Japanese settlers played key role in town's history

By MARK HIGGINS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Near the Mukilteo-Everett border is a forested ravine known as Japanese Gulch. It was used after the turn of the century for housing Japanese immigrants and their families who came to Mukilteo to work in the mill.

Mas Odoi grew up in the gulch and has fond memories of the woods, creek and shoreline where he and his friends would play and picnic. The families raised vegetables, fished and stocked trout ponds.

By the 1920s, about 150 people of Japanese descent lived in Mukilteo along with about 220 whites. Both races got along well, Odoi recalls.

He says his father, who arrived in about 1904, worked in the mill as a "tallyman," who kept count of the various grades of lumber as they were processed.

Odoi says that one of the first Japanese children born in Mukilteo was George Tokuda, father of state Rep. Kip Tokuda, a Democrat representing a string of neighborhoods east of downtown Seattle.

When the Great Depression hit and the mill closed, most of the Japanese-American families left Mukilteo, only to return years later as tourists, Odoi says.

His own family moved to the Long Beach Peninsula where his father went to work at an oyster farm.

Beverly "Bevo" Dudder Ellis grew up on the edge of Japanese Gulch in a log home that is still standing. She remembers playing with the Japanese-American children in the gulch and along the shoreline.

"We all learned to row early," she recalls. "There weren't any motors and there wasn't any gas, and even if there was no one could have afforded it."

Ellis' father also worked in the mill and later, when electricity came to town, opened a bakery.

"No one used to lock their door. Everybody knew each other and worked together," she says.