On a clear April Saturday, the lawns of Memorial Park fill with the smell of grilled teriyaki and the sound of taiko drums, and beneath two hundred cherry trees the Japanese in Cupertino, California gather as they have for more than forty springs. The trees were a gift. The community that tends them is something the orchards of this valley grew long before Apple did.
The Place
Cupertino sits at the western edge of Silicon Valley, tucked against the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains in Santa Clara County. It is one of the wealthiest small cities in the United States, with a median household income well above 160,000 dollars and a per capita income that ranks it among the country’s most affluent towns of its size.
The city was incorporated in 1955 and named, by way of a creek, after Saint Joseph of Cupertino. For most of the twentieth century it was prune and apricot country, part of the orchard belt once called the Valley of Heart’s Delight.
Today the population of roughly 58,000 is more than seventy per cent Asian, and the city is best known as the home of Apple’s headquarters. The Japanese community here is small as a share of that total, but its roots in the surrounding soil run deeper than the silicon.
How It Became Japanese
The orchard years
Japanese immigrants, the Issei, began arriving in the Santa Clara Valley around 1890, drawn by work in the fruit orchards and canneries as economic hardship pushed them out of rural Japan. Many were single men at first, filling labour gaps left after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
They worked as farmhands and cannery labourers across the valley, and a number put down roots in and around Cupertino and neighbouring Mountain View. The land they tended was the same orchard country that would later be paved into the world’s most famous technology corridor.
It was never easy. The California Alien Land Law of 1913 barred immigrants ineligible for citizenship, which by law meant Asian immigrants, from owning farmland and sharply restricted their leases. Families were forced to move on, to farm in others’ names, or to watch the fruits of their labour pass to someone else.
Removal and return
The Second World War broke the valley’s Japanese American community apart. Under Executive Order 9066, the Issei and their American-born Nisei children across Santa Clara County were forced from their homes and farms into incarceration camps, abandoning land, businesses and harvests they had spent decades building.
Those who returned after the war faced the slow work of rebuilding. The institutional heart of that rebuilding lay a few miles east, in San Jose’s historic Japantown, one of only three surviving historic Japantowns in the United States. Its churches, language schools and the Japanese American Museum of San Jose became the anchors for a community that had been scattered, and they remain so for the families who now live in Cupertino.
The valley turns to silicon
From the 1950s onward the orchards gave way to subdivisions and chip factories. De Anza College opened in 1967 on the grounds of a former winery, and along with the rise of the technology industry it helped turn a small town into a Silicon Valley city.
For Japanese American families already in the region, the transformation meant a generational shift off the land and into the professions: engineering, medicine, teaching, the new technology firms. Cupertino’s schools, consistently among the highest rated in California, became one of the chief reasons families chose to stay and buy here.
The new arrivals from Japan
A second, more recent layer arrived with the technology boom itself. As Japanese corporations opened Silicon Valley offices and Japanese engineers came to work at firms across the valley, Cupertino’s combination of strong schools, safety and an established Japanese cultural infrastructure made it a natural landing point. The same draw has shaped other foreign-born technology communities across the valley.
These newer families, often on multi-year postings, sit alongside the descendants of the orchard generation. The result is a community with two distinct memories: one shaped by removal and return, the other by the global movement of the modern technology workforce.
A friendship sealed in trees
In December 1978, Cupertino formalised a sister city relationship with Toyokawa, in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture. The first delegation of Cupertino citizens visited Toyokawa in June 1979, and the city sent twenty-five coast redwood trees to Japan as a gesture of friendship.
In 1983, to mark the fifth anniversary, Toyokawa gave Cupertino two hundred cherry trees and two large stone lanterns. They were planted in Memorial Park, where they bloom every spring, and the relationship is still kept alive today through student and adult exchanges built around home stays rather than hotels.
The Landmarks
Memorial Park, 21121 Stevens Creek Boulevard. Cupertino’s central park is home to the two hundred cherry trees gifted by Toyokawa in 1983 and to two stone lanterns from the same city. Each April it becomes the grounds of the Cherry Blossom Festival, the most visible expression of the city’s Japanese ties.
Cupertino Cherry Blossom Festival, Memorial Park. First held in 1983 and now in its fourth decade, the festival fills the park with taiko, folk dance, calligraphy and food stalls selling sushi, gyoza, yakisoba and mochi. Proceeds support the Cupertino Toyokawa student exchange, tying a weekend of festivity back to the friendship that started it.
Tokyo Central, 19750 Stevens Creek Boulevard. Run by the Marukai Corporation, which has been serving Japanese American shoppers since 1965, this Cupertino supermarket stocks Japanese groceries, fresh seafood and prepared sushi. For many families it is the weekly errand that keeps a Japanese kitchen running in the middle of Silicon Valley.
