I felt I had to include some historical background on World War 2 Japanese internment so that these pictures are viewed with their historical context in mind. The Office of War Information (OWI), a government agency for controlling the content and imagery of war messages, was horrified by the advance.

'My brother and I, we thought we would be able to stay home and run the (family grocery) store because we were citizens. Factsage Скачать Бесплатно. I didn't think they would take citizens away,' Harue “Mae” Ninomiya told me during an. The late 1937 graduate of Jefferson High School and decades later from Portland State University clearly and pointedly recalled the episode more than six decades earlier, from the age of 89. 'I knew that my mother and father being aliens would be. But what a disas... It was really a shock to hear that we all had to go.'

Portland was one of the 16 feeder camp locations where the specific region's population of American Nisei (US-born children of Japanese immigrants) and resident aliens of Japanese descent (Issei) reported via city bus, vehicle drive ins, drop offs by non-Japanese friends and associates, interurban trains, or simply walking in with whatever they could carry. Their matter-of-fact bearing during the assemblage remains one of history's remarkable displays of stoic dignity and human pride during episodes of mass oppression. This extraordinary public proclamation about the city's role in the internments, read by Mayor Wheeler, continued, “The City of Portland issues this official apology to its Japanese American community for failing to defend the civil and human rights of its citizens and legal residents in 1942... And whereas today, March 28, 2017,, that the City of Portland affirms its resolve, along with the Japanese American community, that never again will any persons be registered, restricted, or detained based solely upon their ancestry or national origin.”. “I hope that we shall receive orders at an early date — I would like to have them today, if possible — to evacuate all Axis aliens and second generation Japanese from this area, as soon as possible.

We feel — and I think that I am speaking the sentiment of the great majority of our people — that they are definitely a hazard, and that the longer they are permitted to have the freedom that they now have, the more danger there is to themselves personally, and the greater is the hazard that is created for our defense situation.”. “One of your advance men asked me what I thought should be done with them. I don’t believe they should be abused. I think that they should be put to productive labor of some character, and be properly remunerated for it, so that they would be making a contribution to our defense problem. We have acres and acres and acres of beets in the interior that, for the lack of farm labor, probably will not be harvested.

More acres would be planted if they had the labor. Most of these people are good at that sort of work, and I do not feel, sir, that they should be left in this area.”. “As a social worker, I am thinking of the aged; I am thinking of the sick in the hospitals today, in the Japanese community; I think of the babies that have been born since Christmas time and those about to be born; I am thinking of the young people in the schools and colleges of this State.

Are they a menace to this community, that they must all be moved now? I am speaking as an evacuee, having been evacuated only last year from Japan — not evacuated by the Japanese Government, but by the American. Conditions inside the Portland Assembly Center concentration camp – from May to September 1942 – were cramped and spartan and worse. “Six cots, that’s all the furnishings there were. No table, no chair, no nothing,” Ninomiya recalled about living quarters within the huge hall facility at the Pacific International Livestock and Exposition Center, a stockyard for cattle and other animals. She said that in their family “apartment,” the cots took up all the floor space and were simply left open side by side both day and night.

“At first we got mattress bags, and we had to fill them with straw.” Mattresses were eventually distributed. As for privacy, “In our compartment, the wood partitions were, I think, 8 feet high and our doorway was a canvas bag.”. June Arima Schumann, former Executive Director of the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, said several years ago, 'What they did was take away the partitions of the animal stalls, swept away the manure on the dirt floor, laid rolls of 2x4s, and then put 1x10 or 2x10 boards across to make the floor. So people lived on top of what used to be where the manure was.' She noted that a standard space for a family of four was 20x14 feet, with larger dimensions for bigger families. The canvas door coverings were purposely left several inches off the flooring, Schumann explained, 'so officials patrolling the area could look into the unit.' To date, nearly two months since it happened, no local media has covered the public apology in any serious way.

An important story for the major daily local newspaper The Oregonian? One would certainly think so. However, when I pointed out the event via email to Betsy Hammond, the paper's interim politics editor, she curtly replied on April 6, “Lawrence: I would assume that previous Portland mayors also apologized for the city's actions in the 1940s.

