Moving Encounters With Spatial Racism: Walking in San Jose Japantown

The San Jose Japantown StoryWalks Research Project

For the San Jose Japantown StoryWalks, community members curated walking tours with personal stories of incarceration, discrimination, community activism, and community development in the historic neighborhood known as Japantown, San Jose, California (U.S.). The neighborhood is about 0.26 square miles and is contained within approximately six blocks from 1st to 10th Street and between two major streets, Taylor and Empire, with notable business and residential zones. During this 3-year project, I worked with my community research partner, PJ Hirabayashi (artist, activist, and long-time resident in the community), who I first met in 2000 during my dissertation research with San Jose Taiko, one of the first Asian American taiko drumming ensembles in the United States and which serves as a forum for social action, community development, Japanese American, and Asian American identity politics particularly within the San Jose Japantown landscape, its artistic home. My apprenticing with the ensemble involved a walking tour of the town in which we met local residents who shared stories of immigration, discrimination, World War II Japanese American incarceration, and community development. My continual participation in taiko drumming and Asian American identity politics is mixed with my own ambiguous racial identity (see Powell, 2008) of whiteness and a partially unknown ethnic heritage that led me to pursue Asian and Asian American studies. I do not reside in Japantown in terms of residency, nor do I have Japanese American lineage, but my involvement in the Asian American drumming landscape over the past 20 years fuels my relationship with PJ Hirabayashi and with many residents of San Jose Japantown. PJ’s interest in activism and our shared passion in arts and social change inspired our collaboration.

PJ and I walked and talked with about 30 Japantown residents aged 5 to 91, who gave us walking tours of places and sites that mattered to them. Our prompt was intentionally open-ended: If you were to take us on a tour of your town, where would you take us, and why? Participants were multigenerational Japanese American, Chinese American, and Filipino American. Rather than conceive of this project solely as a walking tour or walking interview about a place, we were interested in conceiving ways in which walking could operate as a methodology. Over the many walks and years of engaging in this project, it became clear, ironically, that walking in place(s) often acted as a methodology of displacement. As mentioned above and explained further below, movement’s potential is not solely located in the act of walking in a specific place and time. Movement, found in all matter, exceeds a specific lived experience so that the walking body is part of a gathering of spatial temporalities with varying speeds, flows and durations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) across bodies, buildings, objects, archives, histories, and places.

In what follows, I first discuss theories pertaining to assemblage and movement, drawing primarily from the scholarship of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) as well as contemporary theorists who draw upon these ideas as the basis for their scholarship. I then discuss a few walking narratives as they pertain to the 1942 World War II US Japanese American internment, followed by a section on walking narratives pertaining to redlining and the period of redress and redevelopment following the incarceration.

Spacialized Racism as Assemblage and Movement

My use of movement in this paper is situated largely within Deleuze’s and Guattari’s (1987) use of assemblage is a means through which to analyze configurations not as organic wholes or the logical coming together of parts, but rather as conjunctures of separate parts that have a degree of autonomy within their arrangement. Their use of assemblage is synonymous with their use of concept (Deleuze & Guattari, 1996), an important consideration when working analytically with assemblage because of how a concept connotes abstraction. As abstractions, assemblages are conceptually open to “space, time, matter, thought, and the possible as events” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1996, p. 33). So, while an assemblage can apply to a specifically lived and local situation, it is ultimately a concept that exceeds the limits of a particular situation or locale..

Many contemporary theorists of assemblage (e.g., Buchanan, 2017; Nail, 2017; Springgay & Truman, 2018) point to the problematic translation of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s original use of the French agencement or agencer into the English assemblage, due to the fact that the former expressions connote an active process of composition—"to arrange, to lay out, or to piece together”—as a form of composition (Nail, 2017, cited in Buchanan, 2017, p. 458) whereas the latter term is often associated with a completed compilation. Agencement and agencer thus refer to an active arrangement, and it is this construct that I work with throughout this paper when referring to assemblage.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe an assemblage as having two vectors, one of which is oriented toward “strata” or territoriality (p. 145) and the other of which is oriented toward non-strata or deterritorialization. The stratic vector has two arbitrary and nomadic dimensions: the machinic, or the form of content; and the expressive, defined as an emergence, dynamism, or “becoming” within an ordering and arrangement. While their operation within an assemblage are the same, the relation between them, as mentioned, is arbitrary rather than determinant and irreducible.

