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OREGON DAYS OF CULTURE
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www.oregondaysofculture.org
| Portland Tribune & Community Newspapers |
September 26 - 28, 2012
By Nancy Townsley
Pamplin Media Group
In the spring of 2011, Robert Hegwood was
closing in on an advanced degree in world
history at Portland State University.
The Indiana native and one-time culinary
student had mulled over a number of mas-
ter’s thesis ideas before settling on a doozy:
He decided to write about Japanese civil
rights and redress efforts in Portland during
the years immediately following World War
II.
It was an area none of his researchmateri-
als seemed to address.
“There was a lot of talk about the intern-
ment of Japanese-Americans during the
war,” said Hegwood, 31, now a doctoral stu-
dent at the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia. “But I found out there was a
pretty glaring omission regarding what hap-
pened to themwhen they came back to Port-
land after the war.”
With PSU history professor Ken Ruoff
guiding and cheering him on, Hegwood ap-
proached the Portland chapter of the Japa-
nese American Citizens League — the oldest
Asian American civil rights organization in
the country — to ask its leaders if they could
provide him with data covering the post-war
years of 1945-55.
The league’s leaders were happy to oblige.
“Until Robert approached us, all of these
materials were kept in a storage shed,” said
Jean Yamamoto, co-president of the league’s
Portland’s chapter. “Sometimes you don’t re-
alize the value of something … you think
something is inconsequential.
“But it really is pieces of peoples’ lives. It’s
who we are as people and how we were able
to overcome adversity and contribute to our
communities.”
Ruoff, who also serves as director of the
university’s Center for Japanese Studies, sug-
gested his student work on defining the post-
war struggles and triumphs of the Japanese
community here at home.
“I figured it was a perfect fit for me,” Heg-
wood said.
Post-war archives
Enter JimKennedy, a past president of the
Japanese American Citizens League, and Ni-
cole Nathan of the Oregon Nikkei Legacy
Center, a Japanese American history muse-
um located in downtown Portland.
Kennedy pointedHegwood in the direction
of a storage unit south of Clackamas, where
16 boxes of materials were squirreled away.
“It was the biggest collection of post-war ar-
chives I’d seen,” Hegwood said.
As he began sorting through thousands of
records — from receipts for a flag set from
Meier & Frank, dated Dec. 8, 1941, to scrap-
books, programs, meeting minutes and pho-
tographs—Nathankicked off a grant-writing
process.
The pair put together a plan to archive the
treasures—many fragile pieces of which had
sustained water damage — but the enormity
of the project wore them down.
“Due to the sheer size of it,” Hegwood said,
theywere forced to put their efforts on a back
burner. For nine months about two dozen
boxes, containing the minutiae of history
from the 1930s to the 1960s, sat idle in his
apartment. Then, last year, after Hegwood
completed his thesis, “Erasing the Space Be-
tween Japanese and American,” a funding
miracle came true.
Board members of Portland’s Japanese
American Citizens League and the Oregon
Cultural Trust voted independently to pro-
vide grants of $5,000 each to the PSUFounda-
tion. Those grants landed in the lap of Chris
Paschild, archivist and head of special collec-
tions in PSU’sMillar Library. The charge was
to inventory, organize, preserve and make
accessible the citizens league records that
had languished for years in storage.
“These materials really are a fascinating
look at Japanese community between the
1930s and the 1980s,” said Paschild, who grew
up in Oregon but spent four years as head of
special collections at the Japanese American
National Museum in LosAngeles before com-
ing to PSU. “There are JACL membership
rosters, correspondence and internment re-
cords.
“These documents tell the tales of people
coming back from the war and trying to re-
establish their lives.”
New life
Paschild is in the process of hiring a part-
time archivist to tackle the final pieces of the
project unearthed by Hegwood and given
new life by arts- and history-oriented bene-
factors.
The league’s Yamamoto and co-president
Susan Leedhamtoured the PSU library at the
end of April, giving Paschild a chance to show
them the vault where their group’s precious
papers are being patiently and meticulously
processed. Soon, students, professors and
communitymemberswill be able to carefully
peruse them, satisfying their hunger for his-
tory’s gems.
“This collection is about JACL’s history,
but it’s about Portland, too,” said Paschild,
who did not have to be nudged to accept the
materials or the money to care for it.
“I recognized their historical value imme-
diately,” she said. “It was an easy sell.”
Now it’s Paschild’s job to preserve and pro-
tect the documents. Some of the oldest lists
and memos are written on onion skin, mak-
ing them quite tricky to deal with.
“We’re going to find the balance between
preserving these documents and providing
the public access to them,” noted Paschild,
whose application to the Oregon Cultural
Trust for amatching grant moved the project
forward.
Yamamoto, who was born and raised in
Hawaii, and Leedham, who grew up in Cali-
fornia, couldn’t be more excited.
“We’re really happy the PSU library was
able to provide a proper home for our histori-
cal documents,” Yamamoto said. “They’re
going to be right in the middle of downtown,
available to future generations.”
‘Conspicuously silent’
For Hegwood, it was a turn of fortune that
allowed him to shine a light on the stories of
hundreds of Portland Japanese Americans
who returned to the Pacific Northwest after
WorldWar II to unanticipated backlash.
“There were progressive movements in
Oregon beforeWorldWar II,” Hegwood said,
“but no significant white groups raised an
outcry to the racism many Japanese Ameri-
cans experienced. It was conspicuously silent
in Portland.”
Severe economic trauma related to intern-
ment meant many Japanese families literally
had to start over, Hegwood said, including the
Matsushimas, founders of Anzen Hiroshi’s
Inc. foods.
“They have a particularly harrowing sto-
ry,” he noted. The father, UmataMatsushima,
was arrested by the FBI immediately after
the attacks on Pearl Harbor and was “carted
around from detention camp to detention
camp” during the war, Hegwood said.
Familymembers returned to Portland pen-
niless, “without even their luggage, which
had been accidentally sent to Japan,” Heg-
wood added. They lived in Vanport — at that
time the nation’s largest public housing proj-
ect — in the years following the war, many
losing their lives in the infamous Vanport
Flood in 1948.
Assets from Umata Matsushima’s busi-
ness had been seized by federal authorities at
the war’s outset and were not returned to
him until the mid-1950s, long after his rela-
tives had rebuilt the family business with the
help of other Japanese Americans in Port-
land.
Too many stories to count — about the
lives of George Azumano, Bill and SamNaito
and others — sprang from the cardboard
boxes hauled down to PSU early last year.
“I contactedCris, and she said she’d love to
have them,” said Hegwood, who noted that
he “literally carried” half the collection to her
office after Kennedy had carted down the
first half. “I’m definitely ecstatic that they’re
being preserved.”
In 1940, therewere 120,000 JapaneseAmer-
icans living on theWest Coast, but only 2,500
of them settled in Portland. “It’s really im-
pressive howmuch that small population has
given back to Portland” in the years since,
Hegwood said.
Best job on campus
The prospect of giving the community a
treasure trove of historical nuggets is enough
to make Paschild grin from ear to ear.
“I have the best job on campus,” she said.
“Fifty years from now, the work we do with
this collection will matter.”
preserved
A pair of grants will allow the stories of Portland’s
Japanese Americans to be archived for posterity
HISTORY
A page from
a scrapbook of
Portland Japanese
American Citizens League
records and files in the
collection kept in Portland State
University’s archives.
PamPlin media grouP: adam WiCkHam