the Pacific War.

JAPAN IN PREWAR SAN FRANCISCO

The city “on the border line . . . between the Occident and the Orient” had historically been the “Gateway to the Orient,” as the Panama-Pacific International Exposition made clear.13 However, this title had shifting referents. It originally denoted San Francisco’s strategic, commercial, and transportation regional importance. Over the course of the twentieth century, it evolved into a domestic story of the city’s cosmopolitan landscape and population. And through World War II, Japan held a distinctly marginal position in the city’s landscape and civic identity.

San Francisco had long embraced an identity as the “Metropolis of the Pacific,” a city with unparalleled reach into the oceanic region’s “broad expanse.”14 The Gold Rush turned the Bay city into the first major US metropolis on the West Coast. Well before that, the Spanish empire and the fur trade bound what became San Francisco to ports all over the Pacific Ocean, from Lima to Honolulu to Manila to Canton and more. These links positioned the city so that a 1881 guidebook could reasonably include Japan, China, and the Sandwich Islands as San Francisco’s “vicinity” destinations.15 US imperialism, though, amplified San Francisco’s Pacific prominence. The 1898 outbreak of the Spanish-American War in the Philippines was a major boon. The San Francisco Chronicle reported, “[M]ost of the supplies in the Quartermaster’s line . . . will have to be obtained at San Francisco.”16 The city also had a flood of temporary residents as the troops waited for deployment in San Francisco, their point of embarkation. This was the precedent when foreign powers dispatched troops to quell the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. Boosters predicted that “should the war in China continue . . . San Francisco would become an important shipping point for supplies” for all nations involved. California “has become known as a great source of supply the world over of late, and more especially so since the beginning of the war in the Philippines,” and San Francisco, as “the nearest point,” would benefit the most.17 By the end of the bloody Philippine-American war, San Francisco had consolidated “an importance formerly undreamed of” as a “vital” staging and supply point for “operations in the Pacific.”18 Furthermore, the four-year-long war had been fought in large part in order to secure US commercial interests in China, opening all of Asia to the “commercial advance of America.”19 As the westernmost major US port, San Francisco was the “natural shipping point” that connected the “commercial centres of America to every corner of the world’s greatest ocean.”20

Over the course of the early twentieth century, this interpretation of the city as a commercial and strategic link between US and Asian markets, investment, and resources gave way to a domestic narrative of the city’s history and demographics. No word was more frequently used to describe the city than “cosmopolitan.” This shaped accounts of the city’s history. Distinctive from the European roots of other US cities, San Francisco began as a “drowsy Spanish hamlet” that also had Russian antecedents.21 Narratives abounded of the diverse masses of people drawn by the Gold Rush: “Kanaka, Indian, Filipino, Chinaman, Japanese, Lascar, Hindu, Sikh, Greek, Roumanian, Turk, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swede, Norwegian, Hollander, Frenchman, Mexican, and half a dozen others.”22 Its place as a “strategic point on the international highway” remained, but by the interwar years its commercial and strategic links were subsumed to its status as a “peculiarly cosmopolitan city.”23

While many contemporary US cities had even larger proportions of immigrants, the “influx of Orientals” made San Francisco distinctive.24 No single feature was more critical to the city’s cosmopolitanism than Chinatown, as the 1915 exposition suggested. The neighborhood came to define San Francisco. As a central attraction for visitors and an integral part of the city’s identity, almost every city guidebook and article referenced, and usually pictured, the neighborhood. As one journalist noted as early as 1876, “to visit San Francisco and not spend some time in the Chinese quarter, is equivalent to visiting Rome without seeing the Pope.”25 It was uniquely San Franciscan: there was “nothing like it in any other part of the country,” and “there can not be anything like it in China,” either.26

Chinatown reflected and shaped San Francisco’s identity throughout its history. Anti-Chinese animus birthed the neighborhood and defined its exotic allure through the early twentieth century. As historians have richly demonstrated, the neighborhood began as a segregated enclave for a persecuted minority. Morality, disease, gender, sexuality, and race molded perceptions of Chinatown’s inhabitants as contagions to be by turns contained, excluded, policed, and exterminated. But the perceived menace also tempted visitors. Early excursions were made “in the company of a detective,” a testament to Chinatown’s twinned associations of danger and fascination.27 This changed after the destruction of the 1906 fire. Entrepreneurial residents rebuilt the “exotic city-within-a-city” with tourism and popular acceptance in mind.28 Architects and property owners crafted storefronts with pagoda-like facades based on the well-liked and colorful “Chinese Villages” of world’s fairs. Community leadership combined this “vastly improved” and “inviting” streetscape with anti-crime campaigns to promote a “New Chinatown” suitable for even family visits.29 As these changes heightened touristic interest in the neighborhood, and after anti-Chinese campaigns ended migration, the city increasingly “took its Chinese colony to its bosom.”30 Journalists began to note a “modern trend in Chinatown” and portray its residents in less foreign terms.31 The sheer numbers of Chinese Americans in San Francisco lent them some political clout by the 1930s, as local Democrats wooed them into their New Deal coalition. Later, Chinatown leaders cooperated with the war effort and postwar municipal reforms; they also promoted family and gender normativity. This encouraged postwar observers to note the neighborhood’s exotic color but also to describe its “new generation of Americans.” These included “bobby-soxers,” “M.D.’s from Stanford,” and “ex-GI’s,” some of whom lived or worked outside of the enclave.32 By the 1950s, Chinatown was regularly used as evidence of how San Francisco “squelched” racial prejudice.33 The neighborhood was a pillar of the city’s identity, first of cosmopolitanism and then of tolerance.34

There was no Japanese or Japanese American equivalent to Chinatown in either its popularity or its centrality to civic identity, but Japan was not absent from San Francisco’s landscape. The main landmark was the “famed and favorite tourist mecca” of the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, the only site marked as Japanese in guidebooks or media.35 The garden and its buildings had originally been constructed as part of the “charming” Japanese Village in the California Midwinter Fair of 1894.36 The village’s one acre was molded into a “correct representation of Japanese architecture and landscape gardening.”37 After the fair closed, the grounds were turned over to the Parks Commission as one of the first permanent Japanese gardens in the United States. It remained as a garden, gift shop, and teahouse run by the Hagiwaras, a Japanese American family, for the next fifty years. Stuffed with miniature trees, a drum bridge, pavilions, and stone lanterns, it provided visitors with a fantastical vision of Japanese landscapes ten years before Chinatown was remodeled into an “Oriental city [of] veritable fairy palaces”38 (fig. 1.1). Yet even the tea garden was not without ambivalence. The Midwinter Fair concession had been awarded to an Australian Japanophile, not a Japanese. This provoked Japanese consular officials and the migrant community to call for a boycott of the exhibit.39 The city’s Japanese icon had origins in transpacific contention.

Commerce brightened transpacific tensions. Japan was one of San Francisco’s major foreign partners in a trade-dependent economy, although transpacific commerce was not overly significant in prewar years. Through the 1930s, according to a state senate report, coastal and domestic trade with eastern cities was the “base of Bay Area shipping activity,” with twice the tonnage of foreign trade.40 Furthermore, the Pacific city remained well behind New York City, the US commercial capital, in A...