When I first moved to
San Francisco, I lived on the corner of Divisadero and Eddy. I loved my apartment but the
neighborhood was rather bland.
Today Divisadero is full of life, but in the 1990’s it was dull. Back then my closest commercial
neighborhood was Japantown. It was
five short blocks to Safeway and just across Geary to Japantown. When I first arrived, Japantown seemed
“exotic.” But exotic is always a
relative term. I grew up on the
East Coast in places with few Asian Americans and Asian immigrants.
My first Japanese
experience was a visit to a Japanese restaurant on a family trip to San
Francisco. I was 11. I was disappointed that we couldn’t be
in one of the rooms where we would have had to remove or shoes and sit on the
floor. My 80-year-old
great-grandmother was with us and, as adventurous as she could be, she was not
going to sit on the floor. For the
rest of her long life she remembered that restaurant as that place where we
had to fish for our food.
Eventually I moved to
the Lower Haight and have lived there since. Japantown is still only a 20-minute walk away and I always
end up there a few times a month.
It’s been a long time since I thought of Japantown as exotic. Japantown is part of my everyday life. As I look back on so much of my art I
begin to see how living near Japantown has influenced my work.
The 2011 Project had a number of pieces with their origins in
Japantown. There were the pieces
using origami
paper from one of the dollar stores.
There was the sushi
map and the Tokyo
piece. Both used maps I bought
in Japantown. The Western Addition
Branch Library also serves Japantown.
It has a good collection of Japan-related books in both English and
Japanese. In 2009 I randomly
picked up a book on Japanese Textile Patterns that lead to an entire series of new mixed
media, map collages.
I still have not been to
Japan, and I am sure when I arrive, it will all seem exotic to me. Then again, years in Japantown have
probably prepared me a little bit.
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