[2] Unlike the rest of Japan Center, which was funded by corporate interests, the Peace Pagoda was built mainly using contributions from San Francisco's sister city, Osaka.

[3]: 3 Masayuki Tokioka, president of National-Braemar (the company that had been selected by SFRA to develop the Japan Center site), is credited with the idea to include a pagoda on the site;[3]: 12  according to a 1961 article in the 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".

[4] 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.

[3]: 23  Continuing issues with leaks draining the reflecting pools into the garage underneath led to the permanent drainage and removal of landscaping in 1990.

It presents a magnificent view to all esthetically minded people who raise their eyes up to the horizon on the perimeters of San Francisco.

The design for the Peace Pagoda was completed by April 1963, when the San Francisco Chronicle printed an article showing a rendering of the completed Peace Pagoda and Plaza; Justin Herman said he had approved the modern concrete structure over a wooden replica of the Daigo-ji Temple in Kyoto, as he felt the replica would be out of place in the modernist Japan Center.

[3]: 18  The interior of the first story was intended to be lined with mother-of-pearl, and also was to include a symbolic image of Peace encrusted with cultured pearls from Japan.

Finishes and decorative materials were sourced from Japan, and the reinforced concrete structure would be cast at the site in San Francisco.

Another reflecting pool, at the northern edge of the Peace Plaza, was adjacent to a covered walkway connecting the Miyako (West) and Kintetsu (East) Malls.

He was a graduate of the University of Tokyo and the father of architect Yoshio Taniguchi, known for the 2004 redesign of the New York Museum of Modern Art.