The Monkey poses with one of the ceremonial lions on Grant Avenue, the heart of San Francisco's famous Chinatown. With Toronto, Vancouver, and New York, this compact neighborhood is the core of one of the largest communities of Chinese outside Asia. The community began arriving in California, like many other groups, in the aftermath of the 1849 Gold Rush. The Chinese who didn't strike it rich in gold often worked as low-paid laborers, notably in the eastbound construction of the Transcontinental Railroad (meeting the westbound largely Irish crews at Promontory, Utah on May 10, 1869). Others concentrated in operating small shops and family businesses.
Despite long confronting racism and repression, the Chinese community nurtured itself and has contributed much to the cultural life of San Francisco (and elsewhere). Though today the descendents of Chinese immigrants and new arrivals from China are more likely to reside elsewhere in the city, old Chinatown remains the cultural and commercial focus of the community, with temples, specialty food and herb shops, restaurants, markets, and other meeting places.
Less known but almost as old as San Francisco's Chinatown is Japantown. Japanese immigrants began arriving in the late 1860s, and following the 1906 earthquake they established a community in the area known as the Western Addition. Japantown shriveled in size during the Second World War, when the U.S. government interred some 112,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps following Japan's attack on the Pearl Harbor U.S. naval station in Hawaii. After this knee-jerk repression, Japantown's residents returned to find many of their homes and businesses occupied by laborers brought in for the war effort.
Today only 4 percent of the Japanese-American population of San Francisco remains in the neighborhood. Alternately called J-Town or Nihonmachi by locals, Japantown continues to serve as common ground for the city's Japanese-American community. It features a number of Japanese shops, businesses, and restaurants, as well as Buddhist temples and a Japanese bath. Here the Monkey admires the graceful lines of Japantown's Peace Pagoda. Designed by Yoshiro Taniguchi, the 34 meter-tall Peace Pagoda was a late 1960s gift from Osaka, San Francisco's Japanese sister city.
One of the most tranquil places in all of San Francisco is the Japanese Tea Garden—despite its popularity. Originally commissioned for the Midwinter Fair of 1894, the Tea Garden brings the landscaping if not necessarily the ritual of traditional Zen Buddhist tea ceremony to an appreciative public, and at least one Monkey. Within the grounds you can stroll past stone lanterns, bonsai and dwarf trees, cherry blossom trees, many flowering plants, reflecting pools spanned by stone bridges and a semicircular wooden drum bridge built by a Japanese master carpenter, and the brilliantly-colored temple gate and pagoda pictured above (left to right). Of course, there's also a tea house where vistors can relax with a pot of soothing tea while listening to the trickle of a nearby waterfall.
Schleppie was here, too. Check him out by clicking here.
Also at the Japanese Tea Garden, the Monkey encountered this splendid Buddha. Cast in Japan in 1790, the 3.2 meter bronze statue is said to be the largest such Buddha outside of Asia. Though still very much on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean, at this point the Monkey felt as close to the shores of East Asia as he had yet been in 2003. Luckily, the Monkey visited Asia in 2006. Those pictures are on the way...
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