For the past three years, San Francisco’s Japantown has organized an annual festival in the Peace Plaza known as Osaka Matsuri. The festival celebrates the sister city relationship between San Francisco and Osaka, which has been upheld for over 60 years. Although the relationship has been under threat for the past two years, and was politically severed in October, the cultural connection between the cities remains. Osaka Matsuri features live musical and cultural performances from all across the Bay, and the scent of delicious Osakan street food wafts through the air. Among the crowds of people, many of whom walked in off the street out of curiosity, are community members operating different booths. This year, on September 29, Connor Nakamura ’20 helped run a booth comparing the life of Japanese and American high school students.
Nakamura has been an active member of the Japanese-American community in San Francisco for many years. “I’ve been a boy scout in the Buddhist church [in Japantown] for a long time now,” Nakamura said, “and have volunteered at various Japantown events.”
This past summer, Nakamura joined Wendy Li, a senior at Lowell High School, on a three-week-long trip to Osaka as part of the Student Ambassador Program, funded by the San Francisco-Osaka Sister City Association (SFOSCA). Founded in 1957, SFOSCA “helps build bridges of friendship and commerce between these two vital centers of culture and finances,” according to the Association’s website. One of the main ways SFOSCA upholds these bridges is by reaching out directly to the future of each city: students. SFOSCA sends two high school students every year to Osaka to “broadened [their] horizons, [and give them] a new sense of self, and an appreciation for Japanese culture and people,” Miho Armacost, the program’s chair, said.
Nakamura, selected from applicants from all around San Francisco, visited Osaka during a time when the sister city relationship had never been shakier. In late 2017, Osakan mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura requested that San Francisco remove a statue memorial for Japanese “comfort women,” women forced into sex slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in WWII when they occupied territories. The memorial is a public piece of artwork, and the SF Board of Supervisors voted in favor of it in 2015. Yoshimura threatened to dissolve the sister city relationship if the statue was not taken down. While San Francisco has a total of 19 sister cities, Osaka was the oldest and strongest relationship of them all. However, San Francisco’s mayor at the time, Ed Lee, said that the statue was not going anywhere.
SFOSCA assured San Franciscans that the Student Ambassador Program, among its other work, was not going anywhere either. “In light of current uncertainty as to the future of our government-supported sister city relationship, our commitment to work as a conduit of goodwill between the people of San Francisco and Osaka is stronger than ever,” Armacost said in a statement on SFOSCA’s website this past spring. Only a few short months later, with the uncertainty of the sister cities on his mind, Nakamura boarded a plane to Osaka.
Despite all these tensions, though, he had a great time. “Osaka is amazing,” Nakamura laughed, “it’s the greatest city in the world.” The food is delicious, and the history is vibrant. “It used to be the capital of Japan,” Nakamura describes, “they have all of this really old history next to some of the most modern advancements in the world.”
Nakamura stayed with a host family during his time in Osaka, and made long-lasting connections with people he is still in contact with to this day. “There’s this guy who goes to Osaka University. I met him at a party at my homestay’s house. He studies languages.” After Nakamura returned home, his friend came and stayed with him while looking at SF State, not as part of the Student Ambassador program but as part of their friendship. “The day after, he came to Lick to visit a couple classrooms… I tried to emphasize a lot of the affinity clubs at Lick, since they have some of that stuff in Japan but the minority groups don’t have as much of a voice.”
Nakamura’s experience with Osaka and San Francisco was largely one of comparing two cultures that are completely different, but are held together by the fundamental bond of the sister city relationship. There are always groups travelling between the cities, whether they’re people on vacation, government officials, or young people like Nakamura.
However, since Nakamura returned from Osaka, tensions between the sister cities have only gotten worse. In October 2018, Mayor Yoshimura announced that Osaka’s sister city relationship with San Francisco was going to be severed in a ten page letter to Mayor London Breed of San Francisco. “I feel like [Mayor Yoshimura] really overstepped his bounds on this issue,” Nakamura said, “Even though I appreciate our sister relationship, I feel like we shouldn’t sacrifice our values as a city, especially our acceptance of people all across Asia.”
The issue runs deep. In Yoshimura’s letter to Breed, he outlines concerns voiced by previous Osakan mayors from as far back as 2015, when the comfort women memorial was greenlit. “I would suggest that some of the special attention currently being given to Japan’s ‘comfort women’ issue should be broadened to memorialize all the women who have been sexually assaulted and abused by soldiers of countries in the world,” Yoshimura wrote in an excerpt from the letter, citing another open letter to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in 2015. Since then, San Francisco has remained steadfast in its decision to keep the statue up, maintaining their status as the first major American city to have a public comfort women memorial, and Yoshimura made it clear in 2017 that it was only a matter of time before the entire relationship is cut.
There is hope for San Francisco’s tie to Osaka, though. While relations on the political end of the spectrum are dicey at best, the cities’ cultural connection holds steady. SFOSCA aims to continue the Student Ambassador Program, and Japantown has made no moves to discontinue the tradition of Osaka Matsuri. “There’s still an amazing network of Osakans who are super passionate about the sister cities, and want to keep it going on,” Nakamura said. Politically, Osaka and San Francisco are becoming more distant by the month, but the true relationship between the cities is only getting stronger.
