Heart and Home is a monthly column by Josh Ishimatsu.
Places that Make Us
I don’t know a ton of Japanese – and maybe this is kind of a descendant of immigrants’ experience/feeling – but you can grow up immersed in a home culture where you don’t really know the language and then, later in life, you come across a word which just makes so much sense. You didn’t know this word before but it captures a core set of values/feelings/experiences in a way that you didn’t know a single word could embody. This word has been part of your identity for most of your life but you didn’t know it until you heard it.
For me, furusato (there used to be a sushi restaurant in Campbell with this name) is one of those words. It’s not a word that I grew up knowing, but once I learned it, it felt really evocative and personal.
Furusato literally means old village (using the kanji where furu = old and sato = village). It is most commonly translated into “hometown.” But there’s more to it than that. Furusato is a positive word – there’s nostalgia to it, but more than that, it’s about a place that was formative to your values, your beliefs, your sense of who you are. If you want to generically talk about where you were born or where you grew up, you would use a separate, different word in Japanese – shushinchi. Calling a place a furusato means something different – it’s about a deeper connection, a deeper sense of appreciation. And, the way that I understand it, you don’t have to have been born in a place for it to be a furusato for you. It can be a place where you found a home and which, in turn, shaped and influenced you. It’s a place that made you.
For me, San Jose/this valley – especially San Jose Japantown – is the place that has most shaped me – my furusato. I grew up in San Jose and my extended family has been in San Jose for 4 generations. When I grew up here, San Jose and Santa Clara County hadn’t yet fully become Silicon Valley. It was mostly suburban but there were still some orchards mixed in and you could see some new office parks coming in (though not yet the full-blown tech campuses that we have now). When I was growing up, San Jose felt like the unglamorous, less-sophisticated, less-accomplished, geekier, more awkward, younger sibling of San Francisco. Our valley was scrappy (scrappy in the way that ambitious people who have an inferiority complex are scrappy), a little troubled, but smart and looking to make a name for itself. And this is part of my core identity: awkward, a little bit of a bad attitude, geeky, feeling a little underestimated, looking to do something outside the box (though in my older, more mature years, I’ve been working to shed the bad attitude and become a kinder, more supportive version of myself).
What Makes This Region Special
The current, dominant mythology of Silicon Valley is about tech. The predominating history of Silicon Valley is encapsulated in the story of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both were Homestead High students back when Cupertino was affordable to working class and middle class families, who pulled pranks together, hacked Ma Bell, and built a computer in their garage and then built their hobby into what became one of the richest companies in the world. But this valley is about innovation that encompasses more than big tech. Our history since the 1900s illustrates how we are a place of innovation and transformation, more broadly. We were an agricultural/industrial food processing hub, which became a huge suburb, which became Silicon Valley (which itself has had multiple waves of remaking itself). At each stage of our transformations, there has been racism, exploitation, exclusion, and small-mindedness. This has always been a complicated part of who we are as a place. We are, like the rest of this country, deeply flawed. And, at the same time, this region has been creative, adaptive, generative, and a magnet for people who share these traits.
In terms of trailblazing leaders, there’s Cesar Chavez, Janet Grey Hayes, Blanca Alvarado, Norm Mineta, to name a few. Food-wise, there’s orange sauce, burnt almond cake, Eggo waffles, fruit cocktail… For cultural innovation, there’s Lowrider Magazine, the Wave, Chuck E. Cheese. This place has a track record of doing new things (even if some of them are cheesy, so to speak). Our collective creativity and experimentation has always been something that has made us special, in spite of our other flaws.
And we are losing what makes us special.
Why Silicon Valley is Losing Its Soul
Our county is dynamic and creative, in part, because it has been good at attracting a diversity of dynamic and creative people. Some of it is the reputation (people come here thinking they can become the next Steve Jobs). Some of it is the academic institutions that are here. Some of it is the mythology of the greater Bay Area as a place where you came to be liberated. The Free Speech Movement, the Beat Generation, Queer Liberation, Hippies, the Black Panther Party, etc. This is part of the Bay Area ethos that has rubbed off on our sleepy valley in the South Bay.
But whatever the reasons people were/are attracted to come here, they could stay here because it was affordable to live here.
It is no longer affordable to live here. So, now, Silicon Valley’s soul is shrinking, not growing. We are not the same magnet for immigrants, for migrants, for artists, for creatives, for small business owners, for ambitious geeks of all types. The full spectrum of people who make this place special can no longer sustainably afford to live here. We are displacing our diversity. We are displacing our dynamism. We are displacing our soul.
What We Can Do?
I believe a big part of saving Silicon Valley’s soul is through affordable housing and housing justice. Of course, I work for an organization whose mission is to advance affordable housing and housing justice. So this answer might be seen as self-interested or might feel like it should fall under the category of “when you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” But I do this work because I believe this is what our community deeply needs, not the other way around. This community, this region, this valley – we only live up to our promise and our legacy of innovation and dynamism if we can make this place affordable again. And I mean affordable for everybody, not just at the edges.
This will require a deeper and different investment in housing than we have done to date. It will require innovating new ways of delivering housing affordability, including new ways of expanding homeownership. It will take time, creativity, and multiple new sources of funding. I don’t want to hide how much I think this will cost. Just the same way that tech, over decades, has relied on hundreds of billions of dollars of venture capital, we need deep, patient investments in the positive transformation of our housing ecosystem. The cost is high because the stakes are high and the hole is deep. If we want to keep what makes this place special, we will have to put in the work, the time, and, yes, the money.