Rows of suitcases loom silently in the near darkness of a Seattle hotel basement, stacked four and five high. A thin veil of dust covers the names scrawled across their exteriors—the only markers distinguishing one bulging rectangle from the next. Fushimi. Murakami. Shimizu. Inside sit dozens of family histories, a collective past both interrupted and forgotten.
“It’s heavy,” says Jan Johnson, the owner of the Panama Hotel, illuminating a solitary light bulb. “And only getting heavier.”
This makeshift storage unit in the basement of the Panama is tied to one of the United States’ ugliest legacies, the systematic and government-sponsored incarceration of thousands of innocent U.S. citizens during World War II that reshaped Japanese American communities up and down the West Coast.
Since purchasing the Panama in 1985, Johnson has guarded its stories, protecting the building, the basement, and an account most of the world knows nothing about.
Left Behind
Takashi Hori had owned the Panama for barely five years when a police officer pasted the notice on his hotel’s front door. Part of Executive Order 9066, a declaration signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in early 1942, the instructions gave Seattle’s Japantown residents just days to evacuate their homes and businesses and report to authorities at King Station. From there, trains would whisk them away to barbed-wire-ringed camps in Idaho, Arizona, and California. The action was said to protect Americans from the men, women, and children Hori had grown up with, many with U.S. passports themselves.
Panicked and scared, neighbors scrambled to pack their lives into a single suitcase and board up their windows. The owner of a café near the hotel asked to store some of his cooking equipment in Hori’s unused basement. The 22-year-old agreed, and in the few days before he had to report to the station himself, he helped the man and some of his workers stash their goods. Soon, other neighbors were stowing suitcases full of dolls, kitchenware, basketball trophies, and family photo albums in the dark safety of the Panama’s cellar.
A few days later, Hori, alongside his family, would make his way down to the train station, assuring his neighbors that their things were safe, even if their own fates were far less certain. While some would return for their families’ goods after the war, many—disenfranchised and disillusioned by the place they once called home—never did.
Johnson feels the weight of the past as she slides through the shadows. Now in her 70s, she maneuvers around luggage and handwoven kori baskets with the deliberateness of someone who has spent nearly four decades mastering the maze.
“This is American history,” she says, using her phone to illuminate a pair of hand-carved wooden sculptures. “It’s tangible. You don’t have to read about it; you breathe it.”
Johnson was born an artist. After completing studies at the Cornish School of Allied Arts in downtown Seattle, she booked a one-way ticket to Rome to pursue clothing design and didn’t return until the sudden death of her father years later. She landed in Japantown, rented an artist’s studio for $50 a month, and began taking pattern-making classes at Seattle Central College.
It was during that time that she first noticed the curtains in the windows at the Panama Hotel. Around the corner from her studio on Sixth Street, near the intersection with Main Street, the Panama was a constant in the changing neighborhood. The 102-room hotel was built by Japanese architect Sabro Ozasa in 1910 and was purchased by the Hori family in 1938.
Johnson was struck by her neighbors’ eye for detail, and she remembers consulting Hori’s wife, Lily, about the broadcloth on the curtains she had admired from afar. A shared love of textiles and design soon led to prodding Lily’s husband about the building’s electrical system and helping out with small wiring and plumbing jobs around the hotel.
Johnson was entranced by the wooden banisters winding up from the entryway and the natural light reflecting down the hotel’s hallways. Then, of course, there was the basement. When Hori resumed his work at the hotel in 1945 after returning from his own imprisonment in Idaho’s Minidoka War Relocation Center (he had hired a management company to keep the business operating during his absence), he opened his door to a surge of Seattle evacuees coming back for their belongings. As the wave of returnees ebbed, he shelved the mission, leasing the basement’s sento, a traditional Japanese bathhouse and de facto community gathering place. Though it closed to patrons in 1954, it remains one of the last intact bathhouses of its kind in the United States. “I’d never seen so much history in a building that was still alive,” says Johnson. After her experience wandering through the ruins of European empires, she felt suddenly immersed in a story continuing to unfold in Seattle.
When Johnson discovered the Panama, the neighborhood around it was in atrophy, squeezed between rising rent costs and the development of affordable housing projects that pushed out longtime Japanese American residents. More damaging still, a pervading identity crisis had wafted back from the internment camps, a feeling that lingered for decades after the end of the war.
“There was a real hesitancy coming back from being incarcerated for being Japanese,” recalls local Japanese American writer and poet Lawrence Matsuda, who was born in the Minidoka War Relocation Center and raised in Japantown. “Do you want to go back to a Japanese place?”
