(gentle mallet music) - I'm standing at an intersection which is an epicenter of Seattle history.

It's the corner of South Main Street and 6th Avenue South of the Chinatown International Historic District.

The neighborhood has also been portrayed in the best-selling novel "Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" by novelist Jamie Ford, that captures life in the Nihonmachi, also called Japantown, which was centered in this place.

And the hotel referred to, it's still here, a resilient survivor of an event that tore this community apart 80 years ago.

(gentle orchestral music) The hotel in question is the Panama Hotel and Tea Room.

It was an SRO, a single room occupancy hotel.

This was a form of dense, affordable housing that boomed during the early years of the 20th century, and served transient workers and immigrants.

They were often lively communities of permanent residents housed in humble accommodations, but had everything they needed within a couple of blocks.

Sounds like an urban ideal.

The Panama had some special characteristics.

It was designed by the first Asian architect in Seattle, Japanese immigrant Sabro Ozasa.

It was built by a Japanese businessman, Ushitar Ota under corporate ownership at a time when the Japanese were forbidden to own property.

It was constructed in 1910 at a cost of $50,000.

That's more than 1.5 million in today's dollars.

It had 90 rooms and hot and cold running water in every room, which not every SRO had.

It was designed with the growing Japanese community in mind.

A key element was a public bathhouse for men and women, which became a beloved community gathering place.

It is said to have been the first stop for new arrivals from Japan as soon as their Pacific steamships landed.

The hotel managed through the boom years and then the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was a challenge.

But the worst happened following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941.

The following February, Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which initiated the incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry on the west coast.

Within months, some 120,000 people, most of them US citizens, were shipped to camps and relocation centers like the Orwellian-named Camp Harmony in Puyallup.

Most long-term camps were in the western interior.

Some 8,000 residents of Japantown were ordered to leave with what they could carry, vacating homes, closing their businesses and losing their livelihoods.

The incarceration turned people into refugees in their own country.

The manager of the Panama Hotel Takashi Hori, allowed some Japantown residents to leave their belongings in the hotel's basement.

He arranged for the hotel to remain open with white managers, then he went off to camp too.

When Hori came back from camp he sought to reunite the possessions with their owners, but many did not want them anymore or never came back for them.

Thus was created an unexpected artifact, physical, poignant evidence of a point in time a Pompeii-like image of a disaster.

Some of the baggage has remained there for eight decades, waiting, gathering dust, a powerful symbol of a tragedy that was long ignored by the rest of the population.

In the 1980s, Hori sold the Panama to artist Jan Johnson, who took on the task of running it.

It's still a hotel and Airbnb and tea house, but she also took on the task of protecting and honoring its legacies.

She put a piece of plexiglass in the floor so visitors could see into the basement where the piles of possessions still sit.

The hotel is now on the National Register of Historic Places and has been voted a Seattle Landmark.

The walls are lined with old photos and memorabilia of a thriving Japantown that didn't take root again after the war.

In the 1960s and 70s, most of the SRO hotels like the Panama were knocked down.

Change in development challenges still swirl around the district.

Mr. Hori once said, "The Panama "was always much more than a hotel.

"It has many layers.

"It is a landmark, yes, but also a living time capsule "and a shrine to a community deeply wounded "by the collective trauma of the warriors.

"It's a tribute to that community's resilience "and the importance of memory."

The baths closed in the 1960s, but the lockers and advertisements of local businesses are still there.

Some walls have ancient graffiti chalked on them.

The basement was ordered to be a fallout shelter during the Cold War, and boxes of post-apocalyptic crackers and drums of water still a await atomic disaster 60 years on.

The war era assemblage is a dream scape, dark and still piled with unclaimed suitcases, satchels, boxes, flannel shirts folded and ready to wear, coffee tins, tools, furniture, many are tagged, cataloged by scholars.

A report from 1996 treating the basement repository like an archeological dig talked about some of the artifacts excavated in the basement, golf clubs and ice skates, flags, wartime bulletins on the latest victories in the South Pacific, a February 1942 Reader's Digest, perhaps unread, issued the same month as Executive Order 9066.

A scholar has called it a treasure chest of forgetting.

Today it's an opportunity for all of us to do some long overdue remembering.

(somber orchestral music) - [Announcer] Hear more about this episode on the Mossback Podcast.

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