In the 1930s, Japanese Americans owned a majority of the curio shops on Grant Avenue, the main tourist thoroughfare of San Francisco’s Chinatown. During this same period, Japan invaded China, starting a conflict that shaped relations between San Francisco’s Chinese American and Japanese American communities as well. While some Japanese American elites began to describe Issei business successes in Chinatown as an extension of Japan’s triumphs in Asia, the city’s Chinese American merchants cast their competitors as invaders and urged white tourists to boycott them. The ensuing “war” on Grant Avenue demonstrated the way the city’s traditional anti-Asian laws and practices constrained the opportunities and shaped the identities of San Francisco’s Asian Americans, ultimately encouraging them to struggle against each other for whatever small advantages they could gain.
New World-Sun Daily (San Francisco), "Chinese ‘Rice Bowl’ Fete Packs Streets; Japanese Tradespeople Close Early," June 19, 1938, 1; New World-Sun Daily, "Grant Ave Merchants Prepared for Worst," June 18, 1938, 1; New World-Sun Daily, "China Wins Local War," June 6, 1938, 1; William Hoy, "The Passing of Chinatown: Fact or Fancy," Chinese Digest (San Francisco), January 31, 1936, 11; Shaonian zhongguo chenbao [Young China, San Francisco], "Sanfanshi huabu zhi ye xiangqing buzhi" [San Francisco’s Chinatown night: A supplement], June 26, 1938, insert. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author.
2.
See, e.g., Lon Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival in Los Angeles, 1934-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 65-66; Renqiu Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 77-87; Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 217-18; Him Mark Lai, "To Bring Forth a New China, to Build a Better America: The Chinese Marxist Left in America to the 1960s," Chinese America: History and Perspectives 6 (1992): 31-34; Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 190-207; Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 224-47. Gloria H. Chun, "‘Go West . . . to China’: Chinese American Identity in the 1930s," in K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan, eds., Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 184, mentions the conflict briefly, as does K. Scott Wong, Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 29.
3.
Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 67; Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 63, 165. For more about the anti-Chinese movement of the nineteenth century, see Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
4.
Connie Young Yu , "A History of San Francisco Chinatown Housing,"Amerasia8, no. 1 (1981): 97-99; Shah, Contagious Divides, 32; Ivan Light, "From Vice District to Tourist Attraction: The Moral Career of American Chinatowns, 1880-1940,"Pacific Historical Review43, no. 3 (August 1974): 368.
5.
Light, "From Vice District to Tourist Attraction," 383-85; San Francisco’s Chinatown , October 1909, 11-14, Department of Special Collections , Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles; Frank Morton Todd, The Chamber of Commerce Handbook for San Francisco (San Francisco: San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, 1914), 67-68.
6.
Yu, "A History of San Francisco Chinatown Housing," 100; Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 165-66; Wayne F. Daugherty, 1939 Real Property Survey, San Francisco, California, vol. 1 (San Francisco: City and County of San Francisco, 1939), 101, 182; Bernard Taper, 1939 Real Property Survey, San Francisco, California, vol. 3, San Francisco’s Housing (San Francisco: City and County of San Francisco, 1939), 30; anonymous social worker, ca. 1924, p. 2, major document 148, box 26, Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast, Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA; Albert S. Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900-1954 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 31; Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 13-14, 20-25; Ray Stannard Baker, "A Corner in Labor: What’s Happening in San Francisco Where Unionism Holds Undisputed Sway," McClures 22 (February 1904): 366; William Issel and Robert W. Cherny, San Francisco, 1865- 1920: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 56, 206. Until the 1940s, the majority of Chinese Americans in San Francisco were not American citizens, and even those who were citizens were often too young to vote. For this reason, local white politicians really began courting Chinatown voters only in the 1940s, after the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
7.
Federal courts in the West were already denying Japanese eligibility for American citizenship on racial grounds at the turn of the century. The Supreme Court confirmed this in the 1922 Ozawa v. U.S. decision. Children of any race born on U.S. soil were automatically U.S. citizens, however. In addition, Asian immigrant veterans of World War I became eligible for naturalization in 1935.
8.
School of Social Studies, "Living Conditions in Chinatown," 1939, p. 9, "Hogan-Living in Chinatown" file, box 2, Records Relating to the History of the Agency ("Historical File"), 1934-1948, Records of the Central Office (Records of the Office of the Historian), RG196, National Archives and Records, College Park, MD; Pardee Lowe, "Chinatown’s Last Stand," Survey Graphic 25, no. 2 (February 1936): 90; Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 18-21; Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 150-52; Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 55-56.
