Umeko Kawamoto is a bright-eyed woman with a radiant smile who enjoys reminiscing about San Diego’s thriving Japanese American community in the years before World War II. She recalls the prewar Japantown, in what is now downtown’s Gaslamp Quarter, as a bustling neighborhood that included grocery stores, restaurants, pool halls, dry goods stores, and hotels. The neighborhood, like Japanese districts all up and down the west coast, was emptied of its residents during World War II and never regained its prewar character.
Kawamoto’s father, Yoshigoro Mamiya, was a Japanese im…