When I spend time with someone who was also born and raised in San Francisco, also calls it Frisco, and also grew up in the eighties and nineties riding MUNI, we eventually stumble across the intersections of our lineages and stomping grounds. We inevitably trade stories of displacement, survival, beauty and anger. But I don’t always get to time travel.
“I’m so deeply in tune with this Asian American femme body, this vessel. We hold our anger, and don’t let it out, but there is so much power in its expression, and the ways we organize and mobilize community thereafter.”
Eryn Kimura, fifth generation San Franciscan, and fifth generation Japanese and Chinese-American, is a time traveler. “I’m so deeply in tune with this Asian American femme body, this vessel. We hold our anger, and don’t let it out, but there is so much power in its expression, and the ways we organize and mobilize community thereafter.”
When she moved away for college, Eryn began experiencing intense and constant sexual harassment, objectification and racial slurs at school, on the street, at work, in dating. This unwanted treatment continued when she moved back home. She poured her rage and disgust into making a series of defiant collages and illustrations of Asian women. One illustration, “We Will Be Respected”, drawn in black ink, was the figure of Asian femme woman, face hidden with the declaration I will not be objectified, stereotyped, confined, exoticized written prominently on her back. The figure raises not two, but three arms in the air, each hand with a different gesture – a peace sign, a fist and a middle finger. Through a grassroots fundraising campaign called We will be RESPECTED, Eryn covered costs to produce hundreds of stickers and t-shirts of “We Will Be Respected”.The image went viral. This declaration, it turns out, is also a holler back to her Chinese femme ancestors.
Eryn’s maternal great grandfather traveled from Toisan, China, to San Francisco in the 1860s when thousands of Chinese men were brought over as exploited labor to build the first transcontinental railroad. With immigration laws actively discouraging Chinese residents from forming families, the presence of Chinese women was rare, and they were often forced into prostitution and servitude. Before the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which put a total ban on immigration from China after the completion of the railroad, there was the Page Act of 1875, barring Chinese women from entering the U.S., effectively codifying their hypersexualization.
“It must have been so scary for her.” Eryn speaks of her great grandmother, who traveled unaccompanied for three weeks to San Francisco from Toisan, China, at the age of 16 to meet her husband as his second wife. While Eryn delights in sharing that her other great, great grandma ran a laundromat on Valencia when the street was still cobblestone with horse-drawn carriages, there is no turning away from what it must have been like to walk down the street, let alone being a second wife raising eight sons. “I have this intense rage and I feel a lot of their femme stories in my body. Oh, this has actually happened before, and I know it in the depths of my bones. I made these art pieces to recontextualize the Asian American femme body.”
When I ask Eryn what she does to be able to stay in San Francisco, I do not expect an answer that goes back 100 years. “I think it was opium.” Eryn deduced this from her grandpa, one of those eight sons her great grandma raised in Chinatown. His own father, who spoke both Cantonese and English, ran an employment office at Portsmouth Square that was a front for an opium trading post from the 1920s into the Great Depression years. It is said he controlled three blocks in Chinatown and was part of a tong, a secret fraternal organization notorious for criminal activity and gang warfare during this time period. Eryn found an old newspaper article with his photo, struck by their likeness. It mentioned him as one of the early hatchet men of the time, having been tried and acquitted for murder in Utah while building the railroad. So many unknowns remain, but Eryn recognizes these survival moves, not so different from the poverty, racism, and exclusion that pushes people towards the underground economy under today’s capitalism. Eryn credits these moves made by her gangster great grandpa with how her entire family is still able to call San Francisco home to this day.
Eryn’s dad is Japanese American; her paternal step-grandfather worked as a longshoreman in Hawaii, and they moved to SF when her dad was twelve. Four years later, her parents met at the Lowell high school dance as students, became sweethearts and have been together ever since. Eryn affectionately calls herself “lil sis”, the youngest of three siblings and proud auntie to their children. Her dad didn’t grow up in Japantown, but made sure that his three children did – sending them to preschool, youth programs, Taiko drumming classes, and summer camps run by community institutions like Japanese Community Youth Council (JCYC). Eryn fondly recalls following her older brother and sister up and down J-Town streets, having waterfights in the summer, going in and out of Japanese-owned businesses like Benkyodo’s Manju Shop, the feeling of belonging and everyone knowing each other. “The streets felt like our streets.”
