by Gary Kamiya
Japantown on the eve of the war was a bustling enclave. It had 40 churches, 17 schools and kindergartens, a department store, and dozens of small businesses. Culturally, it was a scramble: There were four traditional baths but also American-style diners serving hot dogs, ham and egg sandwiches—and fried noodles.
Then came Pearl Harbor. After word got out, hostile whites drove through the neighborhood, staring creepily at its inhabitants. The authorities immediately began arresting “suspicious” Japanese. An incident reported in the December 9 Call-Bulletin reveals the round-up-the-usual-suspects nature of this early venture into Homeland Security. Under the headline “Enemy Aliens Arrested Here,” the paper gravely reported that three Japanese men had been arrested on suspicion of taking a photo of an army transport, “although no camera was found.”
“No camera was found” could have been the motto for the entire hysterical, fear-and-race-driven episode that followed. Californians in general and San Franciscans in particular had long viewed the Japanese as even worse—more ambitious, more evil, more underhanded—than the despised Chinese. Journalist and historian Carey McWilliams described the hostility as the “California-Japanese War.” In 1900 the San Francisco journal Organized Labor opined, “Chinatown with its reeking filth and dirt, its gambling dens and obscene slave pens, its coolie labor and bloodthirsty tongs, is a menace to the community; but the snivelling Japanese, who swarms along the streets and cringingly offers his paltry services for a suit of clothes and a front seat in our public schools, is a far greater danger to the laboring portion of society than all the opium-soaked pigtails who have ever blotted the fair name of this beautiful city.”
In February 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, expelling “all persons of Japanese ancestry, including aliens and non-aliens,” from West Coast military zones. Every Japanese person in San Francisco was ordered to register and report at various sites for processing. Stripped of their belongings except for what they could carry, they mustered at 2020 Van Ness and then were sent to “assembly centers,” mainly the Tanforan Racetrack in San Bruno. Most of San Francisco’s Japanese residents, including Nippon Drugs co-owner Hatsuto Yamada, were sent to the Topaz internment camp in Utah, one of 10 hastily built “relocation” camps scattered across the barren stretches of the country. (My father and his family, from the Central Valley, were mustered at the Merced Fairgrounds, where my dad had once shown his 4-H Club chickens, and imprisoned at desolate Camp Amache, official name Granada, in Colorado.) By April, Japantown was empty.
Sometimes the silences left by cataclysmic events are the loudest reminders. While researching the city directories, I compared the 1942 listings (compiled before the internment order) from “Yamada” to “Yamazaki” with the 1943 listings. In 1942 there are 32 listings—Yamada, Yamagata, Yamaguchi, Yamamoto, Yamasake, Yamazaki. In 1943, there are none. The names, and the people, are simply gone.
The forced removal and imprisonment of 110,000 people, most of them American citizens, for no reason other than their race, was one of the great injustices in U.S. history. But the sudden departure of 5,000 Japanese from the Western Addition proved a boon to another victimized group of Americans: blacks.
As we have seen, World War II was responsible for the great influx of blacks into San Francisco. Before the war, the city had fewer than 5,000 black residents. By the end of the war, 32,000 blacks, drawn by good-paying shipyard jobs and the opportunity to get out of Texas or Louisiana, were living in the city.
The jobs were there, but there was literally nowhere for the newcomers to live. Some found housing in the apartments that were quickly constructed in Hunters Point, but thousands more units were needed. San Francisco was not an egregiously bigoted city, but many white landlords refused to rent to blacks, and overtly racist actions were not unheard of.
In this charged situation, the empty apartment buildings and houses in Japantown were a godsend. Because the neighborhood was already racially mixed, its landlords were happy to rent to blacks. Between 1940 and 1950, the black population of the Western Addition went from 2,144 to 14,888. Citywide, the demographic change was even more startling: San Francisco went from having 4,846 black residents in 1940 to 43,502 in 1950.