9.
Crocker-Langley 1912 Directory of San Francisco (San Francisco: Crocker-Langley, 1912), 1979; Crocker-Langley 1921 Directory of San Francisco (San Francisco: Crocker-Langley, 1921), 1602; Crocker-Langley 1925 Directory of San Francisco (San Francisco: Crocker-Langley, 1925), 1994-95; Crocker-Langley 1928 Directory of San Francisco (San Francisco: Crocker-Langley, 1928), 1632, 1728.
10.
John Farnam, "Tourists Trek West,"New York Times, August 25, 1935, xxi; William H. Mullins, The Depression and the Urban West Coast, 1929-1933 (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1991 ), 88, 92; Crocker-Langley 1933 Directory of San Francisco (San Francisco : Crocker-Langley, 1933), 1853; Lloyd Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China under Nationalist Rule, 1927-1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 224-40.
11.
Crocker-Langley 1934 Directory of San Francisco (San Francisco: Crocker-Langley, 1934), 1845; Crocker-Langley 1938 Directory of San Francisco (San Francisco: Crocker-Langley, 1938), 1771; Crocker-Langley 1939 Directory of San Francisco (San Francisco: Crocker-Langley, 1939), 1540-41. As I discuss below, Chinese American-owned shops that originally carried both Chinese and Japanese goods dropped the latter after 1931.
12.
Tom Irwin, "Podii Harries Owner of Building for 27 Years," San Francisco Chronicle, March 3, 1936, 3; Irwin, "Japanese Merchants Get Help from Podii," San Francisco Chronicle, March 7, 1936, 6; Irwin, "Family Victimized for 25 Years by Podii," San Francisco Chronicle, March 4, 1936, 5. As Sing Hong pointed out in a letter to the editor, Irwin portrayed podii as victimizing whites, when in fact Chinese American property owners were also subject to it. Sing Hong to editor, San Francisco Chronicle, February 20, 1936, 10.
13.
Lowe, "Chinatown’s Last Stand," 90; Chinese Digest, "Exploit Chinatown?" November 22, 1935, 8; Hoy, "Passing of Chinatown: Fact or Fancy," 11; Peter Tamony, "Chinatown: The Podii," Western Folklore 31, no. 3 (July 1972): 201. Tamony notes, as I have, that some of what white property owners described likely occurred because of the anemic Depression-era property market. The first mention of podii that I have found in the Chinese Digest was in 1938: Chinese Digest, "The Po-Dai System Must Go," October 1938, 2.
14.
M. W. Chue and Lena A. Way, "Comments on Housing Action in Chinatown," May 1940, sec. I, p. 5, "Chinatown" file, carton 6, Catherine Bauer Wurster papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; School of Social Studies, "Living Conditions in Chinatown," 6; Thomas C. Fleming, "Some Reflections on Black History: Part 50," San Francisco Sun-Reporter, January 30, 1997, S4; Wei Wo [Only me], "Juxing ‘zhongguo zhou’ yihou" [After "China week"], Shaonian zhongguo chenbao, May 20, 1935, 1. I have rendered the derogatory Chinese term woqiao as "Japs," a close English language approximation.
15.
"Chinatown, My Chinatown!"Business Week , March 12, 1938, 28.
16.
Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 233-34; Yung, Unbound Feet, 225-27; Azuma, Between Two Empires, 171-72.
17.
The name Beijing, which means "northern capital," had been changed during this period to Beiping ("northern peace") to signify the fact that the Nationalists had their capital at Nanjing.
18.
Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 200, 144-45; Russell A. Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 263; Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 114-18; Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, "Ethnics at War: Italian Americans in California during World War II," in Roger W. Lotchin, ed., The Way We Really Were: The Golden State in the Second Great War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 144-45; Brian Masaru Hayashi, "For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren": Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895-1942 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 133; Zi Zhen, "Shenke de yinxiang" [Profound impression], Chung Sai Yat Po [Chinese-Western Daily, San Francisco], February 12, 1940, 1; CH-62 interview in Dorothy Swaine Thomas, James Sakoda, and Charles Kikuchi, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement, vol. 2, The Salvage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 216; Azuma, Between Two Empires, 165-67; John J. Stephan, "Hijacked by Utopia: American Nikkei in Manchuria," Amerasia Journal 23, no. 3 (Winter 1997-1998): 3.
19.
The "open door policy" was not as benevolent as the United States often boasted. One of the policy’s main objectives was to protect American business access to China.
