2/19/2009
Japantown and its Catholic school a bittersweet memory
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| Japantown and its Catholic school a bittersweet memory |
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Ed Langlois
Twenty years ago, when he was middle-aged, Portland businessman George Nakata traveled to the Holy Land. On a quiet day, he gazed silently across the Sea of Galilee, recalling a few sweet years of childhood among women who wore black. The memories are unnaturally short.
Nakata, 75, is the son of immigrants who ran a hotel in Portland’s Japantown during the 1930s. He is one of only a few dozen Japanese Americans who attended a small and short-lived Catholic school in the city from 1938 to 1942. The school halted abruptly when a nation took security too far.
Starting in the 1890s, young Japanese men arrived in Oregon to work on railroads and in lumber mills, farms and fish canneries. By the 1910s, many had become established and began to arrange for brides. By 1920, there were more than 1,300 Japanese women living in Oregon. These new families opened businesses and made humble homes along the Willamette River North of Burnside Street.
Anti-immigrant sentiment was strong. A 1911 treaty between the U.S. and Japan had allowed Japanese nationals to enter the U.S. and own property, but in 1913, fearful California voters banned immigrants from owning land. Oregon followed suit in 1923.
Still, by 1940, there was a cluster of more than 100 Japanese businesses located within an eight-block area. It was a busy place, where immigrants would come to buy food, see the doctor, have a steam bath and get a haircut. Portland’s Japantown stretched from Burnside to Glisan and from Second to Sixth, roughly where Chinatown is now. In those days, Chinatown was mostly south of Burnside.
Father John Larkin, pastor at the Downtown Chapel in the 1930s, noticed that hard-working Japanese-American parents had little time to be with their children. The Archdiocese of Portland and the Sisters of the Holy Names opened a daycare and school named after St. Paul Miki, a Japanese Christian martyred in the 16th century.
“The husband had a job. Mom ran the hotel. There was no one to watch the kids,” says Holy Names Sister Marilyn Harris, who taught at St. Paul Miki shortly after entering the convent in 1937.
The school first opened in a Third Avenue storefront, then moved to a house on Northwest 15th between Everett and Flanders.
The mornings started with a short talk by one of the sisters. That would set the daily rhythm of prayer, study and play.
Sister Marilyn taught handwriting and Sister Madaleva, (later known as Sister Gertrude Schaefers, who died in 2007), gave instruction in voice and piano. For festivities, like the visit of Holy Names superiors from Canada, the children wore traditional Japanese outfits.
The sisters often made soup for lunch. The students seemed to dislike split pea, but were too polite to leave empty bowls. Instead, they poured the liquid into their lunch pails to hide it. Sister Marilyn recalls the green messes with a laugh.
Sister Marianne Hoffman, who was handy at carpentry, helped the youngsters build an indoor playhouse. On fair days, students ran in the grassy back yard, which included a sandbox. In the afternoon, the children rolled out mats for naps. After rest, it was time for Japanese lessons, provided by a woman who later converted to Catholicism.
On occasion, officials from Cathedral School would invite the St. Paul Miki children for programs. Sister Marilyn recalls one drama during which two Cathedral boys, dressed as angels, got into a fistfight on stage in lieu of playing their parts. The scuffle prompted a flurry of merriment among the St. Paul Miki children.
The Japanese students often attended Mass at nearby St. Joseph Church, which is now gone. For one liturgy, the priest asked a 2-year-old girl from St. Paul Miki to lead the procession. Aware that youngsters usually rush in such situations, the pastor advised the girl to move slowly. She heeded all too well, taking tiny inch-long steps, causing the procession to drag on agonizingly.
Jean Matsumoto, daughter of a downtown hotel owner, started school at St. Paul Miki when she was 4. She recalls the sisters rocking her to sleep when she was upset on those first few days. She and her blood sister, Alice, adored the nuns. The women, now in their 70s, recall how the sisters lifted their habits an inch or two when instructing the students in the art of dance.
“The sisters started us on the road of education, the road of having discipline and respect,” says Nakata, now a consultant in global trade and marketing. “Sister Marilyn taught us lessons I remember very well.”
