Utah's Japanese community, Japantown redevelopment plans focus at festival Saturday

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

Utah's Japanese community celebrates its culture at the Nihon Matsuri festival on Saturday.
Denver Consul General Hiroyuk Okajima and Salt Lake officials will attend.
This year's event highlights Japantown redevelopment plans amid Salt Lake City's urban projects.

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah's Japanese community and Japanese culture are the focus of a festival Saturday that will also serve to call attention to proposed redevelopment plans in the Japantown area of Salt Lake City.

Nihon Matsuri, in its 20th year, goes from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, April 26, in the Japantown area in the heart of Salt Lake City, on 100 South between 200 West and 300 West, which is known as Japantown Street. Among the expected visitors is Hiroyuki Okajima, consul general of the Japanese Consulate in Denver, which covers Utah.

"This festival is a chance for our community to share our history, art, food, entertainment, values, history of Japantown and my own personal heritage," Jani Iwamoto, honorary consul of Japan in Salt Lake City and a former state senator, said in a letter of support for the event. The event also serves to celebrate the "essential role" of the Japanese community "in shaping the broader fabric of Utah's diverse culture."

Etta Preece, 2, left, and Sadie, 3, right, pose for a photo while wearing traditional Japanese kimonos during the 13th annual Nihon Matsuri Japan Festival in Salt Lake City on April 27, 2019. (Photo: Silas Walker, Deseret News)

Japanese food will be on offer at the festival along with exhibits and entertainment. "Festivalgoers can look‬ forward to an immersive cultural experience, including authentic Japanese cuisine, traditional‬ and contemporary performances, children's games, martial arts demonstrations and educational‬ exhibits," according to a statement from organizers.

Japanese men started coming to Utah in the late 1880s for jobs building the railroad and shifted to other work, including coal mining and working beet fields, according to the Utah Education Network's Utah History Encyclopedia. "Utah's Japanese residents now include third and fourth generations — sansei and yonsei, respectively."

Okajima, head of the consulate, also met with Salt Lake City and Utah Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity representatives during his brief visit here.

Future of 'Japantown'

The future of historic "Japantown" will also be on display Saturday.

The historic neighborhood, which has been whittled down to one downtown block over past developments, now finds itself at the center of the new "sports, entertainment, culture and convention district." Organizers plan to display 3D scale models of the current and future layouts of its remaining buildings in relation to its neighboring blocks.

The Japanese Church of Christ and Salt Lake Buddhist Temple are tucked between the Salt Palace Convention Center's southwest end and the northern end of "Block 67," two properties with the latest developments in downtown planning.

These models show where the Japanese Church of Christ and Salt Lake Buddhist Temple fit within the "sports, entertainment, culture and convention" district in downtown Salt Lake City. (Photo: Japanese Church of Christ)

Salt Lake County is slated to vote Tuesday on whether to sell about 6.5 acres of Salt Palace land that could go toward a plan to demolish the section closest to the churches. Block 67 was recently added to the project amid concerns from Salt Lake leaders, partially because of its proximity to Japantown.

Revitalizing the neighborhood and some of the other cultural buildings in the zone remains Salt Lake City Councilman Darin Mano's "deepest hope," but he said he was concerned the project's late addition could jeopardize that.

"I don't feel 100% confident that ... what we've done is determinative that the outcome will be positive," he said earlier this month. "There are still so many choices that will be made along the way — design choices, choices about where to put entrances to parking garages ... and things like that."

Meanwhile, conceptual designs that University of Utah architectural students created late last year to show what the historic neighborhood could look like will also be displayed at the event.

All of the concepts reflect the neighborhood's past while "creatively designing a Japantown of the future," according to Lynne Ward, a member of the Japanese Church of Christ leadership.

"These ideas could spark energy into incorporating some of the ideas into the area," she wrote in an email.

Salt Lake City's proposed Main Street promenade also includes a nod to the neighborhood along 100 South east of the convention center, which divides the historic neighborhood.

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The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.