Panama Hotel and Tea House

This guide to the Panama Hotel in Seattle's Nihonmachi follows the spring of 1942, when Japanese American families given only days to pack under Executive Order 9066 brought what they could not sell or carry down into the hotel's basement. It traces Takashi Hori, the immigrant owner who stored their trunks without asking anything in return, and what became of the families who trusted him. The guide follows Jan Johnson, who bought the building in 1985 and found dozens of those trunks still waiting exactly where Hori had left them. Look down through the glass floor of the tea room at what one of them still holds.