San Francisco - Japan Center / Japantown

San Francisco's Japantown district is the cultural and business center for the city's Japanese community, the first of whom arrived in San Francisco, the city they called Soko, over 120 years ago. It was only after the 1906 earthquake, however, that they started to settle in this particular area, Japantown or Nihonmachi as it is known in Japanese.

During the Second World War most of San Francisco's Japanese and Japanese-Americans ("Nisei") were interned. On their release many of the former went back to Japan; the others gradually returned to pick up the threads of their lives in the district they had left. Today there are more than 12,000 Japanese resident in San Francisco.

The opening of the Japan Center in 1968