The Panama Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Today I toured the Panama Hotel, the hotel that is featured in the book "On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet." The hotel owner, since 1985, gave us the personal touch. She is kind of like a walking history book and has procured an amazing amount of artifacts about the Japanese internment on the West Coast, many of which she shared today. The Panama Hotel is still in operation. It boasts a tea room/cafe, 101 rooms with bathrooms and showers down the hall, a basement in which many of the trunks left by Japanese families during the interment still reside, and best of all the ONLY fully intact old-style Japanese bath house in Northern America. The bath house was the best part. It has not been renovated or updated in any way and was fully functioning until 1963. Apparently, following internment, many Japanese families moved out of the city and relocated to homes with land. The small block near the Panama Hotel that housed over 8,000 Japanese before the war was changed forever. With bathrooms in their own homes, they no longer needed to come to the public bath house. If you ever come to Seattle for a visit and have an inkling for times gone by, The Panama Hotel would be a great place to spend a night or two.

Half The Sky

I am currently reading the book "Half the Sky" by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Rather than summarize the book, I have decided to print the quotes that headline each chapter, here goes:

"Women might just have something to contribute to civilization other than their vaginas"
-Christopher Buckley, Florence of Arabia

"Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself."
-Abraham Lincoln

"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."
-George Bernard Shaw

"The mechanism of violence is what destroys women, controls women, diminishes women and keeps women in their so-called place."
-Eve Ensler, A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer

"Preparation for death is that most Reasonable and Seasonable thing, to which you must now apply yourself."
-Cotton Mather, in a sermon advising pregnant women

"Would the world stand by if it were men who were dying just for completing their reproductive functions."
-Asha-Rose Migiro, UN Deputy Secretary General, 2007

"Whenever cannibals are on the brink of starvation, Heaven, in its infinite mercy, sends them a nice plump missionary."
-Oscar Wilde

"A majority of the dwellers of hell will be women, who curse too much and are ungrateful to their spouses."
-Muhammad Imran, Ideal Woman in Islam

"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."
-Derek Bok

"Are women human yet...If women were human, would we be a cash crop shipped from Thailand in containers into New York brothels...Would our genitals be sliced out to "cleanse" us...When will women be human...When..."
-Catherine A. Mac Kinnon, Are Women Human

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
-Mahatma Gandhi

I am going to work on that last one starting tomorrow, good-night!