The Gateway to the Pacific

In World War II's aftermath, the United States engaged in the strategic repair of its relationship to Asia, with an eye toward the enhancement of national security and trade interest. In the making of an American Pacific, US cities and their Asian American residents played key roles, generating not only more economic transactions but also new discourses about race, culture, and community. By delineating the emergence of “transpacific urbanity” in San Francisco between the mid-1940s and late 1960s, Meredith Oda in The Gateway to the Pacific tells an important story of the city's growing engagement with the Pacific as both a geographical place and an embodiment of socio-cultural values. Japanese American San Franciscans, more so than Chinese Americans and African Americans who also had been racially subjugated in the pre-war decades, made a leap, laying a path toward the era of US relation to Japan as an economic giant. As Oda convincingly shows, however, urban renewal and rising socio-economic opportunities did not come without grassroots resistance, loss of resident autonomy, and racial divisions.Beginning with Japanese Americans’ return from the incarceration camps after the war, the book reveals fascinating histories that helped San Francisco become a key site for a new US relation to the Pacific through the early decades of the Cold War. Although Oda offers informative discussions of cultural exchanges—for instance, Chapter 2 tells a detailed history of the sister city arrangement made between San Francisco and Osaka—the book's primary strength lies in its sustained attention to the Bay City's built environment. It is neighborhoods, buildings, and streets that makes the historian's craft shine. As Oda argues, postwar urban development plans were less focused on the revival of ethnic enclaves like Japanesetown than they were on aligning their goals with the city's growing relationship to Japan. Not only residents, small business owners, and urban planners, but also financers, developers, and architects with ties across the Pacific became involved in the city's renewal.Indeed, one of the pleasures of reading The Gateway to the Pacific is to encounter delightfully apt individuals. Chapter 4 illuminates the key role played by a Honolulu-based banker, Masayuki Tokida, in the building of the Japanese Center, as he offered crucial connections between Japanese American planners and Japanese business partners. In Chapter 5, Nisei architect Minoru Yamasaki gains a “new aesthetic sensibility and claim for expertise aligned with his racialized identity” (p. 153) by designing the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center. Simultaneously, their intermediary work perpetuated the long-standing preconception against Japanese Americans, that is, that they are naturally equipped with Japanese aesthetic sensibility. Although this notion worked to uplift Japanese Americans’ socio-economic status, it also exacerbated race and class divisions. The neglected Chinatown stood in sharp contrast to the freshly remade Japanesetown. A highway ran along the south border of the center, palpably demarcating the predominantly Black blocks as a neighborhood left behind. Poorer, often older, residents faced evacuation. As Oda adeptly notes, these dynamisms unfolded centering on Japanese Americans who saw the least numerical growth among Asian Americans after the war. Many pre-war immigrants and their children in the group had already left the urban neighborhood for wealthier suburbs. In a sense, then, transpacific urbanity was an idea cast on an increasingly vacant community. Racial integration seemed more imaginary than substantive in this light.While Japanese American actors and their shifting relations to race, place, and culture come to life vividly, their counterparts across the Pacific remain somewhat in the background. In the second chapter, Oda makes an illuminating use of the photos of Japanese businessmen in business suits, arguing how not only traditional femininity, but also modern masculinity, came to represent Japan by the 1950s. And yet, the book does not offer an analysis of what happened to this gender dynamism later; nor does it reveal what socio-cultural gains beyond perhaps more obvious economic ones that Japanese officials and businessmen might have seen in transpacific urbanity. Considering how Japan was going through the rapid economic growth that demanded a rearticulation of gender, a few words about how this historical moment affected Japanese interest in San Francisco would have been informative. This reader also wonders about the varying terms that referred to transpacifism, as in San Francisco as a gateway to “the Orient,” “Japan,” “Asia,” and “the Pacific.” Were these terms used interchangeably, or did they carry specific meanings that changed over time? Was these terms’ use affected by transpacific interactions?These questions arise because of Oda's rich analysis of San Francisco's locality and its energetic outreach to what lies beyond its shores. The book makes an admirable use of wide-ranging sources and renders racial and cultural negotiations freshly tangible as both a thought process and material transformation. It is a rewarding read for anyone interested in Asian American history, urban history, the history of the Cold War, and international relations in the Pacific

Economic history · Grassroots · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · White (mutation · World War II · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History · Law