"The answer to Irene’s question is directly tied to a Chicago immigrant experience like no other. Japanese-Americans didn’t end up in Chicago of their own accord: The U.S. government forcibly resettled 20,000 of them to the city from World War II incarceration camps. And, as part of that effort, the government pressured them to shed their Japanese identities and assimilate into white society.
The result? Unlike cities on the West Coast, Chicago’s “Japantown” was not official and it was short-lived. The government’s efforts have had a lingering effect on Japanese-Americans, though.
As one Chicago Japanese-American tells it: “You had to basically be unseen.”...
In the 1960s, a Japanese-American community formed in Lake View, which was considered affordable at the time. The move might seem to defy the government’s warning not to congregate, but Doi says it was actually in line with the government’s vision for assimilation.
“The long game was about housing and employment,” Doi says. “Getting Japanese-Americans into more middle-class and whiter housing was the long-term solution to [what the WRA saw as] the ‘Japanese-American problem.’”...
Many eventually settled in the Chicago suburbs, but there was never an effort to recreate a neighborhood like the one in Lake View. However, in recent years, a new, distinct Japanese-American enclave has formed in Arlington Heights, consisting mainly of foreign-born Japanese who arrived to take jobs for tech companies between 1990 and 2000."
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