20.
Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 29-30; Harold R. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and India (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1980), 155, 167; Quincy Wright and Carl J. Nelson, "American Attitudes toward Japan and China, 1937-1938," Public Opinion Quarterly 3, no. 1 (January 1939): 52. Henry Luce was well known for his advocacy of the Chinese Nationalist government both before and after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The China-born son of American missionaries, Luce featured one or both of the Chiangs on the cover of Time six times before 1939.
21.
Frederick C. Adams, "The Road to Pearl Harbor: A Reexamination of American Foreign Policy, July 1937-December 1938," Journal of American History 58, no. 1 (June 1971): 91-92; Ernest O. Hauser, "News of the Far East in U.S. Dailies," Public Opinion Quarterly 2, no. 4 (October 1938): 653; George Gallup and Claude Robinson, "American Institute of Public Opinion-Surveys, 1935-1938," Public Opinion Quarterly 2, no. 3 (July 1938): 389; "American Institute of Public Opinion-Surveys, 1938-1939," Public Opinion Quarterly 3, no. 4 (October 1939): 599.
22.
Labor Clarion (San Francisco), "San Francisco Labor Will Boycott Japanese Goods in War Protest," January 14, 1938, 1; Yung, Unbound Feet, 241-42.
23.
Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 242; Chinese Digest, "S.F. Chinatown’s ‘Bowl of Rice’ Pageant," July 1938, 12.
24.
Gallup and Robinson, "American Institute of Public Opinion-Surveys, 1935-1938," 389; Iwao Kawakami, "Smoking Room," New World-Sun, June 15, 1938, 2; New World-Sun, "China Relief," June 17, 1938, 1; Victor Abe, "Once-Over," New World-Sun, June 20, 1938, 1.
25.
Azuma, Between Two Empires, 35-60, 191; CH-12 interview in Thomas, Sakoda, and Kikuchi, The Salvage, 303.
26.
New World-Sun Daily, "Anti-Japan Move in Chinatown Foils Chinese Merchants," October 30, 1939, 1; New World-Sun Daily, "Boon to Grant Avenue Seen in Cooperation of Chinese to Maintain Minimum Prices," October 16, 1939, 1; New World-Sun Daily, "Chinatown Veers toward Wang," October 12, 1939, 1; Gilbert Woo, "Hanjian zai benbu huodong" [Collaborators with the Japanese aggressors are active in San Francisco], in Yuzun Liu, Dehua Zheng, and Larry Lam, eds., Hu Jingnan Wenji [The collected works of Gilbert Woo] (Hong Kong: Xiangjiang, 1991), 9. This essay originally appeared in the October 16, 1939, Jinshan shibao [Chinese Times, San Francisco].
27.
Wei Wo, "Juxing ‘zhongguo zhou’ yihou," 1; CH-53 interview in Thomas, Sakoda, and Kikuchi, The Salvage, 242. Azuma, Between Two Empires, 166-68, describes the intense community pressure placed on Japanese American individuals, businesses, and organizations to make donations and participate in other pro-Japan activities, especially after 1936.
28.
Gloria Heyung Chun, Of Orphans and Warriors: Inventing Chinese American Culture and Identity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999). For example, Charles Leong, who was the publisher of the Chinese Press, owned a Chinese art good store in Chinatown; Pardee Lowe’s father owned a dry goods store in Chinatown; William Hoy was commissioned by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association to write an official history of the organization, which he completed in 1942.
29.
Gilbert Woo , "Tan zhengzhi" [Talking politics], in Hu Jingnan Wenji, 322-23 (originally published in Taiping Yang Zhoubao [ Chinese-Pacific Weekly, San Francisco], August 2, 1957); Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 234.
30.
Victor G. and Brett de Bary Nee, Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 71-72; Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 8; Him Mark Lai, Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004), 53, 64.
31.
New York Times, "Funds for Chiang Swelled by Fight," August 23, 1937, 2; CH-53 interview in Thomas, Sakoda, and Kikuchi, The Salvage , 243.
32.
New World-Sun, "Chinese ‘Rice Bowl’ Fete Packs Streets; Japanese Tradespeople Close Early," 1; New World-Sun, "Japan Day," May 2, 1939, 1; New World-Sun, "Grant Ave Merchants Prepared for Worst," 1.
33.
Shaonian zhongguo chenbao, "Meiren fan ri ou" [Americans turn against the Japanese], October 4, 1939, 8.
34.
