Koji and Mayumi Ogawa opened Ichiban restaurant at 601 Main Street, in the Panama Hotel building, around 1983. The small restaurant served homestyle Japanese food to its customers in the Nihonmachi or Japantown area in Seattle’s Chinatown - International District for 27 years. In early May 2010, the Ogawas posted a “Farewell letter to our loyal customers and friends” announcing the restaurant’s closure at the end of that month. The letter referred to “numerous issues with the landlord” as the cause.

The sign for the Panama Hotel is visible in this photo, below and in the background of the Ichiban sign. The hotel was built in 1910 by Sabro Ozasa, the first Japanese architect in Seattle, as a single room occupancy hotel for single Japanese men looking for work. The Panama Hotel also housed a bathhouse and other businesses, and became a gathering center for the community. When Japantown residents were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in camps during WWII, many stored their valuables in the basement of the Panama Hotel, though not all returned to reclaim their possessions. Currently (as of 2024), the Panama Hotel hosts a small museum which recreates the hotel and the bathhouse as they existed before the war, and the unclaimed trunks are visible beneath the glass floor of the Panama Hotel Tea & Coffee House on the ground floor.

Caption information source: “30-year eatery in Japantown closes its doors” by Tony Dondero, International Examiner, June 15, 2010, retrieved at https://iexaminer.org/30-year-eatery-in-japantown-closes-its-doors-2/
Caption information source: Panama Hotel & Japanese American Museum of Seattle website at https://www.panamahotelseattle.net/