The Panama Hotel, located in Seattle’s International District and what was once the heart of the city’s Nihonmachi, or Japantown, is historically significant for its roles in the early twentieth century Japanese immigrant community and Japanese Internment in the 1940s.

Sabro Ozasa, the Panama Hotel’s architect, was the first Japanese architect to practice in Seattle and one of the earliest Japanese architects in the United States. When the hotel was completed in 1910, it sat at the center of Seattle’s Nihonmachi. Nihonmachis were the center of Japanese American life in the western United States. They provided services and resources to Japanese immigrants who often found themselves excluded elsewhere. Nihonmachis allowed Issei Japanese immigrants and Nisei (second generation Japanese Americans) to share cultural traditions in new settings and to build communities. After Internment and World War II, Seattle’s Japanese community dispersed and Nihonmachi was absorbed into the larger neighborhood that is the International District today.[1]

The basement of the Panama Hotel is divided into two sections. One is for hotel storage and the other houses the Hashidate Yu bathhouse. The Japanese tradition of bathing is at least 1,200 years old and the public bathhouses, or sentos, that appeared in nearly every American Nihonmachi and represented the adaptation of a long-standing tradition.  The Hashidate Yu is one of only two surviving sentos in the United States.[2]

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the deportation of Japanese Americans on the West Coast to internment camps. Notices went up in Seattle in early March that all residents of Japanese descent would be “evacuated” from the city. The owner of the Panama Hotel, Takashi Hori, opened the hotel’s basement for dozens of families of Nihonmachi to store their most precious belongings before they were sent to the camps. Hori himself was sent to a camp as well and an acquaintance took care of the property until he returned in 1945. Some families never returned to claim their items and they remain in the hotel’s basement, including baskets, bowls, photograph records, and a brown suitcase bearing stickers from Hong Kong, Manila, and Yokohama.[3]

The Panama Hotel was designated a National Historic Landmark in March 2006 and in April 2015 the National Trust declared the building a National Treasure, one of approximately 60 sites nationwide and the only one in Seattle.[4]

Credits and Sources:

Description by Madison Heslop on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History.

Broom, Jack. "Seattle’s Panama Hotel Deemed a National Treasure." The Seattle Times, July 26, 2015. Accessed August 22, 2016. http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattles-panama-hotel-deemed-a-national-treasure/.

Dubrow, Gail. “Panama Hotel National Historic Landmark Nomination Form.” In Washington Information System for Architectural and Archaeological Records Data (WISAARD). July 18, 2002. Accessed August 15, 2016.