Photo by: Stephanie Zhu/The Chronicle photo illustration
(SFChronicle.com)
Established in the early 1900s, San Francisco’s Japantown was once a vibrant residential hub.
Most people consider the early 1940s as the neighborhood’s heyday, when most of the more than 5,200 Japanese immigrants and American-born Japanese in San Francisco lived in the 20 square blocks of Japantown. It thrived with more than 200 businesses owned by people of Japanese descent.
However, the issuance of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, marked the beginning of a dark period. This order led to the forced removal of Japantown’s residents to prison camps, effectively extinguishing the neighborhood’s bustling life.
The exile of Japantown is hard to visualize today, but much of the story can be reconstructed through newspaper archives, recently uncovered research, the stories of the expelled citizens and the U.S. census. Over nearly a year, the Chronicle collected and analyzed this data, seeking to understand just how Executive Order 9066 reshaped Japantown.
