In this episode, we discuss the thriving Japanese community that lived in Tacoma prior to World War II with UW Tacoma Professor Lisa Hoffman and UW Tacoma Associate Professor Mary Hanneman. Hoffman and Hanneman have written a new book called Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma. The book is a result of a years-long project to document and preserve the experience of Japanese immigrants and their descendants in Tacoma. We’ll talk about what brought immigrants from Japan to Tacoma, what life was like for their children, and how their history was almost erased both during and after World War II.
In this episode, we discuss the thriving Japanese community that lived in Tacoma prior to World War II with UW Tacoma Professor Lisa Hoffman and UW Tacoma Associate Professor Mary Hanneman. Hoffman and Hanneman have written a new book called Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma. The book is a result of a years-long project to document and preserve the experience of Japanese immigrants and their descendants in Tacoma. We’ll talk about what brought immigrants from Japan to Tacoma, what life was like for their children, and how their history was almost erased both during and after World War II.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
Preserving this and thinking seriously about how this type of systemic erasure impacts individuals and communities in terms of their own sense of belonging to communities and to the United States should really be at the forefront of planner's minds.
Speaker 2:
From UW Tacoma, this is Paw'd Defiance.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
Welcome to Paw'd Defiance where we don't lecture, but we do educate. I'm Eric Wilson-Edge. Today on the pod, the thriving Japanese community that lived in Tacoma prior to World War II with UW Tacoma professor Lisa Hoffman and UW Tacoma associate professor Mary Hanneman. Hoffman and Hanneman have written a new book called Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma. The book is a result of a years long project to document and preserve the experience of Japanese immigrants and their descendants in Tacoma. We'll talk about what brought immigrants from Japan to Tacoma, what life was like for their children and how their history was almost erased both during and after World War II.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
Welcome to the Paw'd Defiance. Today, we are joined by Dr. Lisa Hoffman who is a cultural anthropologist with the school of urban studies at UW Tacoma. And Dr. Mary Hanneman who is the historian of modern Japanese history with UW Tacoma School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Thank you to both of you for joining. So the two of you have just written this new book, which is why I wanted to have you here today. It's called Becoming Nisei. So I thought we would start by maybe going over some of the history that is covered in your book. And I'm thinking specifically about the Meiji era, maybe talking about that and how that shapes the narrative that runs throughout your book.
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
The Meiji period is a very important period in Japan's modern history. It ran from 1868 to 1912. And the reason that's an important time for us and for our book is because that's when the Japanese were starting to migrate to the United States and other parts of the world. But when we started working on this book, we discovered that connection between the Japanese, the Issei, that is the first generation. Our book is about the Nisei, that is the second generation and their children. We discovered that that connection with Japan was very important. And the Japan of the Meiji era in particular, it was that connection that was important. So that Meiji era was a time when Japan was going through great change. It was trying to find a way to preserve itself against the onslaught that maybe is, well, that's not too strong of a word, the onslaught of the West. So they're beginning to modernize so they could protect themselves, but they also wanted to retain their traditional identity as Japanese. And so they rallied around the emperor and clearly defined what those traditional values were.
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
And they did that by writing about them in a document called the Imperial Rescript on Education that embodied all of these traditional values like respect for your parents, respect for the government, loyalty, self-discipline, hard work, all of those kinds of things. So those are some of the values that we saw this immigrant community bringing to the United States and replicating in a way in Tacoma. And they did that at the Tacoma Japanese Language School by having, for example, even ceremonies to commemorate the emperor's birthday and read out the Imperial Rescript on Education, these kinds of things. So we saw that that connection between Japan and Japanese values was very important in terms of what they brought and recreated here in the United States.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
So the folks who came here, and I think you mentioned this in part of your book, it seems like the emperor at the time was really keen on the idea of sending, and I think they were considered even when in the United States subjects of the emperor at least the first generation. They couldn't be US citizens if I remember correctly. Why did the emperor wants to send people to places like the US?
