These days, Portland’s Expo Center
hosts everything from roller derby to dog shows. But few of the
Oregonians who attend can recall when the Expo was used for a much
grimmer purpose. At the onset of World War II, Japanese Americans
were corralled on the grounds for months, awaiting the construction
of internment camps. Sixty-five years later, the Oregon Legislature
has proposed a unique, if token, act of reparation. House Bill
2823, expected to become law later this month, would award honorary
degrees from Oregon universities to those whose higher education
was disrupted by internment.
“It’s a nice
gesture to bring recognition and closure to those that missed out
on their education through no fault or reason of their own,”
says Floyd Mori, the national director of the Japanese American
Citizens League.
After the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl
Harbor, 120,000 Japanese Americans were given curfews and travel
restrictions, ordered to report to assembly areas, and then
dispersed into 10 internment camps across the West, in Idaho,
California, Utah, Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming. It wasn’t
until 1988 that internees received a formal apology from the
federal government and a $20,000 compensation check.
“The honorary degree is a symbolic apology,” says Tina
Kotek, D- Portland, a co-sponsor of the bill, which unanimously
passed the House on April 2. If the Senate approves it, internees
who were forced to leave Oregon universities, or their next of kin,
would be able to request an honorary degree. John Kodachi,
president of the Portland chapter of the Japanese American Citizens
League, believes the bill will help restore pride and dignity. Even
after the war, Japanese Americans in the West faced an unfriendly
climate. Many weren’t welcome back at their former academic
institutions, and had to complete their educations in less-hostile
states like Nebraska and New York.
Although the bill is
popular among many Japanese Americans, for some the memory of
internment is too painful to be assuaged by a piece of paper. Sam
Naito, a prominent Oregon businessman who was forced to abandon his
studies at Oregon State University, has no interest in an honorary
degree. On the
Discover Nikkei Web site, he describes the experience of
being kicked out of the University of Oregon as “the most
devastating feeling I ever had.”
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