Chapter One
Japanese San Francisco

The young Tomizo Fujita arrived in San Francisco in 1906, the year of the great earthquake and fire. He made port on August 13, just four months after the catastrophe that left 4,000 dead and more than 100,000 homeless. His son, Tad, recalled eighty-one years later that his father had told him that "all the city was leveled and it was too late to return" to Japan.^[1] In view of San Franciscans' racist treatment of Japanese Americans, it was truly ironic that Japan subsequently contributed $244,960.10 to rebuilding the devastated city, more than half of the total amount raised from all sources outside the United States. But Tomizo Fujita foresaw none of this; he was naive, optimistic, and full of faith in the future. He brought his young wife to a hostel run by another Japanese family, where they resided in a packing shed. Tad was born there three years later,^[2] a native San Franciscan and a Nisei, a citizen of the United States of Japanese ancestry.

The Fujitas joined a growing community of emigrants from Japan who had settled in San Francisco and other parts of the Bay Area as early as 1860.^[3] Another member of the community, Tomoye Nozawe Takahashi, told a similar story. Her father arrived a few years before the earthquake and set himself up in partnership with his cousins in the laundry business, where he took care of the steam pipes, the mechanical washers, and the ironing mangles the young business required. In a few years, despite the disaster, he was able to go out on his own.^[4]

California was a new world of fresh hopes, governed by a constitution that promised freedom, equality, and justice for all before the law, but it was also a land steeped in prejudice against Asians. This bias was the product of hatred against people of color generally and a suspicion of Asians nurtured throughout the nineteenth century in encounters with Chinese immigrants; anti-coolie clubs were organized in San Francisco as early as 1862, and the anti-Chinese issue was among the most important political issues in the state of California in 1870.^[5] But the first Japanese immigrants knew little of this heritage of racism.

The Japanese government had long maintained a ban on emigration, which it formally lifted in 1884. A few Japanese subjects had left earlier—primarily shipwrecked seamen. The first official Japanese immigrants came to work in Hawaii in 1868: these were the gannenmono , or "first year people," 141 men, 6 women, and 2 children.^[6] A year later colonists founded a silk farm in California, and in 1870 the Japanese government opened a consulate in San Francisco.^[7] San Francisco, a thriving seaport community, was a natural location for travelers from Asia to the North American mainland, and a small community developed there about the same time Japanese Americans were establishing toeholds in the Pacific Northwest and in the Los Angeles area.^[8] The first Japanese settlers were often upper-class students or other travelers, some of whom were just passing through. They were a "select group," permitted to leave by officials of the new Meiji government because they were viewed as healthy, literate, and upstanding people who would reflect well on Japan's national honor.^[9] In succeeding years the emigrants were much more diverse.

Significant numbers of Japanese began to arrive in 1886, when the Meiji government allowed legal emigration to the new world for the first time, and more arrived in the decade that followed.^[10] They were a different population from the first small group, coming primarily from Hiroshima and three other ken , or prefectures: Gum-ma, Yamaguchi, and Fukuoka. They were primarily agricultural

1.
Prewar San Francisco and the Bay Area

people dislocated by the social upheavals accompanying the modernization of the Meiji period; they left home in search of economic betterment and the opportunity to own and farm land. Others— students, second sons of landed gentry, and the venturesome— sought the challenges to be found in a foreign land.

Many who settled in San Francisco resided first in Hawaii, laboring in the sugarcane fields, but they, like earlier migrant laborers there, found the work hard and the rewards few. After 1898, Hawaii's annexation by the United States made further migration possible, so for the next decade many Japanese moved on to the mainland.^[11] Most of the original Japanese settlers intended to save their money so that they could return to Japan quickly and buy land there, and a large number did so, following the pattern of other immigrant groups.^[12] But many found that work was hard in America, and the rewards meager, and they gradually accepted the fact that the new world, not the old, would be their home.

Not all sought an agricultural life. Included among the immigrants were urban people who made their living as shopkeepers, professionally trained men, and a few women brought in to serve as prostitutes in this highly male society. Those who settled in San Francisco resided in all parts of the city. The largest group set up shops on Chinese-dominated Dupont Avenue (present-day Grant Avenue), living among the Chinese until they were displaced by the earthquake of 1906. From there they moved to an area called South Park (Second and Third streets to Brennan and Bryant), and then to Polk Street and north to Bush Street, in an area known as the Western Addition. Others settled on O'Farrell Street near Mason, and some on Stevenson Street, around Second. Most worked first as domestics, the easiest job for someone who knew little English to obtain. Others occasionally toiled as laborers in the Central Valley during harvest season and wintered in the city.^[13] Aspiring businessmen ran cheap hotels or restaurants that their fellow countrymen patronized; these were usually located near piers 34-36, where their ships had docked, or near the Southern Pacific railroad depot, which was also close to the waterfront. The immigrants were young, usually male, mainly under thirty-five, and they made little

money, about $25-$30 a month, scarcely enough on which to return home.^[14]

Like members of other ethnic groups, these immigrants brought some religious institutions with them from Japan and acquired others through missionary work in the community. Japanese Americans accepted both the Buddhist and the Christian faith. Devotion bonded the new residents and gave them solace, which was especially necessary in a Caucasian community that did not welcome these "strangers from a different shore," as historian Ronald Takaki has termed them.

Most Issei (first-generation Japanese Americans) were Buddhist, the predominant faith at that time in Japan, but their institutional ties were not strong. Miyamoto suggested that Buddhism's fatalistic approach, accepting the world as it is, was not as well suited to life in America as Christianity was, which enjoined its members to struggle to improve life on earth as well as to prepare for the world to come. In Seattle this approach had produced a predominantly Christian Japanese American community by the mid-1930s,^[15] and San Francisco seems to have followed a similar course. Protestant Christian missionaries were working as early as the 1870s among isolated Japanese students, bringing them together in friendship as well as faith. There were numerous Christians among the new arrivals; the faith had attracted a very small but elite minority in Japan since its official toleration began in 1873.^[16] Methodists carried out the first missionary work in San Francisco, approaching the Japanese as an offshoot of their work with the inhabitants of Chinatown. The Japanese Gospel Society was founded in 1877. Church historian Lester Suzuki documented that the first immigrant Japanese to be baptized was Kanichi Miyama, who became a minister and firmly established Methodism among San Francisco's Japanese American community. Miyama later inaugurated mission work among the Japanese of Hawaii. He and Kumataro Nakano were both converted by Dr. Otis Gibson, a missionary to

the Chinese; they were the "first harvest of Japanese mission work in America in Chinatown, San Francisco."^[17]

The pattern in San Francisco was similar to religious work in Japan, where Caucasian missionaries spread the Gospel but converts quickly organized their own houses of worship, ordained native ministers, and proselytized as well. In the case of the immigrants, evangelism was mixed with social services, which met other needs of the newcomers. The Gospel Society, which met weekly on Saturday nights, charged a fee of twenty-five cents; its members studied the Bible, but they also practiced public speaking.^[18] The society made English lessons available to its members and found temporary lodging and employment for them. It soon moved to larger quarters in the basement of the Chinese Methodist Mission on Stockton Street. In 1881 the Gospel Society split, and an offshoot was organized on Tyler Street (later called Golden Gate Avenue). The Tyler Gospel Society became the Japanese YMCA, and from it the Japanese Church of Christ was formed. In 1884 the original Gospel Society was recognized as part of the Methodist Mission; two years later, it became the Methodist-Episcopal Mission. The Stevenson Gospel Society, which had begun its operations on Stevenson Street, merged with the Tyler group a few months later. These small mission efforts led to the formation of the Pine Methodist Church in 1886. A subgroup became the organized Church of Christ Presbyterian. Thus, all Japanese Christian groups in Northern California emerged from the same mother body, the Japanese Gospel Society.^[19]

Japanese Protestant churches slowly spread throughout the Bay Area. Under the leadership of Dr. Ernest A. Sturge, the Presbyterians organized their first church for the Japanese in San Francisco in 1885; it became the Christ United Presbyterian. The Protestant Episcopal Church established churches in San Francisco in 1895, and the Reverend Joseph Tsukamoto served the city for many years. The Sycamore Congregational Church was founded in Oakland in 1904 by the Reverend Shinjiro Okubo. The Free Methodists (who were, at this time, separate from other Methodists) established churches in the Berkeley-Richmond area and Redwood City; the Methodists united in 1939. The Reformed Church also located in

San Francisco. The Seventh Day Adventists founded churches in San Francisco and Oakland, and the Salvation Army, Japan Division, established a corps in San Francisco in 1918, led by Major Masasuke Kobayashi. During the 1930s it built a home on Laguna and Geary streets, to which the emperor of Japan donated money; his action stimulated donations among many Issei.^[20] These denominations and others soon spread among the immigrant Japanese communities throughout America, linking them to the broader Christian world and to some degree to the Caucasians who shared their faith, if not their houses of worship. Bay Area churches and missions encompassed the first significant numbers of Japanese Christians outside Japan.

