Japanese contract labourers began arriving in numbers in the 1880s — Densho puts it plainly — "after the Chinese Exclusion Act reduced the number of Chinese workers." They came first as loggers, then to the railroads, then to the salmon canneries and the farms, mostly second and third sons with no land to inherit at home, from Okayama, Fukuyama, Wakayama and Kyushu. Picture brides followed.

The 1882 federal exclusion law and the 1886 expulsion of Chinese residents left regional employers searching for another workforce. Japanese immigration entered that labor system.

Densho describes how restrictive covenants and employment discrimination concentrated Japanese residents into a "large and lively ghetto called Nihonmachi or Japantown." The same legal instruments constrained other communities, including Black Seattle.

Early Japanese businesses were in Pioneer Square, and along Dearborn Street — which a city map of 1891 labelled Mikado Street. Then, in Densho's words, "the Japanese concerns moved eastward up Yesler Way and Jackson Street, after the street was regraded to make it less steep."

The Jackson Street regrade moved 3.35 million cubic yards of earth, cut the grade from seventeen percent to five, and involved six hundred condemnation cases. It was justified as a freight improvement and also produced the flatter ground on which Nihonmachi expanded.

The neighborhood extended roughly from Yesler Way to Dearborn Street and from 4th to 14th Avenue. At its center, 6th and Main closed for Bon Odori; historian David Takami wrote that "the neighborhood could have been any town in Japan." The same ground can be read as an engineering project and as the setting in which a community took root.

There were six Japanese-owned hotels in Seattle by 1900. By 1925 there were 127 owned or managed by Japanese residents, mostly downtown.

The population itself was never large: 8,448 in 1930, and 6,985 in the 1940 census after the Depression sent people to California, to other parts of the state, and back to Japan.

Densho reports that by 1940, when Japanese residents were about two percent of Seattle, they owned 63 percent of its produce greenhouses, 63 percent of its hotels and apartments, 23 percent of its dry cleaners, 17 percent of its groceries, and 15 percent of its restaurants. We have not yet seen the underlying survey, so these figures should be read as attributed rather than independently confirmed.

Many of the hotels were residential: single rooms rented by the week, part of the working housing stock of a port city. Their scale makes the property losses of 1942 a central question, even though no complete accounting has been found.

The five-story Panama Hotel opened at 605½ South Main Street in 1910, designed by Japanese American architect Sabro Ozasa. It held shops below, single rooms above, and the Hashidate Yu bathhouse in the basement. The building became a National Historic Landmark in 2006.

This is what one part of the hotel economy looked like from the street: shops below and small residential rooms above, built for a community whose immigrant members faced severe restrictions on land ownership.

Also in that basement are trunks. In 1942 families packed what they could not carry and left it with whoever would hold it. When the hotel's owner Takashi Hori came back in 1945 there were around fifty trunks in his basement belonging to people who never returned for them. They are still there.

Governor Louis Hart signed Washington's Alien Land Bill in 1921. It barred immigrants classified under federal law as ineligible for citizenship from buying, owning, or leasing land, and provided for confiscation without compensation.

The bill did not name Japanese immigrants. It relied on federal naturalization law, which denied them a path to citizenship; Washington then used that federal exclusion to deny land rights.

Families sometimes placed deeds in the names of American-born children; a 1923 law targeted that workaround. Takuji Yamashita, a University of Washington law graduate, tested the statute in court and lost. Washington did not restore immigrant land rights until 1967.

The community nevertheless built hotels, shops, and institutions through businesses, leases, and property held by citizens—forms of wealth made especially vulnerable by forced removal.

President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 ten weeks after Pearl Harbor. It does not mention Japanese people. It authorises the Secretary of War to designate military areas "from which any or all persons may be excluded."

From that broad delegation followed the ancestry-based removal of roughly 110,000 people from the West Coast into ten inland camps. The short order is held by the National Archives and linked below.

Before it, and immediately after Pearl Harbor, the FBI had already taken the heads of Japanese civic, religious and business organizations—arrested without charge, houses searched, sent to jails in Wyoming and Arizona, with their families not told where they had gone. The community lost its leadership first.

Civilian Exclusion Order No. 1 was issued on 24 March 1942 and applied to Bainbridge Island, a ferry ride from Seattle. It gave the island's Japanese and Japanese American residents — Issei and Nisei alike — six days.

On the morning of 30 March, 227 men, women and children, most of them United States citizens, were walked to the Eagledale ferry landing under armed guard and taken to what became the Manzanar camp in California. They were the first people in the country incarcerated under the order.

Six days is the number to hold on to. Six days to decide what a house contains that is worth more than what you can lift, and to find someone to leave the rest with.

Bank accounts were frozen and businesses confiscated. A curfew from eight at night to six in the morning came in during March, which ended evening work and evening study and forced the restaurants to close early.

The army limited people to what they could carry. So, as David Takami records, "people made arrangements to store their belongings at churches or at the homes or businesses of friends. Sagamiya, the Japanese sweet shop in the heart of Nihonmachi, stored boxes and trunks piled to the ceiling."

There was no comprehensive compensation system or shared inventory—only arrangements with friends, churches, and shopkeepers willing to hold what families could not carry.

Gordon Hirabayashi, a University of Washington student, deliberately violated the curfew and exclusion order to challenge them. He lost at the Supreme Court in 1943.

The Puyallup Assembly Center, thirty-five miles south of Seattle, was built on the Western Washington State Fairgrounds in seventeen days. Barracks went up in the car parks, under the grandstand, and in converted livestock stalls. The authorities called it Camp Harmony.

Most of the people held there were from Seattle. Between August and September they were transferred by train to Minidoka in the Idaho desert.

The Japanese population of Seattle at the time was about seven thousand. Nihonmachi, in the phrase the community itself uses, disappeared in a few days.

The district had not stood empty. African American businesses had come to Jackson Street during the war, including the jazz clubs it became famous for; Chinese and Filipino shops filled the gap; some neighbours kept their friends' homes and businesses for them.

But many people had nothing to return to. Families slept in Japanese language schools and Buddhist temples converted into temporary hostels. Employers would not rehire; old neighborhoods were openly hostile; and "No Japs Wanted" appeared on returning families' houses. Far fewer farmers south of Seattle returned to their land.

The community did not return to its prewar size. Families dispersed across Beacon Hill, Rainier Valley, Renton, the Eastside, the University District, Shoreline, and beyond.

There is no accounting of what happened to the hotels, apartments, businesses, and leases between 1942 and 1945. Some property was protected by neighbors; much was sold, lost, occupied by others, or dispersed through records this project has not examined.

Parcel records and title histories may hold part of the answer. Until that work is done, the scale of the transfer should remain an open research question rather than a settled statistic.

Redress began here. The Seattle chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League set up an Evacuation Redress Committee, and its proposal — worked up substantially by two Boeing engineers, Henry Miyatake and Chuck Kato — became known as the Seattle Plan. It argued for legislating compensation directly, without first waiting for a commission to study what the people who had been there already knew.

Congressman Mike Lowry introduced the plan in 1979, but it died in committee. Congress instead created a study commission, whose findings later echoed the Seattle argument: incarceration resulted from race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership—not military necessity.

On 10 August 1988 President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act: a formal apology and $20,000 to each surviving person who had been incarcerated.

The apology came forty-six years after removal, with payment limited to survivors. It acknowledged the injustice of incarceration; it did not restore the property, businesses, or neighborhood continuity lost along the way.