Chinatown, Japantown, Little Saigon

Uwajimaya

The flagship of a family grocery empire that started in 1928 with fishcakes sold from a truck, now a pan-Asian emporium in Uwajimaya Village.

You're standing in front of Uwajimaya, the flagship of a grocery empire that began in the back of a truck. In 1928, Fujimatsu Moriguchi drove around Tacoma selling homemade fishcakes to Japanese loggers, farmers, and fishermen. He named the business after Uwajima, the Japanese town where he learned food processing, and tacked on ya, the word for store. The war nearly ended it.

In 1942 the Moriguchi family was sent to Tule Lake in California, and when they came back they rebuilt here on South Main Street with money borrowed from friends and customers. The break came at the 1962 World's Fair, where a booth the size of a studio apartment introduced the store to customers outside Japantown. Fujimatsu died that same summer, and his four sons split the company rather than passing it only to the eldest. Step inside now and the shelves run far beyond Japanese staples.

Filipino, Chinese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese products share aisles with a food court, and the whole neighborhood does its shopping here.

Hing Hay Park

The district's red-pavilioned square, where tai chi and chess share the plaza and the name means 'park for pleasurable gatherings.'

Stand in the plaza and you'll see why this park carries its name. Hing Hay translates loosely to 'park for pleasurable gatherings,' and the scene explains the translation. Mornings bring people doing tai chi in slow arcs near the red pavilion, whose upturned roof and lacquered columns came from Taiwan. Chess players set up at the stone tables, and games run for hours while a leaning audience calls out moves.

The park opened in 1973 on a corner that had belonged to the Filipino community, anchored by Duke's Tavern and Eddie's Barbershop, and it grew in 2017 into a full neighborhood square. Circle the pavilion slowly and read the painted panels; each dragon and figure was made to be looked at, not passed by. The building just west of the park is the Bush Hotel, one of the residential hotels where Asian immigrants lived in rooms above storefront shops for decades. This corner is the district's living room.

Wing Luke Museum

A 1910 hotel turned pan-Asian museum, named for the first Asian Pacific American elected to public office in the Pacific Northwest.

This brick building was a hotel before it was a museum, and that is the point. The Wing Luke Museum fills the East Kong Yick Building, raised in 1910 with money pooled by the Chinese American community. Its upper floors held single-room-occupancy rooms where new arrivals slept, its storefronts held shops, and its meeting rooms held family associations. The museum is named for Wing Luke, who won a Seattle City Council seat in 1962 and became the first Asian Pacific American elected to public office in the Pacific Northwest.

He led the city's first Human Rights Commission and fought for open housing until a plane crash killed him in 1965 at age forty. Inside, the historic hotel tour takes you through a preserved family association room, the Yick Fung general store, and the old hotel rooms, with walls left much as residents knew them. Exhibits branch from here into the wider Asian Pacific American story, so give yourself time to drift. Upstairs, the old floors and linoleum keep a particular smell, the smell of a building that was lived in.