{"id":13005,"date":"2010-08-09T23:05:51","date_gmt":"2010-08-10T03:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/?p=13005"},"modified":"2010-08-10T13:29:19","modified_gmt":"2010-08-10T17:29:19","slug":"wit-life-114-sakura-square","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/2010\/08\/09\/wit-life-114-sakura-square\/","title":{"rendered":"WIT Life #114: Sakura Square"},"content":{"rendered":"

WITLife<\/a><\/strong><\/em> is a periodic series written by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator <\/strong><\/em>Stacy Smith<\/strong><\/a> <\/em>(Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares s<\/strong><\/em>ome of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

My travels bring me to the mile-high city of Denver, Colorado, not exactly what you think of as a hotbed of Japanese influence.\u00a0 This is why I was surprised to catch a glimpse of hiragana during our city tour this past weekend.\u00a0 Little did I know, but not too far from our hotel was a location called Sakura Square<\/a>.\u00a0 This plaza is overshadowed by\u00a0the adjacent shopping area of Larimer Square, but nonetheless worth checking out\u00a0 for its small shrine and Japanese garden featuring a few bonzai trees.<\/p>\n

An interesting piece of trivia is that former Colorado Governor\u00a0Ralph Lawrence Carr\u00a0(1939-1943) was the only elected official in the United States to publicly apologize to the Japanese Americans for their internment during the war.\u00a0 Some say that this is what might have cost him the 1942 election to the U.S. Senate, but it endeared him to the community and to Japanese Americans throughout the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fact, Denver’s Japanese-American community was so grateful that it installed\u00a0a bust of Governor Carr in Sakura Square as a tribute to his support of Japanese-Americans during their internment.\u00a0 Carr is joined by busts of Japanese-American lawyer Minoru Yasui and Yoshitaka Tamai (1900-1983), a Buddhist priest who lived in Denver and presided over the neighboring Tri-State Buddhist Temple.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to our tour guide, Tamai Tower, the 20-floor apartment building in Sakura Square named after\u00a0the priest, is exclusively for residents of Japanese ethnicity.\u00a0 It was part of a development sponsored by the local Japanese community after Japantown was torn down by the Denver Redevelopment Authority.\u00a0 There are several shops\u00a0and restaurants on the ground and first floors of the building, but they seemed more\u00a0like generic Asian establishments (i.e. supermarket) than Japanese ones.\u00a0 However, the Japanese mom and pop restaurant Yoko’s Express<\/a>\u00a0gets high marks\u00a0for its homestyle offerings.\u00a0 If you find yourself in Denver and craving something Japanese, make sure to check out Sakura Square!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WITLife is a periodic series written by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations. My travels bring me to the mile-high city of Denver, Colorado, not exactly what you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42,18,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anecdote-article","category-translatinginterpreting","category-wit-life"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-3nL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13005"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31859,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13005\/revisions\/31859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}