Mitsuwa Marketplace, 675 Saratoga Avenue, San Jose. Just over the city line and minutes from Cupertino, Mitsuwa is one of the largest Japanese supermarkets in the country, with a food court of ramen and a bakery, a matcha shop and a sake selection. It functions as a regional gathering point for the whole South Bay Japanese community.
Ippudo, 19540 Vallco Parkway, Cupertino. The Cupertino branch of the international ramen house sits at Main Street, the dining and retail district that replaced part of the old Vallco mall. On weekends the queue is a cross section of the city: tech workers, students from De Anza and Japanese families.
San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin Japanese Language School, 640 North 5th Street, San Jose. Founded in 1907 in San Jose’s Japantown, the Saturday language school still teaches reading, writing and Japanese culture to children across the South Bay, including Cupertino families who want their children to keep the language. Its longevity is a measure of how far back the valley’s Japanese community goes.
De Anza College, 21250 Stevens Creek Boulevard. Opened in 1967 on the site of a former winery, De Anza is woven into Cupertino’s identity and educates a heavily Asian American student body. It stands as a marker of the moment the orchards became a college town and a technology hub at once.
Where They Came From
The older families trace back to the Issei who left rural Japan around the turn of the twentieth century, many from the farming and fishing prefectures that sent so many emigrants to California’s agricultural valleys. They came to work the orchards and stayed to build a community that survived incarceration and returned to rebuild.
The sister city link points specifically to Aichi Prefecture and the city of Toyokawa, a connection now more than four decades old. While the relationship is civic rather than a migration route, it has kept Cupertino’s ties to a particular corner of Japan unusually personal, carried by generations of exchange students.
The newer arrivals come from across Japan, often from its own technology and corporate centres, brought to the valley by company postings and the pull of Silicon Valley itself. For them Cupertino offers what it offered the generation before: good schools, safe streets and a place where being Japanese is ordinary rather than remarkable. It is a pattern echoed in other affluent enclaves where Japanese families have gathered, from the Japanese community in Irvine in Southern California to the Japanese families of Palos Verdes Estates, and in the corporate enclaves of Fort Lee and Edgewater, New Jersey.
Cupertino Today
The Japanese in Cupertino, California are no longer a farming community and were never a large enough group to make a Japantown of their own here. They are woven instead into one of the most Asian and most affluent cities in America, their presence felt in the grocery aisles, the language classes, the ramen queues and, most of all, the cherry trees.
The community’s institutional centre remains in San Jose’s Japantown, a short drive east, where the churches, the museum and the language school carry the formal memory of Japanese American life in the valley. Cupertino is where many of those families now live, raise children and send them to its prized schools, even as the daily rituals of faith, language and remembrance often pull back toward Japantown.
What endures most clearly is the friendship with Toyokawa, renewed each April under blossoms that a Japanese city planted in California soil. In a place defined by the relentless forward motion of technology, it is a quiet, recurring reminder that Cupertino’s Japanese story did not begin with the valley’s chips. It began with its trees.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Japanese community in Cupertino, California?
The Japanese in Cupertino, California are a small share of a city that is more than seventy per cent Asian. The 2010 census recorded Japanese residents at about 3.3 per cent of Cupertino’s Asian population, within a total city population now around 58,000. The community is dispersed throughout the city rather than concentrated in one neighbourhood.
Why did Japanese families settle in the Cupertino area?
Japanese immigrants first came to the surrounding Santa Clara Valley around 1890 to work in the fruit orchards and canneries. In recent decades, the Japanese in Cupertino, California have been drawn by the city’s top-rated schools, its safety and its established Japanese cultural infrastructure, along with the technology industry that brings engineers and corporate families from Japan.
What is the Cupertino Cherry Blossom Festival?
It is an annual spring festival held in Memorial Park since 1983, featuring Japanese performances, food and crafts. Proceeds support the student exchange programme with Cupertino’s sister city, Toyokawa. It is the most visible celebration of the city’s Japanese heritage.
What is the connection between Cupertino and Toyokawa, Japan?
Cupertino and Toyokawa, in Aichi Prefecture, signed a sister city relationship in December 1978. In 1983 Toyokawa gave Cupertino two hundred cherry trees and two stone lanterns, now in Memorial Park. The two cities still run student and adult exchanges based on home stays.
Where can you find Japanese groceries and food near Cupertino?
Tokyo Central on Stevens Creek Boulevard, run by the Marukai Corporation, sits within Cupertino, while Mitsuwa Marketplace on Saratoga Avenue in San Jose is just over the line. Ramen houses such as Ippudo at Main Street Cupertino round out the everyday Japanese dining options.
Is there a Japantown in Cupertino?
No. The historic institutional centre for Japanese American life in the area is San Jose’s Japantown, one of only three surviving in the United States, a short drive east. The Japanese in Cupertino, California are woven through the city rather than gathered in a single district.
If your family’s story passed through Cupertino, or any of the places Japanese families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the orchards of the Santa Clara Valley and the cherry trees of Toyokawa, to the cul-de-sacs of Silicon Valley, to wherever you are now.