The Buddhists were not far behind the Christians in extending religious work to the immigrants. They began missionary work in San Francisco in 1898, and a year later were founding groups throughout the Bay Area and in other places where Japanese had settled. The Berkeley Buddhist Church, founded in 1911, held its first services in private homes. It then moved to a hotel and finally dedicated its house of worship on Channing Way on February 13, 1921. The Buddhists—both those of the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA), who followed the Jodo Shinshu way, and those of the Nichiren sect—maintained closer ties with Japan than the Christians did, because they required ministers to be trained in Japan. Tom Kawaguchi recalled that although the largest Buddhist church in San Francisco was affiliated with the Nishi Honganji in Kyoto, there was also a Nichiren Buddhist church located on Pine Street. There was a Soto Zen temple in Japantown, and a Shinto shrine a few blocks away.^[21] The Buddhist Church of America began a training program for English-speaking ministers in 1930. Within a few years it had opened a headquarters in San Francisco and begun a program of lectures and correspondence courses to prepare prospective priests for study in Japan. Its mother temple was the Nishi Honganji in Kyoto.^[22] Like the Christians, the Buddhists established youth groups and Sunday schools to serve the growing Nisei population; in the 1930s the BCA sponsored an annual climb of Mount Tamalpais, across the Golden Gate in Marin County.^[23]

The location of the various churches gave evidence of the wide dispersal of the Japanese population in San Francisco: the YMCA was on Haight Street, the Methodist Episcopal on Pine near Larkin; the Fukuin Kai Gospel Society on Bush near Hyde, and the Buddhist on Polk near O'Farrell. By the time of the evacuation in 1942, Buddhist and Christian churches had been established in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, South Alameda County, and San Mateo, as well as further south on the peninsula, in the Central Valley, and Los Angeles. Shinto was also represented, but to a much smaller degree.

Kenjinkai , or prefectural associations, were also very important to the growing Japanese American community. They met social needs, serving as self-help organizations and instruments of social control. Tom Kawaguchi, who grew up in prewar San Francisco, recalled that when a Japanese ship docked, the sailors from Hiroshima Ken were entertained by the Hiroshima Kenjinkai; other associations did the same.^[24]

The early residents in San Francisco were a mixture of merchants, traders, and students. "Schoolboys" were students who made their living as domestics while attending classes. Many of the schoolboys came as bona fide workers, but there was an increasing number of students and shosei , pseudo-students "who came [only] to learn English and 'the ropes.' "^[25] Some of these were refused entry into the country after they were identified as political radicals by the local Japanese consul, who feared they could bring disrepute upon the Japanese American business community. The students, whatever their political orientation, came from a higher class than the laborers. Seizo Oka, a historian of the San Francisco Nikkei community, proposed that the arrival of an increasing number of less cultured laborers had much to do with the rise in prejudice against the Japanese. The early students were an elite and usually politically moderate or conservative group, and they were inoffensive, few in number, and unobtrusive.^[26] The relative lack of discrimination they encountered may have been due simply to the modesty of their numbers: there were only 148 Japanese in America according to the

census of 1880. As the numbers grew, the dedication of the Japanese to education diminished. As few as 900 of the 6,395 Japanese in the United States who came as students between 1867 and 1902 may actually have been studying.^[27]

These numbers are significant only when one realizes how few Japanese immigrants there were in America altogether. The following census figures give a picture of ethnic Japanese (who did not intend to be permanent immigrants) resident in the United States:^[28]

Drawn together by their common heritage, Japanese immigrants to San Francisco began to form a separate ethnic district of the city as early as the 1880s. Miyamoto pointed out that most Japanese Americans on the Pacific coast before World War II either lived in or were "in some fashion bound to a Japanese community and were significantly influenced by the affiliation,"^[29] and those in San Francisco were no exception. This grouping focused on businesses and services. A core group lived in the central area (which, as we will see, shifted over the years), but the population was somewhat dispersed, usually as a result of employment: newcomers who worked as domestics often resided with their employers.

Family structure was an essential component in the creation of a permanent ethnic culture. Like other immigrants, the Issei viewed America through the cultural perspective of their homeland, where family ties held society together. Neither Caucasian San Franciscans nor the Japanese immigrants favored intermarriage, which was, in any case, illegal. The Japanese government encouraged women to emigrate, in order to discourage men from resorting to

prostitutes, but few women actually left Japan unless they were already betrothed or married. In 1905, 22 percent of the Japanese population in Hawaii was female, in contrast to 7 percent of the mainland population.^[30] This unequal sex ratio (which included many males who were married but had either left their families in Japan or were awaiting their arrival in America) made for many lonely men, even among those who intended only to be "birds of passage," returning to Japan when they had earned enough money.

One solution to the problem was to import prostitutes. A 1910 Japanese study noted that there were 913 Japanese prostitutes in Honolulu and 371 in San Francisco. In countries such as the United States, where prostitution was theoretically illegal, these women were often smuggled into the country in barrels.^[31] Their lives were harsh in the extreme. Usually coerced into the practice or even sold by their parents, they were accepted by neither the white nor the traditional Japanese culture. The trade in prostitutes was supposedly ended with the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1908, which allowed only spouses, parents, and children of Japanese Americans to immigrate to America. After that year, Seattle at least had begun to disperse its colony of prostitutes; some were deported, while others went into the countryside. The situation in San Francisco is not as clear, but certainly by the 1920s the community had begun to develop a family-centered culture, entering the "settling period," as Miyamoto described it.^[32]

Between 1911 and 1920 women represented as much as 39 percent of all Japanese immigrants. Many came as picture brides; others were married conventionally either before the husband emigrated or while he was on a trip home. Picture brides entered into marriages that were arranged by exchanging photographs. The picture bride institution, which continued until 1921, was not unusual in a culture that commonly used a baishakunin (go-between) to negotiate between families that wanted to establish a marriage. These brides might accompany their husband to America or travel alone to meet him there, but whatever the circumstances, they found a new and unexpected world where the streets were not paved with gold and life was not easy. Often the spouse they met on arrival was neither as good-looking nor as wealthy as they had

been led to believe, and they entered upon a life of very hard work, especially if they had married a farmer. Their process of adjustment was as difficult as their husband's had been, if not more so.^[33]

The new brides were often considerably younger than their husbands, for men could not send for a wife until they themselves were financially established. Married Issei women's options were even more limited than the men's. Traditional Japanese culture dictated their inferior status in society, and little in their new circumstances conspired to change that. In the rural areas, as well as in the outlying nurseries and fields of the Bay Area, they often worked with their husbands, and couples in domestic work were both wage earners. As a couple, they earned little, but the woman brought in far less than her husband. Still, the women's primary tasks were to maintain the home and raise the children.

