Finding Unexpected Family History at Seattle's Nippon Kan Theatre
Eric Hayashi, president and CEO of Seattle Clinical Research Center, recalls hearing relatives reminisce about the old Nippon Kan Theatre, a hub of the Japanese immigrant community in Seattle during the early 1900s. When he got the chance to buy the 31,000-square-foot building that once housed the theater, he took it, paying about $10 million for the property in 2023. Hayashi worked with Soderstrom Architects and Suyama Peterson Deguchi to renovate the upper floors for his company’s offices and to restore the first-floor theater, reopening it as a multi-use event space in May 2024. We spoke with him about the project and the deeper family ties it uncovered.
How did you end up buying the building?
I knew [my company’s] lease [in our old building] was coming up, so I started the process of looking at commercial buildings. And then I happened upon this building. It was so clear to me that this was the perfect fit for what we wanted to do from a business perspective, but the real clincher was the historic nature of the building and the personal connection for me. And on top of that, the building was so much nicer than the other places I looked at that were in this [price] range. I told my wife, “I feel like this was meant to be.”
How have you learned about the history of the building?
There’s a fair bit of information out there. I even got a book by Edward Burke, an architect who purchased the building circa 1970. I read through that, and it’s just a fascinating history. And then after I purchased the building, I met with some of my relatives and talked with them about it, and I actually have even more history with it than I was aware of at the time.
photo by: Stuart Isett
Eric Hayashi, shown outside the theater.
What did you find out?
I brought my aunt and uncle into the building two or three weeks ago. They were very interested in seeing it; they had been there when they were younger. They saw a photo on the wall. My Aunt Laura goes, “Oh, there’s Grandpa Shoichi”—my great-grandpa, Shoichi Okamura. A former tenant had put up these old photos, and I [had seen] that one, but I never realized that my great-grandpa had been there since I bought the building.
It was built in 1909, and [there was] a wave of Japanese immigrants around that time. The main floor was the Nippon Kan Theatre, and the second and third floors were an SRO [a single-room occupancy hotel]. These immigrants would come over, and my great-grandpa had a business called the Grand Union Laundry. He would give them a job at the laundry until they got on their feet.
Why did the theater close?
Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 [in 1942], so in a very, very short period people of Japanese descent were sent to [incarceration] camps. The theater was shut down that year. There was a family that purchased the building after the war with the intent to restore it. And [they] tried to raise money in the Japanese community to restore the building, but that was a tough time for everybody, and most people had lost quite a bit of money. [They were] ultimately unable to raise the money, so it stayed in that same state for years.
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What aspects of the original building remain?
Edward Burke had done the lion’s share of the renovation of the whole building in the ’80s. [Some of] it was reinforcing the concrete window frames and doing seismic work. When he bought it, it was in a horrible state of disrepair. He’s the one who should be credited for most of the restoration work.
When I bought the building, [the theater space] was being used as an office. Picture carpet tile on the floor, fluorescent lights on the ceiling, and cubicles. But you could clearly see the bones—I mean, 18-foot ceilings and all of that. Thankfully the floor in the main area was in quite good shape. The stage and the mezzanine floors unfortunately were not, so I put in new oak flooring there. I managed to find some vintage lights that were of the era. They are all-plaster lights from a place in Seattle called Second Use. And I did some seismic work to [meet] today’s standards.
There’s a wall where the actors would write or paint their names. I definitely wanted to keep that. I wanted to keep the general layout, too, because it works so well. I think the acoustics are quite good. I’d also like to maintain the pre–World War II photographs throughout the theater. You can see different performances and events they held there, everything from kabuki to community meetings to weddings to dance clubs to theater.
What is your vision for the theater space?
There might be a kabuki theater performance one evening, and the next evening might be a wedding. The next day or week there might be a quinceañera. I have to figure out how to make it chameleon-like, flexible for many different types of events.
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