A couple walks through San Jose’s Japantown neighborhood. File photo.
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San Jose’s Japantown is one of the last remaining Japantown neighborhoods left in the United States of America. The others are San Francisco’s Japantown Cultural District and Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo district.
San Jose’s Japantown is the youngest of the three remaining Japantowns, with San Francisco being the oldest. In the 1890s, when Japanese immigrants arrived in the area for agricultural work, they settled in San Jose’s existing Chinatown – the current location of Heinleville Park on North Sixth Street – as a refuge from anti-Asian sentiment and for cultural similarities. According to JTown San Jose’s website, it wasn’t until the early 1900s that the growing Japanese and Japanese-American community established its own neighborhood alongside Chinatown.
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