The form of content consists of limits, the conditions under which materials come to matter. In an assemblage of spacialized racism, a form of content is “place” prison camps, hospitals, museums, redlined neighborhoods. The specific conditions—how it is decided that a specific arrangement of place is conceived of as suitable for Japanese Americans to inhabit—become a form of expression concerning race. For Deleuze and Guattari, expression is performative in that it does something rather than simply acquire meaning, orienting analysis toward the conditions through which race becomes expressive. Thus “Japanese American” is performative, materializing through specific conditions within an assemblage. This is a process of becoming-with, whether it is becoming with history, becoming with a racialized narrative, becoming with racist policies, or becoming with one’s own accounts of rebuilding, redress, and resistance.

These forms of content and expression constitute an ongoing process in which something always escapes the arrangement or arranging, diverging and potentially converging in new arrangements. Thus, the other vector within the assemblage retains these content and expressive forms but also presents a means of deterritorilization: a potential novelty that might move toward a new assemblage/concept of place and race.

These processes involve movement. Movement within an assemblage/agencert/concept is inherent in all matter, perceptible or imperceptible as a passage between time and space with varying speeds, durations, directions, and flows (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Such movement does not necessarily involve intentional coordination or physicality. Rather, the quality of movement involves sensation and affect. Affects move and flow within and among human and non-human matter as ever-modulating (e.g., augmented or diminished) intensities: affects are becomings, felt as they pass from one body to another (Deleuze & Guattari, 1996), but not in a determinant way; as noted previously, such a becoming is indeterminant. Puar (2012) and Tsing (2016), for example, emphasize how assemblages take into account precarity, interdependency, capacity, sustainability, and multiple temporalities in which conjunctures arise from common histories as well as from “unexpected convergences and moments of uncanny coordination” (Tsing, 2016, p. 205).

Springgay and Truman (2018) elaborate on an immanent theory of movement for walking methodologies in order to raise new questions regarding the politics of participation and the rhetoric of inclusion. They distinguish between relative and absolute movement. Relative movement pertaining to walking refers to a body’s conscious movement of changing locations; it is directional. The body moves while other objects in the environment (e.g., a building, a street sign) are seen as fixed, and movement is that which passes between the body and its environment. In contrast, absolute movement is not about passing between points. It is movement that engages a multiplicity: absolute movement within an assemblage multiplies endlessly in the sense that it might engage “an interminable array of micomovements” having to do with both preambulatory movement and its potential for shaping new assemblages (Springgay & Truman, 2018, p. 76). Absolute movement is vibrational, a force that lies within the physical (even the molecular, as Deleuze & Guattari write) and is imperceptible to us. This is what is meant by the term “immanent”: it is movement’s potential to produce new systems and systemizations of thought, theory, ways of being that we might or might not ever have intended. These vibrational forces have the potential to displace current assemblages. Springgay and Truman (2018) ask what an immanent theory of movement might do for a consideration of participation’s potential in walking research. Similarly, in this paper I ask what immanent movement might do in and for racialized spaces and the type of spatial imaginary it produces.

Incarceration, Monument, and Museum

Located in California in the United Stated, San Jose Japantown is one of three remaining Japantowns in the country, a town heavily affected by the 1942 World War II Japanese American an Executive Order Number 9066 given after the bombing attack on Pearl Harbor. This executive order called for the relocation of approximately 112,000 Japanese American citizens along the Pacific coast from their residences to internment camps across the United States. These 10 “Relocation centers” were built in remote, desolate areas far inland. These centers included Jerome, Arkansas; Rohwer, Arkansas. Poston, Arizona; Tule Lake, California; Manzanar, California; Granada, Colorado; Minidoka, Idaho; Topaz, Utah; and Heart Mountain, Wyoming.

San Jose Japantown is a significant community in the sense that out of 53 businesses that were forced into closure during internment, 40 businesses and 100 families reestablished themselves by 1947, 3 years following the revoked policy (see JTown San Jose, 2021). In a city of over 1 million people over a third of the population are Asian American (alone or in combination with other races), and about 12,000 are Japanese American (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). Approximately 4,000 residents live in Japantown, many of whom are Japanese American, Chinese American, Filipino American, and Latino American (City-Data.com, 2016).

