The struggle for the soul of the International District

Oct 15, 2000

Florangela Davila, Justin Mayo

Seattle Times staff reporter

Before World War II, the population of this tiny, historical neighborhood just south of downtown Seattle was mostly Japanese. Today, the majority of its residents are Filipino, and many immigrants make it their first U.S. home. Most of the shops are Chinese-owned, but the most prominent store is a Japanese-American-owned grocery. In this moil of shifting populations and cultures, clashes over the character and identity of the neighborhood have intensified as it confronts development pressures from Seattle's burgeoning ---------------------------

Uwajimaya, the region's most prominent Asian grocery, next month will unwrap a dramatic replacement for its current Chinatown International District store, roofed with signature blue tiles and decorated with dragons.

But while some herald it as a symbol of a bright new economic future, others fear it signals the erosion of the neighborhood's traditional Chinese identity.

Uwajimaya Village, a retail-residential complex, will be twice as big as the old store, offering several restaurants and 176 apartments. It took over a block of South Lane Street, transforming it into a parking lot and pedestrian plaza.

That street closure sparked a land-use fight between village developers and those who want the street left open to traffic.

But this battle goes deeper, and pits the immigrant Chinese business community against one of the area's most prominent Japanese-American landmarks.

In one corner is Ruby Chow, restaurateur, former King County Council member and political godmother for the Chinese-American community, who has thrown her support behind the neighborhood's Chinese business owners.

In the other corner is Tomio Moriguchi, the well-connected, much-respected CEO of Uwajimaya, the grocery founded by his Japanese immigrant father 72 years ago.

They haven't talked to each other in years, and it doesn't look as if they will anytime soon since Chow and the Chinese/Chinatown Chamber of Commerce have sued Uwajimaya over the Lane Street closure.

Critics charge Uwajimaya shouldn't have been allowed to take one city block in a historic, compact neighborhood already being squeezed by development.

"Traditionally, the Chinese don't like to criticize other people. We're supposed to be humble," says Chow over coffee at her regular afternoon hangout, Yummy House, a cheery bakery across the street from Uwajimaya.

"But we have to speak up. This isn't about jealousy. It's about a street being taken away from us to benefit one private individual."

But the Lane Street flap, like others concerning the neighborhood's official name and a proposed McDonald's, is about far more than real estate.

To hear Chow and others tell it, it's really a fight about the Chinese community preserving its identity in a rapidly changing, multi-ethnic neighborhood that, historically, has never belonged to a single group.

One district, lots of identities

Whatever you call this neighborhood - The International District, the ID, Chinatown or the Chinatown International District - its uniqueness is being changed by a flood of new development.

Fancy condominiums. Sleek office plazas. An indoor shopping mall painted turquoise and white.

The new Seahawk stadium will open nearby in 2002.

The Union Station renovation project at Jackson Street between Fourth and Fifth avenues will create as much new office space as the Washington Mutual Tower downtown. And it will house as many workers as the entire neighborhood.

Already, visitors can top off a pho lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant with a skinny Americano from a Starbucks or Tully's.

The unprecedented pace of development worries everyone with a stake here - new immigrants, old-timers, activists, shopkeepers.

Will the neighborhood become too yuppie? Will there be a demand for drugstores and 24-hour gyms? Will it - and this is a question asked delicately by activists, residents and merchants - become too white?

Throughout the country, cities boast Chinatowns, Japantowns, even Koreatowns. Seattle, however, is the only city in the continental United States, where Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, African Americans and, most recently, Vietnamese built one neighborhood, according to Seattle's Wing Luke Asian Museum, which specializes in local Asian-American history.

The city notes this fact on its Web site and in other documents, calling the area the International District. There is no single official name.

When Chow and a group of other Chinese community leaders petitioned the City Council earlier this summer, the Council issued a directive to city staff to call the neighborhood "Chinatown/International District" or "Chinatown/ID" in honor of the Chinese immigrants who had settled here.

Moriguchi and many others protested.

"You would think the City Council would have better things to do," grumbled Moriguchi. "If you call it Chinatown, what happens to all the other people?"

For a short while, it seemed as if the Chinese had won. For decades, they have argued against calling the neighborhood the ID, even taking issue with its usage in a Wing Luke Museum exhibit.

