The internal strife of the Sengoku period caused a great many people, primarily samurai, commoner merchants, and Christian refugees to seek their fortunes across the seas.

As Toyotomi Hideyoshi and later the Tokugawa shōguns issued repeated bans on Christianity, many fled the country; a significant portion of those settled in Catholic Manila.

Japanese architecture has traditionally been typified by wooden structures, elevated slightly off the ground, with tiled or thatched roofs.

At one time, there were 43 different Japantowns in California,[52] ranging from several square blocks of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, to one in the small farming community of Marysville in Yuba County.

There are currently four recognized Japantowns left in the United States, which are facing issues such as commercialization, reconstruction, gentrification and dwindling Japanese populations.

[57] Steveston in Richmond, British Columbia was another community whose population in 1942 was primarily made up of people of Japanese descent.

[59] Canadian municipalities with Japanese populations higher than the national average (0.3%) include: Prior to World War II, there were countless Japantowns across the country with over 40 in California alone.

The mass evacuation and incarceration of Japanese Americans in the wake of Executive Order 9066 resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of Japanese American properties and businesses, effectively erasing many of the historic Japantowns across the country as their old neighborhoods were quickly occupied by new families who had moved in during their absence and were further obliterated in urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 60s.

[60] Even the surviving Japantowns are a shadow of their former selves as later generations scattered and dispersed across the country as pre-war housing covenants began to be lifted in the 1960s, and now cater more to tourists and the greater Asian Pacific communities.