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16 December, 2002
RECHARGING THROUGH COMMUNITY
NOTE: This column was written for the annual Holiday Issue of the Pacific Citizen, the national newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League.
San Francisco has "Japantown," a several-blocks-long area of shops and restaurants that are almost all Japanese, with many located in a cluster of buildings. Los Angeles has "Little Tokyo," a larger district that covers several more blocks and includes the striking modern building which houses the Japanese American National Museum.
 The kids, of course, are the future of the JA communities. Here they're lined up for their dance performance during the annual Sakura Matsuri, the Cherry Blossom Festival, at Denver's Sakura Square. |
Sakura Square may be small, but it too serves as the hub for Denver's Japanese and Japanese American community. It was built in 1972 in a neighborhood where Japanese-owned businesses had thrived for decades since World War II.
It takes just a few
minutes to tour the one-block concrete complex, which includes Pacific
Mercantile, the supermarket and sundries store, and the Denver Buddhist
Temple along Lawrence Street. On the other side of the block you'll find
Yoko's Express and Akebono restaurants, Nonaka's hairstyling shop, the
Rocky Mountain Jiho newspaper's office, an antique store, a Japanese book
and magazine store and a travel agency. The block is anchored by Tamai
Tower, a high-rise low-income apartment building that houses mostly older
Japanese. A visit to Sakura Square is a brief immersion into a world where
Japanese is the main language spoken and people bow slightly as they greet
each other.
| Denver has Sakura Square, our own "Tiny Tokyo." |
Denver's Japanese population is relatively small. According to the 2000 Census, there are only 12,314 people of Japanese descent in the city's metro area. The total is 18,676 statewide, compared to 1,148,932 throughout the United States. So Sakura Square doesn't have to support the huge numbers of Japanese who flock to the Little Tokyos or Japantowns of California.
But it helps to have somewhere we can call our "home."
Growing up in the world's largest J-town, Tokyo, it never occurred to me that I was living among people who looked like me and who spoke a language other than English. It was only after I moved to the states when I was 8 years old that I became a "minority." Even then, it didn't really impact me very much, because in the Northern Virginia suburb where we lived, I didn't have any Japanese friends to identify with, and I simply forgot that I was anything but a white kid in white-bread America.
It was only when
I was slapped by the occasional racist comment that I was reminded that
I wasn't like the other kids.
 The Obon dance brings together the JA community every year on the Saturday night of the Sakura Matsuri. |
I don't know if there is a Japanese enclave in the Washington, DC area. I know we never visited one while we lived in Virginia. But every weekend our family would pile into the old green Plymouth Fury and rumble into town to a little Japanese grocery store in a mostly African-American neighborhood, where my mother would unload tray after tray of mochi manju, sweet rice cakes filled with azuki bean paste, for the store to sell. We'd pick up our weekly supply of Japanese food and staples such as rice, and then rumble back to Virginia.
So when we moved to Denver in the fall of 1972 and saw Sakura Square, which was brand-new that year and boasted not just Pacific Mercantile but also Granada Fish Market, which had fresh seafood but also stocked a mix of Japanese and American groceries (and, most important to me, candy and other snacks), it seemed to me that Denver's Japanese community was powerful indeed.
|
|
We moved into the suburbs and, like our weekly drives in to Washington DC, we trekked to Sakura Square every weekend to deliver mochi and pick up supplies for the week. Much later I realized that was the extent of my family's involvement with Denver's "Tiny Tokyo." Because we didn't attend the Buddhist church and only occasionally drove downtown to dine at a Japanese restaurant (my parents' favorite for years was the old Fuji-en on Lincoln Street across downtown from Sakura Square), we weren't part of the community.
Since those years I've experienced the scope and vitality of ethnic enclaves, from New York and San Francisco's enormous, noisy and bustling Chinatowns to LA's Little Tokyo and San Francisco's Japantown. I love being there, and feeling the concentrated energy of the culture that is so alive. Erin says she goes to these paces to "recharge," and that's a perfect description of what happens when JAs like us from the Midwest arrive at our own Meccas. It's a good substitute for traveling to Japan.
Which is not to say that Denver's Sakura Square isn't a great spark of Japanese energy. It certainly, is, and life in Denver would be so much poorer without it.
With new generations of Japanese Americans growing up hungry for their heritage, the places to "recharge" our culture will become increasingly more important. In the increasingly global environment, there is also an increasing interest in pan-Asian culture, and I've seen and heard Chinese, Koreans and southeast Asians shopping in Japanese enclaves. In Denver, we love going to the mostly Vietnamese district along South Federal Blvd, that includes the Far East Center, and we also shop at the Korean stores in Aurora, the eastern suburb, that congregate along South Havana Street. These areas recharge us in a different way.
There is one other "J-town" that I visit, and I do it from home: The virtual J-town that is available on the Internet.
Through the Web, I am constantly learning about and connecting with my Japanese heritage and my Japanese American culture. One of my most important communities is an e-mail discussion group called "Ties-Talk," which is hosted by the folks who run the Little Tokyo Service Center in LA's Little Tokyo district. I don't know how many people belong to Ties-Talk, but there is a lively group of core members spread out from Japan to Canada, with subscribers in Denver, Seattle and of course all over California. I've learned a lot from them, and appreciate their friendship.
On a recent road trip through LA and San Francisco, Erin and I were able to dine with members of the Ties-Talk group and put some faces to names we've only known online. We've also met with Denver-area Ties-Talkers and had a great time finally "meeting" each other face-to-face. We've built real relationships through our e-mails, and it's great to know that a virtual community can be just as viable and powerful as a real one.
It's all a way to stay connected with our roots, and to recharge.
Read archives of discussions and sign up for Ties-Talk e-mails here.