Peace Plaza and Pagoda

The San Francisco Peace Pagoda is a five-tiered concrete stupa between Post and Geary Streets at Buchanan in San Francisco's Nihonmachi (Japantown). The Pagoda, located in the southwestern corner of Peace Plaza between the Japan Center Mall and Nihonmachi Mall, was constructed in the 1960s and presented to San Francisco by its sister city Osaka, Japan on March 28, 1968. It was designed by Japanese architect Yoshiro Taniguchi.

The San Francisco Peace Pagoda and Peace Plaza are in the center of the Japan Center Mall, which was completed in 1968. The the historic core of Japantown was demolished and replaced with the Japan Center. Unlike the rest of Japan Center funded by corporate interests, the Peace Pagoda was built mainly using contributions from San Francisco's sister city, Osaka.

Masayuki Tokioka idea was to include a pagoda on the site, San Francisco Chronicle covering Mayor George Christopher's request to the Japanese government for the gift of a 'Pagoda for Peace', Tokioka 'envisoned it as a symbol of Japanese-American friendship in the way that the gift of the Statue of Liberty enhanced Franco-American amity'. Tokioka said he conceived of the pagoda to demonstrate 'the majority-a big majority-of the Japanese people are friends of the Americans' after the June 1960 riots that forced President Dwight Eisenhower to cancel a planned trip to Japan.

In the mid-1980s, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution to designate Peace Plaza as a permanent open space, and then the City Recreation and Park Commission took complete ownership of the Plaza in 1989 through eminent domain.

- wikipedia