Tacoma’s Historic Japantown: An Overview

IV. Postwar Development and Decline

Large group of Japanese Americans inside a church. Wooden pews and a “Forward with Christ” sign are in front of the group.

Group of six Japanese American girls in kimonos in front of a scenic stage backdrop.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the number of Japanese-owned businesses in Tacoma dropped sharply, despite the 1958 report of a city government urban renewal committee that marked historic Japantown as an important element in saving the downtown from urban decay. The largely Japanese congregation of the Methodist Church moved to Puyallup and other local congregations, selling the building to the University of Washington in Tacoma in 1999. (As of 2016, the building was still in use, as an instructional and work space for the university.)

By the 1970s, only a few main sites for gathering a Japanese community remained in the Tacoma area. One was the Tacoma Buddhist Temple, which still stands in 2023. In 1950, a group of concerned Issei met with Nisei leaders and created the Tacoma Nikkeijin Kai, a community-service organization that continues to meet at the temple. Another was the Whitney Methodist Church population, which continued to worship in Puyallup until 2016.

The largest community gatherings have been reunions organized by or for the former students of Japantown’s Japanese language school. These Nisei students returned to Tacoma in 1977, 1983, 2003, and 2014, each time visiting the businesses and sites that they had known as children. Despite efforts in the late 1990s to preserve the language-school building and mark Japantown as a historic district, the University of Washington demolished the building in 2004, deeming it unsafe for occupancy. In its place, the university in 2014 erected a memorial statue, designed by Gerard Tsutakawa (b. 1947), to the language school; it also devoted research to documenting the experiences of the school’s students. Along with a small number of descendants of Japantown residents still living in Tacoma, the language-school monument and the Tacoma Buddhist Temple stands today as one of the few physical reminders of the city’s historic Japantown.

Credits:

1) Northwest Room at the Tacoma Public Library, Richards Studio A 93722-1.

2) Northwest Room at Tacoma Public Library, Richards Studio, D 122125-2

*Text reprinted from Tamiko Nimura, “Tacoma Neighborhoods: Japantown (Nihonmachi)—Thumbnail History,” HistoryLink.org, 2016. Sources for this overview are listed with the article on HistoryLink.