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What treasures did Japanese-Americans abandon when they left for internment camps?
The teahouse nestled below Seattle's historic Panama Hotel is filled with relics, from Japanese dolls in kimonos to the framed page of a Japanese-American newspaper from the day it ceased publication in 1942. But the most intriguing artifacts are the dusty ones in the basement, which visitors can just make out through a square of plexiglass cut out of the hardwood floor. Under a spotlight, the items look eerie: a trunk, a stuffed basket, some furniture and books, an old handbag. They are but a few of the belongings left here by Japanese-Americans and Japanese immigrants when they were forced-by presidential order-to relocate to internment camps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
The Panama Hotel, a National Historic Landmark, was designed by Seattle's first Japanese-American architect, Sabro Ozasa. It was built in 1910 on South Main Street in Nihonmachi, or Japantown, and the brick building became a gathering spot for the Japanese immigrant community. With lodging upstairs, doctors' and life insurance offices on the second floor, and a bookstore, barbershop, and billiards room on the ground floor, it was ahead of its time-not unlike today's mixed-use properties. The basement's traditional Japanese-style bathhouse remains the best surviving example of an urban sentó in the United States and looks much like it did when it closed in 1964.