How San Francisco’s Japantown was devastated by mass incarceration by San Francisco Chronicle

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 much Japantown was reshaped by this shameful chapter has been unclear — until now.

In this story, the San Francisco Chronicle reveals the extent to which the oldest Japantown in the country was devastated by the incarceration of its residents, using interviews with descendants of those forced out of the city, business directories from Japanese American newspapers, materials from the Chronicle archive and detailed records from the 1940 and 1950 U.S. census — data made public in April 2022.