Shared Spaces
A version of this article originally appeared in The Parkside Journal December 2021 issue.
Growing up on the East Coast as a mixed-race Japanese American I didn’t learn much about the historical relationships among the African American and Japanese American communities. Only after I became involved with the civil rights group Japanese American Citizens League in my early 20s amidst the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement did I start to understand the extent of the overlap in our experiences. Over the past decade working in the racial justice space I have come to realize just how much the Japanese American community owes to the Black activists, community organizers, cultural producers, and legislators who paved the way for our own civil rights movement to take place during the late 1960s to late 1980s.
While there was some limited contact among our communities during the early 20th century, large-scale interactions began with two parallel migrations that took place during the early 1940s: the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast who were then mass incarcerated in US Concentration Camps in the interior, and the Second Great Migration of African Americans moving to West Coast cities from the Deep South. Both occurred as a result of the Second World War.
After the Empire of Japan staged its December 7, 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor – approximately 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent were systematically evicted from their West Coast homes and businesses, rounded up, and forced into prison camps under armed guard of the US Army Military Police. More than two-thirds of them were US Citizens and over half were children under the age of eighteen. Those who were immigrants had lived in this country for close to two decades since 1924 when the US closed their borders to all Asian immigration under the racially restrictive Immigration Act. While the government propaganda narrative stated that persons of Japanese ancestry might pose some threat to US security interests in the event of an Imperial Japanese invasion of the US mainland, not a single case of espionage or sabotage was ever discovered.
What ensued was a wholesale landgrab by white nativists in the West Coast agriculture industry who took this opportunity to deprive the Japanese American community of their valuable farmlands and eliminate the competition. Since 1913 when California passed its Alien Land Law prohibiting Asian immigrants from purchasing land, the vast majority of Japanese Americans were tenant farmers with no legal rights to the land they occupied beyond the terms of their lease. Even the lucky few who had purchased land before the law passed had their lands confiscated and were uncompensated as the government reallocated their property to white farmers. The same was true for many of the business owners and residents of West Coast Japantowns, who had no legal recourse against the white landlords and building owners they rented from in the urban Japanese communities that existed up and down the coast.
The African American community enters this story with the Emergency Shipbuilding Program, an initiative that the US government commenced in January 1941 – almost a full year before entering WWII. This program aimed to produce enough ships to keep America’s overseas territorial possessions (read colonies) safe amidst the growing conflict of WWII, while also assisting the United Kingdom in non-combat roles through its merchant navy. In May 1941 Terminal Island in South LA became home to the California Shipbuilding Corporation, also known as CalShip.
After the Attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the US shipbuilding industry was at an all-time high as defense contractors worked in a mad rush to replace the damaged ships of the United States Pacific Fleet. With a majority of the service-aged men in LA choosing to join up after Pearl Harbor, the resulting labor shortage opened up a slew of new opportunities for African Americans looking to migrate West, away from the Jim Crow South. By 1944 over 7,000 African Americans were employed by CalShip alone.
During the 1940s, Los Angeles real estate was governed by segregated housing covenants that prohibited the incoming African Americans from moving into white neighborhoods. Thus, the recently vacated Little Tokyo already coded as a non-white neighborhood, was identified by city planners as a settlement site for the community. Soon after relocating, the new residents renamed their neighborhood “Bronzeville” after the celebrated African American business district in the South side of Chicago.
For the next four years Bronzeville would become a vibrant working-class neighborhood home to overcrowded workers’ quarters, jazz clubs, and a number of African American owned businesses. The nightlife was particularly notable for its many “breakfast clubs” consequently named because they stayed open until the next morning.
As WWII came to an end, labor needs shifted to other industries and many African Americans moved out of the neighborhood. Once Japanese American families began returning from camp, many of the white property owners either canceled or refused to renew the leases held with their remaining African American tenants. Although Japanese and African Americans cohabitated this space for several years through the end of the decade, Bronzeville and its African American residents soon became a footnote in the history of the neighborhood. However, many of the friendships established during this era would continue for decades to come. Japanese American musicians and audiences frequented the African American owned jazz clubs throughout LA. African American customers would patronize the many sukiyaki restaurants and Japanese American businesses in Little Tokyo and elsewhere. It was a time of great cultural exchange that left a permanent impact on both communities.
Longtime resident of Little Tokyo and racial justice activist Abraham Ferrer writes, “this intersection of Japanese American and African American communities would play itself out for decades after WWII, when these communities established homes in the nearby Seinan District (what we know as Crenshaw, at the foot of Baldwin Hills). During the 1940s Bronzeville would become known as a second hub of African American culture and society, rivalled only by Central Avenue in South Central LA.”
Little Tokyo was not the only case in which African Americans began inhabiting Japantowns during WWII. Similar communities were established in San Francisco, Oakland, and many of the smaller cities where war production factories were located on the West Coast. Unfortunately, by the wars end this made already tenuous neighborhoods visible targets of racist city planners who were looking to permanently disperse non-white enclaves from prime urban real estate.
The California State Division of Immigration and Housing minces no words in their racially biased 1943-1944 Biennial Report, “Negroes are moving into the deserted Japtown districts of our metropolitan centers in vast numbers, and conditions of sanitation are generally poor, and overcrowding is a major difficulty….We have succeeded in cleaning out several of the smaller abandoned Japtown districts throughout California, and through abatement and misdemeanor prosecutions, we have had a large number of old dilapidated frame shacks razed to make way for new buildings.”
A combination of institutional racism in government policy and gross neglect by a majority of white Japantown property owners led to a culling of California’s many Japantowns from a pre-war record of nearly four dozen to just three; Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose. In subsequent decades Japanese Americans have undertaken tremendous advocacy efforts to preserve and maintain the legacy of these last surviving Japantowns, persevering against identity erasure and gentrification in all three cities.
In the SF Japantown context, the intersectional histories of Japanese Americans and African Americans remain an important part of the neighborhood’s history as both communities rallied together to oppose urban renewal in the postwar era. Developers eventually succeeded in physically dividing SF Japantown from the predominantly African American Fillmore District through the construction of an eight-lane expressway that resulted in largescale displacement for both communities. However, the shared issues between Black and Japanese activists would help drive Bay Area racial discourse in a more progressive direction and lay a foundation for the multiracial civil rights movement of the West Coast that we will be covering in a future article.
In our own city, several thousand Japanese Americans were resettled by way of West Philadelphia’s Black Bottom neighborhood. Although few would permanently settle in the neighborhood, many of them would spend their first months as civilians living in the Philadelphia Hostel, a Quaker-run halfway house for Japanese Americans who were reentering society after their wartime incarceration ordeal. Located at 3228 Chestnut Street, the hostel residents became acclimated to their Philadelphia surroundings in part thanks to the friendships they developed with their predominantly African American neighbors. Like so much of the area, the original site of the hostel was destroyed when urban renewal devastated the neighborhood and few physical traces remain of the once vibrant Japanese American community who resided there.
Numbering around 3,000 persons, Philadelphia’s Japanese American population is one of the smallest Asian ethnic groups in the city (compared to nearly 40,000 Chinese Americans). We have no neighborhood or business district, and are dispersed throughout the region. Given these facts it is no wonder that the shared histories among African Americans and Japanese Americans are not better-known locally.
Through the Reimagining Recovery Project, Japanese Americans have been invited by Shofuso Japanese house and garden to reengage with their site as a physical community space. On behalf of the Japanese American community, I sincerely hope that Shofuso can become a place where we continue building friendships and solidarity among new generations of our respective communities in the years to come.