In one of the stranger urban transformations in American history, the area around Post and Buchanan went from being a Japanese neighborhood to a black one virtually overnight. Maya Angelou, who as a 13-year-old had moved into a building near that very corner, wrote: “The Yamamoto Sea Food Market quietly became Sammy’s Shoe Shine Parlor and Smoke Shop. Yashigira’s Hardware metamorphosed into La Salon de Beauté owned by Miss Clorinda Jackson. The Japanese shops which sold products to Nisei customers were taken over by enterprising Negro businessmen, and in less than a year became permanent homes away from home for the newly arrived Southern blacks. Where the aromas of tempura, raw fish and cha had dominated, the aroma of chitlings, greens and ham hocks now prevailed.”
The old neighborhood was gone, and overnight its new inhabitants made it their own. And the neighborhood they created, before the city destroyed it, was one of the most jumping places on the planet. It was called the Fillmore, a.k.a. the Harlem of the West. Or just the ‘Mo.
Within months, the Fillmore was exploding with life—and its crown jewel was its jazz clubs. By a coincidence as exuberant as an Art Blakey snare drum roll, the Fillmore’s incarnation as a black neighborhood at the beginning of World War II exactly coincided with one of America’s great artistic achievements, a rival to abstract expressionism: the birth of modern jazz, in its first incarnation—bebop.
The virtuoso improvisational style created by Bird and Diz and Monk and Max Roach and Bud Powell ushered in a new age of intense, deeply personal, and harmonically advanced music. It took serious chops to play bop. To use a phrase coined by Mark Schorer, the great English professor across the bay at U.C. Berkeley, it was “technique as discovery.” And what they discovered, during a thousand jam sessions, was an American soundtrack of genius and joy.
For more than 15 years, the Fillmore was the hottest jazz, blues, and R&B scene outside New York. Everybody in the ‘hood and plenty from outside dressed to the nines and hit the streets to drink, party, and listen. The mile-long stretch of Fillmore and its side streets was packed with more than 2 dozen clubs. All the greats came: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, and Dexter Gordon, to name just a few. Even Art Tatum, a.k.a. God, played the ‘Mo.
In 1949, the old Victorian at 1690 Post underwent its strangest transformation yet. Shuttered-up Nippon Drugs reopened as Vout City, a club run by a jazz guitarist, pianist, composer, and singer named Slim Gaillard. Gail-lard was a weird and wonderful character, a musical cousin of Lord Buckley. In addition to speaking eight languages, Gaillard made up his own, which he called Vout—hence the name of his club. Jack Kerouac immortalized Gaillard in On the Road. He describes going to see him at “a little Frisco nightclub” where “great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the guitar, piano and bongo drums … He does and says anything that comes into his head.”
Shockingly, Gaillard turned out to be a terrible businessman, and Vout City quickly folded. The building’s owner, Charles Sullivan, had to find a new tenant. Sullivan approached John “Jimbo” Edwards, one of the first black car salesmen in San Francisco, who decided to open a café called Jimbo’s Waffle Shop in the former Vout space. When local musicians discovered it had an unused back room, they started using it for after-hours jam sessions. Jimbo changed its name to Bop City, word got around, and soon every jazz musician who came to San Francisco started heading there.
The cover photograph of a book about the ‘Mo’s glory days, Harlem of the West: The Fillmore Jazz Era, by Elizabeth Pepin and Lewis Watts, captures an indelible moment. A heartbreakingly young, innocent-looking tenor player stands on the stage. He and fellow tenor man John Handy and trumpeter Frank Fischer are listening to altoist Pony Poindexter soloing. T
he young man is leaning slightly forward, his eyes half shut, a slight smile on his face. He is listening so intently, so gently, that his whole body seems to be a receptacle for sound. The young man is John Coltrane.
Bop City carried the torch for 15 glorious years. But by the early ’60s, musical tastes had changed. Jazz was not as popular with either whites or blacks. The club featured more R&B. In 1965, owner Charles Sullivan closed it down.
Sullivan was a remarkable man. He was born in Monroe County, Alabama, to an illiterate mother. He ran away from his adoptive father at age 13 and made his way to San Francisco. When the war broke out, he was the only qualified black machinist in California. He tried to get a job at the shipyards, but the union refused to hire blacks. Sullivan got 50 white machinists to testify on his behalf, but it took the personal intervention of President Roosevelt to get the union to hire him. During the war years he began opening bars and liquor stores in the Bay Area, including a liquor store just down the street from Bop City at 1623 Post. It was the first liquor store in San Francisco to make free deliveries. Branching into entertainment, he became the leading black music promoter on the West Coast.
