Japantown Peace Plaza

This guide to Japantown Peace Plaza in San Francisco starts with an eternal flame carried in 1968 from a shrine in Osaka, gifted to seal a sister-city friendship, then turns to the harder history beneath it: the Japanese American neighborhood that once filled this stretch, and the 1942 order that forced those families into incarceration camps. It follows how the plaza was rebuilt afterward, with little say from the people who had lived there, and how Osaka's peace pagoda came to stand at its center. A listening tip: look up at the twelve concrete pillars supporting its tiers, each one taller than a five-story building.