Seiki Kayamori  Seiki Kayamori (1877–1941) was a Japanese photographer who lived in Yakutat, Alaska, before World War II. His photographs captured the village's residents, mostly Tlingit Indians, at a time when the fish canning industry and other outside influences were beginning to change or eclipse traditional ways of life. Kayamori lived in Yakutat for some 30 years and never returned to Japan. But even before Pearl Harbor was bombed, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation suspected him and other Japanese immigrants on the West Coast of spying. Two days after the attack, awaiting his arrest, Kayamori committed suicide. No credible evidence has ever been produced to indicate that he was a spy. Today, about 700 of Kayamori's photographs are housed at the Alaska State Historical Library in Juneau. Kayamori was born in 1877 in what was then the village of Dembo, today part of Fuji City in central Japan. He was the fifth of eight children; the second of four sons. The wealthy and prominent Kayamori family owned a paper mill, farm lands and a small department store. Under Japan's conscription law, Kayamori likely served a three-year military term. The law also required an additional three-year term in the reserves. In 1903, Japan was on the brink of war with Russia, and reservists like Kayamori waited to be recalled up to duty. In September 1903, Kayamori turned 26 aboard the steamer Iyo Maru during the voyage from Yokohama to Seattle. He arrived with $87.10 and a steamer ticket for San Francisco, according to the ship's manifest, which lists his last residence as Tokyo and his occupation as "laborer and farmer". The ship's manifest lists his destination as the Japanese Methodist Mission on Pine Street. By 1910, Kayamori was living in a Seattle's Welcome Hotel and working as a "cleaner and passer" at a dye works, according to census records. Around 1912, he moved to Yakutat, a small Tlingit village in southeast Alaska, where he worked in the Libby, McNeil & Libby fish cannery. Racist attitudes and active unions at the time ensured that the jobs available to Japanese immigrants on the West Coast were largely limited to agricultural, railroad, laundry and cannery work. Today, Yakutat is a large (9860 square mile), sparsely populated, consolidated city/borough. After his father's death, Kayamori's mother went to live with her grandson's family in Manchuria, then a Japanese colony.