On Feb. 19, 1942, in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, declaring much of the West Coast a military zone and barring people of Japanese descent from residing there. Within months, San Francisco’s Japantown, a bustling residential neighborhood, was largely vacant, its people sent to desolate incarceration camps.
The effects of that expulsion lasted long after the camps were closed. But exactly how Japantown was reshaped by this shameful chapter has been unclear — until now.
In April 2022, the National Archives made public detailed records from the 1950 U.S. Census under the “72-Year Rule.” These handwritten listings allowed the Chronicle to see nationality and ethnicity data at the individual level, enabling us to compare the number of residents of Japanese descent living in Japantown in 1940 and 1950. Chronicle data visualization developer Nami Sumida analyzed that data, combing through 1,185 pages of listings to document the toll of expulsion and incarceration during World War II on the once-thriving Japantown community.
And these records were just the beginning. The Chronicle also conducted extensive interviews and searched through its own archives as well as collections in the Library of Congress, directories from Japanese newspapers and unpublished research.
What reporter Peter Hartlaub and Sumida discovered was a legacy of profound loss: A vibrant Japanese community that made up 67% of the neighborhood’s population in the 1940s amounted to just 29% a decade later.
To help readers better understand the story of Japantown, Sumida and designer and developer Stephanie Zhu employed both animation and data visualization.
A map plotting the locations of historical Japanese-owned businesses, as well as the racial and ethnic makeup of residents of each lot in Japantown forms the backdrop of the story. Scrolling over it are illustrator John Blanchard’s animated recreations of historical images of Japantown at its zenith.
Blanchard, a nisei Japanese American whose family was incarcerated at Heart Mountain, Wyo., illustrates the history of incarceration in a style that blends Japanese manga with Western comic strips. By the animations’ end, the Japanese population and their businesses vanish from the map as portraits of local Japanese Americans from the period disappear in an echo of the real expulsion.
As the story continues, pictures from legendary photographer Dorothea Lange — who documented the expulsion for the War Relocation Authority — and the Chronicle archive capture the mad rush to prepare for internment, as Japanese Americans hurried to sell off possessions and board up storefronts.
New images by photojournalist Lea Suzuki — a yonsei Japanese American whose family had roots in S.F. Japantown and were also incarcerated at Heart Mountain — connect the history and present day. Her pictures depict a dramatically altered landscape, where homes and mom-and-pop businesses have largely been replaced by a commercial and tourist hub.
Yet, Japantown endures.
As Paper Tree origami shop owner Linda Mihara, whose family has run businesses in the neighborhood since the 1930s, put it: “You want to talk about resilience, that’s Japantown.”
