Travel: San Francisco’s Japantown

The scene in Japantown during the cherry blossom festival (yes, those are orchids in the foreground).

(Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival)

For a true taste of San Francisco’s Asian culture, skip crowded, touristy Chinatown and head straight to Japantown, a neighborhood celebrating 100 years in its current location. Few of San Francisco’s millions of annual tourists venture to the area—and that’s a shame.

Japantown may be off the beaten path for sightseers, but it’s accessible from downtown by bus (about a 15-minute ride) and is an easy place to park, at least by San Francisco standards. Once there, you can sip a cup of sencha green tea and nibble on an an-pan (a bun filled with sweet beans). You can take the waters at an authentic Japanese bathhouse, choose your sushi from a little boat as it floats by, and learn how to make origami cranes. And you’re surrounded by history the whole time.

Nihonjin machi, which means Japanese People’s Town, began its life in 1869, when the first Japanese began arriving on the West Coast looking for work. Originally it was on the fringes of Chinatown and the working-class South of Market neighborhood, and most of its inhabitants were young, single men. When the 1906 earthquake and fires destroyed that area, Japantown relocated to its current home in the Western Addition, near the major intersection of Geary Boulevard and Fillmore Street.

The community, long beleaguered by racial hostility, began to thrive with the arrival of thousands of “picture brides,” Japanese women who came to the United States to marry men they had never met. At the time of the 1910 census, the new Nihonmachi, or Japantown, had 50 Japanese-owned businesses and was home to most of San Francisco’s 4,700 Japanese.

The fragile peace the community managed to broker with its neighbors was smashed when the Japanese navy attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Prominent businessmen, clergymen, and schoolteachers were tagged as enemy aliens and troublemakers, rounded up by the FBI, and separated from their families. In February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, paving the way for the internment, or “relocation,” of 120,000 Japanese-Americans on the West Coast—including every single resident of Japantown.

The effect on the community was devastating. Though postwar numbers eventually caught up with the prewar population for a time, Japantown never recovered its prosperity or vitality. When much of the neighborhood was razed during a misguided urban renewal project in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it slid into further decline. The area, which once covered more than 20 city blocks, is now only a few blocks, and today only a small fraction of the city’s Japanese-American residents live there.

Nowadays most of what is called Japantown is located in the Japan Center, a three-block-long complex of shops, restaurants, and Japanese grocery stores, anchored at its ends by a movie theater and the Radisson Miyako Hotel. Essentially a Japanese-themed mall, Japan Center was built in the late 1960s as part of the legacy of urban renewal, and its architecture reflects that period. It’s a bit dated looking, with low ceilings, dim lighting, and a prefab exterior—some say it resembles a Japanese train station. But inside lies a wonderland of passageways and bridges that lead to pocket-size restaurants and tiny shops peddling all manner of imported goods.

Window-shopping is a treat. You can purchase objects both precious and prosaic, from rare silk kimonos to mass-produced teapots and incense burners. The tiny White Crane Tea Company offers dozens of different green teas and often a spontaneous acupressure session with its owner, David. Kinokuniya, one of the largest Japanese bookstores outside of Japan, is a treasure trove. The sister stationery shop across the hall is a find for lovers of pens, notebooks, and paper goods, as well as of trendy little cases to hold them.

A two-block-long pedestrian street outside the mall is designed to evoke a traditional Japanese village, with cobblestones and with two origami-inspired fountains designed by the sculptor Ruth Asawa. Though many Japanese-Americans rue the changes the neighborhood has undergone since its heyday, they can’t deny that Japan Center is a pleasant place to while away a few hours.

April is a perfect time to visit. For two weeks the entire area is caught up in the annual Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival, with two weekends given over to a big street party. All things Japanese are given center stage during the festival, and there are food and craft booths and traditional dance demonstrations. Japan’s vibrant youth culture is represented by loud pop music performances and plenty of manga (Japanese comics) on display.

For lovers of Japanese cuisine, not only are there plenty of bento box-size sushi restaurants, but there are also places to get soba and udon noodles, traditional Japanese country cooking like pork and rice, and sweet crepes filled with green-tea ice cream. There are also shabu-shabu places, where you cook your own meat in a pot of simmering broth, and even cafes that serve Hawaiian versions of Japanese cuisine, most of them involving Spam. Last but not least, there’s a Japanese Denny’s (yes, Denny’s), with an unadvertised Hawaiian menu that you have to ask for.

Japantown is also a great place to be pampered. Kabuki Springs and Spa is a Japanese bathhouse with New Age touches. You can soak in hot and cold pools, take a sauna or steam, and get a massage, all in a soothingly dark and peaceful setting. If you want something quicker, Sain Saine offers walk-in reflexology and Anma, a Japanese deep-tissue massage.

The area has been experiencing something of a commercial renaissance lately, and San Francisco’s mayor has targeted it for a revitalization project. Much of the shopping mall was recently sold to an outside investor, causing many locals to fear the area will lose some of its Japanese flavor. Still, the neighborhood perseveres. The locally based National Japanese American Historical Society, founded in 1980, produces a quarterly journal called Nikkei Heritage and funds traveling exhibitions on topics such as Japanese-American baseball and the legacy of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The society recently received a million-dollar grant to help build a research and exhibit center in the city’s Presidio National Park. Project 640 (named for the building it will occupy) will tell the story of Japanese-American linguist soldiers who trained during World War II at a top-secret Military Intelligence Service Language School in the very same building. When you visit Japantown, stop in at the center’s headquarters on Post Street to learn more.

And even though most of the city’s Japanese live in other neighborhoods, many still go to Japantown to socialize and buy traditional products like handmade manju, a sweet delicacy made from pulverized rice and filled with colorful bean paste, which they find at Benkyodo, one of the oldest family-owned businesses in the neighborhood, dating to 1906, the year Japantown moved to its present location.

The spiritual and physical heart of Japantown is the Peace Plaza, built in 1968 as a gesture of reconciliation between the United States and Japan. The plaza is the hub of the cherry blossom festival as well as of other events, like the annual Day of Remembrance in February, when the community marks the anniversary of FDR’s Executive Order 9066. With its multi-tiered pagoda, fountains, and blossoming cherry trees, it’s a nice spot to catch some sun and reflect on the neighborhood’s poignant history. Just be sure to pick up some manju to munch on.

For more information about the Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival, visit www.nccbf.org.

—Amy Weaver Dorning is a freelance writer in San Francisco.