In July 1899, a group of Japanese fishermen sailed into San Diego Bay chasing abalone — and stayed. In the years that followed, they and the countrymen who joined them brought something the bay had never seen: the bamboo pole method of tuna fishing, refined across generations in Pacific waters, and a willingness to push their boats far into open ocean when every other fleet stayed close to shore. Within a decade, the canneries were rising along this waterfront. Within two decades, Japanese Americans dominated a fleet that would make San Diego the Tuna Capital of the World.
They were extraordinary mariners. By 1911, San Diego's newly opened canneries were contracting directly with Japanese American fishermen whose mastery of deep-water currents made them irreplaceable. By 1920, they owned or operated dozens of vessels out of this harbor, delivering catches to processors lining the waterfront in what is now Logan Heights. Portuguese fishermen from the Azores, Italian families from Sicily, Mexican and Chinese crews — all of them worked alongside one another on a bay that ran at full capacity and smelled, in the best possible way, like the sea.
Off the water, those same families had built something rarer than a fleet: a real community. San Diego's Nihonmachi — Japantown — occupied a tight grid of blocks near Fifth and Island, where the Gaslamp Quarter stands today. More than 35 Japanese-owned businesses anchored a two-block commercial heart: hotels, restaurants, produce markets, pool halls, a Buddhist temple at 2929 Market Street, two Japanese-language schools, three churches. A community of 1,554 people had made something permanent from labor and hope. Their American-born children walked to school in those blocks, worshipped in those buildings, learned to live in two languages simultaneously, and called this city home.
President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Within weeks, 1,150 San Diego Japanese Americans — fishermen, the women who worked the cannery lines, their Nisei children — were ordered to report for removal. They were sent first to the Santa Anita racetrack, families sleeping in horse stalls while the belongings of some families were stored in the shuttered Buddhist temple on Market Street. From Santa Anita, they were dispersed to inland camps: Poston and Gila River in Arizona — desert country, far from this water.
Six days after Executive Order 9066 — on February 25, 1942 — a fleet of 16 tuna clippers sailed out of San Diego Harbor for Navy war service. The Navy and Army ultimately took 52 California tuna clippers — most of them homeported in San Diego — more than half the fleet's carrying capacity — and 600 fishermen had signed up for military service at a Naval Reserve Armory meeting in the days before. The men who knew those boats best, who understood their engines and their drafts and the exact weather windows off the Baja coast, watched the Pacific from the desert.
When exclusion orders were lifted — effective January 1945 — most San Diego Nikkei had nowhere to return to. Leases were broken, homes were lost, businesses were shuttered. The Buddhist temple sat emptied of its congregation and of the stored belongings of people who had hoped, when they locked its doors, to return soon. San Francisco kept its Japantown. San Jose kept its Japantown. Of the 43 Japantowns that existed in California before the war, most vanished permanently in the years that followed. San Diego's was erased — a community built over fifty years, dismantled in weeks, never reconstituted in anything like its original form.
The fishing industry survived, diminished. The last San Diego cannery eventually closed. What replaced the canneries along this waterfront is beautiful and worth your time. But the ground beneath it is still the floor of a vanished industry built by people who were owed far more than they received — and whose story belongs to anyone who loves this city enough to want the full version.
Sources: San Diego History Center Journal, "Origins of California's High-Seas Tuna Fleet" (sandiegohistory.org/journal/v58-1/v58-1felando.pdf); San Diego History Center, "The Internment of the Japanese of San Diego County" (sandiegohistory.org/journal/1972/january/internment/); California Japantowns Project (californiajapantowns.org/sandiego.html); Densho Encyclopedia, "Santa Anita (detention facility)" (encyclopedia.densho.org); HMDB, Tuna Fleet Service WWII Historical Marker (hmdb.org/m.asp?m=52350).
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