Of the 30 participants who led us on walking tours of San Jose Japantown (CA), four had experienced the Japanese American incarceration firsthand and three were docents at the museum. Their walks were thus a blend of formalized, historical and personalized narratives about discrimination, incarceration, resettlement, and community development. Throughout Japantown, the WWII Japanese American incarceration narrative exists in various forms: as monuments, as museum archives, as public events such as the annual Day of Remembrance, through music and performance, and through stories, oral and written, told by those who personally experienced incarceration. The Japanese American Museum of San Jose (JAMsj), located within the neighborhood, leads walking docent tours that often integrate these monuments, artworks, and signage into the tour. The museum’s permanent collection along with rotating exhibits that document over 100 years of Japanese American history, from early immigration, their leadership role in agriculture, incarceration during World War II, resettlement, adaptation, and community develop (JAMsj, 2021). According to the museum’s website mission statement, the museum “provides a historical forum that stimulates present day discussions on civil liberties, race relations, and discrimination and American identity” (JAMsj, 2021, para. 2).

Since three of the walkers on our project were docents from that museum, it was not a surprise that their tours included similar sites as a means to discuss the history of Japantown: the museum; memorials and monuments, particularly those at the intersection of the main streets of town; Issei Memorial Building, once a hospital serving the Japanese American community and now a cultural office building; Ikoi no Ba, five peaceful places for reflection symbolically marking five moments in Japanese American history—internment, festivities, farming, immigration, and culture (Japantown Business Association, 2021); San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin; Roy’s Café, a coffee shop in the middle of Japantown; the Hori Midwife house; and the Wesley United Methodist Church. While each walker took me to similar stops and monuments along the way, the stories they shared, and the sites at which we lingered, differed.

Joe Yasutake, a docent at the museum and in his late seventies at the time of our walk, took me on a 2-hr walk through the museum, so that our entire walk entwined the museum’s exhibitions with Joe’s personal stories. Many of the exhibits he showed pertained to artifacts and documentary materials pertaining to Japanese American incarceration experience. Joe’s tour was deeply personal. As we stood in front of a large series of photos and maps of the prison camps, he recalled stories of his experiences as a boy in the camps and of the separation of his family from his father for 2 years, during which time they did not know of his whereabouts. His father was a U.S. government translator for the immigration department at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Joe was 9 years-old when they arrested his father, shortly after his family had returned from Church and his father left to go to a poetry reading. Ironically, he was detained in a cell in the same immigration building in which he worked. His father, a first-generation Japanese immigrant, was deemed a dangerous political threat under the new presidential executive order and sent to a high security camp for dangerous prisoners. Separated from his father, Joe, his mother, and three siblings were forcefully relocated to the Puyallup Assembly Center in Washington and then imprisoned at the Minidoka War relocation Authority Camp in Idaho.

Standing in front of an exhibit of arial maps and photographs of camp locations and buildings, Joe pointed to the exact barrack on a photographic map in which he, his mother, two brothers and sister were imprisoned and spoke of the never-ending dust, dirt, and wind of the desert camp that blew in through cracks in the poorly built tenement buildings. He spoke of the silence within his family that followed those years of internment, in which his father was never employed by the US government again and instead took up employment as a domestic servant when they moved to Chicago. Eventually, his father became the executive director of the Chicago Resettlers Committee, a service that helped formerly incarcerated Japanese Americans restart. He spoke about overhearing his brothers discuss leaving the camp, and how one of them left their imprisonment to join the World War II 442^nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated Army unit comprised of Japanese Americans that was the most decorated for its size and length of service (The National WWII Museum, 2020).

Our walk concluded with Joe taking me to a large metal shed behind the museum, a large storage area for items deemed important and not yet incorporated into the museum. We stood amid rows of farming equipment from the late 1800s to the 1930s as Joe explained some of the agricultural history. In the late 1800’s, Japanese laborers came from Hawaii and began to settle around San Jose. While some Japanese immigrants bought land, California changed the law several times; The Alien Land Law of 1913 was aimed at Asian immigrants ineligible for citizenship, barring them from property rights from 1913 to the end of World War II. Joe shared his analysis about the passing of this law. “White farmers didn’t like us very much,” because, he surmised, Japanese and Chinese American Farmers had developed cooperative farming practices in which they traded information on and supplies of soil, seeds, crops, and machinery that made them very financially successful. “They were more than happy to see us leave,” he says of the executive order.

Joe’s personal stories mingle with stratic forms of content (place) and expression (race). Land rights, economics, and farming in the Santa Clara Valley, and the success of Asian and Asian American farmers arranged and sedimented within Asian discrimatory policies and practices. The places that Japanese Americans were allowed to occupy become systematized with the Alien Land grant’s segmenting of farmland and landrights that, in turn systematize the formation and form of a prison. The prison, in turn, doesn’t refer back to itself so much as it arranges new ideas and constructs of what a prison does (as Foucault suggests in his own analysis of form and expression in Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 66). Japanese American prison camps become expressive—performative—of Japanese American: “Un-American,” “criminal,” “dangerous,” “outsider” materialize through the prison and Executive Order #9066.

