Meredith Oda, "The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

New Books in Japanese Studies · Dec 25, 2023 · 1h 27m

In The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Meredith Oda shows how city leaders and local residents in San Francisco fashioned a postwar municipal identity through their promotion of what Oda calls transpacific urbanism. Though the Japanese American presence in prewar San Francisco had been minor, it boomed as Japan came into vogue during the early Cold War. The Japanese Cultural and Trade Center was the apotheosis of urban redevelopment to attract Japanese capital and sell Japanese culture. Oda traces the conflicts…