Return to Old Town (Part 1)
Hard and relentless rain smashed Portland. Everything was heavy and gray on a Saturday morning in January.
I was determined to get off my ass and do something rather than read more about the most mysterious person in American history—Emily Dickinson. The more you read her poetry and biographies, the more opaque and complicated she becomes. Bob Dylan is as easy to read as a phone book compared to her.
My destination—the Japanese American Museum of Oregon in the corroded heart of Old Town, the epicenter of Portland's homeless disaster.
The last visit to Old Town of six months ago on behalf of my homeless friend Mark had left me shattered and disillusioned as a human being and Oregonian. And that was on sunny day with roses blooming. Today I would venture into the abyss (AKA Apocalypse Now) during a deluge on a winter day to avail myself of a cultural offering.
The forced relocation of Japanese Americans into concentration camps in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor has fascinated me since I was a kid and still feels inadequately explored by novelists, historians, journalists and filmmakers. For one reason, the story is still going on and reparations to those Americans dispossessed of life, liberty and property in places such as Hood River have been pitiful. Those Oregon families that prospered by cheating and robbing their former neighbors have never been properly called out.
Portland's Old Town has a unique history related to the Japanese-American concentration camp story. The Naito Family of Portland gave up everything in the round-up hysteria and moved to Utah and somehow evaded internment. After the war they returned and two Naito Brothers, Bill and Sam, slowly built a business empire in Old Town (and downtown) and created among other enterprises, Import Plaza, Made in Oregon stores and a place I used to grade papers when I taught in Portland, The Galleria. They also helped establish the Japanese American Historic Plaza and the very museum I was about to visit. They were were easily two of the finest and hardworking people in the history of modern Portland. My Portland life was certainly enhanced by their entrepreneurship and I feel embarrassed for leaving out their voices in my anthology of Oregon history commemorating the state's sesquicentennial in 2009.
The Naito Brothers helped rescue Old Tow from blight and obscurity in the 70s and 80s and became civic leaders. One wonders what they would have thought of the abyss of Old Town today. One wonders what they would have done to address the crisis. I can't believe they wouldn't have taken direct action to house people and keep them from disintegrating on the streets in abject debasement. Surely, they wouldn't have left it to the non profits, the city, the county. They were not men of dithering or excuse-making or the jargon of advocacy gobbledygook. They got shit done and done right.
We'll never know.