My friend Sarah and I were wandering around Japantown San Jose last night and the place was really depressing. At 8pm the place looked deserted, with almost all the businesses closed except for a few restaurants. Quite a few storefronts were empty, businesses that had simply shut down for lack of, well, business. In fact the whole place looked even worse than when I’d last visited it a couple years ago.

The busiest place around there was the Buddhist temple nearby, where there was some kind of ceremony—a funeral we guessed from all the people dressed in black.

I found myself low on cash and when we went looking for an ATM I finally realized why Japantown is so dead: there are no banks or ATMs closer than about five blocks, and almost none of the restaurants there accept credit cards. A reflection of modern Japan, Japantown SJ is not; post-war Japan maybe…