What the earthquake didn’t destroy, the politicians did.
April 18, 1906: The Great San Francisco Earthquake struck at 5:12 a.m., changing the course of thousands of lives in San Francisco, including Japanese Americans.
It was one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. Thousands of buildings collapsed. Fires raged for days. Over 3,000 people were killed and more than 200,000 were left homeless.
But for some city officials, the disaster also presented an opportunity to reshape San Francisco without Asians in the way.
At the time, Japanese immigrants lived mostly at the edge of Chinatown. Their community was still growing — many were laborers, merchants, and students who had settled in the city in search of opportunity. Some had been in America for decades.
When the earthquake hit, both Chinatown and the Japanese neighborhood were heavily damaged. And some city leaders saw their chance.
Courtesy of SFGATE
San Francisco City Hall in ruins after the 1906 earthquake and fires. While the city crumbled physically, white officials used the chaos to rebuild social boundaries.
From San Francisco Nichibei Nenkan 1906
Dupont and California Streets, 1906 (today’s Grant and California). Japanese immigrants once lived and worked here before the city pushed them out.
Courtesy of California Historical Society
The Young Men’s Kenjin-kai, 1898. Japanese immigrants in San Francisco had already formed organized communities well before the 1906 earthquake.
Map by Ben Pease
Map of Nihonjin-Machi (San Francisco’s Japantowns). Japanese areas are indicated in purple.
Photo by Arnold Genthe
Residents of Chinatown watch San Francisco burn, April 18, 1906. What followed was not just rebuilding, but decisions about who could remain.
Courtesy of Marilyn Blaisdell Collection
Chinese Parade on Stockton, c1882 – By 1906, there were close to 15,000 Chinese residents in San Francisco.
Courtesy of San Francisco Public Library History Center
Japanese settlement in South Park, 1910, after the first Nihonjin-Machi was destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake
A year before the earthquake and the school segregation order, the city’s mayor was already pushing national lawmakers to halt Japanese immigration altogether.
The Asians They Could Move
They couldn’t get rid of Chinatown. It was already too large, too visible, and too politically sensitive, especially with pressure from the Chinese government. So they looked elsewhere.
The Japanese, they decided, could be moved.
City plans began shifting Japanese residents away from their original homes, westward toward the Western Addition, what would become known as Japantown.
The move wasn’t voluntary. Many Japanese residents, already displaced by the earthquake, found themselves unwelcome as they tried to rebuild in their original neighborhoods.
The Oriental School
But it wasn’t just about housing. In the months after the earthquake, San Francisco’s Board of Education tried to implement a segregation policy for students of Japanese descent, grouping them together with Chinese and Korean students at the “Oriental School” in Chinatown. They claimed it was about overcrowding. But they were talking about a different kind of “crowd.”
International backlash followed, particularly from Japan, and eventually President Theodore Roosevelt was forced to intervene. The compromise? The Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907: Japan agreed to restrict emigration of laborers to the U.S.
In return, the U.S. would avoid officially enacting segregation laws. But the message was already clear. Japanese Americans were being pushed to the edges — physically and socially.
Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley
Racism in bold type: A 1906 poster from the Japanese & Korean Exclusion League. It was was backed by city officials including Mayor Eugene Schmitz to fan anti-Asian hatred.
Courtesy of Marilyn Blaisdell Collection
The city simply renamed the existing “Chinese Primary School” to “Oriental Public School,” lumping Japanese and Korean children in with Chinese students.
For Roosevelt, the first U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese school segregation was embarrassing.
Photo by Dorothea Lange
Business district on Post Street, right around the time of mass incarceration in 1942
Courtesy of Yamazaki family
John Misao Yamazaki, one of many who joined the exodus to Los Angeles after the Earthquake, 1906
Born From Exclusion
Japantown was born not from growth, but from exclusion. It became a new center of culture and community. But its roots were laid by displacement.
Today, San Francisco’s Japantown is one of four left in California. Its history is rich. But so is the story of how it got there.
It was a choice made for them.
Others left the city entirely. Many went south to Los Angeles, where the Japanese population more than doubled by 1920.