Author: Marlon Meyer
Northwest Asia Weekly
The stairs of the Panama Hotel displayed in front of the Landmark Preservation Committee. (Screenshot of online meeting)
The interior of the Panama Hotel is built like a Buddhist temple, and the interior uses black wood that has been preserved for more than a century.
Taking these characteristics into consideration, the city’s landmark protection committee voted unanimously on December 1 to nominate the hotel, including its interior, as a designated landmark site.
Betty Lau, a community leader who supported the nomination, said, “This will provide developers with another layer of protection.”
But when approving the nomination for the site, the board recognized more than the original beauty of the building, although they repeatedly praised its current owner, Jan Johnson, for protecting it.
Through an hour-long demonstration, they reviewed what the hotel meant to different people at different times in its long history, including 8,500 common items that people of Japanese descent left in the basement when they went to the concentration camp.
At every stage of its existence, the importance of the hotel to the Japanese-American community and those who are later interested in its heritage depends to a large extent on the unjust laws that oppress the community, making the hotel a sanctuary and cultural mecca.
When Japanese immigrants were forced to leave Seattle due to exclusive laws in the 1920s, it was one of the few bathhouses of cultural significance. Beginning in 1942, when 120,000 people of Japanese descent were imprisoned, it became a warehouse for luggage, suitcases, and furniture. After World War II, it became the last relic of most of the destroyed Japanese castle.
Today, it plans to become a Japanese-American museum to preserve the lost moments in time.
By the time the Panama Hotel was built in 1910, the population of Japanese immigrants and their children had exceeded that of Chinese immigrants and their descendants. This is because anti-immigration laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, mainly target Chinese.
During this period, the hotel’s six store spaces were equipped with companies that provided a knowledge base of Japanese culture, including bookstores, grocery stores and later news media. But by the early 1920s, oppressive laws against the ownership of land by people of Japanese descent began to escalate.
Initially, Japanese immigrant farmers found some creative ways to circumvent laws restricting their ownership of land, such as placing the land in the name of a child born here or a white agent. But the new law makes this impossible. This has led to an outflow of people from Seattle to remote areas around the state to engage in agriculture or other industries.
But the bathroom in the basement of the hotel provides a necessary public hub, and community members will return regularly. During this period, there were only 10 Japanese bathhouses in North America. According to the schematic diagram of the basement, the bathhouse is divided into separate parts for men and women and children.
In the early years, the hotel also provided accommodation for new immigrants who needed to be familiar with the environment. The hotel has 102 rooms. There is also a laundry room in its basement.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, creating a “forbidden zone”, effectively forcing anyone of Japanese descent on the West Coast to enter a concentration camp.
Before being imprisoned, the owners of the hotel, Miyuro and Hori Toyo, opened the basement of the hotel as a storage place for things that people could not carry with them.
Since the order clarifies the items that families and individuals can carry, people must decide at the last minute which items are worth keeping.
“It’s no surprise that shock, fear, worry, and confusion are the biggest characteristics of the emotions people experience at this time,” according to a group of psychologists who interviewed 30 survivors, such as “Reminiscences of historical injustice: qualitative “A Survey of the Emotions in the Memory of Japanese-American Imprisonment”, a chapter in the book “Qualitative Strategies for the Study of Ethnic Cultures”.
Later, during their imprisonment in Minedoka, Idaho and other places, emotions will turn to fatalism.
But at the time, the items they chose to store in the basement seemed to imply their desire to prove that they were American.
In addition to ordinary items such as teapots, bowls, and rice cookers, there are also a lot of things that reflect the absorption of American society, even though society has worked hard to prevent this from happening.
There are collections of American flags, voter brochures, local high school graduation requirements checklists, Coca-Cola advertisements, and brocade images of Mount Rainier, and more.
However, by the end of the war, Japantown had been abandoned for many years and could never be restored. Despite the hotel owners’ repeated efforts to find their property, few camp survivors came to recover their property (decades later, the current owner, Johnson, will receive federal funding to catalog the 8,500 items left behind).
In 1954, the boss died and his son took over the management.
But by then, it was too late. The decline of Japantown worsened. The bathhouse ceased operations in the 1960s.
As the years passed and the demographic structure changed, the population of Japanese Americans dispersed further, some in the Eastern District, and some even further.
In 1985, local art connoisseur Jan Johnson bought the hotel. At the meeting of the Landmark Preservation Committee, she said that the upper level of the hotel is still operating as a hotel. But the most important thing for her is inner aesthetics.
“Every day, the light and shadow coming in from the windows upstairs illuminate different artworks,” she said.
Board members generally praised her for keeping the hotel safe during the period of massive gentrification.
Board member Russell Conway pointed out that the hotel was designated as a national landmark in 2006.
“This is a proud moment for the city of Seattle and Jan, because the greedy developers will plaster and build apartments on it,” he said.
Another board member, Harriett Wasserman, described how hotels became popular. She said that her book group read the New York Times’s best-selling novel “The Hotel in the Bitter and Sweet Corner”, which was based on hotels and asked them to go to the hotel. The teahouse discusses novels.
Xiaolin Duan, a historian of material culture history at North Carolina State University, called this “a shift from individual memory to collective memory.”
Johnson plans to further promote this transformation by turning the hotel into a Japanese-American museum. Some items stored in the basement have been loaned to the Ellis Island Museum and the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles.
But such an adventure is feasible. Wu Hong, a professor of art history at the University of Chicago, said that in fact, a popular and evocative exhibition touring on several continents might provide a model.
Beginning in 2005, a Chinese artist built a huge art exhibition using all the ordinary objects his mother had accumulated in her long and difficult life. In the exhibition titled “No Waste” curated by Wu, the mother sits among all the items she has accumulated and tells the visitors their importance.
“People need vehicles to preserve and activate memories. We hear historical echoes in dilapidated buildings, dilapidated photos, torn letters, dilapidated objects, loud melody, and recurring dreams,” Wu wrote in the exhibition .
The audience watching ordinary objects was moved to tears.
According to Karen Yoshitomi, head of the Japanese Cultural Community Center in Washington, the Panama Hotel is “one of the last relics of Niohnmachi or Japantown.”
“There is an opportunity to tell not only the broader story about the Panama hotel, but also the story of the wider Japanese community,” she said.
The board of directors will visit the hotel and then vote on the nomination on January 19, 2022.