The family home attested to their presence. Miyamoto described how Issei Seattle homes combined American and Japanese elements, and the same was true of Nisei homes I visited in San Francisco in the late 1980s. Although Japanese was no longer the family tongue unless an elderly Issei grandparent lived there, Japanese foods, shoji screens, floral arrangements, and pictures were as evident as family shrines had been for an earlier generation. American appliances and luxuries came with increasing wealth and were more apparent in the 1980s than in the 1930s.^[34]

For many Issei women learning English was almost impossible, because they had no time to go to school and no regular contact with native English speakers. This situation tied them to their family and ethnic community for their entire lives. But it did not necessarily mean unhappiness: Chitose Manabe, an elderly Issei woman who resided in Berkeley not far from her daughter Fumi Hayashi and son-in-law Tad in 1988, could speak only broken English, but her life as mother, wife, and partner of a lay Christian leader, and even her camp internment, seemed to have brought a great sense of inner peace and contentment.^[35]

Children and parents also crossed the Pacific, creating a more normal family situation for many of the Issei males who now called America home.^[36] Some families came together; Bob Utsumi recalled that his grandfather on his father's side immigrated in 1901 with

his wife, infant son, and daughter. The two children returned to Japan for their education but came back to the United States, where Bob's father entered the University of California. The grandfather on his mother's side immigrated to Alameda in 1898, joining cousins who had come in the mid-1880s. He married a picture bride who came from the same prefecture in Japan. This long family history in the United States gave Bob the somewhat unusual distinction of being one of the few teenaged Sansei (third-generation Japanese Americans) to be interned at Topaz.^[37]

The Nisei, the first generation born in America, were U.S. citizens. They rapidly took their places in the ethnic world of San Francisco's Nihonmachi, which had established itself along Buchanan between Geary and Pine.^[38] Bilingual at least in part, they lived in a Japanese world of restaurants, Christian and Buddhist churches, public and Japanese-language schools, prefecture associations,^[39] and a growing Japanese business community filled with shops, hotels, newspapers, and other enterprises. Since Alameda County had become a flourishing nursery area, San Francisco developed a floral exchange; these flowers, sold on street-corner market stands, gave San Francisco its distinctive appearance. John Modell noted that restaurants were the first Japanese businesses to be opened in Los Angeles, and that may well have been the case in San Francisco.^[40] They usually served Japanese, Chinese, and American food, and catered to the Japanese community as well as other residents of the area.

Because the young Nisei often lived near or went to school with Caucasian children, their worlds were less segregated than those of their parents, but they too suffered the effects of discrimination by their peers. Tomoye Takahashi, who grew up in prewar San Francisco, recalled that she was never invited to class functions such as birthday parties or "anything that happened after school." She could still remember how lonely she was as a little girl. Even though she was allowed to bring a long jump rope to school, she could only turn the rope but not jump. She lived near Twin Peaks, not in

Japantown, and for her going to Japanese school after regular school was a joy because it meant being with other Nisei children.^[41]

The Nisei were truly Japanese Americans, growing up with one foot in each culture. For some their identity was determined by the degree to which they spoke Japanese and could communicate with parents who spoke little English, but other factors were also important: where in San Francisco they lived, what church they attended, and how much contact they had with white children. Racism was always present, but it affected the Nisei in different ways. For some it did not really become apparent until they had completed higher education and found that their job prospects were entirely limited to their ethnic community.

The Issei remained Japanese citizens, prohibited by the American government from becoming naturalized.^[42] Citizenship, once reserved for whites, had been extended to African Americans in 1870, but repeated challenges by Japanese aliens, including four who had served in the American armed forces in World War I, had been denied. The ultimate decision, rendered by the Supreme Court in Ozawa v. U.S. in 1922, was in the negative. No degree of Americanization, no amount of participation in the duties of a citizen, could override Berkeley resident Takao Ozawa's place of birth: Japan. This judgment was an expression of contempt born of the racism that eventually led to exclusion and the camps, but during the 1920s it was just something to be tolerated, like the Alien Land Laws. As Frank Miyamoto stressed, alien status not only made the Issei subject to economic hardship but also gave them a sense of being unwanted, unwelcome, permanent outsiders.^[43] Lack of citizenship was not, in the 1920s, an occasion for fear or outrage— rather, it was an aggravation. Fear came later.

Especially important to the lives of the Issei was the local Japanese Association, which was founded in San Francisco in 1900 and quickly spread to other major population centers.^[44] Later very controversial, the associations were originally established for the purpose of self-help and to intercede between the Issei and the

Caucasian world, particularly as racism and discrimination developed in northern California. The Japanese Associations were never nationally coordinated. At one point there was a national headquarters in San Francisco, several branches called "central bodies," which corresponded to the territorial boundaries of the different Japanese consulates, and a myriad of local associations.^[45] As John Modell pointed out, these were "expressions of solidary communal resistance to white hostility."^[46] Roger Daniels concluded that because of their very close ties to the Japanese government, they should be considered semiofficial organs of it,^[47] but their function was usually bureaucratic rather than governmental. The local association issued a certificate enabling an Issei to bring his bride (whether proxy or conventional) to the United States (before 1924), but it was also involved in issues as mundane as obtaining Japanese-language driving tests. The central body of the Japanese Associations met periodically in San Francisco. It occasionally protested to Japan that the $800 in savings that the Japanese government demanded an emigrant possess before it would issue a passport was exorbitant, but the organization was ineffective in changing this stipulation. The associations also attempted to protect immigrants against discrimination by whites. They served as agents of acculturation as well, urging Issei to become "Americanized" so they could keep a low social profile and not attract hostility.^[48] The importance of the Japanese Association in San Francisco did not diminish even as Issei developed more contacts with the Caucasian community, because it and the local East Bay associations continued to play an important role between the Issei and Japan.^[49]

Japanese San Francisco followed a pattern similar to the Nihonmachi in Seattle and Los Angeles, the other major West Coast urban centers where Nikkei (Americans of Japanese ancestry) settled. As in those communities, the many kenjinkai met to provide friendship and reinforce ties based on a common prefectural origin. The urban dwellers were increasingly a minority of their ethnic group in America, most of whom lived in rural areas and pursued an agricultural life.^[50] To outsiders the community appeared a crowded ethnic enclave, but to those inside it was safe, familiar, and secure. One resident after World War II recalled the old days, when

Nihonmachi had a "ghetto mentality" centered on the Japanese school and the churches: "We couldn't think beyond; the white world was completely beyond our understanding."^[51] To those who could have afforded better, it must have been confining as well as comforting, but for most it was simply home.

From the beginning of the twentieth century, San Francisco became increasingly the hub of Japanese America, and the economic institutions of the community grew apace. Most Japanese entered America through its port, and its Nihonmachi quickly became the most important. The Japanese consul general was headquartered there.^[52] Two Japanese banks, the Japanese American and the Golden Gate, were opened in 1905, only to fail the next year after the earthquake. The population before the earthquake has been estimated at over 10,000, but it dispersed considerably in the months that followed.^[53] Those who did not live in Japantown— perhaps half the population—were live-in domestic servants, residing in servants' quarters in such luxurious areas as Pacific Heights, but they too shopped, attended church and language schools, and frequented the Japanese Association in Nihonmachi. There were also Japantowns in Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley, and Richmond. Until 1907 the Bay Area, Sacramento, and the upper San Joaquin Valley were the areas where the Japanese population was growing most quickly, but after that year more people moved to the south because of growing discrimination against Nikkei in northern California.^[54]

Hotels were perhaps the most important business establishments serving the Japanese pouring into San Francisco, since a place to stay was essential. The first, constructed between 1885 and 1890, consisted of a few small boardinghouses on Stockton Street in the Chinatown district. Somewhat larger boardinghouse hotels were built next; they served the many single men in the community. Proximity to the waterfront was an asset for businesses that catered to the new arrivals, but after Chinatown was destroyed in the earthquake and the fire, new hotels were built in the South Park

district, a block south of Market Street yet still near the waterfront. It became, as Karl Yoneda recalled, a thriving little Japantown with many hotels and stores, the former filled in winter with single male farm workers who wintered in San Francisco until the spring planting began.^[55]

One family that successfully established a hotel in Chinatown was the Kitanos. Years later Chizu, one of the daughters, recalled that her father, Motoji, immigrated in 1905, when he was eighteen, just in time to see the earthquake and fire. Because he came from a very poor family and wanted to send money back to Japan, he was willing to work hard. After farming in different northern California communities, he finally leased a hotel in San Francisco and in 1913 was successful enough to marry a picture bride, who was chosen for him by his family in Japan. Kou Yuki Kitano was twenty-three when she arrived in San Francisco. Kou was at first discouraged to see how different Motoji was from his portrayal of himself as a successful businessman. Her life was hard, and it did not become easier as the family grew to include five daughters and two sons. The Kitanos remained in Chinatown after other hotel owners moved on. The parents knew little English, and their children interceded between them and the white world. Motoji learned enough English to get by, but Kou, who remained at home with the children and hence had little interaction with Caucasians, learned very little. The children acted as intermediaries between their parents and not only the Caucasian community but also the Chinese world around them.^[56] Chinese resistance kept most Japanese from returning when Chinatown was rebuilt after the fire: the Kitano family was a rather rare exception.

