Hotels, bathhouses, and markets built by Issei immigrants once filled this neighborhood around you, one of only three Japantowns left in the United States. Japanese immigrants — Issei, the first generation — began settling in this neighborhood after the 1906 earthquake displaced many residents and created opportunities in the Western Addition. The community built hotels, restaurants, bathhouses, markets, and community organizations that served the growing Japanese American population.
Then on February 19, 1942, ten weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. More than 110,000 people, the vast majority of them American citizens, were sent to internment camps in the interior. Their homes, businesses, and property were confiscated, lost, or sold at catastrophic discounts.
When the internment ended in 1945, many Japanese Americans had lost everything, and the Western Addition had been repopulated by Black defense workers. The community rebuilt anyway, concentrated in fewer blocks. The Japan Center shopping complex you see — the pagoda and the Peace Plaza — was built in 1968 as a kind of official community anchor, a project the city endorsed as redress for decades of displacement.
One of only three Japantowns remaining in America: Los Angeles, San Jose, and this one.