The Family Businesses That Made San Jose's Japantown a Cultural District First

A hand-carved wooden shark hangs in the front window of Kogura Company on Jackson Street, mid-bite on a piece of sushi, painted in the loud primary colors of a piece meant to be looked at from the sidewalk. Doug Wright made it in 2001 as part of the citywide Shark Byte Project, Don Gagliardi donated it to the neighborhood, and Carole Rast restored it in 2017 when the paint had worn thin. It has sat in that window through three different decades of Jackson Street commerce, longer than most of the businesses that have opened and closed around it. Kogura itself has occupied that spot since 1934, now run by the third and fourth generation of the same family, selling origami paper and tea sets where they once stocked radios and sewing machines.

That kind of tenure is the actual subject of any honest account of San Jose's Japantown this fall. Not the festivals, not the new restaurants, though both matter. The three-block stretch of Jackson Street between Fifth and Seventh is one of only three historic Japantowns still standing in the United States, alongside San Francisco and Los Angeles, and last year the State of California made that status official by naming it a California Cultural District. The designation is recent. The reason it fit is not.

A Title the State Gave Last Year

California recognized San Jose's Japantown as a Cultural District in 2025, formally acknowledging a three-block area with shops, markets, and restaurants tracing back to 1900, when Japanese immigrants working the surrounding farms first settled here. The designation recognizes a community with a long, documented presence on these blocks, and the storefronts below are a large part of that record.

What was already standing is worth naming specifically, because it explains why the designation stuck where it might not have elsewhere.

The Shops That Predate the Paperwork

Two doors down from Kogura, at 217 Jackson Street, Tom and Judy Kumamaru have run Shuei-do Manju Shop for 38 years, folding and stuffing mochi, manju, and chi chi dango by hand every day the shop is open. They are only the second couple to run the place. The Ozawas ran it for the 35 years before them. No machine has replaced what happens in that back room, which is part of why the shop has outlasted most of its neighbors on the block.

Neither business is a museum piece. Kogura still does a retail trade in Japanese gifts. Shuei-do still sells out most days. What makes them load-bearing for the neighborhood's identity is continuity of ownership across generations who chose to keep doing the same specific work in the same specific storefront, decade after decade, without a state title to make it official. The Cultural District designation gives that continuity an official name.

What's New Still Runs on the Same Pattern

The newest arrivals on Jackson Street aren't breaking from that pattern. They're extending it.

• Sora Soba, a new restaurant serving buckwheat soba sourced from Hokkaido and Nagano, sits next to its sister restaurant Hinodeya, a ramen outpost owned by Masao Kuribara. Kuribara's great-grandfather opened the original Hinodeya in Hasuda, Saitama Prefecture, in 1885. The restaurant on Jackson Street is a fourth-generation extension of a family business that started on a different continent 141 years ago.
• Minasan, whose name translates to "everyone," is the newest shop on the block, mixing local crafts, vintage T-shirts, and vinyl. It has become a regular site for neighborhood events, and it draws a younger crowd than some of the district's older institutions, which matters for a neighborhood whose founding generation has largely moved to the suburbs even as the culture holds here.

Neither business erases what came before it. Sora Soba and Hinodeya import a family lineage from Japan the same way Kogura's founders did in the 1930s. Minasan gives the neighborhood's younger residents a reason to spend time on Jackson Street the same way the manju shop has given older residents a reason for decades. New doesn't mean disconnected here. It means the same mechanism, run by a different generation.

The Calendar That Doesn't Need a Ribbon-Cutting

The businesses hold the blocks together on an ordinary Tuesday. The calendar holds them together the rest of the year.

The Japantown Business Association runs a Certified Farmers Market that operates year-round, not seasonally, which puts it on a different rhythm than most neighborhood markets in the South Bay. On top of that steady baseline sits a festival calendar that has run for decades without needing state recognition to justify itself. Nikkei Matsuri opens the year each spring, produced by the nonprofit Nikkei Matsuri Foundation since 1978. This year's 48th annual edition ran on April 26, drawing crowds for artisan booths, community exhibits, and food from local nonprofits at Fifth and Jackson. Obon follows every July. Fall brings Aki Matsuri and a newer addition, the Spirit of Japantown Festival, both giving the neighborhood a reason to gather again before winter.

None of these events were created to earn a title. Nikkei Matsuri has been held since 1978, well before the 2025 designation. The festivals follow their own annual schedule, set by the community that hosts them.

What the Title Actually Changes

The Cultural District designation gives the neighborhood an official name for what its storefronts and calendar already show. Kogura's fourth generation keeps the shop their family opened, the Kumamarus keep folding manju by hand, and the Kuribara family keeps a restaurant name that dates to 1885. The title recognizes that work.

Walk Jackson Street this fall and the shark is still in the window. The manju shop still runs out of certain items by early afternoon most days. The farmers market still sets up on its own schedule, cultural district or not. If anything is different, it's that the neighborhood now has an official designation that matches what the storefronts have shown for most of a century.

If you're comparing what different Silicon Valley and South Bay neighborhoods actually offer day to day, not just what a listing says about them, Alexander Kalla spends time in these blocks the way he does in escrow paperwork. Let's Connect if you want a conversation grounded in what a place is actually like to live in, not just what it's zoned for.