Seattle Now and Then

Seattle Now & Then: Seattle Buddhist Church, 1901

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(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: On Oct. 5, 1941, the Seattle Buddhist Church congregation waits in its new temple for a four-block-long procession to arrive with the Amida Buddha shrine. Among the marchers was Jiro Iwamura, last of the church’s nine founders. Within six months, the building was emptied by Executive Order 9066. The U.S. Maritime Commission held it until July 1946. (Courtesy of Seattle Buddhist Church)
NOW: Congregants gather before the restored altar. Damaged in a 2023 arson, it was shipped to Japan for a year of restoration and returned looking, members say, better than it had in decades. (Jean Sherrard)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 15, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 18, 2026

Spiritual Journey:
Seattle Buddhist Church marks 125 years of change as Japanese community hub
By Jean Sherrard

In the morning, rosy cheeks. By evening, white ashes.

In Buddhist teaching, nothing lasts forever — it’s not tragic, simply how things are.

Seattle Buddhist Church, marking its 125th year, has weathered that lesson repeatedly. Also known as Seattle Buddhist Temple and Seattle Betsuin Buddhist Temple, the church began in a Blaine cannery bunkhouse in 1900. Shodo Hatano, an ordained priest on a mission from Japan, spent the salmon season there alongside 50 countrymen. One night he asked his roommate, Tatsujiro Akiyoshi, about starting a Buddhist church in the Northwest.

That winter, following the cannery workers south, the two gathered signatures on Seattle’s Skid Road, joined by seven others — nine founders total, most in their early 20s.

On Nov. 15, 1901, they held their inaugural service. It was the start of likely the first Buddhist temple of any sect north of San Francisco.

Seven years to the day after that first gathering, on Nov. 15, 1908, they dedicated a temple at 1020 Main St., soon to be, for many, the center of Northwest Japanese life.

THEN: At the March 16, 1941, traditional construction ceremony, trustees on a platform at the unfinished Seattle Buddhist Church fling rice cakes, or mochi, to the crowd below. (Courtesy of Seattle Buddhist Church)

In the late 1930s, the growing congregation laid plans for a larger temple at 1427 S. Main St., designed by young Japanese American architect Kichio Arai. It was dedicated Oct. 5, 1941.

Two months later, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. By spring 1942, Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 had emptied the temple, its congregation sent first to the Puyallup fairgrounds, then incarcerated at the Minidoka concentration camp in the Idaho desert. Families sold their businesses and homes, often for pennies on the dollar, and took with them only what they could carry.

Returning after the war, congregants patched walls, repainted

NOW: The Rev. Katsuya Kusunoki, who came to Seattle Betsuin in 2017, outside the temple at 1427 S. Main St. Kusunoki sees the temple’s oldest purpose returning: a gathering place for people working remotely and increasingly isolated. “Everyone is interconnected,” he says. “No one is living by themselves.” (Jean Sherrard)

ceilings and scrubbed the ransacked main hall, or hondo. Eighty years ago this summer, on Aug. 4, 1946, the doors reopened.

“It was like getting off the boat all over again,” says Alan Hoshino, a third-generation member whose entire family was incarcerated at Minidoka. “They started over with absolutely nothing.”

On New Year’s Eve 2023, a man seeking shelter set a fire in the basement where the temple’s physical archives were stored. Smoke and water damaged what flame did not. Boxes of records, many of

NOW: Archives committee co-chair Andrea Mano makes digital scans of items that survived a 2023 fire that started in a basement room of Seattle Betsuin. With Mano is Alan Hoshino, who a day after the first alarm spotted the fire rekindling and called firefighters back. He is the executive director of Wisteria View Housing, a temple-founded nonprofit across the street that manages 86 units of affordable housing for seniors. (Jean Sherrard)

them documenting the incarceration years, were lost. Volunteers hauled out what survived while the building still smoldered.

Susan Moriguchi, whose late husband, Toshi, was born at Minidoka in 1944, understands the long shadow of displacement. Buddhism, she says, offers a way through: “After every great storm, there’s always a calm, a sense of renewal that’s ongoing.”

Today’s Seattle Betsuin — a 1954 appellation recognizing it as a major branch temple — rises from white ashes into rosy morning, reflecting a world its founders could only have imagined. Members and guests will gather Nov. 18 and 19 to mark 125 years.

WEB EXTRAS

To watch our narrated 360 degree video of this column, click on through.

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