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
Well, first of all, you're right about that, they were not allowed to become US citizens because of exclusionary laws at the time. And that's obviously simplifying, I was going to say this is what I teach, I take a quarter to teach this. How do I encapsulate it in two minutes? But anyway, the government wanted to send migrants abroad to Western countries as a part of almost a diplomacy effort, to make connections and links with the Western community like, "Hey, here we are, we're part of this international community as well."
Eric Wilson-Edge:
So I know that Japanese who came over, they settled in different places up and down the West Coast. When we talk about Tacoma, what area or areas did these folks live in or settle in and build a community?
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
Yeah. So they primarily settled in the area that we know today as the Downtown Core. So between site11th and 19th and Pacific and Tacoma. And you'll see in the book, we actually have maps that show that concentration. But what our research also showed is that there was an important small grouping of Japanese families in South Tacoma on South Tacoma Way in about 84th and 86, then there were a series of businesses there. They were considered a roadside market where a primarily white clientele would drive up and have their orders. And they would come and give them the orders in their cars. And then there was also an important grouping of families along St. Paul Avenue on the Tideflats. And this was housing that was provided by the St. Paul in Tacoma Lumber Company. And again, that's through some of the archival research that we did that confirmed those families there. And then in addition, there was a boarding house for single Japanese men, many of whom were bachelors, but there were also some from other scholarship that as soon as they were married but were not able to bring family members here.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
And I know that your book covers a long period, but I'm wondering if we could talk about what did this, wonder if we could describe what this area looked like perhaps the main downtown part in the years immediately before World War II. What would we expect to see if we could go back?
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
Well, first of all, there are some good photographs in the book that depict out. But along Broadway, for example, between 13, 15, 16, and 17, it was almost entirely Japanese businesses. One of the men that we interviewed gave this almost photographic memory listing you go from this, here was this grocery store, and here was this barbershop as you walked down this street. So it was really largely this Japanese community. And then one of the other reasons that this book was important to Lisa and I is because there were also hotels, residential hotels, but I was going to say that on UWT Campus footprint kind of writ large, there were residences homes. It was a very vibrant community.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
There's a great example of how the community felt on a daily basis is that Dr. [Ren Munakata 00:09:14] who Mary was noting had this incredible photographic memory of especially that area 13th to 15th on Broadway. But he told stories of walking on the street and knowing all of the proprietors of the businesses. They were Issei. And he felt compelled to bow to them because he said they knew me and I knew them, and I knew the proper way I was expected to behave. And so that was also a really interesting part of how the streets because of that density, especially in that downtown area, those kinds of eyes of the Issei say really reinforced the behavioral expectations of these young Nisei. And he did say that when he went to California later as an adult, he said it was so shocking to him that Japanese would pass each other on the street and they wouldn't acknowledge each other because he had grown up in a city that had that familiarity.
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
I'll also just add here that because the community has basically disappeared, people may not realize it as a percentage of the population. But per capita, according to Michael Sullivan who's has done a lot on local Tacoma history, very knowledgeable about it. He says that it was the largest per capita Japanese population in the entire country during the pre-war period. So Tacoma had a very large, again, as a percentage of the population Japanese community.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
We also had this amazing research assistant, Sarah Pyle, who was an undergraduate in urban studies and then got her MS in geospatial technologies also in the school of urban studies. And so she was with this project for quite a long time. And what she created was a whole database of all of the businesses, houses, associations that were inhabited at one point in the pre-war time by Japanese Issei and Nisei families. And she took this information from all the interviews that we conducted, from different historical sources. She then went to the Polk City directories to confirm those locations. And it started with, I think, close to 400, and then there were around 300 that she was able to confirm through these multiple methods.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
And so you see that in some of the maps that are in the book. And that also helps to show that, yes, there was this concentration, but then there's these other ... Individual families might be running a market in a primarily white part of town, for instance. So you also see that. And that gives you a sense of how, spatially how the Japanese-American community was dispersed around Tacoma.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
We've written a number of articles about the Japanese community that lived in Tacoma prior to World War II for the UW Tacoma website. If you'd like to learn more about the Language School or the Language School Memorial, just head on over to our website and type language school into the search bar.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
So it strikes me now, and I guess I've worked at UW coma for about five years now. I know the two of you have been here much longer. But I never really thought about, and I know some of the history of the area, but I never really thought at this point in history, that is prime real estate where UW Tacoma. So I guess it's a little surprising considering that I'm assuming these folks weren't warmly welcomed, at least at the federal level, the policy was not a welcoming one. So I'm wondering the areas these folks, the primary area, there were other areas, but the biggest concentration, was that area considered prime real estate because it does surprise me that the racism of the time, if it was prime, that they would let immigrants from a country they didn't want people from to settle in that area or was it completely different back then?