Many never did, their belongings relegated to a Seattle basement or lost entirely. Japantown’s population shrank after the war as Japanese Americans settled in the suburbs, away from neighborhoods where they could be victimized en masse and in new ones they could afford. Of the 200 Japanese American–owned hotels once in the area, only a handful operate today. Matsuda’s father helped run a family-owned grocery store before the war but was forced to sell his business at a loss after Pearl Harbor and never recovered. Still, he took a young Matsuda to the Panama’s bathhouse, like many other Japanese parents during that time. The bathhouse continued to be a place to share culture and speak Japanese without repercussions.
“Even if Japanese families weren’t living in the area, they were still coming here to shop,” says Hori’s daughter, Susan. Susan grew up in the hotel, turning the hallways of the five-story building into her personal playground. With its bathhouse, ground-floor shops, and pharmacy, Susan says, the Panama was what Japanese people recognized and returned to.
Through the early ’80s, Johnson saw the community wander in and out of the hotel’s front doors and watched in dismay as other local businesses were leveled for parking lots. As she thought about heading back to Italy, Hori, then in his late 60s, told her he was looking to retire—and sell the Panama.
When Hori began receiving offers from established developers, the artist feared the hotel and its contents could go the way of other razed area businesses. She knew she was a single white woman with little money and no credit to her name, but after years spent with the Horis, she wanted to protect a Japanese American legacy she had come to respect. “He had seven offers, but I said I didn’t care,” Johnson laughs. “I told him I would match them. I finally wore him down.”
She never bought that plane ticket.
According to Susan, and much to the initial chagrin of many Japantown residents, Hori overlooked Johnson’s cultural differences and saw someone willing to keep his life’s work intact. “I think my dad was very surprised by Jan’s willingness to take on challenges and learn,” says Susan. “He wanted to find somebody to maintain the hotel as a hotel, not demolish it. Jan was the one to really come forward.”
Partnering with another local artist, Johnson secured a loan from the Bank of America down the street and completed the Panama purchase in 1985. She would take full control of it a few years later, after the dissolution of the original partnership.
As the Horis would later find out, maintaining the Panama was just the start of Johnson’s plan.
Hashidate-Yu Sento
The floorboards of Panama Hotel Tea and Coffee sigh gently as patrons step inside. An espresso machine whirs while a small group of women discuss books in Japanese in front of a counter of pastries. Hanging close to the café’s front corner, a framed copy of the North American Times, a former Seattle-based Japanese American newspaper, proclaims the 1942 evacuation of Japanese Americans in the city—and the publication’s last print edition. Tracing brick walls, black-and-white archival photographs of Japantown storefronts, hotels, theaters, and parades lead to a plexiglass-covered square cut out from the café’s wood floor. A quick look down offers a peek into the Panama Hotel’s basement and a literal window into its past.
Nearly 18 years in the making, the café opened in 2001, revealing the history of the building to a modern audience.
“Her vision of that space provided a whole new way to look at the hotel,” explains Susan. She says that when her father signed over the establishment, he told Johnson she could trash the abandoned basement items, that too much time had gone by and the owners had moved—or passed—on. Johnson vehemently ignored her friend’s advice. “I’m grateful that she never cleaned it out,” Susan says. “[Jan] went down and saw the value of what was there.”
Johnson still operated the hotel, but suddenly the hotelier could truly share a slice of history she says she “never found in textbooks.” In addition to displaying the framed photos and offering a glimpse at the basement’s storage unit, Johnson re-created maps of Japantown businesses long gone and hung art projects by former local residents.
“[The café] was the place you felt like you are having tea and coffee where our ancestors might have,” explains Connie So, an American ethnic studies professor at the University of Washington. “It was Jan’s efforts that really showed and appreciated what was in the past.… You felt like you were part of something larger.”
News of the space spread quickly, and in 2006, the hotel was declared a national historic landmark and its 7,500 artifacts were archived by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It’s been over 80 years since those suitcases were left behind, and even though inquiries to reclaim them have all but dried up, the reminder of their existence has inspired a new desire to explore the past.
Tours began stopping at the shop, and university professors like So brought their students. By 2009, author Jamie Ford had published Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, a World War II–era novel based on the Panama and its basement relics that became a New York Times bestseller. As visitors began arriving from around the world, they came with their own histories and started picking out ancestors from the café’s collection of old photos. Johnson, in turn, handed them a marker and asked them to write their stories.