After Pearl Harbor, Japantown was looked on with scorn. The anti-Japanese sentiment was so strong that heating oil companies refused to sell to St. Paul Miki.
Then General John DeWitt issued an order to detain people of Japanese ancestry on the west coast. Sister Marilyn watched in horror as the families of Japantown were forced out. They lost jobs, homes, cars and dreams.
“Our lives were turned inside out, upside down,” Nakata says. “We didn’t know what to do. We wondered, How can this be? Is this America?”
General DeWitt’s decision, records later showed, was not backed by evidence of Japanese-American disloyalty.
To the government, the Nakatas became family number 15066. They could bring only what they could carry. Nakata’s mother wept when the family sold its new $100 radio to a policeman for $5. The piece of electronics had been a symbol of having advanced in American life.
Like the rest of Portland’s Japanese-American familes, the Nakatas were first sent to the stockyards near the Columbia River, a site now occupied by the Expo Center. In an old wooden building, the government built a maze of plywood cubicles. It smelled of urine and feces from cattle and pigs.
“You could hear the next-door neighbor snoring. There were pigeons overhead,” recalls Nakata, who was 8 when his family was locked up. Military police roamed the area.
“This was a period when the U.S. became very careless with its Constitution,” Nakata says. “It was a time when human rights became selective.”
Families had been told to prepare for internment, but the stress of the unknown was unbearable. When they were shipped away from the coast in trains, they were ordered to shutter the windows. No one knew how long the trip would be. The group arrived at night at a camp northeast of Twin Falls, Idaho. Called Minidoka, the stark compound was composed of rough barracks set in sagebrush and blowing dust. The inmates, accustomed to greenery and gardening, were stunned.
As young George grew up in the modified prison, he saw that his community was enterprising. They built sidewalks, schools, a baseball diamond, vegetable gardens and even a swimming hole. His father worked in the mess hall for $16 per month. He recalls when his mother fell ill and he had to walk the length of the 33,000-acre camp to see her. Minidoka had more than 600 buildings and a total population of about 13,000.
George recalls a moment when he was wandering through the camp with an older friend. In the window of one hut, George spied a banner with a gold star. He asked his friend what it meant. That family, his friend explained, had a son who died while fighting for the U.S. in Europe.
During World War II, a Japanese-American Army unit — the 442nd Regimental Combat Team — became the most decorated in U.S. history, with more than 18,000 medals. Meanwhile, the parents of many of the soldiers were detained behind 10-foot-tall barbed-wire fences at places like Minidoka.
After the camps closed in fall 1945, families returned to Portland and had to begin anew. Their businesses and homes were gone. Nakata’s father, once a business owner, took a job making mashed potatoes eight hours per day at a downtown restaurant. The children picked berries and beans for pay.
George, by then 11, was enrolled at James John School in North Portland. On his first day, a girl in the front row opened her makeup mirror to stare at him in fascinated horror.
On one of their first weekends back, the family traveled to Portland’s Japanese cemetery and were shocked to see that tombstones had been smashed.
Bigotry continued for years. When Nakata and his new wife went hunting for a Portland apartment, they were snubbed.
He would attend Lewis and Clark College and serve in the Army. He and his wife had three children who have made a success of their lives. He is a proud grandfather.
“We move forward,” he says. “Not bitter, but thankful for what we have.”
The 26 remaining St. Paul Miki students are scattered around the nation, all of them having been locked away by their government. Nakata says none will ever forget their days at their percious, small Catholilc school, the joy that was untimely ripped away.
Nakata still meets with Sister Marilyn. He for one, loved her split pea soup.
Mission to Japan
The Holy Names Sisters, in addition to serving Japanese immigrants in Portland, opened a mission in southern Japan in the 1930s. They worked in Kagoshima, close to the bay where Japanese pilots practiced for the raid on Pearl Harbor.
Sister Jane Ellen Burns, who now lives in Portland, oversaw the education of some of Kagoshima’s most gifted students at the height of Japan’s economic ascendance, 1977 to 1987. This former college professor still marvels at the enterprise of the youths, calling her decade in Japan “a truly wonderful experience.”
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