As the assemblage is a fragmentary whole, what is both knowable and doable becomes unsettled: this is its arbitrary and indeterminant potential. The performative nature of the “criminal-unAmerican-prisoner-Japanese-American-becoming” slips and reconstitutes itself. The museum physically and conceptually materializes out of redress, relocation, and re-integration, providing the conditions wherein historical and contemporary discussions on civil liberties, race relations, discrimination and American identity materialize and become expressive. Indeed, the museum co-hosts an annual Day of Remembrance event (JAMsj), an organized day of speakers, events, and candlelight processional that focuses on civil liberties. On the museum’s website about the event are interviews with people who were impacted by civil liberties violations in relation to Japanese American history. In a 2014 interview for the event, Joe stated, “We really need to keep aware of this [internment experience] because of the state of our country. ( . . . ) There are things that are going on today that are just as relevant as seventy years ago. It is very important that people do not forget what happened” (JAMsj, 2014).

A critical aspect of immanent movement in the above account concerns story as an affective, mobile operator within the concept of spatial racism. The next account further demonstrates this idea in relation to the museum, monuments, and public installations in the neighborhood. Jimi Yamaichi’s walk highlighted the museum but extended to other buildings and landmarks in the town. We spent three separate days together in various formats: a sit-down interview in which he gave me an oral family history account; a StoryWalk of the town; and a subsequent meeting in which he shared maps of the town and its buildings over time in order to discuss changes.

“I was imprisoned in the camps at age twenty, and was there for four years.” Jimi Yamaichi, 91 years-old ¹ at the time of our walk, was the cofounder, volunteer docent, and curator at the JAMsj. During his imprisonment, he was a construction foreman at the World War II Tule Lake War Relocation Authority (WRA) prison camp for Japanese Americans, a flat, sparse, elevated (4000 feet) stretch of 110,000 acres of a dried-up lakebed in California. Jimi learned carpentry while at the assembly center and the prison camp, eventually overseeing the construction of an irrigation system for the dry prison sight.

One of the stops on his walk was a barracks room installation, part of the museum’s permanent collection. “I built this replica of one of the camp homes based on what it was like to actually live there, and from photographs,” he explains. “The thing that’s different here? No dirt. In the camp, wind would blow the dirt in through the cracks in the wall, and cover everything.” Jimi recalled how the wind would blow through the camp and through the cracks of the untreated, shrinking and cracking wood walls. Sitting in the installation, Jimi pulled up a chair to sit at the table while I sat on a cot bed. Attention to sensory details abound in this room, something he found important when trying to convey the experience. Around us were an oval-shaped shaped stove, handmade furniture, a window, a door that opened to the outside, and hung laundry hanging on an indoor clothesline. Some of the items in this room were actual artifacts from the camps, Jimi noted, like the stove. Jimi built this barracks room from architectural blueprints and memories. He had even recreated the gaps between floorboards, a detail that Jimi had preserved from his memories. Nested within his own permanent exhibit, on the barrack’s cot is Flo Oy Wong’s “1942: Luggage From Home to Camp,” suitcases from those who were relocated and imprisoned that now held personal items and photos from Japanese Americans incarcerated in the camps, an installation that carries memories, mementos, and metaphors of migration and movement.

His walking tour of the town’s monuments, historic buildings, public installations, and the local senior center highlighted spatiotemporal and sensory dimensions of his stories. We walked to the historic Hori building that had formerly been a midwife house and named for the Japanese midwife Mito Hori (now a one-story apartment building) in which Jimi and many of his siblings were born. Jimi is the fourth child in a family of 10 children. Standing in front of the house, he pointed my attention to the granite bench, one of many public memorial benches placed around the neighborhood. Made of polished granite, each has an etched drawing taken from a photographic image and/or an engraving that tells a story about that site. Etched onto the bench in front of the former midwife house is a rendering of Jimi with many of his siblings who had been birthed there.

