The Panama Hotel is an example of the single-room occupancy hotels that characterized Seattle's historic nihomachi, today a part of the city's International District. The basement of the building includes the Hasidate Yu, the best surviving example of an urban Japanese-style bath house. The Panama Hotel was located at the core of Seattle's pre-World War II Japanese American community. Found in virtually every American nihomachi, sentos provided a cultural connection with a 1200-year-old tradition remade in an urban American setting. Sentos are one of the cultural elements that are central to the identify of the Japanese American community in America. In addition to the bath house, the other side of the basement comprises a storage area containing trunks and suitcases filled with personal treasures and every day items left by Japanese Americans when they were forced to leave Seattle in 1942. The Panama Hotel was though to be, and was, a safe place to store their possessions. A dozen or more of these packed trunks and suitcases remain.

Photo: Joe Mabel

Information provided by the National Register of Historic Places, a program of the National Park Service.