Japan-on-the-Peninsula, A Perspective

San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin, San Jose, 2011

I grew up near New York City, where transistor radios were about the only popular from Japan until the opening of Beni Hana Toyko in 1964.  Still, Japanese objects fascinated me:  the samurai sword my Uncle Bill brought back from Occupied Japan, the glass fishing floats described in that quintessential SoCal surfer romance, Gidget.  My father hosted a garden party for the actor-turned-Zen-priest, Sessue Hayakawa, whose auto-biography he'd edited.  I was awed by the tall, dignified actor and the villain Hayakawa played in Bridge of the River Kwai.  Later, studying sumi-e, Japanese brush painting, I learned that form could be created with measured strokes of black ink on white paper.

I'm not alone in my fascination with Japan's culture of symbols, where the visual and the gestural are a secret code with layers and layers of meaning.  100 years ago, exhibitions in Chicago, and later in Buffalo, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego and Saint Louis, inspired American Japonisme:  the consumption of Japanese paintings, prints, ceramics, gardens and even buildings.  For my generation, it's called Cold War Orientalism.  As the hatreds of World War II diminished, Americans travelled across the Pacific, spreading tourist dollars and democratic ideals. GIs returning from Occupied Japan added to a renewed appreciation of culture.

If earlier generations of Americans absorbed the aesthetics of Japanese art, others were interested in Japanese labor.  Japanese farmers, able to coax crops from marginal land, and suffering from the economic instability of modernizing Japan, were recruited to labor in the sugar plantations of Hawaii.  Then these Issei, or first generation pioneers, came to the orchards and fields of the "Valley of Heart's Desire," now Silicon Valley.  In the fisheries on California's coast, on farms and in dozens of towns like Salinas and Monterrey, they recreated the culture and society of Meiji Restoration Japan. With their success came resentment and discrimination.  After Japan attacked Pearl Harbot, West Coast Issei and their families were interned in isolated camps, and most of Calfornia's Japantowns destroyed. After the war, American born, second generation Nisei, struggled to regain what their parents has achieved and been denied.

Today, three Japantowns remain in California. San Jose's is far less crowded with tourists, and less commercial than those in Los Angeles and San Francisco.  For many Japanese Americans dispersed through out Bay Area suburbs, it is the heart of the community.   In and around it you can find much which suggests the historical and continued presence of the Japanese in California.

Next: I'll offer a 48 hour itinerary to do just that.