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Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 14, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 17, 2025

Poignant past could guide the future of Japantown’s Panama Hotel

By Clay Eals

On the corner of Sixth and South Main, the brick building stands resolute. Its west face meets an angled sidewalk. At the corner, turning east, the sidewalk inclines further. Up close, the five-floor structure resembles a statuesque promontory.

Bypassed by busier traffic in the Japantown (Nihonmachi) sector of the Chinatown-International District west of Interstate 5, the edifice may appear obscure.

Its legacy, however, is not.

This is the 115-year-old Panama Hotel, the title setting for Jamie Ford’s best-selling 2009 historical novel of heartrending cross-cultural romance, “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.”

Designed by Sabro Ozasa, Seattle’s first Japanese architect, the Panama was built during construction of the famous canal thousands of miles south. From the outset, it was a single-room-occupancy (“workingman’s”) residence for immigrants. Its basement included what is described today as the last intact, albeit unused, Japanese-style communal bathhouse in North America.

The hotel’s poignant fame, center stage in the novel, derives from a preserved cache of 8,500 items, from suitcases, baskets and trunks to books and myriad household items, all left behind by 37 Japanese families whom the U.S. government forced into incarceration during World War II. Their materials — “saved for a happier time that never came,” wrote Ford — make the place both a museum and a shrine.

At the vortex of this city-landmarked “treasure” (the term used by the National Trust for Historic Preservation) is its passionate owner, Jan Johnson.

She grew up in Olympia and West Seattle, studying art in Italy before becoming so inspired by the Panama’s saga and surviving original features in 1985 that she purchased it soon afterward.

The seller was Takashi Hori, who was raised near Chehalis and in Seattle and secured a University of Washington business degree. He had bought the hotel in 1938 before being removed in March 1942 like the others whose belongings linger there.

Over the decades, Johnson’s motivation hasn’t varied: “It’s the history and the education and the knowledge and to save the building.”

Daily, she juggles renting rooms, supervising a tea-and-coffeehouse, handling maintenance, even trying to launch a Panama Hotel nonprofit, while touring streams of guests. During one hour in June, visitors included an Australian tourist and a curator for L.A.’s revered J. Paul Getty Museum.

It’s daunting work for someone well into retirement age. The situation cries out for sensitive benefactors, says Historic Seattle’s Eugenia Woo, a longtime Johnson champion. “The hotel has an authenticity you can’t re-create,” she says. “It needs people who appreciate history and can run it like a business.”

Which begs the question: Will the Panama’s future be bitter? Or sweet?

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Nancy Ishii, Reina Endo and especially Jan Johnson for invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Here is an extensive 2022 Seattle Times article on the hotel, and a similar 2002 North American Post article.

Below, you also will find 3 additional videos, 1 additional photo, 4 landmark documents and 18 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.