Yasutaro Kawakami
Yasutaro Kawakami arrived in the Yukon before the Klondike gold rush. He established the Northern Hotel, between King and Queen streets in Dawson. He also was successful running a commission business and, from 1899 to 1901, he operated a store on King Street in Dawson.1)
Yasutaro travelled to Japan in 1900 and brought back his bride Josephine whose family was prominent in Osaka. His brother, Shuzaburo, travelled back with them to the Yukon. In 1902, Yasutaro was supported by eighty miners on Bonanza Creek who encouraged him to run for the Yukon Territorial Council. He was attacked with insult and ridicule in the Yukon Sun newspaper, and he withdrew from the race about the same time there was a fire that destroyed his business.2)
The Dawson Japanese had a big celebration after Japan's victory over Russia in 1905 in the Russo-Japanese War. Five hundred Britons and Americans attended and forty Japanese (all the Japanese in Dawson.) Yasutaro presided and spoke in English and Shuzaburo also spoke in English. The committee in charge were Yasutaro Kawakami, Shivada, and Omura.3)
Around 1906, Yasutaro Kawakami built a roadhouse on the winter road up the Twelve Mile River. That year, about 3,000 tons of material was dropped by the Yukon River steamers at Twelve Mile Landing, about eighteen miles northwest of Dawson. The loads included lumber from the Twelve Mile sawmill for the Yukon Ditch flumes. The material was to be hauled thirty miles up the Twelve Mile River to the Power Plant site. Roadhouses were built every ten or twelve miles. Kawakami’s roadhouse was at the foot of the Twelve Mile Hill, five miles downstream from the powerhouse where the steep road climbed out of the river bottom to reach the ditch line, 1,000 feet above. The Yukon Ditch brought water from the Ogilvie Mountains for hydraulic mining in the Klondike goldfields.4)
Yasutaro Kawakami was a generous man who supported the Japanese community in Dawson. He paid the funeral costs for at least two Japanese men who died in Dawson: Saiki Mitaki (d. 1905) and B. Sato (d. 1911).5) In 1910, he spoke out about George Black’s attempt to deny Asians the vote in the Yukon, and the proposed amendment was voted down with Black as the only supporter.6)
Yasutaro joined the rush to the Chisana District in 1913 and ran a boarding house at the mouth of Coarse Money Creek in 1915. He remained in the district until at least November 1916.7) He left the north in 1916, opened a store in Seattle in 1916, and moved back to Japan about 1920.8) Shuzaburo, by that time a well-known Dawson businessman, was concerned about the health of Yasutaro and his family, including four Dawson-born children, after the great Tokyo earthquake in 1923.9)