Certainly (former mayor) Vera Katz, with her family's history of involvement with concentration camps, would have. Am I mistaken?”. 75 years in the making, the city's official apology obviously stands has an important human rights watershed that should receive widespread coverage. However, to date The Oregonian has included exactly one sentence and a quote in an event preview story for the ONLC's 75th anniversary commemorations held on May 6. The line “The city of Portland also officially apologized for its role in the incarceration for the first time in a proclamation signed by Mayor Ted Wheeler on March 28” was tossed into the middle of the May 5 article like a hidden and unexplained admission. So far, that lone single brief reference buried deep in an event preview stands as the paper's recognition of the city's apology. And I had to prove the first-ever status of the apology to the paper before it felt compelled to note that very simple fact.

It was a campaign headed by editor/publisher Palmer Hoyt that the newspaper has apparently never recognized in its pages since it occurred. And now, in the 75th anniversary year of that local human rights' nightmare, an editor of that very same newspaper -- which did everything it could in tandem with the City of Portland to ethnically cleanse the city and state of its innocent Japanese Americans -- had the uninformed gall in 2017 to push back against a simple request for coverage on the issue because she assumed the City of Portland had somehow already done the right thing?!

“Oregon newspaper publishers were deeply involved in the political life of the state in the period in question. They served on public boards, some ran for political office and many were involved in political parties,” Professor Tim Gleason, Director of the Ancil Payne Award For Ethics In Journalism at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication in Eugene, clarified by email. “In fact, it would have been unusual for a publisher to not be involved. So, the fact that Hoyt testified is not unusual and not in conflict with the journalism ethics of the day.”. But if that's true, why during the Tolan Committee hearings does it appear that The Oregonian's Hoyt was the only representative from a non-Japanese-American newspaper or news organization to provide testimony?

Combing through the hearing transcripts, I found no witnesses listed from any newspapers or radio stations or magazines in Seattle, San Francisco or Los Angeles, the other Tolan Committee hearing sites. Hoyt and The Oregonian appears to have stood alone in the testimony saddle. The Chandlers, who published the Los Angeles Times, did not provide testimony. Publisher George T. Cameron of the San Francisco Chronicle wasn't spending time with the Tolan committeemen.

And John Boettiger, publisher of the, did not appear. Perhaps William Randolph Hearst found the time to personally testify before Congress on such a slam dunk topic? Ah, no, he did not. Of course, that's not to say all the other major West Coast papers were not complicit in their own direct ways.

“As you probably know, all the major West Coast newspapers, especially the Hearst papers, advocated the internment,” Peter H. Irons, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of California at San Diego wrote me via email. Irons was the lead counsel in the landmark successful federal courts campaign to reverse the internment convictions of the human rights leaders Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Minoru Yasui.

Irons is author of Justice delayed: the record of the Japanese American internment cases. Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press, 1989. The Oregonian did not even have the wherewithal and the courage to clearly state its own position on removing and imprisoning innocent local US citizens. Instead, the paper incredibly deferred the question to the military, and concluded that 'the Army must not be wrong.' Even though there is no doubt about the editorial position of The Oregonian, it simply can't bring itself to go on record and write down the actual words. A more horrifying display of abdicating a bedrock journalistic editorial responsibility is difficult to find, I think.

And so, to date, there has been no reference to the newspaper's pro-removal editorial or editor/publisher Hoyt's congressional testimony in the pages of The Oregonian in any internment article I can find since the internments occurred. Is that the reason the paper cannot yet bring itself today – in 2017 after 75 years – to report with any effort on the official apology by the City of Portland for its role in the internments? Because the paper would then be forced to look at the complete record of its own active role in the ethnic cleansing campaigns? What’s really appalling is either Rose knows the truth, or he’s failed to make the most basic efforts at learning the role taken by his employer in this cruel human rights chapter. Either way, his 2016 article fails to recall that The Oregonian not only did ask and respond to some important internment-related questions of the day, it took a leading role early on in the roundup of the Japanese-American community both through its editorial pages and in person by its publisher during congressional hearings on the internments held in Portland.

