Amid the glossy expanse of the Portland Expo Center, there’s little to indicate a portion of the complex was once a detention center that held nearly 4,000 Oregonians of Japanese descent against their will.
But on Saturday afternoon, a framed piece of yellowing parchment displayed inside one of the expo’s warehouses as part of Portland’s annual Vanport Mosaic Festival offered a rare look at evidence of what took place there 80 years before.
The document showing detailed plans for how Japanese Americans and other people of Japanese descent would be imprisoned in a former livestock display area was given to the Japanese American Museum of Oregon by Portland Expo Center officials during a brief ceremony.
“It is such an important piece of American history that we need to recognize and remember so this doesn’t happen again,” said Alicia Crawford Loos, the center’s sales and marketing manager. “To impart that human beings have lived here against their will.”
The Portland Assembly Center was created in 1942 after President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the forced detention of Japanese Americans and immigrants from Japan living in the United States.
The 80-year-old engineering plan for the detention center was discovered by an expo center employee about four years ago and shows plumbing plans for the “Portland Assembly Center,” an incarceration center for Japanese Americans and immigrants from Japan during World War II. Thousands of people of Japanese descent were forced into “assembly centers” like the one in Portland before being imprisoned in long-term “relocation centers.” About 120,000 people of Japanese descent – two thirds of whom were United States citizens – were forcibly removed from their homes and businesses and imprisoned by the end of the war.
According to Crawford Loos, the decades-old architectural plan is one of the only pieces of evidence the Expo Center has found detailing the detention center’s existence. Most photographs of the warehouse from that era were staged or “propoganda-driven,” making the historical document they found especially rare, she said.
The thin, drawn outlines of the Portland Assembly Center show partitions for restrooms, nurseries and a hospital area. The entire perimeter is depicted as surrounded by barbed wire.
For Chisao Hata, creative director of the Japanese American Museum of Oregon, learning of the document’s existence brought up “a mix of glad and sad and mad.”
“This is a story that hasn’t been told, that a lot of us don’t know,” Hata said. “But here’s another way to help our story, another proof.”
Before it became the Portland Assembly Center, the warehouse was a livestock exposition hall where animals were auctioned and sold. After Franklin signed his executive order consigning American citizens and other Japanese immigrants to forced detention, wooden planks were hastily laid down over the warehouse’s dirt and animal remains to make room for families and individuals who were forced to live in stalls formerly inhabited by animals. Many survivors say they still remember the smell, Hata said.
Between May and September of 1942, 3,676 people were incarcerated inside the Portland Assembly Center, according to Crawford Loos.
The building was returned to its former state as a livestock exposition hall by the end of that year, Crawford Loos said. But Hata said the pain of imprisonment left scars still felt generations later.
Hata’s parents were incarcerated in a similar detention center in Arizona before she was born. Three years prior, Hata said, her mother had become one of the first Japanese American nurses in the United States.
After they were released, Hata said, her parents moved from Arizona to Des Moines, Iowa because they and other Japanese Americans were encouraged not to cluster together or form communities. Neither of her parents spoke about their experiences being incarcerated until she was 15 years old, and they wouldn’t speak Japanese, Hata said.
Roosevelt’s order to lock up Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants destroyed thriving Japantowns throughout the United States, including Portland’s.
Prior to World War II, a 10-block radius of Northwest Portland that was once Nihonmachi – Portland’s Japantown – was home to nearly 3,000 Oregonians of Japanese descent, she said. Many were forced to live there due to racist housing policies and redlining, Hata said.
The once-bustling community was destroyed by the end of the war.
“We don’t have any stores or businesses or community centers that we had – the museum is it,” Hata said.
Rare pieces of history like the plans for the Portland Assembly Center are important not only for preserving history, but also for helping generations of Japanese Americans heal, she said. The document is expected to go on display inside the Japanese American Museum of Oregon by the end of this year.
“This is American history, and we want the true American history – the good and the bad and everything that we experience as people of color in America – to be told,” she said. “That’s what we’re doing, and that’s what we continue to do, and we want more people to be able to tell that story.”
— Catalina Gaitán; @catalinagaitan_
