Portland Magazine
July 27, 2023
An undergraduate researcher started to ask questions about the experiences of Japanese Americans after their incarceration on US soil during WWII. These “stories of return” are largely missing from the history books. She decided to do something about that.
Story by Marie Hashimoto '23
IN THE CLOSING days of 1945, twenty-six-year-old Harue May Ninomiya watched the Idaho desert speed past through the windows of the family’s two-door Ford. After more than three years of confinement in a World War II Japanese American detention center, Ninomiya, her parents, and two brothers were on their way back to their Portland home. Finally, the brown dust and shrubs gave way to a familiar, and far more welcome, view: the lush, vibrant greens of the Columbia Gorge. Describing the experience almost seventy years later in an interview with a local historian, she recalled that the sight “somehow just uplifted my entire body,” because “I was coming home to where I belonged.”
Several months before Ninomiya’s return, Yoji Matsushima had glimpsed similar sights as his family arrived in Portland from their detention camp in Texas. Yet the thirteen-year-old did not share Ninomiya’s raptures. Even decades later, Matsushima refused to refer to this period as “returning home.” According to an interview transcript from 2012, he simply stated, “Our family did not have a home in Portland. Our family only had a number[:] 15181.”
Over half a century after Ninomiya and Matsushima confronted the task of rebuilding their lives, they told their stories to historians in Portland, who wrote them down and placed a copy in the archives of the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center (now called the Japanese American Museum of Oregon), an organization based in Old Town dedicated to preserving and sharing the experiences of Oregon Nikkei.
In the summer of 2022, these sources found their way to another Japanese American living in Portland: me. Reading through these stories for the first time while I was a Collections Assistant, I was struck by the vivid picture of struggle, hope, and promise they painted that remained brilliant even decades later. I knew that I wanted to elevate voices like theirs that had for so long lain silent in the historical record.
The experiences in the detention centers, on the other hand, have been well-documented. In the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks, President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1942 Executive Order 9066 invoked national security to allow for the forced removal of all 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. Branding anyone of Japanese descent an “enemy alien,” this measure forced citizens and non-citizens alike from their homes and communities. Among those affected were the 1,680 Portland-based Nikkei, a term that refers to anyone of Japanese descent who makes their permanent home outside of Japan. In Portland, most Nikkei clustered in the Old Town enclave of Nihonmachi (Japantown). With less than two weeks’ notice, these Portlanders packed what they could carry and most were sent to Minidoka Relocation Camp. Located in Idaho and operated by the federal War Relocation Authority (WRA), it was one of the ten incarceration camps throughout the Inner West that imprisoned Japanese Americans during World War II. However, Nikkei life did not end with the war. When the camps began to close, their incarcerees faced a daunting question: Now what?
My own interest in opening this conversation was deeply personal. As the descendant of Japanese immigrants to Hawai'i, I grew up surrounded by the rich culture and heritage of previous generations. Yet I searched the history books in vain for stories of people who looked like me and my family. These narratives that composed such a vital part of American history were absent, depriving some of representation and all of a full picture of our shared past. Consciously or not, I began to view my own history as secondary to the “official” narrative, something to be pursued outside of the “real” academic discipline.
However, my perspective began to shift when I took a US history course during my freshman year of college. The professor presented diverse narratives, not as optional, but as the only way to begin to understand the truth about the past. Through this class, I was exposed to history not as an abstract set of dates and names, but an organic, personal narrative, with so many stories waiting to be told. I was able to see myself as an equal part of the historical record by writing about my family’s history. Declaring a major in history soon after taking this class, I chose to use my passion for reading, writing, and analysis to lift up the silenced stories of my own heritage.
My upper level studies at University of Portland have provided unique opportunities to further this goal—especially my internship with the Japanese American Museum of Oregon. I spent my days in the museum’s collections room. Its unassuming rolling shelves held a wealth of sources, from Old Town life in the 1920s to intricate shell pins fashioned from materials collected around Minidoka Incarceration Camp to postwar narratives.
I found myself drawn to what I began to call the history of the “what then?”: the period of resettlement immediately after wartime detention. Understandably, the vast majority of scholarship on Japanese Americans focuses on the incarceration experience, but this emphasis often creates the impression that Nikkei life ended with the war.
For the first time, I had the opportunity to engage in hands-on research without the aid of a professor or textbook. This was particularly true given that, as far as I can tell, only one historian has written on resettlement in Portland. My project used sources that, to my knowledge, no historian has analyzed before. No one was there to tell me if I was drawing sound conclusions or going in a completely unhelpful direction. I had to learn to trust my own judgment based on the knowledge I had, but this flexibility also helped me to realize that history, as it comes to us in textbooks and scholarly publications, is a fallible, constructed narrative. Although this was a bit terrifying, it was also liberating. As I began my own research in earnest, I realized that, if grounded in the sources, my own conclusions were genuine additions to the historical field.
My thesis ultimately centered around a collection of fifteen oral histories from a variety of Portland returnees, including those of Ninomiya and Matsushima. What I found shattered traditional assumptions of Japanese Americans as passive and docile, especially in years immediately after the war. They pushed back against anything that would essentialize the Japanese American story as defined entirely by the dehumanizing experience of incarceration. Resettlement was a process of negotiation, albeit unequal, between returnees, their old-new neighbors, and within the community itself. It was also deeply personal. Although all resettlers faced similar struggles to gain access to housing and employment in a city divided over their return, each experienced these in different ways, and these unique perspectives strengthened the broader community. For instance, despite their different reactions, both Ninomiya and Matsushima spent the next years engaged in the same work of rebuilding their lives and the life of their community. The heart of this history was ultimately not contained in government reports or data summaries, but in the personal stories of those who lived it.
History is not only about recording the earth shattering, dramatic events, but also about exploring the long road to regeneration. At its best, this history of the “what then?” honors, even posthumously, the agency, dignity, and complexity of a community recreating a present and future for itself. Although my capstone research has concluded, I hope this is merely the beginning of a much broader conversation on resettlement in Portland. If we learn to listen to the silences, perhaps history will one day be a space where all people can feel that, like Ninomiya, they are coming home to where they belong.
MARIE HASHIMOTO recently graduated in the Class of 2023 with a major in history and a minor in sociology. She plans to take a gap year of service and then pursue graduate studies in history.
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