Jessie rode up Post Street and pulled into one of the motorcycle parking slots by Peace Plaza, the physical center and spiritual heart of Japantown. Its focus was the Peace Pagoda, a spare, moderne concrete structure of five circular layers rising above a broad, stone-tiled plaza dotted with benches and tree planters, stretching between two low mall buildings. A small grove of cherry trees ran from behind the pagoda to the western mall’s doorway, their still-bare branches overhanging a few benches where one young man sat reading a book, a cup of boba tea by his thigh. Elsewhere across the plaza, people sat and wandered about: mothers with strollers, teens in boisterous threes and fours, couples ranging from their twenties to their nineties. On the north side of Post Street, there were a few more small cherry trees running up along a wide pedestrian walkway between two-story, ‘60s-era wood-sided buildings full of shops and restaurants. The corner of the buildings by Post Street had a tower supported by slender, concrete pillars and topped with a sign reading “Nihonmachi” in both Roman lettering and kanji. The middle of that walkway was a pattern of cobblestones arranged like a sinuous river flowing through the concrete, with two steel fountains shaped like origami flowers blossoming out of it. That origami concept was echoed in the decorations of the...
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