Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center exhibit: Japanese Americans re-create home life after WWII

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(Gallery by The Oregonian)

Correction appended

Ed Tamiyasu doesn't remember spending his first two years in a crowded barracks, but the experience has marked the ensuing years of his life.

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Tamiyasu, now 71, was a toddler when his family left Idaho's

where they and 13,000 other Americans of Japanese descent had been held as enemies of the state during World War II.

Their home in

had been looted and the Tamiyasus' truck farm had been liquidated, so the family moved to Portland, where his parents found work as hotel managers.

The story of their imprisonment -- and those of hundreds of Japanese American Portlanders who left the city in rail cars bound for detainment camps in Idaho, California, Wyoming and Colorado -- are well known. But their postwar struggles to re-create a home life haven't gotten the same attention.

Historians have recorded postwar accounts from Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans, but recollections from imprisoned Nikkei -- a term for Americans of Japanese descent -- have been left out. A new exhibit at the

is among several recent efforts to give them a voice before their stories die along with members of their generation.

Tamiyasu and his contemporaries grew up in an America that was trying to forget the war, but the fallout rippled through society for decades. He came of age battling prejudice and a cultural identity crisis, while trying desperately to distance himself from his heritage.

As he strove to fit in with his white friends, he refused to speak Japanese. As a result, later in life Tamiyasu couldn't communicate well with his immigrant parents.

"The environment made me not want to be Japanese," he says. "I regretted that later on."

Through the exhibit, the stories and sacrifices of Tamiyasu and others who returned home to rebuild their lives will be preserved for posterity, despite the culture lost in the postwar effort to assimilate.

Harsh imprisonment and homecoming

Ten weeks after the Pearl Harbor bombing, President Franklin Roosevelt

to round up the West Coast's 120,000 Japanese American citizens and hold them in detention centers.

Within two weeks, Portland's bustling

, the area north of Burnside and west of the Willamette River known among residents as Nihonmachi, was a ghost town. The immigrant families who ran Japantown's businesses were taken to what is now the Portland Expo Center, then transported in rail cars to rural camps throughout the West.

The stories of their imprisonment -- the communal barracks surrounded by barbed wire fences, the bland, scant food -- are history lessons for today's schoolkids.

Forty-six years after the war, the U.S. government apologized to the Nikkei. It took another 24 years for historians to document the long-term psychological and societal impact of their mass imprisonment.

Life was forever changed for the Nikkei who returned to Portland and other cities after World War II. Japantown was empty, its businesses looted, liquidated or sold while their owners were away. Blinded by wartime prejudice, the Nikkei's once-friendly white neighbors would no longer look them in the eye.

'Proud and sad at the same time'

What must it have been like to return to a home where your neighbors avoided eye contact? Where your possessions and land had been sold or looted? Where you felt the need to prove your patriotism by abandoning your native culture?

Jackie Peterson-Loomis, a retired Washington State University Vancouver history professor and longtime documentarian of Portland's minority history, was tasked with curating an installation to explore postwar experiences of Portlanders who returned from World War II internment camps.

"This show is about the ability of human beings to hold two very contradictory feelings simultaneously -- the ability to be very proud and sad at the same time," Peterson-Loomis says.

The installations will be bolstered by several public programs supported by grants from Oregon Humanities and the Oregon Heritage Commission.

If you go:

"Coming Home: Voices of Return and Resettlement 1945-1965"

Where: Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, 121 N.W. Second Ave.

Cost: $3 suggested donation

When: 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 12-3 p.m. Sunday, through March 31

Public programs:

"What Happened to Portland's Japantown? Place, Community and Identity in the Stories of 'Coming Home'"

Lecture and Discussion with Jacqueline Peterson-Loomis and five exhibit narrators

5 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 5, Portland State University, Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 238,1825 S.W. Broadway

"Japanese-American Imprisonment and Resettlement: The Power of Stories"

Brian Komei Dempster, editor, "Making Home From War," 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 23, University of Oregon, Event Room 142/144, 70 N.W. Couch St.