Most other Japanese residents moved to South Park and then to the Fillmore district, which soon became the heart of the Japanese colony in the city. This area was described by one former resident as "set apart from the surrounding area by its overhead, dome shaped main street lights extending the whole length of the town for nearly twenty blocks."^[57] By 1922 most of the stores and hotels that catered to the Japanese community were in the Fillmore; South Park died out when Japanese immigration ceased in 1924 with the passage of the National Origins Act.^[58] I n 1940 Nikkei operated

sixteen hotels and nineteen apartment houses in the district. They also had five hotels in the Chinatown area and nine in South Park. In general, the facilities were spartan; only the Yamato Hotel was an exception, for it catered to wealthy visitors from Japan. Most of the guests were poor young men, anxious to earn money for their families in Japan, and often San Francisco was just a way-station to the rich agricultural areas of the Central Valley.

Although the hotels and restaurants served a basically Japanese clientele, they were usually leased from Caucasian owners. The leaseholders made little more than a subsistence income from them, but their presence was vital to the Nikkei community in the city. They not only provided food and lodging; those along the waterfront and on the fringes of Chinatown also served as general employment agencies for the immigrants, as boardinghouse operators did elsewhere in the country.^[59]

The proprietors obtained jobs for farm laborers and railroad workers, but they also hired out young men for schoolboy jobs as domestics. These youths worked for board and room with families while they attended school and learned English. By 1909 there were an estimated 2,000 Japanese domestics in San Francisco, most of them schoolboys. This number was half what it had been a few years earlier, but the more mobile and ambitious moved on to better jobs as soon as they could.^[60] They were succeeded by immigrant wives, who similarly took jobs in homes to learn American ways as well as English. Male domestics continued to work as servants and cooks. Those who "lived in" made $75-$85 before the evacuation, and those who had their own residences earned $125 a month or more. Women received about $10 less than men. Gradually the workers became specialized, washing windows, cooking, tending children, or doing laundry work. Morgan Yamanaka recalled that his parents had worked as domestics and lived in with a wealthy family in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco. Their place of residence was of some benefit to Morgan and his brother A1, who were able to attend Lowell High School. To him

the scholastic standards of the high school partially offset the discrimination of his white classmates.^[61] Other Issei worked by day or took work to do at home. The schoolboy or schoolgirl worker still persisted, doing three or four hours of work while attending school.^[62]

Domestic work was one of the most common forms of labor available to the new arrivals. Issei had only to be clean, neat, and reliable to win the favor of their employers. Not everyone could do it, however. Wakako Adachi recalled that her husband, Isaburo, who immigrated to San Francisco in 1897 at the age of twenty-five, took a job as a houseboy. He had worked in a bank in Tokyo before his departure and knew nothing of housework. Hired as a cook, he was asked to bake some biscuits. "Those that didn't turn out were enough to fill a sack," Mrs. Adachi related; when Isaburo realized the enormity of his failure he left the house at night "like a robber," carrying the sack full of inedible biscuits over his shoulder. The incident became a fond memory for the Adachis years later when they were successfully operating a nursery in El Cerrito.^[63]

Most Issei were very successful as domestics. Their value as employees was acknowledged by many employers who wanted to get "their" Japanese back from camp when the war ended. Many Caucasians regarded the Japanese they knew from a lifetime of good service as an important commodity, especially in a world where domestic workers were increasingly scarce or, if available at all, African American. The employment service manager of Topaz estimated in 1945 that 20 percent of the prewar adult Issei population of San Francisco had done domestic work of some kind, living with a Caucasian family, and another 20 percent had been engaged part-time or by the hour. However, this labor was almost exclusively an Issei occupation, for the Nisei were better educated and generally very ambitious, and neither they nor their parents wished them to continue in such a low-status or low-paying job.^[64]

Since the Japanese quickly gained a reputation for reliability, they were soon also in demand as chauffeurs, chefs, caterers, and gardeners.^[65] Gardening, in particular, was prized, for working with the soil had status in Japanese culture. The Japanese gardener, who

was skilled and creative, became a feature of California life that continued after the war. Most gardeners worked on the peninsula, where estates had large gardens; few residences in San Francisco had enough land to support a full-scale garden.

It was not gardening, however, but domestic service by schoolboys that caused problems. In 1893 the San Francisco School Board resolved that Nisei school children should attend the segregated Chinese (or Oriental) school. Since Issei working as domestics resided all over the city with their families, this decision caused much hardship. The officials were ostensibly concerned because the "schoolboys" domestics were occasionally much older than the other students in the class and were attending solely to learn English. After the Japanese consul, Chinda Sutemi, protested, the order was quietly rescinded. There were too few Japanese in San Francisco at the time for their numbers to be really noticeable or to provoke a serious outbreak of Japanophobia. But that situation quickly changed.

The numbers of immigrants began to increase dramatically at the turn of the century, and local politicians seized the issue. On May 7, 1902, a large anti-Japanese meeting was held in San Francisco.^[66] It was the first major outpouring of racist sentiment; the disaster of earthquake and fires in 1906 brought another. White gangs assaulted Japanese shops and stores, despite the aid given to earthquake victims by Japan.^[67] Out of such racist incidents arose the beginning of the movement to remove the community from San Francisco, the jewel by the bay, to Topaz, the concentration camp known sarcastically as the jewel of the desert.

The rest of the Issei community also developed around a service-oriented economy. Between 1900 and 1909, the number of Japanese businesses in San Francisco grew from 90 to 545, the vast majority of them small. A survey of Japanese enterprises in Cali-

fornia in 1909 revealed that 58 percent had capital investments of less than one thousand dollars, and 55 percent of the proprietors operated without hired help.^[68] The Nikkei met their own needs by producing specialty products like tofu (bean curd) or miso (soybean paste), and occasionally groceries for the larger Caucasian community. Issei who moved beyond the domestic work force were limited by the hostility of the all-white labor unions toward nonwhite workers. Their fears were expressed in terms of concern about the willingness of the newly arrived to accept lower wages, but primarily they arose from racism, pure and simple. Prohibited from joining unions or entering industry, Japanese had either to become self-employed or to work for established Issei businessmen.^[69] Ronald Takaki identified the creation of a separate Japanese economy and community as a process that made "America a society of greater cultural diversity."^[70] It may have been, but progress up the economic ladder was slow or nonexistent, for the competition of the white community effectively squeezed them out.

The laundry and dry-cleaning businesses, which were established in the decade between 1910 and 1920, demonstrated such a pattern. The laundry industry began in 1895 in Tiburon, across the Golden Gate in Marin County, where an Issei established the first Japanese laundry in the state. After four hard years the owner moved to the Mission district of San Francisco. He competed with both Caucasians and Chinese, but the former were the more insidious. They formed the Anti-Jap Laundry League to challenge him, and for several years before the earthquake he was imprisoned weekly for violating an ordinance regulating the operation of steam boilers. Although the anonymous Japanese laundryman apparently helped his Caucasian neighbors by letting them draw water from his well after the disasters, he did not earn their friendship.^[71]

Within a few years other Japanese laundries had sprung up, but harassment by Caucasian competitors did not cease. The number of Chinese laundries, also victims of persecution, dropped from 300 in 1900 to 100 in 1920. Japanese laundries were penalized by an obscure city statute requiring block residents to sign a petition

supporting the efforts of an enterprise to locate there. The pioneer laundryman found that even those who had enjoyed his water would not sign his petition. However, he was able to borrow money and buy a new location in the business section of the city. He survived the Depression and his future seemed secure. Then came the evacuation, and the loss of all he had gained.^[72]

Japanese also went into the dry cleaning and dyeing business, some as early as the end of the nineteenth century. It was at first a sideline for laundries and tailor shops but became a separate operation, ideally suited to established Issei and their newly arrived wives. The Japanese Dry Cleaners Association, which dated from the earthquake and developed out of an earlier, looser-knit organization, was one of the most influential and powerful Japanese business organizations at the time of the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915. It functioned in economic matters, setting prices and maintaining harmony with Caucasian cleaners and American labor unions, and it also controlled the number of Nikkei dry cleaners in the city, keeping the membership "in the family" of the Japanese American community. Even the few businesses not part of the association apparently abided by its strictures.^[73] The Issei favored this occupation for several reasons. It required only a limited knowledge of English, since conversations with customers were not extensive and good service and a cordial manner were more important than language ability. The business did not require a large initial capitalization, especially as shops were often acquired from close friends or relatives.

