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作者

A. J. Jacobs

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS,Vol.42,Issue4,P.690-691

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

East Carolina University

摘要

Focusing her Gateway to Pacific on the development of the city’s Japanese Cultural and Trade Center, Meredith Oda offers a compelling account of the key role that Japanese-Americans played in cultivating San Francisco’s social, economic, and political interconnectedness with Asia. Expanding upon her article in Pacific Historical Review (Oda, 2014), she situates the city’s “transpacific urbanism within a history of networks and exchanges, in order to explore the ways that connections with Japan were adapted and transformed in conjunction with the city’s built environment, civic life, and racial terrain” (Oda, 2019, p. 11). In her account which covers the period from the early 20th century through the 1960s, Oda argues that through the Japan Center’s development, Japanese-Americans were able to carve out niches for themselves as middlemen between leaders of San Francisco’s urban growth machine and Japanese interests and culture. She states that they did this not only by utilizing their own professional skills, but also by understanding evolving post-war American attitudes toward Japanese-American residents and Japan’s economic expansion (also see Oda, 2014). In Chapter 1, Oda sets the stage for her socio-ethnic historical analysis of San Francisco by chronicling the hostile social and physical inter-group context that the city’s Japanese community confronted during the first half of the 20th century. She also explores the changing meanings of the city’s Pacific identity, particularly in relation to Japan and Japanese immigrants. These dynamics grew more complex during World War II, when migrants from all over the country poured into the Bay Area to work in the region’s shipbuilding and other war-related factories. During this period, the city’s population expanded from 634,536 in 1940 to 700,735 in 1944, and its Black population from less than 5,000 to 17,935 (p. 31). In Chapter 2, Oda reveals how changing post-war local, regional, and global contexts all helped to rewrite San Francisco’s place within emerging transnational Pacific relations. In the process, she shows how the city’s Japanese community was at the forefront of this reshaping. Equally important was Japan’s rapidly expanding economy, which helped fuel the crucible for San Francisco’s growing transpacific interconnectedness. A sister-city affiliation with Osaka was most instrumental in both broadening and cementing these links. In Chapter 3, Oda chronicles the shifting priorities of city and national officials toward New Deal urban planning. Guided by the 1945 “Master Plan of the City of San Francisco,” and subsidized by funding from the 1949 Federal Housing Act, these efforts sought to transform the city’s built environment through the redevelopment of blighted areas. Oda shows how Japanese-American merchants, driven by their losses from their incarceration in World War II internment camps, asserted themselves in these efforts. From her perspective this was unfortunate. While these efforts ensured that the city’s redevelopment projects were consistent with the interests of the Japanese-American ethnic economy, they also inadvertently accelerated the dismantling of the community’s historic residential enclave. The latter perhaps was inevitable, as by the early-1950s middle-class Japanese-Americans were already re-settling in some of the city’s previously White neighborhoods, particularly the less racially restrictive northwest side’s Richmond district. In Chapter 4, Oda examines how “heterogeneous actors, [namely] local Japanese-American merchants, [city] Redevelopment Agency officials, Honolulu financiers, and former territorial elites in Hawaii” (p. 12), utilized the construction of the Japanese Center as the centerpiece of their plan to strengthen San Francisco’s position as America’s Gateway to the Pacific. In the process, she also illustrates how these agents utilized historical ties between Hawaii’s Japanese community and Japan, to re-position the city’s transpacific compass squarely toward Japan. In Chapter 5, Oda examines how, through the Japan Center and other institutions, post-war Japanese-Americans in San Francisco redefined themselves from foreigner intruders to transpacific mediators, smoothing relations not only between Japan and the local White community, but also between Japan and America. She says that the city’s, and nation’s, growing curiosity about Japan aided this metamorphosis. More specifically, Oda reveals here how restaurant owners were notable actors in the cultivation of what she calls this tenuous inclusion of Japanese-Americans in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Japanese-American merchants and cultural institutions helped to enrich the city by deepening its economic and social links with Japan, as well with East Asia, in general. In the final full-length chapter, Oda delves into San Francisco’s post-1960 inter-racial relations through the opening of the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center on March 28, 1968. Here, she describes how the center was part of an expansive redevelopment initiative that took an immensely uneven toll on the city’s Western Addition district, especially on Japanese- and Black Americans’ homes and businesses. She argues that these efforts also enhanced competition over terrain and local redevelopment among the city’s various racial and ethnic groups during the 1960s. While this initially divided Black and Japanese-American neighbors, these projects ultimately united the two groups in their fight against a White-controlled city hall. The book wraps up with a brief conclusion chapter that seeks to put the Japanese-American community’s experience in San Francisco and the city’s evolving transpacific urbanism within a broader context. This terseness of this conclusion represents one of the few shortcomings of the entire book. Similar to the book’s other minor deficiencies, this is most likely attributable to the publisher’s strict manuscript page/word-length limitations. For example, urbanists surely will ask why there was not more contextual background on San Francisco’s post-war development. Additionally, urbanists, as well as geographers, immigration scholars, and sociologists might have expected more details on the re-settlement patterns of Japanese-Americans following their return from imprisonment in internment camps. Despite these small demerits, Meredith Oda’s Gateway to Pacific supplies scholars and others with a solid introduction to the Japanese-American experience in San Francisco and Japanese Americans’ contributions to the city’s evolving transpacific urbanism. References Oda, M. (2014). Rebuilding Japantown: Japanese Americans in transpacific San Francisco during the Cold War. Pacific Historical Review , 83(1), 57–91. doi:10.1525/phr.2014.83.1.57  [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar] Oda, M. (2019). Gateway to Pacific: Japanese-Americans and the remaking of San Francisco . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]