Sketched on a picture of an old storefront is a handwritten memorial to Aya Soto, the owner of Aya’s Restaurant on the Panama’s block.
On another photo, black ink reads, “Nobujiro. My grandpa.”
The interactive history has become an anchoring feature in Johnson’s mission, an invitation to paint a bigger picture than even she ever imagined. “I learn something every day from this building, from the people who pass through here,” she says.
Great-granddaughter of Toraichi Oku, who once owned Seattle’s De Europe Hotel, and Yoshiko Oku, who taught at a Japanese language school in the city, Kanako (who asked that we disclose only her first name for privacy reasons) first heard about the Panama Hotel in a YouTube video. Born in Wakayama and raised in Tokyo, Kanako knew only that her great-grandparents had lived in Seattle, speculating that they, along with her grandmother, chose to not share many memories to protect their kids and grandkids from the ugliness of discrimination and war.
“I had this shame I didn’t know [my family history],” Kanako, who now lives in the United States, says. “I wanted to walk around where my family lived.”
The video piqued her curiosity, and when she finally decided to fly to Seattle to learn more this past January, she started at the location of her family's former hotel, a site that had been bulldozed decades before to make way for a parking lot. After taking some pictures, she saw the Panama Hotel from a distance and wandered in. It was there, in one of the Panama’s framed photos, that she spotted her great-grandfather’s hotel. In that moment, Kanako’s family history came rushing over her. “If I hadn’t seen the picture, I would have had no idea what [my family’s hotel] would have looked like,” she continues. “It’s a really amazing feeling knowing that they were here, that I was sure they were here.”
“These later generations see the generational trauma within their own families, and they’re curious to learn their own history,” explains Eric Pang, cocurator of the Northwest Nikkei Museum at the Japanese Cultural & Community Center of Washington. “[Uncovering those pieces] helps them understand themselves.”
Pang says Johnson’s work at the hotel has helped bridge that gap. In 1999, Seattle wrapped Japantown, Chinatown, and Little Saigon into an area known as Chinatown International District, a move that many say reflects the intentional degradation of the neighborhoods’ unique cultural histories. Pang and his JCCCW team are working on several initiatives—from curating historical collections to working with local artists like Matsuda to digitally archiving records of old businesses and area residents—to preserve a range of histories from Japantown, which still differentiates itself within the modern-day CID. But Pang considers the Panama’s time capsule, and especially its wealth of well-preserved artifacts, an integral piece of Japantown’s enduring heritage. “These artifacts are a glimpse into the past and a connection with those who have passed on,” he says. “[They] give us proof, hard physical evidence, that something or someone existed.”
As a growing, rapidly gentrifying Seattle continues to chip away at Japantown’s shrinking footprint, Johnson finds herself fighting alongside a community that is straining to not only celebrate its history but stave off its erasure. Archiving the Panama collection was a first step in that direction, but a full-time museum is now in the works. Pang and the JCCCW have signed on to help, and, though Johnson is admittedly wearing a lot of hats these days, she says she’s working to secure a board and funding in the near future.
Johnson has slowly earned the respect of the community she is striving to protect. In fact, these days some older neighborhood residents show up at the café to drop off a basket of family heirlooms. Japantown may be changing, but its inhabitants know that in the Panama, their memories can be safe. “There’s a growing need to preserve,” says So. “I think that’s why we feel like this [space] is all the more precious: because it’s under attack in so many other places.”
“What we forget is what happened before everybody got shipped to the camps,” says Susan. “The hotel and the basement are reminders…that there was a tremendous amount of upheaval that happened in this community.… For me, [the hotel] is the only tangible evidence we have that this actually happened.”
Susan Hori knows that the Panama’s suitcases may stay closed forever. That the contents may never make it back to the families that left them there so long ago. But, because of Johnson’s ongoing quest to safeguard the place Susan once called home, she has seen the reopening of an important chapter in the history of Seattle, and the United States, as the contents of the basement spark a new appreciation for a history once buried in time.•
Kade Krichko is the editor of the travel culture magazine Ori and has spent a decade as a world wanderer. In recent years, the road has led back to the Pacific Northwest, and when Krichko's not writing or editing, he can often be found in the mountains or chasing fickle waves on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. He has written features for the New York Times, ESPN, and Outside, among others, but considers a deep dive on Japanese 7-Elevens his best work. While Krichko is fluent in two languages, he has gotten lost in many others.