The same year that Bop City closed, Sullivan played a key role in the birth of the music that would permanently relegate jazz to the high-art, low-audience niche. Sullivan loaned his dance license for the Fillmore Auditorium to a young promoter named Bill Graham. The Airplane, the Dead, Big Brother, Zappa, and other rock bands played there in 1966 and 1967, kicking off a musical revolution as profound as the one that created jazz.
Sullivan himself met an unhappy fate. In August 1966 he was found dead near Fifth and Bluxome Streets, shot in the heart. The case was never solved.
The ghosts of Vout City and Bop City haunt San Francisco, evoking a fabled time and neighborhood that will never return. But those legendary clubs were themselves haunted by a ghost—the ghost of Nippon Drugs, the business that had occupied the building for decades.
When Hatsuto Yamada returned to San Francisco from Topaz, he opened a new drugstore two blocks away at 1698 Sutter. The 1945–46 city directory shows that “Jas. H. Yamada” gave up his old residence on Divisadero and moved to 1950 Bush, between Laguna and Buchanan. Whether he owned the old building and sold it before being shipped off to the camp, or rented it, is not clear. But he never returned to 1690 Post.
Yamada renamed his new store Jim’s Drug Company, after the “James” that he apparently began calling himself after the war. One wonders what “Jim” thought as he walked past his old store, now bearing the ironically similar name “Jimbo’s.”
After the war, some of the internees returned to Japantown, but many did not. As Reid Yoshio Yokoyama notes in one of the few studies of Japanese resettlement in San Francisco, many evacuees, believing ethnic enclaves exacerbated racism, thought it would be better to disperse. The major Japanese American organization, the Japanese American Citizens League, took the same position. JACL president Saburo Kido, who visited Japantown in late 1944, wrote that returning Japanese Americans would face four problems: housing, jobs, hostility from labor unions, and relations with blacks. Kido warned, “Since [blacks] occupy the former Japanese residential district, they will resent being displaced by returning evacuees.”
A confidential government report echoed Kido’s fears, predicting that “the release of Japanese from War Relocation Authority Camps will be the cause of friction and racial clashes when the Japanese arrive back in California.”
Despite such concerns, about half the former residents of Japantown returned. They found that housing was indeed a major problem. Those who had been renters found that their apartments were occupied by others. Property owners, who may have constituted as much as half of the returnees, fared better, but not always. There were 13 occasions on which their property was seized by the government. At first many stayed in hostels or slept on cots. But gradually the Japanese Americans found places to live.
Work was also hard to find. Anti-Japanese sentiment continued to run deep for years after the war. (In 1949, the famous Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park was still being referred to as the “Oriental Tea Garden.” The Hagiwara family, who had lovingly tended it for three generations, was not allowed to return to it; not until 1958 did ownership of the garden return to the Japanese community.) Many businesses would not hire Japanese: Some owners said their veteran workers would kill any “Japs” who were hired.
In late August 1945, more than 60 members of the AFL Machinists Union threatened to strike after they learned that a 37-year-old Nisei named Takeo Miyama had been placed as a mechanic with the Municipal Railway. Mayor Roger Lapham and State Senator Jack Shelley tried to convince the workers not to strike, but they refused to back down. Miyama was going to withdraw, but after a three-hour meeting with JACL and War Relocation Authority officials, he decided he would go to work, saying that he “would be betraying other Nisei and other minority groups if he abandoned his fight for a job.” Miyama showed up for work at the barn the next morning, and the machinists put down their tools.
Facing 60 angry men, 2 men rose to defend Miyama. Both of them were bus drivers and part of a different AFL union. The first driver was a black man named Robert Gray. As the Pacific Citizen reported, Gray said, “When Negro bus drivers went to work for Muni there was some fuss at first, but soon everybody got used to it. If you boys let this man go to work, you’ll find it’ll be the same way.” The second driver was an American Indian named James Burns, who said, “Do you want the sort of thing here that goes on in the old South?” But the machinists refused to yield, saying that because Miyama had not fought in the war, they would not work with him.
