Tomorrow the Portland State Department of History will hold a panel discussion about the legacy of the Japanese-American internment experience at 6 p.m. in the University of Oregon White Stag Building on Northwest Couch Street. The event, free and open to the public, will feature thesis presentations by three PSU master’s graduates with expertise in Japanese-American history.
Tomorrow the Portland State Department of History will hold a panel discussion about the legacy of the Japanese-American internment experience at 6 p.m. in the University of Oregon White Stag Building on Northwest Couch Street. The event, free and open to the public, will feature thesis presentations by three PSU master’s graduates with expertise in Japanese-American history.
This panel discussion is part of a series of events co-sponsored by the Oregon Nikkei Endowment in recognition of the 70th anniversary of the implementation of Executive Order 9066, which set the stage for the wrongful internment of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government.
Robert Hegwood, one of the three presenters, will be sharing his research about the treatment of Portland’s Japanese Americans in the post-internment decade.
“My thesis is about the return of Japanese Americans to Portland, not only in the sense of how Japanese Americans found housing, jobs and reestablished an ethnic community. I also wanted to investigate how the racial and social dynamics of exclusion developed before WWII and in the early 20th century,” Hegwood wrote in an email interview.
Now in the doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania, Hegwood began studying history and Japanese at PSU after moving to Portland in 2002. He decided to research the post-war period after reading an article by Ellen Eisenberg that explored Portland’s distinctive lack of protest against the wrongful internment of Japanese Americans.
Ali Jessie, a current history graduate student focusing on Japan-U.S. relations, commented that the narrative of the wrongful internment did not begin with the Executive Order in 1924, but much earlier, as Japanese immigrants had already faced a long history of racism in the Americas.
According to Mari Watanabe, executive director of Oregon’s Nikkei Endowment, a Japanese American history and culture nonprofit, Japanese Americans living in Portland faced acts of discrimination since they began emigrating in the late 1800s.
Watanabe’s own parents are internment camp survivors. She said although her parents suffered tremendous losses, emotionally and financially, they didn’t simply give up and move away, but returned to Oregon and worked to create better lives and future opportunities for their own children.
“Neither of my parents had the opportunity to go to college. [When they returned from internment] they immediately had to find jobs because they had no money. They lost everything. They had to start completely over,” Watanabe said.
Hegwood said that this kind of resiliency on the part of Japanese Americans was not uncommon and that the serious financial strain on camp survivors is often overlooked. “Japanese Americans were yanked out of the Portland economy just as war-time production led to a huge influx of economic activity,” Hegwood said. “By incarcerating the Japanese-American community, federal authorities literally robbed the community of a great share of their future financial prosperity.”
Hegwood’s thesis examines written evidence and oral histories taken from Oregon Nisei about their lives in the years following the end of the internment in 1945. In Japanese, the term Nisei is used to describe children born to Japanese immigrants.
Hegwood claimed that in 1945, Portland’s social climate was still quite hostile toward Japanese Americans. Members of the Portland American Legion, the mayor and the city council, as well as members of the Congressional delegation, were all in collusion to ensure returnees knew they were unwelcome. There was even a group called the Japanese Exclusion League whose sole purpose was to make Japanese exclusion permanent.
While Hegwood’s thesis presentation will focus mainly on the era after the war, the other two presenters will share different topics about Oregon’s history with Japanese internment. One presenter researched the events that took place atthe Tule Lake internment camp located in Northern California. This camp used forced Japanese labor to produce one million dollars worth of agricultural produce per year to Northwest markets.
Civil rights attorney Peggy Nagae, who has firsthand experience in litigating against the U.S. for the violations of the constitutional rights of Japanese Americans, will moderate the panel discussion. According to Watanabe, Nagae is a third-generation Japanese American and one of the first female Asian litigators in the nation.
For Hegwood, the purpose of the panel is not only to commemorate a tragic time in American history, but also to highlight a story of local significance not often covered by historians from other regions.
Through presenting, Hegwood hopes to share with Portland and all Japanese Americans the conclusions made in his research.
“I believe each community that becomes the subject of research has a right to know the outcomes of that research and contest the findings. I think it improves future scholarship and helps the community better know their heritage in a way broader than their personal experience,” Hegwood said.
