Japanese American Museum of Oregon

The Japanese American Museum of Oregon is small, but it carries one of the most important stories in the Pacific Northwest, and it tells it in the right place. Before the Second World War, the blocks of Old Town around today's museum were Portland's Japantown, a busy neighborhood of hotels, shops, restaurants and community institutions built by Japanese immigrants and their American-born children. In 1942, after Executive Order 9066, Japanese Americans in Oregon were forced from their homes, held at the Portland Assembly Center in the livestock pavilion of the Pacific International Livestock Exposition, and then incarcerated in inland camps; the neighborhood never recovered. The museum, at 411 NW Flanders Street in the Naito Center with its entrance on 4th Avenue, preserves that history through objects, photographs, documents and personal testimony. One of its most powerful displays is the jail cell of Minoru Yasui, a Hood River native and Oregon's first Japanese American attorney, who deliberately broke the wartime curfew to challenge its constitutionality, took his case to the Supreme Court and spent months in solitary confinement. Exhibits also honor the Nisei soldiers who served with extraordinary distinction while their families were behind barbed wire, and trace the community's postwar rebuilding and the redress movement. Changing exhibitions explore art, culture and contemporary issues. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday and closed Mondays, Tuesdays and major holidays; admission is inexpensive, with children eleven and under free and free entry for SNAP cardholders. Its outdoor companion, the Japanese American Historical Plaza in Tom McCall Waterfront Park, is always open and free.

Why go: many visitors to Portland pass through Old Town without realizing what was lost there, and this museum restores the neighborhood's memory with care. It is a short visit — an hour is enough for most people — but it tends to stay with you, because the stories are told through individual families and objects rather than abstractions. For anyone who has spent the morning at the Portland Japanese Garden, it adds a vital second chapter to the city's relationship with Japan and Japanese Americans.

How to visit: buy tickets at the door or online, start with the permanent exhibition on the community's history, and spend time with the Yasui cell and the oral histories. Ask the staff and volunteers about walking routes through the former Japantown, and then walk ten minutes east to the Japanese American Historical Plaza on the waterfront, where stone sculptures inscribed with poems and names, and a grove of cherry trees, honor those who were incarcerated. In spring the cherry blossoms make the plaza one of the most beautiful spots on the river.

Practicalities: the museum is a block from the transit mall, so MAX and buses are the easiest way to arrive. Old Town can feel rough around the edges, especially at night, but the museum's daytime hours fit neatly with Lan Su Chinese Garden, the Saturday Market and the waterfront, all within a few minutes' walk. Active-duty military families enter free in summer, and masks are encouraged inside.