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
Well, I think it's a both and kind of answer, Eric. I'll say a few words and then Mary can talk a little bit more about the alien land laws, which are really important. I think we know that their prime real estate in terms of residences were not in the Downtown Core. We have those historic homes in Tacoma and you see further along into the Stadium Districts, for instance. But what you do see, and this came through in the interviews and we found really compelling is that there was a transition for many of the Issei from starting in wage labor, manual labor such in the lumber industry. And then transitioning, especially when they started families to small businesses. And so that kind of segregation that you see is absolutely because it was a segregated city and because of discrimination and racism.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
Am, and also because bringing those businesses together was actually a helpful economic practice. So their lives were very difficult, there's a lot of economic hardship. The hotels that they ran were also as businesses, were also where they lived. And there's a really interesting interview with one of the Nisei where he distinguishes between his home, which was in the hotel, his family business, and the families, the Japanese-American families that were well off enough to have a standalone home. So you also see class differences within the community. And something like the hotels, those were also really effective businesses because the women, the mothers could also work at the residence.
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
I like the way Lisa says both and. And there was variety, it wasn't all uniform. One of the guys that we interviewed, for example, laughingly said, "Yeah, we lived right next to the Red Light District. It's amazing that we came out wholesome as we did," kind of a thing. And many of the grocery store, produce stands and so on were catered obviously to Japanese families, but also to white families as well. They were very cognizant of that fact. For example, one of the business areas that housed a number of fruit and vegetable markets, they called it the sanitary market. Clearly, they're kind of making a pitch that this is where you come, this is good wholesome produce, and that kind of thing. It was not just uniform even in that central area, I would say.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
So you mentioned in the book this idea of having the Nisei have a walking scale life, which I really think is a wonderful term. I wonder if you could talk more about what that means.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
Sure. So walking scale refers to many things. I mean, first we've been talking about this concentrated nature, especially at the downtown. And we also just mentioned that many of the families, there's a lot of economic hardship, and so they didn't have cars. And so the interviews are really punctuated with these stories of walking, walking to public school, walking to the Japanese Language School. After school, walking home. Just the play that they did. So the sidewalks became this interesting type of space where belonging could be claimed even if it's fleeting, because we have to recognize there's lots of discrimination and alien land laws and so on, which meant that the Issei could not because they were not considered citizens, they could not ever own land. The sidewalks were a space where they could have some fleeting sense of belonging and legitimacy in the community.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
So there's also something interesting around this idea of walking, the reality of their days, the daily path idea that their own sense of identity and self is being constituted through their experience in the city, through the spaces that they inhabit and through which they move on a daily basis. But also, there's some theories around spatial analysis in the city that distinguishes between planners and those in-charge who have the ability to create strategic plans and define different parts of the city such as where businesses might go, where industry is or where residences are, things like that. And the little tactical moves that an individual can make with their own body moving through space. And so that's the other reason why walking becomes important, because it was a way of claiming some legitimacy, but in a tactical mode rather than a strategic mode in the face of these kind of forms of discrimination that you just referenced as well. And Mary can, maybe you can say something more about the alien land laws too.
