Sento at Sixth and Main: Preserving Landmarks of Japanese American Heritage

Rating:
Summary: Cheap reprint
Review: I saw the a copy of this book in Seattle at the Panama Hotel (that the book is named after) but decided to buy it on Amazon for less. I didn't realize until I got it that it's not the same book, it's been reprinted. Not as nice as the original.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: Sento at Sixth and Main is beautifully written and executed. This book is not only historic and academic, but culturally elegant and articulate. Studies like Dubrow and Grave's are much needed in ethnic communities. I enjoyed learning about these different sites, as well as experiencing the artistic and honorable way they are presented.

Rating:
Summary: Arcade Journal Review by Richard Engeman
Review: The following review written by Richard Engeman appeared in Arcade 20.3, a journal of architecture and design in the Pacific Northwest:

No longer is history created solely from the written word. No longer is historic preservation justified solely by esthetics. We will be seeing a very much more layered look at our past, as new research combines evidence from unexamined data along with different ways of analyzing the information it holds. In Sento at Sixth and Main, Gail Dubrow and Donna Graves have created a striking work about Japanese American communities on the Pacific Coast from the 1890s into the 1990s. It provides a novel way of understanding the past by carefully observing the buildings of the physical present, and by imaginatively analyzing a wide variety of historical evidence.

What Dubrow and Graves have tried to do is to recreate some aspects of the daily lives of residents of Japanese American communities, using the buildings and structures that remain and that represent archetypal activities of the communities. The ten chapters/structures might be characterized: industrial work/housing; farm; store; theater; bath; school; temple; clinic; urban district; entertainment hall. Each chapter details the story of a building or structure in the Seattle or Los Angeles area: its history, its significance, its place in community life. The books makes extensive use of oral history interviews, personal snapshots, archeological findings, and such paper ephemera as merchandise catalogs and newspaper clippings, as well as more traditional historical sources.

This is a rich and dense production that will cause you to look more closely at the everyday world, to wonder what it says and what it represents. A building may give sign of its significance away at first glance, as Emmanji Temple in Sebastopol seems to do. But you would not know by looking at it that it was originally built as a railway exhibit building for the Century of Progress at Chicago in 1934, intended as of a replica of a Buddhist temple of the Kamakura period (1185-1333). Many other structures betray little if anything that would associate them with an ethnic community. An example is the deserted and largely demolished milltown of Selleck, Washington, where the differences between the housing for Japanese American workers and that for white workers are not distinguishable in the absence of the residents, although they were readily apparent when the town was active.

The book weaves text and illustrations into a convincing whole, where photographs are not merely illustrations but are a vital and integrated part of the argument and the story. Alas, a few of the most striking photographs do not directly portray what one thinks they do. The evocative cover image of a woman in a sento (bath) was taken in Japan, not Seattle, and quite recently. The timber workers whose image anchors the section on the town of Selleck, were photographed in Oregon, a hundred and fifty miles from Selleck. As historical evidence, the first photo fails to represent either the time or the location that its placement suggests. The second example misleads only in terms of place, and not significantly for documentary purposes, but its placement within the book suggests it was taken near Selleck. Caption notes at the back of the book tell most of the story, but fail to note that the cover photo was in fact shot in Japan.

I hoped there would be a chapter about a garden, but there is not. I was thinking of the remarkable Kubota Gardens in Seattle, a vernacular construction that is the result of an intersection of esthetics and business. Interestingly, Fujitaro Kubota worked at the Pacific Coast Lumber Company mill in Selleck not long after his immigration to the United States.

Small criticism for a book that is beautifully conceived and produced, and that makes such a pointed case for the value of structures in documenting the history of communities. It gives the cause of historic preservation good reason to examine the values of vernacular architecture, and for all of us to examine the values of community.

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Richard H. Engeman is public historian at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland. He was at the University of Washington Libraries 1984-1999, where he was the archivist in charge of historical photographs and architectural plans and drawings.