Dear Readers,

While I was writing the neighborhood guide to Japantown for this issue, I encountered a duality that I see all too often in San Francisco. I wanted to write the story because I was fascinated by the contrast between J-town's traditional manju shops and its trendy boutiques, by the sight of Japanese American elders walking down Buchanan Street alongside teenagers dressed as anime characters. Like many districts, Japantown exists on several different levels--traditional and modern, native and transplant, rich and poor. It's all part of San Francisco's celebrated diversity--except that even when these elements coexist within the same city block, many people never reach out across the boundaries.

Asian Americans are 33 percent of the city, but you'd never know it from reading city magazines like San Francisco Magazine or 7x7. In a sense, it's hard to blame them, since we've segmented ourselves so effectively. San Francisco is only seven by seven miles, but the Marina doesn't exactly hang with the Mission. Chinatown gets labeled a sellout if it gets too friendly with the tourists, and the Castro, symbol of the gay community, is one of the richest and whitest neighborhoods in the city.

Well, forget labels, and forget demographics. This month we're bringing you hipsters, hip-hop, and San Franciscans with roots in countries from South Africa to Japan. Sex positive, fat positive; heterosexual, homosexual, and objectum-sexual--it's easy to pay lip service to our city's diversity (what does that word even mean, anyway?), but we've done our best to go beyond that and bring you a large cross-section of the population. So the next time you brag to an out-of-towner about how diverse and cosmopolitan we are, think about what that really means. Step out of your district; take the time to reach out across those invisible lines we draw; get to know someone whose life differs radically from your own.

Elizabeth L. Smith
Editor-in-Chief