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
Oh right, yeah. As Lisa just mentioned, the Japanese were barred from naturalization as American citizens. And as such, they were not allowed to own land. So all of these businesses that we're talking about, they didn't own the land. They might own a building on the land or they might own, of course, they'd own the equipment, whatever equipment their business might take, but they couldn't own land. And of course, that gave this great sense of insecurity about their status here in the United States. They couldn't become citizens, couldn't own land. And that made the Nisei, that is the second generation this important connection, this link because they were citizens. It's just interesting dynamic here because the parents on the one hand, they wanted to make sure that their children retained Japanese language, thus the Japanese Language School, had a understanding of Japanese culture and Japanese heritage, history, et cetera, because they recognized that they might at some point have to go back to Japan. And they just didn't have the security of knowing that they were going to be here and be able to be here.
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
And it also meant that when incarceration did come in 1942 with World War II, they were uprooted lock, stock, and barrel because they didn't own anything basically, they didn't have that security.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
It's interesting, it almost sounds like a walking scale life as the consequences, the time in which they lived and the place in which they lived like an America of that time where we had these pretty severe laws about who could come here and who could stay. So it almost sounds like this area was like this is your protective zone. And that as a result of these external forces playing out.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
Yeah. That's interesting, Eric, because a number of the people that we interviewed actually described their childhood as a happy childhood. And they had their friends around, they knew their community. They were aware of segregation and discrimination and that they didn't have Caucasian playmates for most of them. And this is also because this is old age looking back. So there can definitely be that nostalgia about those moments. And we address all of those issues in the book, the politics of remembering. But nevertheless, there's lots of stories about that closeness of the community. And that was also definitely related to that walking scale experience.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
So this book is organized with an approach like transnational and spatial organization to it. For folks who may not know what those concepts are, I'm wondering if you could talk about, define them and explain how you use it in your research and in the book?
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
Well, the transnational piece, we've kind of touched on that, and that is the connection between the United States and Japan and understanding that it's not one or the other. That it's this dynamic and ongoing relationship between two cultures. The Japanese migrants in this case didn't just leave one nation behind and one identity behind and come to a new country and say, "Here we are, we're Americans, and brand new story." And it's also not that gradually over time, okay, we were Japanese then, but gradually we become more American or become American. That it is this dynamic. Japanese Issei and Nisei went back to Japan and they came back to the United States. And they went back and forth, not routinely obviously because it was a big journey, an expensive voyage and so on. But there was just this interplay, and that's what the transnational piece tries to recognize.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
Yeah. And on that, it also then is an approach that's different from the assimilation story about Americanization because we see that as much more dynamic. So in terms of the spatial part, it's really recognizing that identity formation is related and very closely linked with placemaking. So some of the language that we use around that is the idea that subjectivity and spatiality are mutually constituted. But it also helps us to understand that Nisei were negotiating multiple positionalities in their daily lines. So if we think about how they moved through spaces and the way they experienced those and how it's related to who understood themselves to be, we see, again, as Mary was just saying a much more dynamic process. And we call that bridging in the book to underscore the importance of this constant negotiation.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
The spatial part helps us, as I was saying, that link between spatiality and subjectivity helps us to understand too that the destruction of the community was also a spatial process. And so war time incarceration and then the deliberate dispersal of Japanese-Americans around the US after the camps were closed was a spatial experience. It was, not kind of, it was a spatial experience of the destruction of one's community. And then upon returning to the city and seeing all the buildings that one knew, the kind of places that one understood to be the childhood experience has been erased. It may also be experienced as an eraser of the self. And so those are these kinds of ongoing spatial dynamics. And I think it's important to point out that this is a collaborative process between scholars from different trainings and backgrounds. And there was no way we could have written this book alone. The stuff that comes out of it is because of the collaboration.
