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SF: So when your dad and mom came over, how did they start life? I mean what was Nihonmachi like in those days?

FM: Well, that takes a lot of telling about, because Nihonmachi here in Seattle was mainly clustered around Skid Road initially and up Jackson Street, which is the direction which they moved. But Jackson Street at that time was a totally different kind of setting than it now is. There was a hill between Cherry Hill or First Hill, and Beacon Hill, that cut straight across that area and what the city of Seattle did was to wash down that hill, remove it, and put Dearborn Street straight down through that cut in order to create a different kind of -- well to create a transportation (line) through, through fare from Rainier Valley down into the downtown area.

(Narr. note: "Skid Road" refers to the skid down First Hill and Yesler Way down to Yesler Mill at 1st and Yesler. The road was used to slide logs off the hill to the mill. This term was given to the area of homeless men (loggers, sailors and ne'er-do-wells) who gathered at the bottom of the skid. "Skid Row" was the name adopted in the American language for such areas.)

SF: This, this is about what year roughly?

FM: Around 1900. Early 1900. So, yeah, around 1905. No, it must have been, yeah. Around 1905, 1910. Somewhere in there. They washed down that hill to considerable extent and therefore, 12th and Jackson, for example is much lower now in elevation than it was at that time, and as I say, the Beacon Hill bridge is, was, would not have been necessary back in the days when there was a hill cutting across that, through that area. So Seattle -- and the other thing about the Seattle downtown is that the shoreline cut across from let's say 1st and Yesler up to about 8th or 9th and Dearborn. That was the shoreline and the rest of it was tide flats underwater. What Seattle then did was to pour all the sand that was being washed off the hills down into that flat area and create an industrial section. And so what you have now is the railroad tracks down on 4th Avenue, for example, and the King Street Station. The King Street Station area was on the shoreline, but the lines coming into it would have been underwater if it had not been for the fill that has created that large industrial section in Seattle. Then the Japanese community then is created by, well as it develops, moves up the hill. Originally, it's on, parts of it were on stilts because of this, the watered, tide lands area. But it, as they fill in and create this area that is around King Street, Weller and so on, the Japanese community moved in that direction. The other thing to be said is that the residential area, however, at that time and for a long period thereafter was mainly up on Washington Street and so on, on top of the hill to the north of Jackson Street. So Nippon Kan, which is on Maynard and Washington, was kind of a hub that was developed close to the residential section which was, as I say, mainly on Washington moving eastward from the Nippon Kan center.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.