The Gateway to the Pacific

Meredith Oda's innovative addition to the historiography of Japanese Americans, San Francisco, and the post–World War II Pacific world, The Gateway to the Pacific, reveals a hitherto unexplored aspect of urban redevelopment. Although the book focuses on an intensely local story—the urban redevelopment of San Francisco's multiethnic Western Addition neighborhood into a more visibly Japanese cultural hub—it is not simply a San Francisco story. Instead, Oda offers readers a model for exploring the effects of postwar transpacific relationships on the cultural, economic, and physical environments of Pacific Coast cities. She argues that the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center project was part of the development of a larger “transpacific urbanity” that reaffirmed the city's longtime claim to be the “gateway to the Pacific” (p. 4). This transpacific urbanity emerged from cultural and economic ties forged between San Franciscans and Japan. These developments expanded Japanese American cultural and economic opportunities for Japanese Americans but did so at the expense of the neighborhood's other ethnic communities

Archaeology · Economics · Economy · Ethnic group · Gateway (web page · Historiography · Political science · Redevelopment · Sociology · Urbanity · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law