Jimi is, in fact, found everywhere in Japantown. His personal history is embedded literally in the public memorials situated within the neighborhood; he frequently stopped to speak informationally about each one. When we arrived at a street corner in the center of town marked by three memorials in close proximity—Issei Voices, The Issei Pioneer Stone, and the Nikkei Lantern—he spent considerable time discussing the significance of each one, but mainly focused on the Issei Voices memorial, a 36-foot, horizontal granite monument engraved on the sides with Japanese words and phrases and on the top with a timeline of Japanese American historic events. “These are words and phrases that were important to our families. These are phrases that the Issei (the first generation of immigrants from Japan) wanted their children to learn.” Pointing out one phrase in particular: “Shikata ga nai,” in letters noticeably larger than others etched onto the monument, Jimi translated it to “It cannot be helped.” Beyond just the literal English translation, Jimi explained that the phrase in Japanese “was a way of life.” The phrase embodied an attitude toward events of all kinds, but Jimi noted its importance for situating the Japanese American incarceration. For Jimi, it didn’t mean one was powerless; it meant that there were things out of one’s control.

Issei Voices is also meant to serve as a resting area for people to reflect. As Jimi and several others described on their walks, these are Ikoi no Ba, peaceful places for reflection, of which there are five throughout Japantown symbolically marking five important moments in Japanese American history: internment, festivities, farming, immigration, and culture (Japantown Business Association, 2021). Jimi walked me to an Ikoi no Ba that he had created and installed on one of the wide sidewalks down the street from the museum, a rounded, sculptural cedar bench that he had helped craft out of a single cedar tree, revealing the story of finding the tree, transporting it to this location, and his vision of honoring the circular shape of the tree trunk in the shape of his installation.

Jimi’s stories reveal how spatial racism arranges specific conditions under which matter becomes material and expressive Barren and isolated landscapes, harsh weather conditions, substandard buildings, and untreated, gaping wood are physical materials fit for the Japanese American-as-criminal. While his installation recreates the barraks in which he and his family were imprisoned, the installation form (that also includes Wong’s luggage installation) gives rise to affective encounters with time, space, and place that become expressive of Japanese American-becomings of citizen, artist, activist, and survivor. A prison barrak, a museum installation, an Ikoi no Ba resting place, and a family history carved into stone perform the concept of spacialized racism as a system that self-arranges into a fragmentary whole, wherein something always escapes via its expressive dimension.

Both Jimi’s and Joe’s stories reveal how a museum’s archives, monuments, and installations move affectively within an assemblage of spatial racism. The museum’s collections are not static archives reflecting a moment in history and tied to a particular place. Rather, the museum’s archives resonate across space, time and particular locations as they entwine with personal stories. The immanent movement in photos, installations, and exhibits become affective encounters with Joe’s stories as he moves from photograph to map to document, drawing an invisible path of connectivity across space and time to other places. Similary, Jimi’s walking tour of monuments and public installations demonstrate the ways in which memorials are in movement, inscribing and inscribed by personal stories.

Redlining, Redress, and Redevelopment

Many walking participants mentioned the immigration of Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants to the Santa Clara Valley and around Japantown, referring frequently to policies and events that physically shaped its borders and buildings. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and The Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota and excluded Asian immigrants altogether (see Office of the Historian, 2021), were given as reasons for the establishment of medical and law practices, churches, and business centers within Japantown. The purpose of the 1924 Act was to “preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity” (Office of the Historian, 2021, para. 8). A shared history of discrimination produced Pinoy-town and Chinatown entwined with and adjacent to Japantown (j. Muriera, personal communication, July 15, 2015) and provided safe spaces for these immigrant groups.

Another policy that determined the location and boundaries of San Jose Japantown was a practice of residential segregation referred to as “redlining.” In 1936, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board incorporated “residential security maps” into their standards to determine where mortgages could or could not be issued (Federal Home Loan Bank Board, 1936; see Hillier, 2005). Developed by the Home Owner’s Loan Coalition (HOLC), these were color-coded maps indicating the level of security for real estate investments in 239 American cities. Redlining derives from the practice of drawing a red line on a map to delineate these areas where financial institutions would not invest or back mortgages based on racial, ethnic, and religious composition without regard to residents’ qualifications or creditworthiness (The Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston, 2021). A study released for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (Mitchell and Franco (2018) showed that the vast majority of neighborhoods marked “hazardous” in red ink on maps drawn by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corp from 1935 to 1939 are today much more likely than other areas to comprise lower-income, minority residents, locking neighborhoods into concentrated areas of poverty. Neighborhoods that were predominantly made up of African Americans, as well as Catholics, Jews and immigrants from Asia and southern Europe, were deemed undesirable (Jan, 2018). This discriminatory practice continued until 1968, when the Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in housing, although Rothstein (2017) notes that redlining was a state-sponsored system of segregation that has impacts on communities today.

