By admin 
It’s been close to 20 years since Ouye’s Pharmacy operated near 10th and V streets in Sacramento, though its former building could soon be getting renewed attention.
Read more Your guide to California’s 5th Assembly District race
The city announced Friday that it had been awarded a $99,500 grant from the U.S. National Parks Service. Sean de Courcy, the city’s preservation director, said the city had applied for the grant over the summer for a Japanese American survey and historic context project.
As part of this, the city will nominate the building where Japanese American-owned Ouye’s formerly operated at 921 V St. and a former dentist office at 2014 10th St. that was designed by the city’s first Japanese American architect for the National Register of Historic Places.
Much of Sacramento’s Japantown was lost to construction of Interstate 5 and redevelopment of the old West End. Even local landmarks can have a part in shameful history, with de Courcy noting that Memorial Auditorium was a staging area for the shipment of Japanese American residents to internment camps for during World War II.
“Right now, our register does not have equal representation of the other groups that contributed to Sacramento history,” de Courcy said. “So when we do these projects, we work with the community to identify places that are important to them and then we can then make sure that those significant places are preserved going forward and not repeat the mistakes of the past.”
The project follows the city’s award-winning African American Experience Project and its LGBTQ+ Historic Experience Project, which were each completed in recent years.
Each of those projects went into great detail and the Japanese American one could do more of the same.
“It’ll go much further than the redevelopment era and or internment,” de Courcy said. “It’ll go up into modern times and it’ll go back as far as probably the Gold Rush or or even even before the Gold Rush.”
The city noted noted that the project would include “interviews and public meetings to gather community members’ knowledge and experiences.”
“I imagine she has some oral histories out there, but we’ll look to gather those and hopefully build on them when we get more historical context about interment in Sacramento,” de Courcy said.
Read more Your guide to California’s 4th Assembly District race
The grant has a three-year deadline. The city hopes to complete the project with at least a year to spare.
“These projects are better the more outreach we can do, but we like to set some deadlines,” de Courcy. “So we’re looking at an ambitious deadline of 18 months. But we’re probably, if we get good community input and response, then that may go to two years, potentially.”
Reactions to history project
The city received letters of support for the project from Sacramento State, the Center for Sacramento History, Preservation Sacramento, Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty and council members Karina Talamantes, Lisa Kaplan, Caity Maple and Rick Jennings.
Near the former site of Ouye’s Pharmacy on Friday reactions were supportive of the project.
Taylor Jung, a cook at Southside Super, a Korean-Vietnamese restaurant next door to the old pharmacy, said he’d had some awareness of the Japanese history of the area.
“I think any historical area is worth celebrating,” Jung said.
Around the corner from Southside Super is Osaka-Ya, a Japanese confectionery shop. Yoshio Murakami, whose family owns the business, said as he stood behind the counter that he was familiar with a T-shirt attesting to different times for Sacramento’s Japantown.
“There was a shirt going around, a Japantown shirt and it had all the old businesses, but everything was all crossed out,” Murakami said.
There were over 100 names crossed out, Murakami said, representing businesses that once existed in Sacramento’s Japantown but were now gone. Of businesses that were named on the shirt and not crossed out, Murakami named his family’s business and Kiyo’s Floral Design on 16th Street.
Murakami welcomed the idea of Japantown getting more recognition.
“I think it’s great that something that was kind of downsizing is now reappearing back in Sacramento,” Murakami said.
Read more California adoptees continue push in Legislature for original birth certificates