The paper even printed front page national and local articles on Feb. 25, 26 and 27, 1942 before, during and after the congressional internment hearings in Portland, but this critical coverage where the publisher's own testimony is referenced isn't mentioned by Rose. He notes only that an April 1942 internment camp piece is buried on page 17, and how state authorities “debate how they should use farms 'evacuated' by families with Japanese ancestry, as if the owners had a choice to leave the land on which they raised crops and American legacies.”.

These are the two items cited by Rose as “appalling” examples of journalistic internment malfeasance in a piece titled “Never forget February 1942”?! Not the quality of the coverage of the special Tolan congressional committee internment hearings held that month in Portland, and publisher Palmer Hoyt's personal testimony? Stories that made the front page on consecutive days in February 1942? Instead, he choose that an internment camp article only made page 17 two months later, and an undated piece about state officials casually debating the potential use of former Japanese-American land? When I pointed out these glaring omissions that only help to whitewash the role of Portland's municipal government and the main media outlet, her newspaper, I received the following reply on Facebook from Parks: 'Lawrence, thank you for your comment -- repeated about 40 times across the Internet today. This wasn't an attempt to whitewash.

I didn't know about the city of Portland (emphasis added). But I do feel like I showed that the majority of people were complicit here -- I even quoted a pretty awful Oregonian article. We also showed Oregonian headlines with the racist 'nicknames.' I feel like that shows pretty well that the general public, and the newspaper included, don't have a good record on this. As for publicly apologizing, that is not up to me.

Feel free to reach out to the editor of the paper to ask about the possibility of that. In the meantime, I will keep sharing the stories of those who have been disenfranchised/discriminated against/marginalized in hopes that Portlanders will know this history.' I replied, 'No one is questioning the need to share the stories of the disenfranchised and marginalized. And no one is asking you personally to make any apologies. Why do you think that? What you continue to fail to understand is The Oregonian specifically led its own extraordinary campaign for internments, in printed explicit editorials and in the personal actions of its publisher/editor, not just a few scattered articles. I think that undeniable overarching effort qualifies as something immeasurably more than not having 'a good record' on internments.

You don't get that?! The newspaper helped lead the campaign for mass internments far beyond what you chose to recall. Were you even aware of the 'For the Tolan Committee' editorial and the congressional committee appearance of publisher/editor Palmer Hoyt? Also, you absolutely should know what the City of Portland did against the Japanese-American community in the name of the majority of its people. How can you state 'I didn't know about the city of Portland,' like it's not the job of a reporter writing about an internee to know the city's specific legislative and other actions on this topic? Was that too much work for you?

I can't believe you made this admission and somehow think your story is in any way adequately covered. This is a major local story still playing out over decades that you failed to address in a way that clearly displays the breadth and depth of official Portland participation in arguably the greatest example of local systemic racism that resulted in an actual ethnic cleansing of an entire minority community. If it needs a motivating example, The Oregonian would do well to look at the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times, which on Feb. 19 this year declared '75 years later, looking back at The Times' shameful response to the Japanese internment' and in the text, 'That was another time, and another Times. This newspaper has long since reversed itself on the subject.

Not only was some of our reasoning explicitly racist, but in our desperate attempts to sound rational — by supposedly balancing the twin imperatives of security and liberty in the midst of World War II — we exaggerated the severity of the threat while failing to acknowledge the significance of revoking the most fundamental rights of American citizens based solely on their ancestry.' During the middle of the war, 1943 to be precise, Palmer Hoyt was appointed by FDR as director of the Domestic Branch of the US Office of War Information, the American WWII propaganda agency. Car Leasing Website Software. He reportedly served in that capacity for six months. Perhaps the federal government noticed pages in The Oregonian like those of May 3 and 10, 1942 showing smiling happy and attractive Japanese Americans reporting to the assembly center, playing baseball, gathering laundry, and getting together with friends, all while being held behind barbed wire manned by armed US soldiers in their hometown concentration camp!

Well, they neglected to show the barbed wire and armed guards, as one might expect. Talk about war-time propaganda.