But a month later, City Council President Margaret Pageler issued a second letter that rescinded the directive and noted historical contributions made by other ethnic groups. Just as people call their neighborhoods by different names, the letter read, city officials could use various names to refer to the neighborhood.

Here was Chow's response: When did Chinatown become a dirty word?

WWII put Japanese in minority

The history of this neighborhood begins with the Chinese. They arrived in the 1860s and early 1870s to mine gold and build the Northern Pacific railroad, settling first near the waterfront and then erecting a second Chinatown at Washington and Third.

At the end of the 19th century, a major street expansion pushed everyone out and east to King Street, where the Chinese built a series of pretty, squat, brick buildings that remain today in various states of disrepair.

The Japanese came in the 1880s and quickly surpassed the Chinese in numbers, largely because of a law prohibiting Chinese laborers - but not other immigrants - from sending for their wives.

According to neighborhood historians Doug and Art Chin, whose research is collected at the Wing Luke Museum, there were 924 Chinese in Seattle in 1910 and 6,127 Japanese. The Japanese would remain the largest minority group - larger than the Filipinos or African Americans who also moved in - until World War II.

Until the war, the neighborhood was largely a bustling, eight-block-wide Japantown - or Nihonmachi. It included 45 restaurants, 20 barber shops, 30 hotels, bathhouses, a bank, newspaper offices, dancing schools, a store that made tofu, a store that hawked fish.

During the war, the government imprisoned the entire Japanese community in internment camps. Japanese shops were hastily boarded up and eventually disappeared. The lively Nihonmachi became a whisper.

The Moriguchis were among the few Japanese who set up business in the old neighborhood after the war.

Tomio Moriguchi, short, silver-haired and bespectacled, sits in a conference room at his company's headquarters, telling his father's story: how he emigrated from Japan to Tacoma in 1923; how he sold kamaboko, a type of fish cake, from the back of a truck at oyster camps and lumber mills; how he named his mobile grocery, Uwajimaya, after his hometown.

After the war, the family moved to Seattle with the help of a friend and opened Uwajimaya in a South Main Street storefront. The store sold the fish cakes as well as Japanese imports. But his father, Moriguchi says, never imagined just how popular the business would become until the family set up a shop at the 1962 World's Fair.

"We started realizing, hell, there were a lot of people out there who were interested in rice cookers," says Moriguchi, in his breezy way of talking.

After his father's death a short time later, Moriguchi quit an engineering job at Boeing to run the business full time.

Now there are Uwajimaya stores, with their red-aproned staff and shelves stocked with Japanese, Korean, Hawaiian, Chinese and Filipino goods, in Seattle, Bellevue and Beaverton, Ore. Sales are expected to hit $30 million this year, and Washington CEO magazine recently named Uwajimaya the state minority-owned business of the year.

Seattle schoolchildren touring the neighborhood are as likely to come to the store to marvel at the yellowtail and durian fruit as they are to visit the Tsue Chong fortune-cookie company or the Wing Luke museum.

But the Seattle store, with its Kinokuniya bookstore, fresh fish tanks, bonsai, photo-sticker booths and kitchenware, long ago outgrew its building.

While Kent's Great Wall Mall Asian shopping center or the Central Market on Aurora Avenue may lure Asian food shoppers, Moriguchi says he never gave much thought to moving Uwajimaya out of the International District.

This neighborhood is the economic center for all Asians in Seattle, Moriguchi insists. His friends are here, not to mention his roots.

As he explains this, Moriguchi pulls out a map of the old Nihonmachi, before it was gutted by the war, and before the district was sliced through the middle by the construction of I-5 and further isolated by the Kingdome.

Kimono-clad dancers filed past the Buddhist Church at Bon Odori. Children scurried up Jackson playing catch. Chick's Ice Creamery sold cones for a nickel apiece.

"This was our small world," Moriguchi says. "Chinatown never truly dominated."

A magnet for new immigrants

The neighborhood as we know it now - neon-signed noodle houses, crates of bok choy on the sidewalks, streets thick with double-parked cars - remains a destination for new immigrants. It has cheap housing, grocery stores, citizenship classes and doctors speaking Mandarin and Cantonese.

There are 2,358 people, mostly Filipinos, living here, according to the 1990 U.S. Census. More than half live below poverty level; 40 percent of the population is elderly.