"From Fact to Fiction: Rare Accounts of the Japanese American WWII Experience"

Kristina McMorris, author of "Bridges of Scarlet Leaves," 2 p.m. Saturday, March 9, Beaverton City Library, Meeting Room A, 12375 S.W. Fifth St., Beaverton

"When Heroes Weren't Welcome Home"

Linda Tamura, author of "Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence: Coming Home to Hood River"

7 p.m. Tuesday, March 19, Portland State University, Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 238, 1825 S.W. Broadway

Memories of postwar Portland

is an audiovisual history lesson, told by those who lived through it. The exhibit runs through March 31 at the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center.

Over several months, curator Jackie Peterson-Loomis gathered hours of recorded memories from nine Portland area residents who lived through internment, resulting in 12 narratives. Some, like Tamiyasu, were too young to remember the camps but experienced the aftermath. Others ranged in age from young children to adults by the time they returned to Portland.

Unlike other museum installations filled with artifacts and interactive elements, this 500-square-foot space is sparse. A few relics of mid-20th century life hang from the ceiling and walls. A 1950s-style party dress, an old bowling uniform, some photographs of teen dances.

But this exhibit is not meant to be browsed. Four simple wooden tables and television screens are the foundation. There, visitors don a pair of earphones and listen as Tamiyasu and his co-narrators tell personal stories of returning to Portland after an experience that had dramatically altered their relationship with the city and its residents.

"This kind of work requires a lot of trust," Peterson-Loomis says. "The narrators did something very brave."

The 12 two- to three-minute narratives, taken from more than five hours of film, are divided into four listening stations. The first station, "Landscapes of Hope & Fear," tells of the initial return to civilian life.

Emiko Namba Kikkawa, whose family came back to

to find their home ransacked, remembers grocery store owners telling her "No Japs. Get out." In spite of that prejudice, her father was the consummate patriot. After obtaining his citizenship, he never missed the chance to vote in an election.

At a second kiosk, "Starting Over in Portland," visitors listen to Henry Sakamoto and Yoichi Cannon Kitayama, who were teens when they left camp. They tell of their generation's push to gain higher education, so they could avoid taking jobs at the hotels and small stores that had employed their parents. The result was greater prosperity, but diminished cultural cohesion.

Station three, "Teen Nisei," includes Tamiyasu's story of growing up Japanese in a postwar world. He remembers American-style dances, drag racing and sports clubs. He also talks of racially charged playground fights.

"My memories of growing up were mixed," he says. "I had school-hood Caucasian friends while at the same time experiencing racism. My parents always wanted their children to fit in with the larger community."

These experiences in his formative years led Tamiyasu to study social anthropology in college, seeking an answer to the lingering question of "Who am I?"

Coping in a new era

Ultimately, "Coming Home" is a story of rebuilding a life that was lost and re-establishing ties to a community that had grown hostile.

believes it to be one of only a handful of attempts -- all of them within the past year -- to tell the Nikkei story of the return to civilian life.

Even within Japanese families, tales of internment are infrequent. The pressure to be patriotic combined with the Japanese cultural emphasis on respect and dignity often led parents to avoid discussing the camps with their children, Peterson Loomis says.

"The War Relocation Authority told them not to draw attention to themselves, not even to speak their language in public," she says. "And then there's this shame that they were in prison. It's an unjustified shame, but it's shame nonetheless, and a desire to put it behind them."

That makes the stories in "Coming Home" even more remarkable. Narrators tell tales of discrimination, assimilation, triumph and sadness. Their memories, backed by hundreds of family photos from the era, reach from the orchards of Hood River to the postwar cleanup efforts in Japan.

"Many of my friends went back East," recalls Harue Ninomiya. "They said they were never coming back to Portland."

But new connections also emerged for those who chose to return to Oregon.

now a Portland mainstay, grew out of the postwar need for a Japanese travel connection as Nikkei Portlanders sought to visit relatives across the world.

also arose from the rubble of the war, developing a lucrative business mailing care packages to Japan.

The generation of children and young adults who experienced life in the camps grew up to be business owners, engineers, sociologists and doctors. And the Japanese community in Portland remains strong and tightly connected, despite the upheaval caused by their government's betrayal during the war.

Harue Ninomiya encapsulates that feeling in her narrative: "When we came to the greens of the gorge, there was a change in my whole body," she says. "I was coming home -- to where I belonged."

Ed Tamiyasu's family truck business was in Brooks and nine narrators told 12 recorded narratives. A story in Sunday's Living & Travel section about Japanese Americans after internment was incorrect on those two points.

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