As the older generation retired, the Nisei gradually moved into the trade. The membership of the association was 40 percent Nisei by 1941. Like laundries, dry cleaning establishments were usually family-run. The cleaning was sent out to a wholesaler who did the actual cleaning, while the shop owner did the ironing and often sidelined in tailoring, alterations, and mending. As the Nisei took over they expanded the businesses, most of which had a steady Caucasian as well as Nikkei clientele. In the years just before World War II, most of the wholesale cleaning for association members was done by a Japanese wholesaler in San Francisco and one in San Mateo.^[74] The Japanese Americans built a solid business

based on good service and a willingness to do a bit more for their customers than the Caucasian cleaners did, and they prospered from it.

The experiences of the laundries and dry cleaning shops were duplicated in the other businesses in which the Japanese residents of San Francisco specialized. Perhaps the most outstanding Nikkei enterprise was the plant nursery. The damp, moist, and temperate climate of the Bay Area was ideally suited to flower cultivation, and the growers produced flowers for both the adjacent rural areas and the city, where they were sold on street corner stands and shops. Kenji Fujii recalled that his father immigrated in 1909, when he was in his late teens. Although he came from a wealthy family, his father was a second son, and his prospects were not auspicious. After working for a well-to-do Caucasian family near San Jose, he acquired enough money to return to Japan to find a wife and married someone known to his family (they actually passed each other on the Pacific and only married after he returned to America). The Fujiis went into the nursery business in Hayward and were able to buy land despite the Alien Land Laws because of the assistance of the lawyer Guy Calden, who helped them put it in the name of a family corporation.^[75]

Flower vendors were not the only businesses whose merchandise appealed to both the white and the Asian community. During the 1910s trading companies were established, along with curio shops and art goods stores.^[76] These dealers handled dry goods, china-ware, toys, lacquer wares, vases, rugs, ornaments, and other curios. Few Caucasians were aware that the four blocks of Chinatown adjacent to the entry to Grant Avenue were owned by Japanese Americans until the evacuation. The shops in this section sold high-quality art goods, antiques, and Asian clothing. During the prewar years the Japanese section of the street was considered the

most picturesque, in contrast to the rest, which was filthy and dangerous.^[77] Japanese merchandising in Chinatown dated to 1890, when several stores were leased by Japanese who located there because of its proximity to the piers where ships from Asia docked. Since most Issei merchants left the street after the earthquake, by the time of the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, only about twelve Japanese art goods stores were located there. Two of the oldest were Daibutsu and Shiota.^[78]

The Japanese in the art goods business competed constantly with both Caucasians and Chinese. However, the Nikkei sold mainly to tourists, while Caucasian department stores that handled such merchandise cultivated the local white clientele. Chinese and Japanese merchants on Grant Avenue were highly competitive with each other. Chinese merchants even resorted to picketing the Japanese stores in an effort to drive patrons away, but to no avail.^[79] Both ethnic groups suffered in the Depression, but after that setback the profitable trade resumed.^[80]

Commercial fishing out of San Francisco was one of the least known but most profitable enterprises conducted by Nisei and some Issei.^[81] Although it was not as large or significant as in Los Angeles or Monterey, it employed 150 Nisei before the war, assisted by some of the Issei who had begun it during the 1920s. The season was year-round, limited only by the weather, which cut it to fifteen or eighteen days a month. The Issei had originally leased boats, but by the 1930s they owned them outright. Unlike other Japanese American industries, the fishing industry was unionized. The Nikkei belonged to the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which was more sympathetic to them than the American Federation of Labor (both unions were involved in this trade). The Japanese were too few in number to arouse Caucasian fishermen's hostilities. The only real competition was with the mainly alien Italians, who were even lower on the social scale than the Japanese. The losses of the fishermen during the evacuation were substantial.^[82]

Other small enterprises kept the less virtuous entertained. Gambling was a frequent diversion for Japanese laborers, especially in the countryside, and in the city pool halls provided much pleasure. There were forty-one in San Francisco in 1912. Japanese bar-restaurants also entertained lonely men; there barmaids "served them familiar foods and spoke Japanese with charm and traditional deference."^[83]

Japanese-language newspapers were important to the community as sources of information for the Issei and a means to hold the dispersed population together. In 1925 Kyutaro Abiko began publishing English-language news in the Nichi Bei , and a year later he began publishing the Japanese American Weekly . These papers and the Shin Sekai communicated news of the Nikkei in the city and reported in Japanese on political developments, such as the alien land ownership controversy, that affected their readers. The Nisei organization that preceded the Japanese American Citizens League published an all-English semimonthly publication, the Nikkei Shimin , which soon became the Pacific Citizen . It has published continuously since the 1930s, as a voice for the citizen Nisei and as a statement of the intensely pro-American views the JACL would adopt. The Shin Sekai went bankrupt during the Depression and closed before the war. The Nichi Bei was the only Japanese American paper to publish continuously until the evacuation; Nisei editor Yasuo Abiko was arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents immediately after Pearl Harbor, but they allowed him to continue publishing the paper so the government could communicate its instructions to the Nikkei until they had all been removed.^[84]

During the 1920s the community was modestly prosperous. Oscar Hoffman noted in a report to the War Relocation Authority in 1943 that "real estate men sought Japanese clients. American banks sought Japanese customers. The Anglo California National Bank was the first to employ a Japanese. The Bank of America and the

American Trust Bank opened branches in Fillmore Street to give accommodations to Japanese."^[85] Hoffman also reported that the Salvation Army Building, the YMCA, the YWCA, and the Buddhist Church were constructed during this time, signs of community prosperity. The population was estimated at around two thousand families.^[86]

Economic ties between the Nikkei and the Caucasians were very important, but there were also institutional connections. Young Japanese Americans became involved with the work of the American Red Cross, the Community Chest, and the Boy Scouts of America. Participation in a Boy Scout troop was very significant in the lives of many Nisei youths, and as they grew older they themselves led troops. Tad Hayashi of Berkeley and Tom Kawaguchi of San Francisco not only participated in scouting but led Scout troops themselves when they returned to the Bay Area after the war.^[87] Support for the Red Cross, which continued even when the Nikkei were interned, was both a social outlet and the indication of a desire to be responsible members of the community.

Education was very important to the community, for Issei expected their children to do well and viewed schooling as a means of economic and social advancement. Some parents became involved in the Parent-Teacher Association, which helped them to aid their children's progress in school. The language barrier prevented many from taking such a role, however, since the teachers were all Caucasian.^[88] Many Nisei attended local colleges and universities. Chizu Kitano Iiyama remembered how important education was for her family; her parents urged all the children to do their best in school, and they spent many hours in the local public library.^[89]

The Japanese American community was stratified according to economic achievement, religion, intellectual interests, prefecture of origin in Japan, and other factors. The white-collar workers topped the pyramid, followed by shopkeepers, farmers, and semiskilled and unskilled workers. In differentiating on the basis of religious preference, recreational activities, political beliefs, and place of origin, the Nikkei were scarcely different from the larger Caucasian

community.^[90] Even as early as 1927 Karl Yoneda had noticed that agricultural workers were "at the bottom of the totem pole in the Japanese community."^[91]

This rosy picture was not the only side of the story, of course. Discrimination against the Japanese began almost as soon as the first immigrants landed on American shores. San Francisco had been a focal point for prejudice against the Chinese, and it spread easily to the Japanese. In July 1870 the first large anti-Asian mass meeting in the nation was held in the city, preceded by a torchlight parade and followed by speeches against the Chinese. The labor movement that grew out of the anti-Chinese agitation was for many years the most outspoken group in its racism. Throughout the decade of the 1870s there were anti-Chinese mass meetings and a series of discriminatory ordinances were passed. The Working-men's Party, headed by Dennis Kearney, campaigned on the slogan "The Chinese Must Go."^[92] The agitation culminated in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

Prejudice against the Issei began where that against the Chinese had left off, but there were few incidents before 1900. Yamato Ichihashi recorded one episode in 1887 and another in 1890, when fifteen Japanese cobblers were attacked by members of the shoemakers' union; this forced the Japanese to leave the trade. White workers demanding the renewal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was due to expire in 1902, quickly extended their hatred to the Japanese and urged Congress to ban them as well. This new "yellow peril" was even more threatening than the earlier version, for the Issei had partially adopted American economic practices and hence were perceived as more competition to whites than the Chinese were. The California state government also responded to Caucasian agitation, urging Japanese exclusion as early as 1901. The Asiatic Exclusion League took up the cry, and the rhetoric of hate escalated.^[93]

