In a Highly Racialized America: Two Communities Under One Roof

Come summer 1945, Kido’s fears about racial friction were largely unfounded. It’s true that the Fillmore to which Japanese Americans were returning was drastically different from the one they had left: the street’s famed arches had been melted down for scrap iron during the war; the old Victorians were strained to the breaking point of overcrowding; the nightclubs and bars now hopped and swayed to an unfamiliar new sound. Some returnees held racist attitudes, but these which went largely unexpressed. Other returnees were wary of their new neighbors, but simply wanted to avoid conflict and resume their lives. 

While some Black Americans shared society’s negative views of the Japanese (the NAACP had taken only a lukewarm stance against internment) there were also many instances of the Black community’s kindness towards Japanese Americans upon their return: A Black landlord saved Honnami Taieido’s stock during internment, allowing the family to reopen their art goods store; a Black minister enthusiastically invited returnees 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, or had stored their belongings.

Toshi Koba, a young social worker who, even during her internment at Topaz, had spent three years serving on the camp’s ad hoc Community Activities Department, returned to San Francisco to find that the buildings which used to house her beloved community organizations were being used by newcomers: the Booker T Washington Center had taken up offices in the vacated Kinmon Gakuen, the American Friends Service Committee was leasing the beautifully designed, Japanese-style YWCA building, and the YMCA was inhabited by the Black USO. 

While many worried that these “takeovers” would drive tension, these organizations quickly transitioned into shared spaces. In the summer of 1945, the Booker T Center, which had used the facility to store and protect many families’ possessions while they were incarcerated, invited Japanese Americans and African Americans to a discussion-based event entitled “Test of Democracy,” to reflect on the “strains and gains” of coexisting in the Western Addition. Similarly, the YMCA and YWCA joined forces to run a joint neighborhood program, feeling that a “provision must be made for [Black] participation lest the Japanese be accused of doing what they have accused other branches of the Y, i.e. practice discrimination.” 

Implicitly, these organizations called for the Western Addition’s two predominant communities of color–who shared different but parallel experiences of racialization and displacement–to seek unity. Toshi understood the need for solidarity, accepting a position at the Booker T Washington Center, where she would serve both Black and Japanese American youth in her community for the next three decades.

Although tension over resources such as housing and jobs was probably not uncommon, those  post-war years were recalled by many as a thriving, polyglot era. Now-board President of San Francisco’s JACL chapter Judy Hamaguchi has described 1950s Nihonmachi as a “great neighborhood for a child to grow up,” despite cramped living conditions in a Victorian apartment on Post Street. She fondly remembers many nights when Jim Edwards, owner of Jimbo’s Bop City and her family’s next-door neighbor, would escort her and her infant brother across the street to where their mother worked as a waitress.