Nippon Kan Hill Climb Challenge
This challenge takes you straight through the Japantown core. The first stretch includes two blocks of hill climbs. Turn east for yet another steep climb to reach the Nippon Kan.
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Start or the end of a tour leg.
Waypoint or town along the tour leg with more information.
Key waypoints and Main Street communities along the tour leg. Sites you do not want to miss!
Spur or ‘side-trip’ off the main tour leg.
Point of interest along the tour leg.
Also known as: Momo; Jackson Loan Office The War Relocation Authority, the civilian federal agency that assumed supervision from the U.S. Army of the 10 major “relocation centers” around the country for the Japanese Americans during World War II, encouraged its charges to leave the camps by relocating away from the U.S. West Coast. College-age Nisei students went off to attend schools in the Midwest or East Coast. Entire families...
Learn more about Sairen (#9)Mile: 0.00
Immediately after the Japanese military attack on the U.S. naval fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i on December 7, 1941, the FBI swooped down on Japanese American communities across the mainland U.S. and Hawai’i, arresting Issei who, according to the Bureau, were “aliens who led cultural or assistance organizations,” “slightly less suspicious aliens,” and “members of, or those who donated to, ethnic groups, Japanese language teachers and Buddhist clergy.” In Seattle,...
Learn more about Jackson Building Warehouse (#10)Mile: 0.01
Also known as: The N.P. “When I first came here everything was so big. We were on the farm in Japan, just a one-story house. I had never seen a building so high, the N.P. Hotel, the building that was to be our house. I couldn’t get over it.” - Yukiko Fujii, who was eight years old when she and her mother left Hiroshima to join her father, Frank Niroku...
Learn more about N.P. Hotel (#11)Mile: 0.02
Opened in 1904, the original Maneki Restaurant stood three stories high in a building fashioned after a Japanese castle, high on the hill at 6th Avenue and Washington Street, at the core of Seattle’s then bustling Japantown. While the forced removal and incarceration of the Japanese American community during World War II and the shuttering of businesses throughout Japantown allowed the castle to be ransacked and made inoperable, the “Welcome...
Learn more about Maneki (#12)Mile: 0.03
Japanese public bathhouses (known as a sento) were once more commonplace up and down the West Coast, serving Japanese immigrants living in residential SRO (single room occupancy) hotels and Japanese migrant laborers coming into the city during the off season. More than just a place to bathe, the sento was a place to socialize and find respite in community, especially through the daily trials of living with racism and discrimination...
Learn more about Panama Hotel Sento (#14)Mile: 0.04
Also known as: Astor Hotel “It was a cultural center. It was a place where you could see the different arts, the dance programs from Japan as well as programs that were developed in the community itself…. It was a nice place for the community to have a place to go.” - May Sasaki Built in 1909, the Nippon Kan soon became the cultural center for Seattle’s Japanese American community....
Learn more about Nippon Kan (#17)Mile: 0.14