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
And further, neither Lisa nor I are Asian-American specialists, Asian-Americanists. And so this is very much an interdisciplinary project. And I think that it stretched, I would say it certainly stretched me, maybe I can say both of us in ways that probably we never really expected to go in our own scholarship.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
It's funny that we're talking today because there was a story about the two of you and your work in the News Tribune this morning, which I read right before we started chatting. And I promise this is a segue into a question, I promise. And this is something, it didn't occur to me, it said in the story that of those folks who lived, those Japanese-Americans who lived in Tacoma prior to World War II, only one in seven returned and the rest, whether they decided not to come back or were basically sent somewhere else and started new lives. That's a shockingly low number of folks to be able to return to the place that maybe they grew up in. That as the statement before the question, how on earth did you find these folks? That's one of the things that really intrigues me is people are scattered, and maybe their names have changed or they could have gotten married and changed name if they decided to do that. How on earth did you find these folks?
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
Well, as Lisa mentioned earlier, it was a close community. And even though they were dispersed and they did disperse and they were actively dispersed after they were let out of the camps, they remained somehow in some kind of connection with one another, some networks and so on. And in 1977, they became the first community, I think, on the West Coast to actually have a reunion. So this is something interesting about this community. It was small enough to do something like that, small enough that they had this one nucleus that kept them all together in Tacoma. It was large enough that there was an active scene going on. Anyway, so they had a reunion in 1977 and then kept in touch further from that keeping this network going.
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
And then I think it was in 2003, UW Tacoma invited them to Tacoma in recognition in light of the fact that it had been decided that they were going to have to demolish the Japanese Language School Building. And so there was a gathering at that time. And Lisa and I got involved at that time and tapped into that network, which they very graciously invited us and accepted us into. So that's how we kept in touch with that community, got in touch with that community, I should say.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
It's also important to note that we had to travel because they were not here, they didn't return. So there were concentrations of people that had grown up in Tacoma, in Los Angeles, in Oakland, California, in Chicago. And then here in the Northwest, we did some interviews as well. One of our interview [inaudible 00:32:09] who was one of the organizers of those, the early and ongoing reunions of the Tacoma Japanese, he was asked to write an article about their first one in 1977 in the JACL paper, Pacific Citizen. And he did, and we quote part of it in the book. And it's really a wonderful moment of them realizing that, wow, Tacoma is close, it is a special community.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
And as we argue in the book, much of that has to do with there being only one Japanese language school in the city, it was secular. So many of the other cities along the West Coast in Hawaii had multiple language schools, and they were started and run by the different religious organizations. So here while the Issei may have been committed to their prefectural identities and the different religious associations, the children all got to know each other through the language school experience. And so they also would move between activities at the different religious institutions. And we also think that has a lot to do with it.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
A lot of us are either stuck at home or maybe stuck going to the same two or three places. One thing you could do right now is download the Tacoma Japantown Walking Tour app. The app includes a map with links to information that will provide context while you're exploring. Before you go, make sure to mask up. In your conversations with these folks, and I think there was 40. Have I made that number up-
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
No. Just over 40, yeah.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
Did these folks talk at all about growing up in this era? And I can imagine people who are maybe coming of age right before World War II and forced removal, it sounds like a foot in both worlds. You're sort of American, but you're also sort of Japanese. And then you're basically pulled out of your lives and thrown into these prisons in the middle of nowhere. I'm just curious if they talked about what their identity.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
There's no question, there's some incredibly powerful publications and personal testaments and stories about the experience of democracy. As American citizens and being incarcerated based on their heritage, it's an appalling period of our history. And I think after 9/11, there were lots of reflections about the reproduction of the kinds of practices. Mary can say more about it, but I just want to switch it just a little bit, Eric, that much of the literature and understandably much of the literature about the Japanese-American experience has focused on incarceration, as it should. But there's less scholarship around the pre-war experience and growing up as a second generation in urban America. And so that's also what this book tries to do is to fill in some of those details and those histories.
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
Yeah. I also think that putting this, juxtaposing this or seeing this period as what happens before incarceration. Incarceration didn't happen out of the blue, this community existed and it have lives prior to that. So what is that history? And it almost seems to me that the experience of incarceration on the one hand reinforced the idea of their identity as Japanese, like, oh yeah, we grew up in this country, this is our country, this is our culture, but we're Japanese. You come face-to-face with that. At least we are defined as Japanese in the eyes of this country, this culture.
