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Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 12, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 15, 2026

Early Japanese barbershop image reflects Seattle library’s care

By Clay Eals

By itself, our “Then” photo poses a multifaceted mystery. Not coincidentally, the story behind our “Now” photos — in which I’ve had a small hand — offers satisfying answers.

A nearly 115-year-old image reveals an immaculate barbershop, three workers, a customer and the view of a city streetscape through the front window. The scene abounds with signs and rich visuals. But who are these people? Where are they? Why?

This shot shows a storefront just off Yesler Way along a curved, diagonal side street near the brand-new Smith Tower. It’s little more than a stone’s throw from what was, and still is, known as Japantown (Nihonmachi), where immigrants began settling in the 1880s to work in fisheries, railroads and logging.

The barbershop owner, perhaps one of the depicted men, was Kashiro Kawakami. Born circa 1886 in Japan, he likely first came to the United States in 1902. A farmer, he returned to Japan in 1910, marrying and sailing back to Seattle with his wife. They had three children here while he worked as a barber at the photographed site in about 1911-14. Records go silent after 1916. Perhaps the family moved back to Japan.

These details and many others about this photo emerged, starting in summer 2023, during detective-style research by Seattle Public Library’s Special Collections staff on a massive collection donated by historian and “Now & Then” column founder Paul Dorpat following his 2019 retirement.

Before his donation and at the library’s request, I was honored in early 2018 to spend 17 afternoons in Dorpat’s basement in Wallingford, logging negatives, prints, slides, discs, tapes, films and other media that he amassed for four decades to document a constellation of Seattle-area scenes. The total, covering a century and a half, exceeded 309,000 items. Many, including a glass-plate negative of the Kawakami image, were unlabeled.

Dorpat, 87, who now lives in a Shoreline care center, contributed his collection to the library because of its mission to provide free public access. But he also knew its staff would first marshal extensive tools — city directories, index files, databases and other collections — to give the materials meaning.

The barbershop photo is a telling example, says Sean Lanksbury, the library’s Special Collections service manager, who assumes that painstaking scrutiny of such images eventually pays off.

In this case,  he says, the library contemplates a potentially wide-ranging impact down the road, “whether it be someone seeking images from that Seattle neighborhood, researchers on minority-operated businesses or, better yet, a relative of these particular Kawakamis.”

Work on the Dorpat collection continues. Public access — and posterity — await!

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Knute Berger, Sean Lanksbury and Gergana Abernathy for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column. (Notice anything different in this week’s 360 audio? If so, email your hunch to Clay Eals or Jean Sherrard.)

Below, you will find 2 additional photos and 3 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.

Plus, you now can browse part of the Paul Dorpat Collection at Seattle Public Library. Click here!