Jim Marshall, "Cathay Hey-Hey!" Colliers, February 28, 1942, 13; Chun, Of Orphans and Warriors, 35; Crocker-Langley 1940 Directory of San Francisco (San Francisco: Crocker-Langley, 1940), 1569; New World-Sun Daily, "Chinatown Veers toward Wang," 1.
35.
Roku Sugahara, "As I See It," Japanese American Mirror, December 22, 1939, 1.
36.
Herb Caen, "Cathay-by-the-Bay," Chinese Press, May 2, 1941, 31; Tad Uyeno, "Lancer’s Column," Rafu Shimpo (Los Angeles), November 24, 1940, 4; Zi Zhen, "Shenke de yinxiang," 1.
37.
CH-53 interview in Thomas, Sakoda, and Kikuchi, The Salvage, 242-43; California Joint Immigration Committee (CJIC), "Progress Report," April 4, 1939, p. 3, "California Joint Immigration Committee- Kaltenbach, Dorothy" file, box 18; CJIC open letter, April 26, 1936, p. 1, "Calif. Joint Immigration Committee" file; CJIC meeting minutes, December 28, 1938, p. 1, "Calif. Joint Immigration Committee" file, all in Robert Walker Kenny Correspondence and Papers, Bancroft Library.
38.
Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict, 3, 25; Current Life (San Francisco), editorial, July 1941, 2.
39.
"Gallup and Fortune Polls," Public Opinion Quarterly 5, no. 2 (June 1941): 333-34; "Gallup and Fortune Polls," Public Opinion Quarterly 5, no. 4 (Winter 1941): 687; CH-53 interview in Thomas, Sakoda, and Kikuchi, The Salvage, 242-43.
40.
CH-62 interview in Thomas, Sakoda, and Kikuchi, The Salvage, 217; David K. Yoo, Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924-1949 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 92-95; Chinese Press, "For Your Protection" and "Cities in Darkness," December 12, 1941, 1.
41.
Photo in Judy Yung, Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 445; Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 246; H.K. Wong, "H.K.’s Column,"Chinese Press, December 19, 1941, 4.
42.
Chinese Press, "Cities in Darkness," 1; Tamotsu Shibutani, "The Initial Impact of the War on the Japanese Communities in the San Francisco Bay Region: A Preliminary Report," 1942, pp. 58-59, folder A17.04; CH-57 interview by Charles Kikuchi, November 2, 1944, transcript, p. 25, folder T1.986, both in Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study, Bancroft Library.
43.
Yung, Unbound Voices, 443-44; Chinese Press, "On the Other Hand," March 6, 1942, 3; Gilbert Woo, "Riben nu" [A Japanese woman], in Hu Jingnan Wenji, 31 (originally published in Chinese Times, April 8, 1943); Him Mark Lai and Betty Lim, "Gilbert Woo, Chinese American Journalist," in Hu Jingnan Wenji, 39; Wong, Americans First, 124.
44.
Crocker-Langley 1943 Directory of San Francisco (San Francisco: Crocker-Langley, 1943), 1640; Crocker-Langley 1944 Directory of San Francisco (San Francisco: Crocker-Langley, 1944), 1855-56.
45.
Ibid.
46.
David Snodgrass to editor, Chinese Press, February 13, 1942, 14. Many Chinese Americans were "derivative citizens," the China-born children of American citizens who themselves kept their families in China. In many instances, these "citizens" were actually illegal "paper sons."
47.
Chinese Digest, "Night Playground Not O.K.’D," May 29, 1936, 8; San Francisco News, "New Hearing Asked on West Side Courts," March 25, 1941, 1, 12; New World-Sun Daily, "To Push Housing Project Plans for Nihonmachi," October 25, 1940, 1; New World-Sun Daily, "Local Japanese Urged to Attend Housing Meeting," November 1, 1940, 1; Lim P. Lee (Li Panlin/Lee Poonlum), "Yu chang jian ping yuan you guanzhi renwu" [Commending Ping Yuen’s advocates and builders], Taiping Yang Zhoubao, October 6, 1951, 13; Chinese Digest, "Chinatown to Have a Fulltime Day Nursery," April 1939, 19; Chinese Press, "Housing," February 21, 1941, 1; Lim P. Lee, "Chinatown Civic Victory: Playground Request Approved by Local Board of Education," Chinese Press, April 11, 1941, 1.
48.
Larry Tajiri, "Fear along Grant Avenue,"Pacific Citizen, December 9, 1950, 4.
49.
See, e.g., Xiaojian Zhao, Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940-1965 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 124; Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves, 184-85.