At this moment the chief radio technician at the barn, Harold Stone, spoke up. Just five months earlier, Stone had been awarded a Silver Star for bravery when his carrier, the U.S.S. Franklin, was devastated by Japanese dive-bombers on March 19 and 807 men were killed—the most casualties on any American warship during the war except the Arizona, sunk at Pearl Harbor. Stone said, “I didn’t go out to fight in the Pacific so people with differently colored skin would be discriminated against when I got home.” The war hero’s speech made the difference. By a better than 2-to-1 margin, the machinists voted to stay on the job.
By 1946, 2,500 Japanese Americans had resettled in Japantown, about half of its original population. Within two years, the population was back to its old size. But most of these were newcomers. San Francisco State University professor Ben Kobashigawa found that only one-third of the 1,952 Japanese surnames listed in the directory were prewar names. By 1949 a lively but smaller Japantown was centered at Post and Buchanan, with 150 instead of 400 businesses.
It is difficult to get a clear picture of the relationship between blacks and Japanese-Americans after the war. Research is scanty, and neither group is interested in reopening any old wounds that may still exist. After her family moved to Japantown, the young Maya Angelou was struck by the fact that the Japanese seemed to have vanished into thin air, leaving not even a memory. “No member of my family and none of the family friends ever mentioned the absent Japanese,” she wrote. “It was as if they had never owned or lived in the houses we inhabited.” Keenly aware of the irony of one victimized people taking the place of another, Angelou wrote, “A person unaware of all the factors that make up oppression might have expected sympathy or even support from the Negro newcomers for the dislodged Japanese.” Blacks did not feel such sympathy, Angelou believed, for all-too-human reasons: They were doing well, and because the Japanese weren’t whites, they didn’t have to fear or even consider them.
Some blacks shared the negative views of the Japanese held by most of society. The NAACP took only a tepid stand against internment. But many blacks had a more favorable view. A reporter for the Afro-American newspaper, Vincent Tubbs, went to San Francisco during the evacuation. During the course of his stay, Tubbs’s attitude became more sympathetic to Japanese Americans, and he noted that the black community’s attitude had also ch
anged. Tubbs came to understand that, like blacks, the Japanese Americans had been victimized solely because of their race. He said that many blacks referred to Japanese Americans as their “good friends.”
As for the returning Japanese Americans, they mostly wanted to avoid conflict and resume their lives. Some Issei, and to a lesser degree some Nisei, may have held racist attitudes, but if so, they did not express them. More likely the returnees were simply wary of their new neighbors. In Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement, one aged Nisei, who was sent with his family to live in Hunters Point, describes running away in fear as a child when he saw a large black man on the street, and offers a poignant apology for something that had clearly troubled him his entire life.
“In general, I would say the relations between the blacks and the Japanese were friendly, not chummy,” 86-year-old Yokio Takakuwa, whose family returned to their home in Japantown after being interned, told me. “We tolerated each other and were decent to each other. There wasn’t that much contact.” Certainly the predicted clashes did not take place. When a black group, the Carver Club, put forward “Should the Japanese be returned to the West Coast?” as a debate topic, no one was willing to argue the negative side. There were numerous documented acts of black kindness toward the Japanese Americans: A black landlord saved Honnami Taieido’s stock during Taieido’s internment, allowing him to reopen his art goods store. The first cleric to welcome the returnees was a black minister, who invited them to join his church in San Francisco. In Oakland, black neighbors were among the first to welcome back a returning dentist and his wife. A number of black families took Japanese Americans into their homes.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, San Francisco’s Little United Nations experienced a renaissance. Japantown, or Nihonmachi, was now a thriving Japanese American neighborhood adjoining a thriving black neighborhood. The two worlds collided at Post and Buchanan: Jimbo’s Bop City was right next to one of the oldest Japanese businesses in the city, Uoki Sakai’s fish market.