While planning our research, PJ Hirabayashi suggested that we walk with Japantown’s community activists, many of whom were of the Yonsei (third) generation of babyboomers born after 1945 and involved with redress, reparation, and redevelopment within Japantown. The Yonsei generation is frequently cited as the activist generation (e.g., Fukuda & Pearce, 2014). Those that walked with us included Duane Kubo, a documentary filmmaker and retired professor; Carolyn Kameya, engaged with the redress movement and also with the town’s seniors; Roy Hirabayashi, co-founder of one of the earliest taiko drumming groups in North America; and Susan Hayase, a civil liberties activist, member of the Nihon machi Outreach committee, and one of the organizers of the Day of Remembrance. The buildings and sites that we walked to were fairly similar across walkers, but the routes and paths, duration, and stories all varied. These sites included the Issei Memorial Building, the monuments at the intersection of 5^th and Jackson (discussed in the previous section), the Japanese American Museum, a few restaurants and stores that have been in operation since before World War II, markets, Roy’s Café, the Buddhist and Methodist Churches, the Corporation Yard that was once the site of Chinatown, and Okida Hall, a theater, rehearsal space, and currently an Ethiopian Church).

The Issei Memorial Building, a San Jose Historic Landmark, was one of the most frequent stops on people’s tours. Nearly all 30 participants took PJ and I there as part of their StoryWalks. Built in 1910, the building served as the Kuwabara Hospital, named after its first resident physician, who served there until 1934. Anti-Asian sentiment and religious, cultural, and language differences are cited as barriers for Japanese residents and immigrants to attend the main hospital in San Jose, which resulted in a need for a hospital within Japantown. Japanese doctors were not legally licensed in the state of California, so Dr. Taisuke Kuwabara was supervised by another doctor, James Beattie, a licensed White doctor, who also held the title to the hospital (Fukuda & Pearce, 2014).

During each of their separate StoryWalks, Susan Hayase and Duane Kubo played with the idea of birth across time and space, noting how, for example, the hospital-turned civic office building gives birth to the development of ideas about the future of the community. Standing in front of the building for several minutes, Duane remarked that the building was once a hospital that served the needs of a community that couldn’t otherwise be attended to otherwise. Duane, who was a professor of Asian American studies and now a documentary filmmaker with an office in the Issei Memorial building, commented that in the 1970’s the building was a meeting place for young people and activists. “These meetings gave birth to SJ Taiko, Asian Law Alliance, Yu-Ai Kai (the local senior center). It’s really kind of an incubator, I think, and still acts as an incubator today for community ideas.” Today, there are groups such as his own—Japantown Community TV—as well as San Jose Taiko and the Contemporary Asian Theater Scene.

Susan Hayase explicitly mentioned redlining as a major factor in creating Japantown as a specific geographic place. Like Joe’s and Jimi’s StoryWalks, Susan’s pertained to both physical and conceptual spaces of her political involvement since the 1970s or to the town’s redevelopment. “I think redlining is the unofficial way that segregation was enforced,” Susan stated. She recounted how she saw a computerized, interactive redlining map from1933 of San Jose, and how the Japantown area was the only redlined area in the city of San Jose at that time. She noted in particular the realtor’s notes, which read, “This area has too many negros and orientals [sic]”:

I think it’s really important to understand that Japantowns (in San Jose, San Francisco, and Los Angeles) didn’t arise . . . just to provide ethnic interest for people. They were because of segregation and for mutual support for communities and social interactions for people. (in Powell, 2019)

Susan also commented on the value of having a geographic location. “It’s nice to have a place where you can go outside and feel comfortable. And having a tie to not only the buildings but the history and the people.” Importantly, she and others such as Carolyn Kameya, another walking participant, were involved in the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee (NOC) in 1979. Both she and Carolyn took us on walks to the museum, spaces where buildings were no longer present, buildings occupied in ways that were different than how they functioned in the past, and to conceptual spaces comprised of group meetings across different locations and times. Physically walking to these latter spaces was not always possible, but all of these locations, she noted, produced grass-roots efforts to help bring about the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

Like many others, Susan walked me to the intersection of 5th and Jackson where the Issei Voices, Nikkei Lantern and the Issei Pioneer Stone monuments stood. Like my walk with Jimi, we lingered there for a while. Many had talked about the meaning of the Nikkei Lantern a tall, arching white memorial with lights along its length symbolizing the optimism of the Nikkei generations and arching at the words, “February 19, 1942,” the date of the signing of Executive Order 9066, symbolic of the “stress and dislocation” imposed on the incarcerated Japanese Americans (Japantown Business Association, 2021). As a term, Nikkei has many meanings that depend on context and location, but generally refers to emigrants and their descendants who live abroad or return to Japan but retain a separate identity from native Japanese (Hirabayashi et al., 2002).

