San Fransisco 1880 would be a plausible setting. The only one that would kinda be out there would be the Samurai and even that’s not too far of a stretch.
It’s actually pretty plausible, the first wave of Japanese people to immigrate to California and Hawaii was in the 1860s. By the 1900 census there were nearly 25k Japanese people living on the West Coast.
San Fransisco 1880 would be a plausible setting. The only one that would kinda be out there would be the Samurai and even that’s not too far of a stretch.
It’s actually pretty plausible, the first wave of Japanese people to immigrate to California and Hawaii was in the 1860s. By the 1900 census there were nearly 25k Japanese people living on the West Coast.
And I guess since the Meiji Restoration was bad news for the samurai class, it makes sense that they would want to emigrate.
(I looked it up because often it isn’t the upper classes that are motivated to leave a society, but in this case it checks out.)
This was my thinking for the Samurai, we are basically looking at embassy staff and exiles that managed to retain their weapons.
The first Japanese embassy to America even landed in San Francisco in 1860