San Francisco Mayor James Duval Phelan was a major figure in the campaign against the Japanese, launching a tirade of abuse in

the spring of 1900 that he continued for some thirty years. He claimed the Japanese, like the Chinese before them, were inassimilable, "not the stuff of which American citizens [could] be made."^[94] As Frank Miyamoto pointed out with respect to Seattle, the exclusion of the Issei from various economic opportunities as well as their residential segregation had the effect of producing a close-knit community that might well appear to outsiders as "inassimilable."^[95] Widespread protest against the Nikkei soon spread throughout San Francisco, based on racism with an economic motivation as well; laborers feared that the Japanese would take jobs from lower-class whites and work for next to nothing. The outcry against the Japanese raged for a few years; they nearly became targets in the drive to renew the Chinese Exclusion Act but then were ignored for tactical reasons. The agitation briefly died down, reappearing in 1905.^[96] Since San Francisco was the largest urban center of the state's Japanese population, the hostility was labor-based and virtually restricted to the city, with the lone exception of Fresno, in the Central Valley, where Chester H. Rowell of the Fresno Republican also took up the cudgels.^[97]

Overt discrimination also began against the very few Japanese American children in the public schools.^[98] A local school board crisis extended beyond its original scope because of the implications it had for American relations with Japan. The latter nation had become a power to contend with in the Pacific, particularly after its victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, and its citizens abroad commanded attention from Tokyo, which was concerned that they be treated with respect. On October 11, 1906, the San Francisco School Board, responding to local pressures, tried to force Japanese, Chinese, and Korean students to enroll in a segregated school. President Theodore Roosevelt attempted to assure the Meiji government, which championed the rights of the Issei, that he disapproved of San Francisco's position. But the president, almost as racist as the Californians, had to pacify both Japan and the San Franciscans. He scolded the latter and deployed federal troops in the city to protect the Japanese; and he also urged Congress to accept the Japanese. But even though he asked for the same fair treatment that was due European immigrants, he himself believed

that the whites were, in fact, a superior race. The school board's desire to segregate a few students was basically a call for immigration restriction, and it did force Roosevelt to act. The president began to negotiate an agreement with Japan contingent upon a cessation of discriminatory legislation in the state. Each house of the California state legislature passed anti-Japanese legislation in 1907 aimed specifically at Issei land ownership, but no one piece was approved by both houses. Roosevelt tried to deter the Californians from passing legislation even more offensive to Tokyo because he realized the necessity of heading off a crisis. By skillful and delicate negotiations he concluded the Gentleman's Agreement in 1907-8.^[99]

The agreement was the product of more than one and a half years of painstaking diplomacy. The Japanese agreed not to issue passports for workers to go to the United States (in return for which America agreed not to let U.S. workers emigrate to Japan). It did not prohibit Japanese Americans from returning from visits to Japan, and wives (whether picture brides or other), children, and parents could still immigrate. Thus, the agreement "served to irritate further the already raw nerves of the Californians and by its very nature was almost bound to do so."^[100] Since it did not totally exclude the Japanese, it was unsatisfactory to the xenophobic Californians. The Exclusionist League continued its agitation, and the San Francisco Examiner and the other newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst picked up the issue. But the focus of anti-Japanese agitation moved from San Francisco to the rural areas of the state, and the emphasis shifted from schoolrooms to immigration and land ownership. Immigration was an issue that festered for nearly two decades, but the issue of land ownership seemed resolved by California's passage of the Alien Land Law of 1913 and subsequent legislation.^[101]

Japanophobes suggested simple solutions to the legal issues of land ownership and immigration restriction. They favored the enactment of legislation on either the state or the federal level that would prohibit aliens ineligible to citizenship (thus, Japanese, by definition) from owning land. The legislation provoked considerable protest from the Issei community and the Japanese govern-

ment, but the Nikkei soon found ways around it. The Issei initially had to accept three-year leases and move from property to property, but later they put their land in the names of corporations in which they held substantial interest, until their children came of age (as with the Fujii family of Hayward). Then the land was held in the names of their Nisei children. The alien land law was renewed in 1920 in a much harsher form, outlawing the leasing of land or its acquisition by minors, and a subsequent amendment made farming even more difficult, but the Issei were not without friends. Sympathetic Caucasian lawyers like the Fujiis' friend Guy Calden assisted them by purchasing shares in land they held.

Immigration, however, was a federal matter. The exclusionists saw many defects in the Gentleman's Agreement, but the time was not ripe to reopen the issue. During World War I, Japan was allied to Great Britain and associated with the United States in fighting the Central Powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their allies. Legislation against the Issei would have been awkward, given the nation's preoccupation with winning the war as quickly as possible. But the determination of West Coast Japanophobes to remove the Nikkei from the United States was only dormant, not dead.^[102]

The year 1920 was an election year, and once again Japanese exclusion surfaced as a major issue. A reorganized Japanese Exclusion League mobilized its forces and a stronger alien land law was passed in California (although not necessarily enforced). Temporary restrictions had been enacted in 1917 and 1920 to bar Asians other than Japanese from immigrating, but the exclusionists desired a permanent solution—not the elimination of Asians in America but the elimination of "economic gain through Asian migrant labor and dependency."^[103] They were led by central Californians, including former senator Hiram Johnson and former publisher V. S. McClatchy.^[104] The negotiation of the "Ladies' Agreement" in 1921 ended the entry of picture brides. In 1922 the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Takao Ozawa that Japanese, regardless of their qualifications, were aliens ineligible to citizenship.^[105] With the principle of the seeming inferiority of the Nikkei now established by the highest court in the land, the exclusionists

were strengthened in their convictions and determined to end the matter forever by barring further immigration from Japan.

The unhappy story of the 1924 immigration bill has often been recounted. The legislation originally postulated a quota system, long advocated by Japanophile Sidney L. Gulick and others, to be based on the number of immigrants of that nationality residing in the United States in 1890. Under such a system Japan, which at that time had only 2,039 nationals in America, would have been eligible for some 100 immigrants a year, a minimal and negligible allowance, yet one that would have allowed the proud nation to save face. It seemed that the bill would pass in that form when a disaster occurred. Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes asked the Japanese Ambassador Hanihara Masanao to write the U.S. Senate about Japan's reactions, and his response was misinterpreted by that body as an insult. Japan's warning that exclusion would have "grave consequences" became a club with which Senator Henry Cabot Lodge bludgeoned the quota system to death.^[106] The National Origins Act of 1924, an act of "studied international insolence," had grave consequences indeed.^[107] In addition to its effect on international relations, it relegated all Japanese, both Issei and Nisei, to a seemingly permanent inferior status in the United States.

Oscar Hoffman, writing the history of Japanese American enterprises in San Francisco and the Bay Area for the edification of the War Relocation Authority's second director, Dillon Myer, did not comment on the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924. Instead, the Topaz community analyst noted that the period 1920-41 was a time "when Japanese capitalized on the fruits of their earlier labor and savings." However, he did not hesitate to call the Japanese American area of San Francisco a "colony," and he seemed amazed at how many churches were located there. He pointed out that the thriving Japanese catered to the "American" trade with curio and arts stores, laundries, restaurants, florists, and embroidery shops.^[108]

Nisei historian Ronald Takaki painted a more accurate picture of Nikkei life after 1924. Embittered, despairing, and angry, the Issei turned inward. Some returned to Japan. Others became stoic, muttering shikata ga nai , it can't be helped. Those who had not married before 1924 now found that there were no available spouses; they could not bring wives from Japan, and almost no unmarried Japanese women were left. The very successful few, such as the "potato king" George Shima, recognized that their lives and fortunes were tied to California. Even George Shima was discriminated against, despite his wealth, when he bought housing in a wealthy area of Berkeley in 1909. The less prosperous realized that their success was bound to that of their children, who could be educated and Americanized and act as their intermediaries. Nisei had become the majority of the Nikkei population by 1930.^[109]

The legislation of the 1920s only governed the larger issues of Japanese American existence in the Bay Area. Daily examples of racism were not affected by it, for these had occurred from the very beginning. For example, even as they were recovering from the 1906 earthquake some San Franciscans physically attacked individual Japanese. They did not distinguish between local victims and distinguished travelers and even stoned a group of visiting Japanese scientists inspecting earthquake damage.^[110] In the decades that followed, discrimination and prejudice took a slightly more subtle course. Racial covenants prevented the Nikkei from moving out of the various Nihonmachi throughout the state. Farmers in the East Bay and on the peninsula were often unable to obtain any but the most undesirable land to cultivate, which they often converted with great effort into level and productive gardens. Japanese were charged exorbitant rents, even though they often improved the owners' orchards by intercropping the land, planting vegetables between the rows of trees.^[111]

Discrimination hurt most the educated and the enterprising. The Nisei often excelled in school, spurred on by eager parents like the elder Kitanos, but graduates found that even advanced degrees from Stanford or the University of California would not qualify them for positions higher than running a fruitstand. Only 25 per-

cent of the 161 Nisei graduates of the University of California between 1925 and 1935 found employment in the professions for which they had been educated. ^[112] Those who became businessmen were subject to harassment, intimidation, and ruthless competition. The only ones spared were the very young, who lived in a Nikkei world where their playmates were just like themselves.