If you include the area known as Little Saigon, a series of corner strip malls at 12th and Jackson, there are approximately 500 businesses. Most are owned by Chinese or ethnic Chinese from Vietnam.

This rich ethnic mix has produced one of the city's most politically active neighborhoods.

When the city announced plans for the Kingdome 30 years ago, community leaders protested for measures to safeguard the district from turning into a giant parking lot.

One of the most influential groups is the International District Improvement Association, or InterIm, which Moriguchi helped found in 1968. He still sits on the board. InterIm has renovated historic buildings into low-income housing, built parks and gardens and developed social-service programs.

The key to revitalizing the International District, says Frank Kiuchi, InterIm's current director, are new residents and anchor retail stores that will lure customers to the smaller shops.

What the district should not turn into, he continues, is a place filled with businesses such as Taco del Mar and the Gap.

"That kind of development is not beneficial to the small-business character we're trying to preserve," Kiuchi said. "To drop a Starbucks in the middle of King Street, that's not what we want to do."

Uwajimaya Village, say InterIm and other project supporters, will bring more residents and shoppers here with a project every bit Asian in design.

Uwajimaya Village, with a moon gate and Gerard Tsutakawa-sculpted fountain, will offer mostly Asian retail and food - a Filipino restaurant, a Chinese one, a Shiseido makeup store and a tea shop.

Tully's will also be located here, but the coffee shop will be designed with an Asian motif.

Some neighborhood activists point out that many properties owned by Uwajimaya's critics are vacant and in disrepair.

"What is their vision?" Moriguchi asks about the Save Lane Street protesters. "They have buildings in the district, and the buildings look like hell."

But Chinese business owners as well as leaders of Chong Wa, a 100-year-old Chinese cultural and educational organization, say they are frustrated that the Chinese community wasn't told early on that the Uwajimaya project would require closing a block of Lane Street.

Closing one block in such a tiny neighborhood will worsen already bad traffic - especially on game days, they say.

The Chinese/Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, according to President Shiao-Yen Wu, gathered 4,000 signatures for a protest petition and raised $140,000 to fight the Lane Street closure.

First-generation Chinese-immigrant business owners, not always keen on being politically active, pledged their support. The chamber organized a group to sue Uwajimaya and the city over the adequacy of the environmental review.

The plaintiffs have lost twice, before the city hearing examiner and in King County Superior Court. The case is now before the state Court of Appeals, which could rule as soon as four weeks.

"They're always trying to tell us what to do," Chow said about InterIm and those who support the Uwajimaya project. "It seems like the Chinese community has nothing to say about what is changing here."

The issue of who speaks for the community simmered earlier this summer when McDonald's began scouting the neighborhood for a franchise site and eyed a handsome brick building at Jackson and Fifth owned by Michael Chu, a Chinese immigrant from Taiwan.

Protests erupted. Critics complained this was a historic building and that McDonald's would attract crime. It wasn't Asian enough. It would hurt the community.

The opposition included InterIm, Mayor Paul Schell and longtime ID activist Bob Santos, who now is a top federal official. The protests scared McDonald's away, even before an elected community board - the one organization some Chinese say is indeed representative - got to review its application.

The protests infuriated many Chinese business owners. Chu needed a tenant, they argued. And wasn't this economic development? Chinatowns in San Francisco and Vancouver, B.C., have McDonald's.

Chow and others complained of a double standard, since many of the organizations backing the Lane Street closure were the same ones protesting the proposed McDonald's. Uwajimaya had also courted McDonald's, and no one protested, Chow said.

"I have been in the district 20 years, working seven days a week, day and night," says Chu, who has since leased his space to a Chinese health-food store.

"I had never even heard about those people," he says of the McDonald's protesters. "They don't speak for us."

Meanwhile, the local business-improvement association - run, as it happens, by a Dutch woman - is trying to keep the peace.

It put up red Welcome to Chinatown/International District banners to promote the neighborhood and plans to also install a series of dragon sculptures.

The Chinese business owners, supportive of such measures to draw more customers here, nonetheless say they're not enough. They are considering raising money to erect a Chinese gate.

Seattle Times researcher Justin Mayo contributed to this report

Florangela Davila's phone message number is 206-464-2916. Her e-mail address is fdavila@seattletimes.com.

Seattle Times researcher Justin Mayo contributed to this report

permission

before you reproduce any part of this material.