The feeling of belonging spills out into other parts of the city as she recalls childhood field trips to Golden Gate Park’s Speedway Meadows, kicking it amongst the trees, getting dirty, wearing shorts on foggy days, and stumbling across the homes of unhoused people living there. She remembers being eight years old and thinking of them as neighbors who had found a cool spot, not really understanding what that meant. Then, there were summer daycamp trips to Rochambeau Park, where I also remember playing after school as a first grader. She played basketball with kids of every background in YMCA and recreation center gyms all over the city, fondly mentioning Tim Figueras, one of SOMA Recreation Center pillars, who was also my uncle. And because we both grew up going to public schools in the Richmond District, we pause to appreciate the Westside neighborhood’s quiet beauty. “Even the way the sunlight hits the gates on Clement Street and makes those pretty shadows on the stoops, the smell of the trees in Mountain Lake Park during different seasons…that intimacy and that love for place that you grow, there’s something eerily romantic about it, but also defining for us as well as little Frisco children.”
Eryn reps the city so hard, I brace myself for another unjust eviction story when she tells me that she made the move to Oakland three years ago. I breathe a sigh of relief when she assures me that she made the move for love. “I’m still gonna die in Frisco,” she declares. “I made this very clear to my partner.”
Gentrification is an unshakeable presence, even as we time travel, the evolution of a long line of displacements, beginning with the violent dispossession of the Ramaytush Ohlone people who stewarded these lands for thousands of years before waves of European colonizers waged genocide to settle here.
“We’re living during a time of intense, deep decontextualization. Displacement, does it, you know? Decontextualizes people from their village, from the place they’ve been actively stewarding and that’s also been nourishing them. Displacement takes people out of context and makes them untethered.” She continues, “I feel like a lot of my work is building connections like a little spider weaving threads that are light and invisible, weaving an ecosystem, with each conversation, each action.”
She has far from abandoned the city, commuting across the Bay Bridge daily to work at Booker T. Washington Community Center, a 105 year-old community center serving the Black community based in Western Addition/Fillmore. When she describes the center’s intergenerational approach to programming–holistic well-being, self-determination, Black cultural pride–and her role there working specifically with Black elders, she reflects, “As an Asian American person, I should be so lucky.”
Japanese Americans currently make up one percent of San Francisco’s population and just five percent of Japantown. Black people make up just over five percent of the city and just six percent of the Fillmore, the last decade’s decrease part of a longer term displacement since the 1970s. The Fillmore once thrived as the “Harlem of the West”, and Japantown once boasted 40 blocks of majority Japanese-owned businesses and homes. Though both diminishing, they still coexist side by side today, their histories intertwined through proximity, war, survival, and solidarity.
Between 1940-1950, San Francisco’s Black community expanded while the Japanese American community contracted. During World War II, the navy aggressively recruited Black people from the south to build war ships at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in 1942, forcing all persons of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast into “relocation camps”, militarized open-air prisons in remote parts of the western and mid-western states. Some African Americans moved into poorly maintained dormitories near the shipyards, while others moved into the empty apartments that Japanese Americans were given just days to leave behind. Abandoned Japanese businesses and cultural centers awaited their fate.
During and post World War II, the same community center that Eryn commutes to every day stepped in to safeguard Kinnon Gakuen, the Japanese Language School on Bush Street founded in 1911 because Japanese children were not allowed into public school. They took over Kinmon Gakuen’s lease and moved into the building to prevent the government from permanently seizing it. After the war ended and Japanese incarcerees were released, the community center returned the building and supported the language school to resume its programming. They helped many Japanese families reunite and find housing as well. At the same time, Black people lost their naval shipyard jobs, racist hiring practices and redlining prevented them from finding permanent industrial jobs and owning homes, while white families bought homes in the suburbs in record numbers. This would not be the last time Black and Japanese communities in San Francisco would need to fight side by side.
Created in 1948, the SF Redevelopment Agency (SFRA), essentially a government agency enacting the predatory vision of white business leaders, designated Japantown, Fillmore/Western Addition, and SOMA neighborhoods as blight areas needing slum clearance as part of a larger national “urban renewal” campaign. Over the next 15 years, despite the joint organizing efforts of Black and Japanese community groups, they bulldozed thousands of homes and businesses, displacing thousands more residents without consent or accommodation. One particularly destructive phase of the project expanded two-lane Geary Street, which served as a main artery connecting Japanese and Black communities, into a six-lane boulevard, effectively separating the two neighborhoods. SFRA promised to facilitate a return for residents whose homes and businesses were sacrificed, but this never happened for most.
