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Building History

In Masajiro Furuya operated an import-export business of American and Japanese merchandise and produce. In 1901, he had four stores, two in Seattle, WA, one in Yokohama, Japan, and one in Portland, OR.

Building Notes

An advertisement in Raymer's Dictionary of Greater Seattle (1908) said of the M. Furuya Company Store: "The friends at home will appreciate a Japanese Art Souvenir of your trip to the coast; and it you select something made by the Japanese, it will be not only useful and beautiful, but different--you can not find it everywhere." (See Raymer's Dictionary of Greater Seattle, [Seattle: C.D. Raymer and Company, 1908], p. 32.) The store claimed itself to be the largest importer of Japanese "art souvenirs" in the Pacific Northwest. Increasingly after 1900, Japanese items became fashionable to collect in homes of the well-to-do, as did the cultivation of Japanese gardens and wearing of kimono. As exemplified by the Seattle Times's publication of Alfred D. Bowen's Seattle and the Orient(Seattle: Times Printing Company, 1900), the city's white establishment turned its attention to cultivating commercial and cultural relationships with Asian countries, all the while subjugating its own Asian-American citizens.

PCAD id: 18185