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Title: Takashi Hori - Yoshito Mizuta - Elmer Tazuma Interview
Narrators: Takashi Hori, Yoshito Mizuta, Elmer Tazuma
Interviewer: Dee Goto
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: June 8, 1998
Densho ID: denshovh-htakashi_g-01-0005

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DG: Now, in your case, Salty, were your clients Japanese?

YM: Well, they were mixture. In the beginning it was mostly Japanese, but then a lot of Filipinos came in later and very few whites. I don't know if there were any whites. There were a lot of Filipinos and Japanese.

DG: So now we are talking about the 1920s in your case.

YM: Yeah.

DG: Okay and so there were maybe, what 100 hotels, Japanese owned hotels at the time?

TH: More than that I believe.

DG: Let's talk a little bit about --

TH: Like the hotels, it's not hotels -- what you think of hotel today is entirely different from what hotels were in those days. You would say more or less rooming houses.

YM: Yeah.

TH: Today there are certain standards. You have to have plumbing, you have to have bathroom, so many on each one. In those days they were a lot like Yoshito mentioned in the beginning, a lot of rooms without plumbing with just the bed in there, and still it was classified as a hotel.

DG: Now, we're talking about Yoshito Fujii wrote a paper about the hotels.

TH: Yes. No. He mentioned about the Welcome Hotel. See, like the Panama Hotel when I took over there's about twenty rooms are without no water in it. So I had Sam Tanaguchi's father put in plumbing for each of the room.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.