Japan Town PDX (review)

On April 28, 1942, signs appeared around Portland informing Japanese Americans they had one week to report to the Portland Assembly Center. Just like that, Nihonmachi—Japan Town in English—disappeared. Its inhabitants spent four months incarcerated in the former livestock exhibition pavilion until they were sent on to Minidoka or one of the other internment camps. Postwar, many returned to Portland, but Nihonmachi never fully came back. Portland’s Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center (http://www.oregonnikkei.org/) collects and preserves the history of Japanese people in Portland. Originally opened in 1998, the center features a museum, archive, and cultural activities. Last year, it released a walking tour app that revives Nihonmachi, at least in imagination.

The app, called Japan Town PDX, maps out about twenty spots of importance to local Japanese American history. As you walk around what is now called the Old Town neighborhood, you tap a pin in the map and it plays a recording about the site and shows you a few pictures. Places include formerly Japanese-owned hotels and restaurants, a bathhouse, and a judo studio. The app also incorporates some Chinese history, as many Chinese people also lived in this neighborhood. In fact, today people usually consider that area much more Chinese than Japanese, since the Chinese were able to keep their businesses going through the war.

Todd Mayberry, the Nikkei Center’s director of collections and exhibits, wanted the app to represent the neighborhood as it is today, as well as prewar. So while listening to the description of Judo Obukan, for example, you will first see a photo of the large gay nightclub, CC Slaughters, the building’s current incarnation. Tap the next icon and you will see black and white photos of serious young men in judo outfits. The Foster Hotel is now Darcelle’s, a long-running female impersonator club. And the Anzen Trading Company now houses the Street Roots newspaper, produced by homeless people. Whether early twentieth-century immigrants or modern LGBT folks, “those living on the margins call this place home,” Mayberry said.

The Japan Town PDX app, released in 2014, is the latest incarnation of a paper walking tour brochure the center produced around 2000. Mayberry described it as a volunteer project with zero budget. Peter Pappas (http://www.peterpappas.com/), a professor at the University of Portland, and twelve of his education students developed the app in conjunction with the Nikkei Center. They created it in a single semester, which is a very impressive feat, but it is also the reason it is a bit rudimentary. The app’s text is a script drawn from oral histories, rather than actual snippets of interviews. Creating interview excerpts required a degree of sound editing that was too much for their time, budget, and technology constraints, Mayberry said. Fortunately, Portland-based mobile app company GammaPoint donated its expertise to get the app up and running. Pappas later produced a more sophisticated iBook on Japan Town, which is available from iTunes as a free download.

Interested parties can find the Nikkei Center’s collection of eighty-five oral histories on the Densho Digital Archive website (http://archive.densho.org/main.aspx). Densho, based in Seattle, helps public and private institutions collect Japanese American history in a central digital repository. The Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center’s collection is transcribed and also available as streaming video. The oral histories describe life before, during, and after the internment camps.

History-minded visitors to Portland will enjoy the free Japan Town app. Standing in front of the old buildings, listening to their stories and seeing pictures of people who used to live or work in them, makes the past more tangible. But bear in mind this is a fairly seedy neighborhood. Long before the audio ends, you might grow uncomfortable loitering in a doorway where somebody has set up a makeshift bed. Nor will you want to ostentatiously flash your iPhone. Not everybody in the...