Brandon Shimoda on Oregon's Memorial to Japanese Internment

We can't let this one pass us by: Earlier this month, poet Brandon Shimoda reflected on downtown Portland's Japanese American Historical Plaza, built to commemorate the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, for the New Inquiry. An excerpt:

THE plaza does not require that anyone remember. It is a suggestion, but the process of remembering is insular. The feeling I get is of the plaza remembering itself. A sign with text by Robert Murase, the landscape architect who designed the plaza, says that the plaza is dedicated to helping people recognize and remember how precious constitutional civil liberties are, and how serious are the consequences when these basic freedoms are forsaken, as they were for the Japanese in our state nearly fifty years ago.

I too want people to remember. But how could anyone who was not there? They might remember being in the plaza. They might remember that the plaza has meaning, but the meaning might escape them. The names of the ten internment camps are not transporting. They read like movie credits, or a poem, the evocations of which are hardly known. The person who stops to read the names stands in front of an upright stone, hard-pressed to recognize the meaning of each one of the places hidden behind, beyond, the name.

What in the plaza is helping people recognize and remember civil liberties and the consequences when they are forsaken?

The place on the Willamette is unrelated to the history to which the plaza’s dedication has been made. It is not a burial grave. No Japanese Americans were corralled there like animals, nor sent, from there, into the unknown, remote America. The Historical Plaza is a ritual grave, but its ritualizing is lost, incomplete. It does not mention, as if intentionally withholding, the more remarkable grave, concealed up the river, where the mass evacuation took place.

Read the full essay at the New Inquiry.