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
But I think that the experience of incarceration also ... I feel like somehow from the interviews it was also a moment that the Tacoma Japanese also recognized their identity as Tacoma Japanese. They had this unique Tacoma culture where like Lisa was saying earlier, they all knew each other. You had to bow to this shopkeeper when you passed. If you saw any Japanese anywhere in Tacoma, you bowed because you knew them. And then to see that that was not the case when they encountered other Japanese in the camps. So it's this moment of coming face-to-face with an identity that's not really set.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
Yeah. Mary, that's a really important point that as they were describing what it meant to grow up in Tacoma, they would often reference their experience when they first started meeting Japanese from other parts of the country and how they seemed different. This is where it came back to the language school and their experience at the language school as well. The teachers were so dedicated, it was a daily experience in Tacoma not just once a week or just on weekends. The language instruction was so strong that there were actually a number of Tacoma Japanese who ended up in the military intelligence service with their Japanese language skills. Mary if you want to say any more about that.
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
Yeah. I don't necessarily have much to add to that except that it was known in the military intelligence service community that young men from Japan, I mean, sorry from Tacoma were very proficient at Japanese. One of our interviewees even said yeah, that they found out, "Where are you from?" "I'm from Tacoma." "Okay. You don't need to take the language test, you're in," kind of a thing.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
So this next question was more I'm fascinated when the past can speak to us like when we come across things. And in this case, you mentioned a little bit in your book about these essays that you read. And I want to know more about that. Just in terms of the process, were those from the language school? But I'm also curious if any of the folks you talked to got a chance to read maybe something that they wrote when they were kids. All this is fascinating to be able to find this and hear what maybe folks you were talking to when you first started this project were thinking prior to what happened during World War II.
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
So students should write good papers so that when they get discovered in archives 40 years later they could still be proud of them. But yeah, we just came upon these in the archives. And they were from the Japanese Language School, they were written in Japanese. So amazing to be able to match names from these essays with people that we had interviewed. We weren't able to take an essay to someone and say, hey, look at this, and look what you wrote when you were 15 years old or 14 or 13 or whatever. And to the extent that people did talk about some of the records kept on them, they were like, "Oh no, look at my attendance record," that kind of thing. It just was really a treasure to find some of those essays.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
All of those materials and also some of the lumber company archival materials are in the UW special collections and seasonal libraries. We have a special thanks to the libraries for holding those materials. And we also had another great RA [Masaki Seto 00:41:34], an international students from Japan, biomed major, but was super interested in this topic. And also helped us because there's a lot of material there, not all that is in great condition, but kind of going through those. And then obviously Mary is a historian of Japan also, reads Japanese. So they did a number of translations themselves.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
And just briefly because it sounds like there were a lot of them. Were these essays that you would read from students now? I'm just so fascinated by what sorts of things folks were talking about?
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
Well, they talked about things like, why is Japanese important to us? Why should we learn Japanese? What I did over the summer. A prominent Japanese speaker came, what did you think about this speaker? What did he say, have to say to us? So the very typical, I would say, typical kinds of assignments that a teacher might ask of their junior high or high school students, which also speaks to the seriousness and the focus of the Japanese Language School. This wasn't just, hey, come have a snack after school and let's sing some Japanese songs. This was, hey, write your essay, this is your topic. It was serious business. And that also, I think, distinguished... as we were mentioning earlier, that distinguished the Japanese Language School in Tacoma somewhat from many others. Some were just only on Saturdays and that kind of thing.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
Those records, there are also older records from the Japanese Association. And in those, we found, for instance, the original letter to do fundraising to build the Language School. So there's a lot of material that's still there. It's all public access, and we hope that others will take advantage of that.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
So it's interesting, we're talking about things that were saved and then maybe moving to so much of what this book talks about or a big theme is this process of forgetting. And I think most, maybe all of them, I'm not sure all, but most of the buildings that were there prior to World War II are now gone. I wonder if we could talk about what happened post end of the war to these buildings and maybe to this history in general. I don't know if it was a wholesome effort to get rid of it or not. And it also strikes me that your book is a way of, if we're talking about forgetting, this is a way to remember. So I'm interested in that idea as well.
