Japantown, San Jose, CA

Japantown is one of only three historic Japantowns left in the United States, alongside San Francisco's and Los Angeles's Little Tokyo, and it may be the most intact as a working neighborhood. It grew up in the 1890s beside San Jose's old Chinatown, Heinlenville, as Japanese immigrants built boardinghouses, churches and shops, and it survived the rupture of World War II, when residents were forcibly removed to incarceration camps in 1942 under Executive Order 9066 and began returning only in 1945. The Jackson Street core is a genuine cultural main street, not a themed one: Japanese restaurants, groceries and sweet shops, century-old Buddhist and Methodist congregations, and the Japanese American Museum of San Jose. Locals know the legacy businesses by heart, from Shuei-Do Manju Shop and Nichi Bei Bussan to Roy's Station coffee in a former family filling station, and the calendar turns on Obon, Nikkei Matsuri and Aki Matsuri. Backesto Park reaches into the northern edge for recreation. The former U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, interned as a child, is one of the community's proudest sons. The rarity and history keep it desirable, and the limited housing supply keeps entry tight, which is the honest tradeoff: there simply is not much of it, mostly older bungalows wrapped around the business district, and what comes up trades on that scarcity. But for buyers who want to live inside a real piece of Japanese American history with a functioning cultural main street at the doorstep, there is nowhere else in San Jose, or nearly anywhere else, quite like it.