<Begin Segment 28>

DG: Now, you had an incident though, Tak, coming back from the war. Now, tell me what you did with the Panama Hotel when you left for camp.

TH: Well, when I left for camp I put it under management with John Davis and Company. They hired help to operate it, but it was not, didn't come out good. When they had to pay so many clerks and so many, they had to get a manager, they had to get somebody to janitor, and maids and things, it just didn't pay. So after about -- I don't know how long -- they found somebody that wanted to lease the property and operate it themselves just like the Japanese did as a family. And we leased it out for, I think, three years or something. Then the lease had expired in, I believe early part of '45. They wanted to renew and I figured we'd be returning to the coast eventually so I didn't renew the lease. However, when I came back in August and I asked them that I want to take over, they just refused to turn the keys over to me. They said no. They're entitled to it because during that period they operated the (place), that they were entitled to an extension and all that, and they just refused to give me the keys until I hired an attorney to send them papers saying that they had to do it and finally got my keys back for the hotel. I mean, they were making money so they didn't want to let it go.

DG: Now, do you think there were other hotels in a similar situation?

TH: Well, I don't know of others. N-P is another one, but they were having management, but theirs worked out good. Atlas Hotel was all right, but I don't know of other hotels that had similar.

DG: Well, I'm thinking about some of the kind of politics behind the land acquisitions and so forth in the farmers. The whites wanted to take over.

TH: Well, that's what happened in the farming community.

DG: Was that not true in the hotel business?

TH: I think there were one or two cases, I think. Like the Takemuras at the Pacific Hotel, they had some kind of problem there.

DG: You sold yours, Salty.

YM: Well, before we left, yeah. Didn't get much, no. I didn't realize then that -- I thought maybe we'd never come back this way. I thought maybe they would ship us to Japan or something.

ET: Let's see, who was that? Tosh? His father had one near First Avenue and Main. The son's name is Tosh. He had a stroke.

TH: Tosh Tanemura?

ET: Tanemura, okay. What I heard Tosh's father happened to ask one of the tenants if they will run the hotel for them. And I don't know whether they kept all the profit. They said yeah because they just came from someplace, they were looking for work, but when the (Tanemuras) got back, they practically threw the key at them and said, "Thank you for coming back," and they just got out of it. They couldn't take it, but they ran it fairly.

DG: So what you're saying is that the hotel business is hard and not everyone could run it.

ET: Yeah. And then these people didn't know any better so they were honest. And the way that Mr. (Tanemura) said they were one of the lucky ones.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.