California Migration Museum : Japantown | Returning to the Harlem of the West: Immersive Walking Tour

The California Migration Museum exists as a museum without walls, using digital tools to map the history of displacement and resilience directly onto the city streets where those events unfolded. Their immersive walking tour of Japantown, titled Returning to the Harlem of the West, focuses on a pivotal moment in nineteen forty-five when Japanese Americans returned to San Francisco following their forced incarceration in desert camps. You are walking through a neighborhood that underwent a profound demographic shift during that three-year absence, as Black families who migrated from the South to work in wartime shipyards settled into the homes and businesses Japanese residents had been forced to abandon.