However, it was not until I read Meredith Oda’s extraordinary and very complex volume of urban, Japanese American, and transpacific history that I began to grasp the reasons for their ambivalent outlook. Its opening nearly six years earlier on March 28, 1968, climaxed a decade of post-World War II urban redevelopment, eviction and gentrification of San Francisco’s blighted multiethnic Western Addition neighborhood that had formerly served as the residential and commercial home for two-thirds of the city’s more than 5,000 Japanese Americans.ĭuring the drive to this destination and throughout the sumptuous meal we enjoyed there together, the Yonedas evinced mixed feelings about this facility. After interviewing them for two days, the Yonedas kindly invited us to be their dinner guests in Japantown at a restaurant located in the spectacular Japanese Cultural and Trade Center.
It came about when I, along with two colleagues in the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, Betty Mitson and Ron Larson, journeyed to the City by the Bay to conduct tape-recorded interviews with the prominent Communist couple Karl Yoneda (1906-1999) and Elaine Black Yoneda (1906-1988). My first visit to San Francisco’s Japantown occurred in May 1974.
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