Eryn has returned to Japantown as an adult to share this history with the high school youth in JCYC’s programs, particularly to emphasize Afro-Asian solidarity and connect the dots between today’s gentrification with the longer history of colonization and displacement. It is hard to discuss Afro-Japanese solidarity without acknowledging Japanese American revolutionary ancestor, Yuri Kochiyama, who lived her last years in the Bay Area; she and I take a moment to honor Kochiyama and the lifetime of solidarity lessons she left us through her activism, including a friendship with Malcolm X. Eryn shares that she wants to make a documentary about Afro-Asian solidarities, which I hope might be her next project. She insists, however, “My artistic practice is so much more than my visual art, and even documentary. I think the way that I’m moving in the world is also like an art form, centering connection and context. My north star vision right now is just continuing to steward a polycultural, intergenerational Frisco-ass village.”
The struggle continues. In 2018, Japantown was designated one of eight cultural districts in San Francisco, receiving funding from the Mayor’s office to support cultural heritage preservation. However, the Kinokuniya Mall on Sutter Street, no longer Japanese-owned, sees the most foot traffic from tourists, and with each new corporate owner, Japanese community leaders must fight for even the smallest amount of cultural space within it. Amidst resilience, there is also fatigue. Eryn laments, “That whole mall in J-Town goes up for sale every few years and we’re always like, oh, god, we gotta organize to protect it again…It’s so trifling in Frisco right now.”
More recently, Eryn partnered with filmmakers, Akira Boch and Tadashi Nakamura, to produce Benkyodo: The Last Manju Shop in J-Town, a short documentary about the final days of the last remaining confection shop making colorful manju and mochi desserts using traditional methods. Owned and operated by the Okamura family since 1906, the business managed to survive anti-Asian laws, World War II incarceration, urban redevelopment, and ongoing gentrification. In 2022, patrons still waited in long lines wrapping around the block hoping to get to the counter before they sell out, which happened daily. Brothers and co-owners, Bobby and Ricky Okamura, who spent decades laboring to make manju and mochi by hand starting at 3 a.m. and had reached ages 67 and 70 respectively, made the difficult but welcome decision to close shop in March 2022.
Though I did not grow up going to Benkyodo’s, I tear up while watching the 17-minute short, hearing Eryn call Bobby Okamura “Uncle Bobby” from behind the camera during his interview, and seeing how this retro-lunch counter on the corner of Buchanan and Sutter Streets served as a cherished homeplace for generations of Japanese community to gather amidst adversity. To my own surprise, I realize my tears flow because this is not another displacement story, but a rare story of self-determination, of a family getting to decide for themselves that they are ready to close. So often I think of self-determination as the right to make our own beginnings, and I am struck by the healing and new possibility that comes from witnessing the end to a Frisco story with no bulldozer in sight.
As our conversation winds down, I’m not surprised when Eryn time travels forward with a clear and self-determined vision of her own ending, which is not really an ending at all. “My secret dream in life is to be a really old, wrinkly raisin Auntie. I want to have a little tea shop in J-Town, a small hole-in-the-wall that’s gonna have tremendous energy, great vibes. I want people to see me every single day, just for two minutes, to get their coffee and their pastry that I will make from scratch. Imagine when people see you every day, just even those like small interactions, that’s everything. And then I want to do a bunch of little activations and block parties, but I want to be really old when that happens. You know, my main goal in life is just to be a kick ass ancestor, a lit ancestor that is doing things for the babies and all the people and beyond.”
Message from Eryn: Attached are some art pieces that speak to this piece! One is a collage I made hella long ago and includes a photo of my great grandma that came from Toisan and my great grandpa the hatchet man. I can’t find those original photos.
In addition a few black and white photos. These were taken in the early to mid 1950s and were supposed be published in LIFE Magazine. My great uncle was HK Wong, a Chinese American journalist among other things, and he parlayed this LIFE photoshoot. However, due to China’s revolution in 1955, they pulled the story. One photo is of my great great grandma, my grandma, and my auntie in Chinatown grocery shopping. The second is of my great great grandma, my great grandma, and I think my great auntie at the dinner table. These were never published.
