City leaders, public grapple over name for proposed park
What’s in a name? As we’ve learned in the Bay Area and across the country, many of the men whose names are on some of our public buildings and spaces aren’t worthy of the honor. So schools and other institutions have changed their names to be more respectful of their diverse communities.
But determining what’s most respectful to a community brings us to an interesting decision facing the San Jose City Council. At today’s meeting, the council is expected to decide on a name for a proposed park in Japantown, a district north of downtown brimming with history and culture. There are two names in contention: Sakura Park, after the Japanese cherry blossom, and Heinlenville Park, named for a 19th century San Jose businessman who owned property in the area.
The unexpected part of this debate is that it is the Japantown community, including its Japanese American and Chinese American residents, who want to honor John Heinlen, a German immigrant who
used his property to create a home for the city’s Chinese community — known as Heinlenville — after it was burned out of downtown in the late 1800s. That site, which later became city property, is where the Japantown Square project is currently under construction.
Brenda Wong, a past president and current director of the Chinese Cultural and Historical Project, emailed me to say she’s strongly opposed to the name Sakura Park because it misses an opportunity to share that history.
“John Heinlen as well as his children were humanitarians, peacemakers and defenders of social justice, countering the dominant anti-Chinese sentiment of the day,” she said. “Their befriending of the Chinese community after the 1887
Market Street Chinatown fire resulted in the Heinlen family receiving extremely harsh treatment by others.”
The issue has been brewing since before COVID-19 put everything in lockdown. City staff recommended “Heinlenville Park,” after aggregating votes for two names in a public survey that referenced Heinlen.
However, at its March 4 meeting, San Jose’s citizen-led parks commission
went in a different direction.
While acknowledging Heinlen’s contribution to the area’s history, they reflected that San Jose might already have enough parks named after White men.
Going back to the list of proposed names, the commission unanimously chose Sakura Park — a name the group felt honored a beloved Japanese community symbol and respected community input, as it also received a high number of votes in the community survey.
Parks Commissioner Larry Ames, who made the motion for Sakura Park, said in a letter to the council that while he appreciated how “Heinlenville” invoked San José’s multicultural history, he stands by the recommendation.
“I also felt that a park name is more than a history lesson for the few, and so I recommended a name that I thought would better honor the
entire community,” he wrote.
It is, to be sure, a safe choice — a pleasant name that references Japanese culture and almost seems designed to be inoffensive. You would have thought that would be the end of the story and an example of an advisory board not taking the traditional — i.e., dead White male — path to a park name.
But in the weeks that followed the park commission’s vote, residents in Japantown and members of the South Bay’s Chinese American community and others pushed back, arguing that the choice of Sakura Park over Heinlenville erased an important historical moment for one of the city’s ethnic communities.
In a letter to the City Council, Tamiko Rast, a fifth-generation Japantown resident whose family owns the popular coffee house, Roy’s Station, and historian Connie Young Yu, whose family’s roots trace back to Heinlenville, wrote: “Assigning a contemporary brand to a historic
enclave is the very definition of whitewashing, reinforces a system of disenfranchisement, and is deeply offensive to the City’s Chinese-American past. It removes an opportunity to show others how diversity ruled in spite of popular opinion in the 1880s, enriches our City’s understanding of race and culture, and fully embraces San Jose’s current edict of diversity and inclusion.”
They also noted that most of the cherry blossom trees planted in Japantown have actually died. The district’s Japanese American farmers cultivated apricots, strawberries and peaches.
“Despite being an ethnically-diverse district with a dynamic history, we are being reduced to an ornamental stereotype,” they wrote.
Several Japantown civic groups, including the Japanese American Museum of San Jose, also sent letters urging the City Council to pick Heinlenville. Members of De Anza College’s Ethnic Studies department also sent an email with similar sentiments.
Even Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors President Cindy Chavez, in whose district the park would be located, put her support behind Heinlenville Park, saying it would show appreciation for Heinlen’s generosity toward San Jose’s Chinese community.
“This was a group of people discriminated against based solely on their ethnicity,” she wrote to the City Council. “John Heinlen set the example to treat every person with respect and dignity that we aspire to today.”
No matter what council members decides, the debate over this park’s name should serve as a lesson that no person or community — whether they are a Chinese immigrant or a German businessman — can be judged solely by their skin color or ethnicity. Our histories are complex and often complicated.