[Vision2020] Community Values v. Development

[Art Deco]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-japantown14mar14,0,274886.story?track=tothtml

>From the Los Angeles Times
Enclave Fears Identity Is on the Block
A Beverly Hills developer is buying part of San Francisco's Japantown. Residents want guarantees the area's character will be left intact.
By John M. Glionna
Times Staff Writer

March 14, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO - The heart of this city's historic Japantown is being sold, stirring up fears in the century-old community that it could lose its deeply rooted cultural identity.

The nine-block area faces a double hit: Not only are the new owners not Japanese, they're from Southern California.

A family-owned development company in Beverly Hills is negotiating to buy several major properties - including two hotels and two retail malls - that comprise two-thirds of Japantown's commercial area and have been owned by Japan-based Kintetsu Enterprises since the 1960s.

As the two sides close the sale, expected later this month, some of the city's Japanese Americans worry that the new owner won't respect the cultural role the properties play in the life of their community. Activists have collected 14,000 signatures on a "Save Japantown" petition, calling for guarantees that the area's character be left intact.

Robert Sakai still owns the market his grandfather opened in 1906 after selling his wares from a horse and cart. He frets that the small cultural stronghold - which survived the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II and the redevelopment frenzy of the 1960s - will lose the soul it has left.

"People are afraid," said Sakai, 55, as shoppers wandered his store looking for sushi and imported foods. "If Japantown loses its character, we're hurt. The customers will stop coming. And the first foothold that Japanese Americans had in San Francisco will be gone."

Once the largest Asian nationality in California, Japanese Americans are now fourth, after Chinese, Vietnamese and Koreans. In 2004, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 315,500 Japanese Americans lived in California, including 13,300 in San Francisco and 50,500 in Los Angeles.

Only three of the nation's Japantowns remain, including Little Tokyo in Los Angeles and Japantown in San Jose. All three are in small, largely commercial areas that have declined over the decades and face uncertain futures as non-Japanese residents and businesses encroach.

Longtime residents refer to San Francisco's Japantown, established after the city's devastating 1906 earthquake, simply as "J-town" or by the Japanese name, "Nihonmachi." The two malls up for sale - the Kintetsu Mall and the Japan Center - have more than 40 Japanese-themed restaurants and shops.

San Francisco officials, including Mayor Gavin Newsom, have sought assurances from the developer - 3D Investments, owned by the Daneshgar family - that it would preserve Japantown's flavor. But community leaders complain that the family has offered few clues about their plans for the area.

Bobby Okamura loves the quaint neighborhood, with its cobblestone courtyard and stately pagoda, a 1968 gift from the Japanese government. "Our greatest nightmare is the new owners will start kicking out tenants to make way for McDonald's and Starbucks," said Okamura, who runs a confectionary store opened by his grandparents a century ago.

Despite repeated telephone calls and a visit to the Beverly Hills offices of 3D Investments, a company representative declined to comment on the deal, provide any information about 3D or make the Daneshgars available for comment.

"These people refuse to meet with the community as a whole, the people they supposedly want to partner with to preserve the legacy of Japantown," said Paul Osaki, executive director of the Japanese Cultural Center in the city. "Give me a break. These kind of mystery developers are good at this. They're accountable to no one."

Information on the company is scarce, but newspaper accounts indicate that 3D has numerous holdings in Hawaii. An affiliate of the company recently paid $30 million for the 24-story Waikiki Trade Center in Honolulu. And a group led by 3D bought Honolulu's 140-room Continental Surf Hotel for $11.6 million last year.

Don Tamaki, a San Francisco lawyer representing Kintetsu, defended 3D's "good reputation."

"They're family-owned and not publicly traded," he said. "Their preference is to be very low-profile."

But 3D's image in Japantown has already suffered. A deal was signed last month to sell the 218-room Radisson Miyako Hotel and the 125-room Best Western Miyako Inn - without the guarantee of long-term ownership activists seek.

When company officials recently met with community leaders, the employees at the hotels - more than 120 in all - received "termination notices," Japantown leaders said. 

"We met with them for three hours, during which they promised not make any quick changes. Meanwhile, these employees are getting pink slips," said Osaki. "That's a bad omen."

Tamaki said the notices - sent out by Kintetsu - were required by federal law, which mandates that employers with more than 100 workers provide 60 days' notice of termination due to the sale of the business. He said 3D planned to keep "a majority" of the workers.

Anxiety pervades the state's Japanese communities, where Japanese-run businesses have sold out to newly arriving Korean and Chinese immigrants and where affluent non-Asian residents are replacing Japanese Americans.

San Francisco's Japantown - a mile west of the city's thriving Chinatown - once bustled with 25,000 Japanese Americans. Now a little more than a thousand of the 11,000 residents in the area bounded by Fillmore, Bush and Laguna streets and Geary Boulevard are Japanese, most of them living in senior centers, activists say.

Forced to leave during World War II, many Japanese Americans never returned to the enclave, which once stretched more than 30 blocks. The area was also shrunk by urban renewal projects in the 1960s and '70s.

Many third-generation Japanese families have moved out and no longer speak or read Japanese. Others have married outside their ethnicity. "There's this steady whittling away of the area's Japanese-ness," said Kaz Maniwa, chairman of the San Francisco-based Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California.

"Parents want a better life for their kids - stressing professional careers and education, so the new generation is less likely to take over the family business," he said. "The question for these kids is: Do you want to work for Intel or continue making noodles?"

Little Tokyo, near Los Angeles City Hall, faces its own issue: the arrival of non-Japanese residents with downtown gentrification. The area expects 1,500 new housing units in the next few years, and community leaders know few new residents will be Japanese American. Today, only half of the enclave's 1,500 residents are of Japanese descent.

"I worry we're going to lose the heart and soul of what was once a thriving ethnic neighborhood," said Bill Watanabe, executive director of Little Tokyo Service Center, a social service provider. "I don't want Little Tokyo to become the Epcot Center, a place with restaurants and shops but no genuine culture."

In San Jose, activist Jimi Yamaichi said most businesses in the city's small Japantown remain Japanese-owned.

"We're trying to attract younger Japanese Americans to come back to the enclave - the insurance people, lawyers and accountants," he said. "It's a survival tactic."

To reassure San Francisco's Japanese American community, Kintetsu attorney Tamaki is working with 3D on what he called "binding commitments" to preserve Japantown's heritage.

"We have done our best to find a buyer who would hold the property for the long term and not flip it," he said.

City officials want to ensure that doesn't happen. Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, whose district includes Japantown, has introduced an ordinance that would require any changes in the Japantown property to preserve the area's cultural integrity.

"We won't be able to protect Japantown unless we have something in the code that looks into the future," he said, dismissing the value of any restrictive covenants. "It's myopic to be lulled into a false sense of security."

Some Japantown residents are "cautiously optimistic." Activist Sandy Mori has met with 3D representatives. She researched one 3D project - a hotel in the East Bay city of Concord - and was satisfied "they did what they told people they were going to do."

Linda Jofuku, executive director of the Japantown Task Force, said Japantown has endured bigger threats to its identity.

"I think our community needs to get real," she said. "The real upheaval we experienced was when everything was taken away in World War II and when the city took our properties by eminent domain in the 1960s and '70s and bulldozed them.

"That was the real loss. We can survive this."

*


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writer Steve Chawkins contributed to this report.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20060314/3cc906b0/attachment-0001.htm