In the above accounts, an example of absolute movement and its potential for novelty is seen in the fluid expressions of Japanese American-becomings. Susan moved from a discussion of the memorial to personal accounts of the NOC’s informational programs concerning what they felt were reasonable demands for redress. She recounted how they asked internees about their experience, and how “many of them just cried.” Eventually, the experience started to “break through” and there was an attempt at organizing people to testify at the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Both Susan and Carolyn, who is also involved in the NOC, separately took me to the museum and discussed how the NOC encouraged people to bring mementos, IDs, documents, and other archives as a means to remember and build a collective memory. Many of these items became an exhibit for the redress campaign before becoming part of the museum. In this way, Susan and Carolyn expressed a direct tie between the redress movement and the building of community institutions.

Susan and Carolyn are also involved in the planning of the annual Day of Remembrance. A day meant to remember Executive Order 9066, its impact, and to reflect on the loss civil liberties and what it means in contemporary times, events are held in a number of Pacific coast locations. In San Jose Japantown, the Day of Remembrance is sponsored by the museum, the annual event involves a gathering of local community members to hear testimonies from those incarcerated, listen to leaders from civics organizations in the local area, and participate in a candelight processional.

In 2015, I attended the 35^th annual San Jose Day of Remembrance (DOR) at the San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin. The year’s theme was “Stories from the Past, Lessons for Today” focusing on personal stories about the effects of incarceration as told by those directly affected or by family descendants. Local civic leaders spoke, such Kenote speaker former congressman Mike Honda whose family was sent to the Japanese American internment prison Camp Amache when he was one year old, Susan’s husband Tom Izue, Director of the California History Center at DeAnza College, and the local music ensemble San Jose Taiko (cofounded by my community research partner PJ Hirabayashi). Also speaking that day was Olyli Bantuas of the South Bay Islamic Association, who expressed appreciation for the NOC; and Vernon Hayashida, who read a poem he wrote during the Tule Lake Pilgrimage. In his keynote, Honda stated the following:

“That next generation has a large task before them. It’s the digital age in terms of our understanding of the Constitution and how that applies to your lives.” ( . . . ) “Don’t be fooled by nice terminology like the “Patriot Act.” We know that after 9/11, the Asian American community . . . was out there in the morning the day after standing together shoulder to shoulder with the Sikhs, the Muslims, with the Arabs, with those who looked like the enemy.” ( . . . ) That’s where we practice citizenship. That is where we practice fighting oppression, fighting bullyism, fighting racism — that is to be put into practice every day. (Hiura, 2015, para. 20-21)

The two-hour program taking place at twilight was intentionally designed so that the walk would be in the evening. Participants were instructed to walk silently and take in the words and stories heard during the program. We walked in a circular motion from the church, to the main street of town, down and back along Jackson Street toward the church to the sounds of San Jose Taiko drumming.

Susan’s walk, Carol’s walk, and the candlelight processional illustrate movement’s multiplicity beyond physical ambulation: these walks move across various spatial temporalities in relation to histories of incarceration, redlining, archives, buildings and their uses, monuments, and political discourses. “Neighborhood” as a form of content materializes from practices of exclusion such as redlining and mass ethnic incarceration that spatially grid people into places. Historically, a redlined neighborhood is expressive of “dangerous,” “hazardous,” and “undesirable.” Insofar as policies materialize borders that create conditions of inclusion and exclusion, walking is racialized in this context. Susan, as well as others, spoke of the ways in which the segregated neighborhood was a safe space for walking to local businesses such as the grocery store, the hospital, to church, and to friend’s homes. The walking tours that both Joe and Jimi gave mapped the policies and places in which racialized bodies materialized and were treated as the criminal other undeserving of citizenship. Yet, what is also clear from their walks, as well as Susan’s and Carol’s is the materialization of becoming-activist, becoming-reparational, becoming-heard, and becoming-citizen. A redlined neighborhood becomes a historic district of businesses, memorials, a museum, remembrance, and activitism, one that materializes expressive forms for incubation, redress, resistance, and cultural development. The spatial imaginary put forth by these walks highlight the performative (ongoing and expressive) nature of democratic, inclusive ideals pertaining to activism, redress, and advocacy.