The Depression struck San Francisco and the Bay Area as it did the rest of the nation. For people at the bottom of the economic ladder, it was apparent in small ways: less call for domestic workers, fewer buyers for flowers, less work for farm laborers. As Roger Daniels noted, the Depression was not as severe for Japanese America, in part because the Pacific coast states were not as hard hit as the rest of the country. Since many businesses were small and owner-operated, they were able to survive. Japanese who worked for the American branches of Japanese trading companies also were secure, but they had long been relegated to positions at the bottom of the ladder and denied economic advancement by the Japanese, who considered them second-class and refused them positions in management. A few Japanese Americans had been able to secure jobs in civil service, and they also had secure employment.^[113]

But the greatest change during the 1930s was in the nation's rising perception of Japan as a growing military threat. John Modell noted the rise of nativism in Los Angeles, which was manifested in a fear of fifth-column activities rather than the previous fear of economic competition. He cited as an example the passage of a law in 1931 forbidding the employment of aliens on public works.^[114] Most Americans sided with China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1937, and many joined in a boycott of Japanese-made goods.

On the surface San Francisco's Nihonmachi looked calm, even prosperous—much more so than Los Angeles' beleaguered community. On January 1, 1989, the Hokubei Mainichi (called The Progressive News before the war) published a special supplement entitled "A Walk Through Japantown—1935," which gave a detailed picture of life in prewar Japanese San Francisco. Based on a

2.
Japanese Towns of San Francisco Based on maps prepared by Seizo Oka.

1935 survey of ethnic minorities by Paul Radin, an anthropologist at the University of California, the lengthy but anonymous article traced each block of Japantown, identifying all the stores and shops by trade and even supplying owners' names when it could. The title called the area "Japantown," since that is the name by which it has been known since the 1950s, but the text referred to it as "Japanese town," the name by which the local population knew it. A detailed map accompanied the story. The types of Japanese businesses differed little from those of the 1920s, but some details about the community were particularly interesting. A grocery store, the Dupont Company, on Geary Street, was run by a widow and her son, who delivered to all parts of the city, serving customers who were scattered and preferred to order by phone. Other shops on Geary included a jewelry and dry goods store that had been in business for twenty-five years, a coal yard, a beer parlor, a hotel and rooming house, and a confectionery store called Benkyodo that sold Japanese sweets, which had made all the tea cakes sold by the Japanese concession at the Chicago Century of Progress World's Fair. Benkyodo was owned by Sueichi Okamura, who also had been in business for twenty-five years. There was a garage run by a Caucasian, a laundry, a dry cleaners, and then a beer parlor—a particularly "notorious place"—next door to a transfer and draying company run by S. Hikoichi Shimamoto and his younger brother, George Gentoku Shimamoto. George was a college graduate who specialized in Japanese architecture and whose talents would help to beautify both Tanforan and Topaz. A few blocks down was a newspaper, The New World , one of three Japanese newspapers in San Francisco, which all suffered from competition with one another. Next was the Candy Kitchen, whose owner was the only Japanese maker of Western candy. Then there was a pool parlor owned by a Caucasian, a Japanese barbershop, and a restaurant featuring parties and sake, "wine, women and song." The author noted it had been hard-hit by the Depression. The restaurant was next door to a bird store that had recently been raided by narcotics agents, who found a cache of drugs there. The Hokubei Asahi Daily News was nearby, staffed in part by workers who had walked out on strike from the Japanese American News . A row of tenements

was followed by a tailor and a store selling fishing rods. At Webster Street, the Japanese district ended.^[115]

There were non-Japanese establishments in the area, but very few. Ace Restaurant was run by a Japanese but catered to African Americans and some whites. A Chinese laundry existed next to a Japanese drugstore. At the end of Webster Street was a chimney-cleaning shop, a "Negro" church, a restaurant, a Japanese gymnasium, and a grocery store. A Filipino barbershop was next to a "shady" hotel, Nishikawa Rooming, "with its unmistakable red sign reading 'Rooms.'" Further down was a restaurant specializing in fresh eel from Japan. A fish store was run by Kiichiro Murai and legally owned by his son Hajime; it did a thriving business. Down the street was a dry goods store, Nichi Bei Bussan, owned by Shojiro Tatsuno. Nakagawa's Shohin Kan was across the street; Tatsuno and Nakagawa once had been partners but had become competitors after a misunderstanding. A small vegetable store was tended by Mrs. Nakata while her husband delivered his wares all over the city. A landmark of the area then and now, fifty years later, was Soko Hardware, owned by Masayasu Ashizawa. Both Nichi Bei Bussan and Soko Hardware survived the evacuation because sympathetic property owners helped the Japanese proprietors reestablish their businesses.^[116]

There were also carpentry businesses, the office of the night police patrol, jewelry shops, chop suey houses, camera stores, a printing shop, doctors' offices, a bookstore, a bath house, opticians, and pharmacies. The author of the Hokubei Mainichi article noted that a cash grocery in the area deliberately kept prices low on its non-Asian merchandise to keep customers from going to the nearby Fillmore shopping district, a major competition for small ethnic businesses. ^[117]

Geary and Post were the main shopping streets, but Sutter, Bush, Pine, Laguna, Buchanan, and Webster, the cross streets, also held a number of Japanese businesses. The American Fish Market was an important location, and so was the employment office. There were many fiats on Sutter Street, as well as a new YWCA; Japanese tenants shared rooms with African Americans and Filipinos, and further down Japanese and Caucasians were neighbors. The Jap-

anese Language Institute and the new home of the Japanese American News also were there, but the largest Japanese-language school in the country was on Bush Street. One of the largest goldfish hatcheries in the region, Nippon Goldfish Company, owned by Tadayasu Murata, was nearby. The new Zenshu Sokoji Buddhist Temple was on Bush, occupying a building that was formerly a Jewish synagogue; it was the first formal temple the Buddhists owned in San Francisco. On Pine Street were two smaller Buddhist churches, a Nichiren and the San Francisco Buddhist church affiliated with the Nishi Honganji. Mixed in were Japanese and Caucasian residences, and according to the reminiscences of Tom Kawaguchi, a few modest houses of prostitution. The Japanese Catholic Church was on Octavia, and it included a school, an auditorium, and a residence. The Christ United Presbyterian Church was also located on that street. On Laguna Street was the office of the Japanese Association of San Francisco; further down was the office of the Japanese Association of America, not far from the Japanese Salvation Army. Buchanan was the busiest street, next to Post; it held a full complement of shops, including candy stores, restaurants, the Seiko Kai church, a bookstore, and a Japanese nightclub. A large vacant lot on the street was the projected site of the Japanese branch of the YMCA.^[118] There were also branches of Japanese import-export firms as well as branches of Japanese banks. This was urban Japanese America, a far cry from the stoop-labor communities of the rural ethnic West.

