Lately it’s been bittersweet to tell Tacoma natives that Uwajimaya started here, and watch their surprised reactions. Ito’s map shows a set of blocks filled with Japanese-owned businesses, including Seattle’s now-famous pan-Asian grocery store, Uwajimaya. Our people have been here longer than we’d thought. I had a similar sense of homecoming when I learned that the first immigrants also came from Hiroshima, where I still have relatives. She was excited to hear that some of Tacoma’s first Japanese immigrants came on a steamship from Yokohama-that’s where she’s from originally, in Japan. And I talked to a few friends, including my friend Megumi Azekawa. (You can read Karrie’s impressions of the tour here on her blog.) I met Tacoma residents who live near Tacoma’s former Japantown and wanted to know more about the history of their neighborhood. We talked about Japanese journalist Kazuo Ito’s book The Issei, which includes incredible hand-drawn maps of Nihonmachi, including Tacoma’s. Karrie had known my writing about Tacoma’s Japantown, she said, and she was excited to see some of the areas I’d been talking about in my work. On the tour, I was able to talk to a few new people, including retired former State Representative Art Wang and local Puyallup blogger Karrie Zylstra. They worshiped in private homes for a few years in 1929, they built this church. The former congregation of the Methodist church was largely Japanese American, and began worshiping well over a hundred years ago. The Whitney building is now the Arts Center for UWT, a converted church that was sold to the University in 1999. We began our tour at that large “W,” then, and moved uphill towards the Whitney. As a fitting conclusion, its last performance was at the University of Washington in Tacoma-just a few blocks from the heart of Tacoma’s Japantown. Today, between the empty slope and the massive convention center, who could know there was once a thriving Japan Town there? And why didn’t the families return? As a former social studies teacher, I see neighborhoods and buildings as primary sources and believe that walking among relevant streets and buildings always leads to more powerful and empathic learning.Īs of this writing, the play has been shown to over forty-thousand school children all over Washington State, as part of the Broadway Center’s annual Civil Rights Tour. I live on the edge of Tacoma’s historic Nihonmachi, and as I crossed it on my way to downtown, I often wondered what stories lay dormant in the vacant, grassy lots. The playwrights and I would email back and forth as we researched the area (including your HistoryLink article, the handwritten map, and Michael’s blog), debating whether the Hashimotos would live on Fawcett or Broadway and referencing historic individuals… When we commissioned, there was a strong sense of wanting to anchor the story in the South Sound Japanese American community. A few years ago, he had seen that the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 was coming up, and commissioned the play.Ī week after the tour was over, I asked Tony about its genesis, and he responded generously in an e-mail: People wanted to see what was left of Tacoma’s Japantown.īefore we started the tour, Tony Gomez of Tacoma’s Broadway Center introduced Michael and I to the crowd-it was his idea to do the walking tour, in conjunction with the Center’s production of Nihonjin Face, an original play by Densho’s Janet Hayakawa and playwright Tere Martínez. By the time we left the sculpture and started walking, around eighty people had joined us. Only a few of them were friends-most of them were people I’d never met. I saw a crowd of about twenty-five people, which was a pleasant surprise. It hadn’t rained, but it was cloudy and sprinkling. Armed with an iPad presentation and historic pictures, I walked over to the big “W” sculpture at the top of the UW Tacoma steps. And it’s supposed to rain, so who knows who will show up?” For a few years, Michael and I had been working on telling bits and pieces of Japanese American history separately (including blog posts, personal essays, an encyclopedia article) and together, on a joint project about the history of the Lorenz Building near the center of downtown Tacoma.īut we’d been invited to conduct a walking tour together. “Well, if we get about ten or fifteen people,” said my colleague Michael Sullivan, “that’ll be a good group.