Walking’s Displacement

StoryWalks’ expressive possibilities within an assemblage of spatial racism pertain to what immanent movement might produce for a spatial imaginary of San Jose Japantown. While prison camps and redlining have racialized bodies in/and spaces, Joe, Jimi, Duane, Carolyn, and Susan performed a constant displacement of such racialization in their walking tours through stories and physical sites of activism, resistance, organization, and redevelopment. These actions, which occurred across multiple spatiotemporalities and places, are yoked and become intensified through the event of story-walking in Japantown; immanent withing the physical movement of a walking tour are a vibratory array of micromovements inherent in matter—foot, breath, story, air, granite, wood, and photographs—that might shape other assemblages of movement (Springgay & Truman, 2018). These vibrational forces have a potential to displace and break apart an assemblage of spatial racism, producing new systems and systemizations of thought, theory, and ways of being that we might or might not ever have intended. Movement’s immanence composes a walkng tour of monuments or a museum of differentiating encounter where stories move within a this assemblage and at the same time recompose that system wherein a racialized spatial imaginary is produced through the incubation of resident activism, redress, and redevelopment. This continutal composing and composition carries the potential for differentiation.

In this sense, an assemblage is pedagogical: it is “a multiplicity composed of a certain number of inseparable and intensive variations that provide a contour and constellation of events still to come” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1996, pp. 32–33). As a theoretical lens, an assemblage view of spatial racism reveals the way in which this concept is a fragmentary whole and how once components are added, it might breaks up or change completely (Deleuze & Guattari, 1996). Importantly, walking narrative tours made visible as a public event, publication, or performance (Powell, 2019) become a means to rupture the concept of spatial racism through stories and walks of a vibrant spatial imaginary.

This work speaks to the work of scholars of racial knowledge systems who study how narratives of racial difference are substantiated through governmental, literary, scientific, and social science systems and provide methods to breach them. McKittrick (2016), for example, critiques social scientific and empirical production of “biologically determinist racist scripts” (p. 3) that naturalizes racial-sexual differentiation, Her thesis on blackness emphasizes a “teleological narrative” (p. 8) where the body, violated by racist scientific narratives, is the very foundation of a liberatory trajectory: within this closed system, a body can only realize itself as it moves from blackness as sub-human to a category of humanness that despises blackness.

Simpson’s analysis of Japanese American internment raises similar critiques. In her book, An Absent Presence, she examines how institutionalized racist practices such as the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans are diminished in complexity when figured as nation-state narratives of racial integration, McCarthyism, and other post-war national anxieties. Evoking Foucault’s concepts of discourse and historicity, Simpson (2002, p. 4) examines how history and memory are negotiated “when the need to remember an event challenges the ideals of democratic nationalism and the narrative unity of a nation that historical discourses ostensibly provide.” Part of that narrative unity, she argues, emerges from 20^th century social scientists, who viewed the problem of the “oriental Other” as one of assimilation (e.g., Park, 1950). Anthropologists sent to the prison camps were tasked with strategizing how to move Japanese Americans along a cycle of contact-competition-conflict-accommodation-assimilation so that they might achieve full assimilation. Simpson’s analysis of the unassimilatable Asian American can be directly mapped onto McKittrick’s conception of racial and racist scientific narratives that construct less-than-human narratives.

Both scholars employ and call for methods that rupture these knowledge systems. Simpson’s (2002) method of critical historicism draws attention to the circulation of the internment—its engagement and its displacement—as an opportunity for critiquing history as a problematic exercise in remembering and forgetting. McKittrick asserts that radical methods, such as Wynter’s (2003) autopoesis method, socio-cultural practices, performativity, and nonlinear time-space experiences can observe this system and name its normalcy, thereby potentially providing new conditions that can rupture an existing social system and potentially build different living systems from the “something else’ that is always “going on” (Wynter, 2003, cited in McKittrick, 2016, p. 9). Such techniques must also be wary of falling back into existing systems of knowledge.

I have argued for two methods in this paper: assemblage as analytical method and walking as research method. To think with assemblage theory is to analyze its material elements, their arrangement, the relations they require, the new arranging/arrangements they might enable, and how these arrangements are legitimated and justified (Buchanan, 2017). It is to analyze the forms that are present, to grasp a form’s expressive, affective qualities wherein attentiveness to immanent movement—a moment of differentiation that occurs in a walking tour—might breach the assemblage and, in doing so, reach toward radical reformation.