The pattern of Nikkei prosperity, if such it was, was uneven. The description of Japanese town in 1935 in the Hokubei Mainichi contained few references to the economic crisis of the 1930s, except to note the occasional restaurant or shop that had failed. John Hada's father's art and dry goods store folded in the early 1930s, and he went to work for the Oriental Department of Gump's department store.^[119] Other businesses, such as the laundries— especially those that were perceived as threats by the Caucasian community—had to cope with intense competition throughout the

period. There were twenty-eight sizable laundries in the Bay Area at the time of the evacuation, the two largest located in Oakland. They did wholesale work for fifty Chinese laundries and serviced hospitals, restaurants, and hotels. The Oakland operations did more work individually than the two largest Japanese laundries in San Francisco did jointly. Their work forces were unionized in 1939 without any ensuing labor problems.^[120] The dry cleaners also prospered, grossing over $1 million of business annually.^[121]

The art and curio dealers on Grant Avenue seemed to thrive despite bad times, but their employees were paid wages as low as $50 to $60 a month for a ten- to fourteen-hour day. They had not tried to organize. Since the clerks lacked job opportunities outside the Nikkei community, their chances for alternate employment were poor. The firms, on the other hand, did well. An average-sized store with about five employees usually grossed more than $15,000 a month. The largest firm was owned by several partners, who ran a chain of about a dozen throughout the country. The largest strictly wholesale firm, Nippon Dry Goods, grossed around $500,000 a year. All the Japanese stores in the city probably totaled over $3 million. ^[122] Japanese San Francisco was becoming a middle-class community before the Depression; it felt the impact, but it slowly recovered from the crash in the ensuing decade.

For families uncertain of their situation in a time of economic distress there was the option of sending one or more children to Japan for a few years of education. With this goal in mind, they insisted their offspring learn the language in Japanese schools in America. (The language schools also helped cement community bonds.) If times worsened and opportunities appeared too limited, these children could always return to Japan to live. Japan-educated Nisei, or Kibei, returned to America as strange hybrids, almost as "Japanesy" as some of the Issei and very different from the Americanized Nisei.^[123]

The Japanese American community soon extended across San Francisco Bay. Nikkei on the peninsula and in the East Bay were pri-

marily agricultural; city children were often sent to the fields in the summer since only there could they find work. Orchards, floral nurseries, strawberry fields, and truck gardens were the primary Issei endeavors. Many of the nursery and agricultural products were sold in the wholesale produce markets of Oakland and San Francisco, some sent to canneries, others shipped to the East Coast. There were about 1,300 Nikkei in Mount Eden and Washington townships in southern Alameda County in 1940. Fewer than 25 percent of the farmers were landowners, but they had over a million dollars invested in nurseries, farms, and homes. Practically all of them leased their land but owned their homes, equipment, and trucks, the easiest arrangement under the Alien Land Law of 1920. Truck farmers raised two or three crops a year, including strawberries. The labor involved was intensive, and usually the whole family participated. The floral nurseries received the largest capital investment, from $15,000 to $300,000.^[124] This network of production and marketing as well as the practice of sending city children to the countryside helped strengthen the ties between the hub of the Japanese American community in San Francisco and its satellites around the bay.

Mount Eden and Washington townships were organized socially like the other Japanese towns in the area. People from the same prefecture tended to settle together, as S. Frank Miyamoto noted, and they formed an important component in the solidarity of the Japanese community.^[125] Several kenjinkai provided the focal point of social life for the Issei in Mount Eden and Washington townships, whereas churches and school activities predominated for the Nisei. The Nisei held dances and skating parties as well as a yearly community banquet to which leading Issei and even some Caucasian community leaders were invited. The Japanese American Citizens League, founded in 1930, had a few local members, but it had limited support in rural areas before World War II. There were also the usual athletic events to entertain people.^[126]

The community of Alameda was a residential area of 35,000, of whom about 800 were Nikkei. Most were small businessmen, independent and conservative. In the Alameda Nihonmachi were floral shops, laundries, a garage, an art shop, groceries, cleaners,

and the like. Many Japanese Americans lived in Alameda because of its good schools and commuted to work in San Francisco. Social events followed the same pattern as in southern Alameda County. One of the Japanese florists, Harry Kono, was well known by everyone in town; he belonged to the Rotary Club and the Merchant's Association, and he took a group of Japanese and Caucasian children to Japan each year to play baseball. Everyone got along well, so that it was painful to all the residents when Alameda was among the first localities to be evacuated because of its strategic location near ports and airfields.^[127]

The East Bay floral industry, dominated by Japanese, was relatively prosperous before the war. Issei had begun to grow flowers in this region from the time of the earliest Japanese settlements, leasing land they could not purchase, and they numbered more than one thousand by 1941. Three wholesale flower markets were established in San Francisco, the largest operated by Japanese, another by Italians and other Caucasians, and the third by Chinese. Some of the land used for growing flowers was very valuable, hence out of reach of the modest resources of the Issei, and greenhouse acreage within the city was quite expensive. Leasing property, required by the Alien Land Law, was not only necessary but also practical, since greenhouse soil wore out rapidly, particularly if—as Fumi Hayashi of Berkeley recalled years later—the Issei grew Chinese asters or had bad luck with plant diseases. Relations with Caucasians in the floral industry were generally good and characterized by cooperation. The Japanese American flower growers periodically gave good-will parties to which the whites and other ethnic groups were invited, and these were considered to be "some of the biggest social affairs of any sponsored by the Japanese."^[128]

The town of San Mateo was the center for Japanese who lived in the northern peninsula; about 600 Nikkei resided there. The towns of Belmont and Burlingame contained most of the Japanese in San Mateo County, although there were a few in Half Moon Bay and Pescadero. Many had worked as domestics in San Mateo for thirty years or more, having moved south at the time of the earthquake. Masako Tsuzuki recalled that her parents had lived on the

third floor of a large home, where her mother worked as a cook and maid and her father cared for the grounds and in the afternoons taught in the Japanese school. She, an only child, remembered being rather lonely, growing up in such a setting.^[129]

Of the 100 Nikkei living in San Mateo, 34 Issei owned their own homes. The community was modestly prosperous by Japanese community standards, even though most still worked as gardeners and domestics. In addition, Issei operated four laundries, three cleaning and dyeing shops, two grocery stores, two nurseries, and two florists. Nisei also ran an additional half dozen enterprises. Belmont held many nurseries, as did San Mateo, all but two of which were leased from Caucasians.^[130]

The communities of Menlo Park, Atherton, and Woodside on the southern peninsula had a Japanese population of only about 250. Atherton and Woodside were towns of the wealthy, and the Japanese were primarily located in Menlo Park, where they were in great demand as domestics and landscape gardeners. Other Nikkei ran nurseries or farmed, and a few were in business. One family owned one of the largest grocery stores in Menlo Park. Social interaction with Caucasians was high, in part because of the relatively liberal influence of Stanford University. The social center of the area was Palo Alto.^[131]

By 1940 the older Nisei of San Francisco and the Bay Area were beginning to take their places in the adult world. As in Los Angeles, some were beginning to work with or replace their parents as managers and proprietors of small businesses.^[132] Kenji Fujii was working with his father, running the family nursery in Hayward. Lee Suyemoto was in junior high school.^[133] Hiromoto Katayama was attending the University of California on a scholarship and holding down a job; his widowed mother worked as a domestic. She and he were pleased that he was preparing to graduate and planning to attend graduate school. ^[134] San Franciscan Tomoye Nozawa had graduated from the University of California, where she had made the acquaintance of many other Nisei from around the state as well

as Japanese graduate students who had come to California for their education. Graduating in 1937, in the depths of the Depression, she found employment nearly impossible. She did some volunteer work, but when work opened at the Golden Gate International Exposition she was easily employed, since her double major— ecological studies and Oriental languages—had equipped her with excellent Japanese as well as a knowledge of Japanese arts and crafts. Further volunteer work brought her romance as well: she met a young journalist named Henri Takahashi. They were married in July 1941 and set up housekeeping in a home on Arguello Street.^[135]

Many other younger Nisei, like Lee Suyemoto, were still in secondary school. Fumi Manabe was studying in Berkeley, and so were Mari Eijima and her sister Hanna; Bob Utsumi was in school in Oakland. Many Nisei who had completed school were having considerable trouble finding employment, and their parents had endured economic hardship during the Depression. But for many young urbanites life was still as Tomoye Takahashi remembered it years later: they worked hard in both American and Japanese school, associated with other Nisei in Christian or Buddhist churches and related youth groups, participated in evenings of amateur entertainment that included Kabuki and plays, and celebrated Japanese festivals such as the Bon dance and Buddha's birthday. Their world and that of their parents came to an abrupt end on December 7, 1941.