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
What happened is developed happened, I guess. There are two buildings now that remain in Tacoma that were originally part of this community. And only one of them is functioning in its original capacity, which is the Buddhist temple on Fawcett in the middle Tacoma UWT campus footprint. The other is Whitney Memorial Methodist Church, which is just down the street now part of the art program for UWT. But the rest of those buildings were just, it's like, okay, it's time for something new. And no one says, wait a minute, this is an important building, this is part of our history. It just got wiped out really not in one fell swoop, but gradually. There's two pictures in the book, one that shows the area on Broadway between 13th and 15th in the 1930s, it shows all these Japanese businesses lining the street.
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
And there's another one taken just very recently right before the book was finished, a drone picture that shows this space is completely different parking lots, the Murano Hotel and so on. The magic slate, the plastic has been pulled up and that's all been, it's all disappeared. I think the fact that these buildings disappeared, this built environment disappeared, it's not just by chance, it's not just development. These buildings were vacated with incarceration. And what happened? The businesses are gone, what happens to the building? So they fall into neglect and disrepair. So then people say, "Well, we got to tear that down so that we can build something new." So it's not just like, "Oh, this is getting old, let's build something new." This is getting old for a reason because no one's taking care of it. Why aren't they taking care of it? Because all the owners have been incarcerated by the US government through no fault of their own.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
There's just been less attention on trying to preserve the Japanese districts Nihonmachi in cities from the pre-war time. Although historic preservation practices are available, if they're applied. And Gail Dubrow who used to be at UW Seattle, a specialist in historic preservation argued that the language school may have been able to be saved had there been an earlier historic preservation district that was recognized formally. So we certainly see that as Mary said urban development and certain areas that were devalued becoming valuable. Eric, you were saying earlier that it's like the prime real estate, but we see that also as part of these traditions, these practices of displacement and gentrification that are decades in the making. We also see it with federal dollars that support the building of highways and parking lots and parking garages and so on for urban development, however it's being defined at that moment.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
It's not one individual who has made this happen, but these are practices over time that certainly have benefited some and not others. And one of the things we say about this in the book is that the erasure of some histories ... And here we can think of the Puyallup and the Coast Salish as well, as well as the Japanese-Americans. The erasure of that was actually necessary in order for certain types of developments to happen. We want to emphasize that preserving this and thinking seriously about how this type of systemic eraser impacts individuals and communities in terms of their own sense of belonging to communities and to the United States should really be at the forefront of planner's minds, that that needs to be incorporated as an important value as we go forward.
Eric Wilson-Edge:
So my last question for the two of you is maybe the easiest or maybe it's the most complex, we'll find out. Why did you decide to undertake this project?
Dr. Mary Hanneman:
That's a good question. I think there's a simple answer and a complicated answer to that. Simple answer is we learned that the university was going to tear down the building. The Tacoma Japanese Language School, as Lisa just mentioned. And they put out a call to faculty, "Hey, is anyone interested in pursuing a project about this?" And Lisa and I either very stupidly or very sagaciously said, "We'll do it." We didn't know each other at that time, but we both expressed an interest, and that's how we got started. The more complicated answer is all the ideas that we've been talking about today are the things that hooked us because it was pretty challenging to ... It took us a long time to synchronize our schedules and so on to be able to get this book out. But we stuck with it because I think we really were connected to the issues and to the people that we interviewed.
Dr. Lisa Hoffman:
Mary said it really well. And I'd only add that we felt a responsibility to make sure this got out and that these voices need to be heard and should be a part of the public historical record. We still hope that there can be an online component, and we're hoping that all of these interviews that are taped and transcribed can also sit in the UW Tacoma library for further research and exploration.
Speaker 2:
Thank you to our guests, and thank you for listening. Be sure to like and subscribe. You can find us on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, and Apple Podcasts.