Densho Digital Archive - Henry Sakamoto Interview (denshovh-shenry

<Begin Segment 19>

JC: So I understand that you were involved in the Japanese American Waterfront Park.

HS: The Japanese American Historical Plaza.

JC: Uh-huh. Tell me a little bit about that.

HS: Well, that's kind of like another product of the internment experience, but not entirely. Bob Murase, who's a landscape architect of international renown, he attended a Remembrance Day and I think it was in 1988, a Remembrance Day for Executive Order 9066, and Executive Order 9066 was the law that made it possible to evacuate the Japanese or persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. That particular executive order wasn't specific as to ethnicity. It just was in general terms, any person could be removed from strategic areas at the decision of military strategists. And then when they issued that Executive Order 9066, they knew that the motivation and the purpose of that executive order was to intern 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry. But the specific exclusion orders were issued, beginning in March of '42, citing persons of Japanese ancestry. Well, February 12th, 1942, is the Day of Remembrance. And so on February 12th, of 19, I think it was '88, they had a remembrance day out at the Expo Center. It was well attended and spoke about all the experiences and whatever. Bob Murase had, in the back of his mind, had intentions of creating something to honor the courage of the Nisei who served in the armed forces, but also he wanted to do something to honor the courage of the Issei pioneers who came to the United States as immigrants and carved out a life in the strange land with a strange language, strange customs, took an awful lot of courage to do that. He wanted to somehow recognize that, those two things in particular, but he also wanted to be able to say something about the internment experience.

So after that Day of Remembrance, he went and talked to Bill Naito who is regarded as a visionary, then regarded as a visionary, very politically astute person and had the, as a result of his activities, knew a lot of people, and so Bob talked to Bill and they talked about that. So it was in 1988 I do believe that the Bureau Parks and Recreations decided to finish the Tom McCall Waterfront Park Project, and the unfinished part was north of Burnside Bridge, and so they asked for proposals. Bill Naito saw the opportunity, called Bob Murase, says, "We need to put together a proposal," and called together representatives of the community organizations to put together a strategy what they wanted the project to be and turns out to be a memorial park with, covering the details that Bob Murase wanted to touch on. Formed a kind of a subcommittee from the members of the Nikkei organizations, and so they went to work on it and came up with a proposal, submitted it to the city, and went through the whole bureaucratic process, and it was not an easy task to gain acceptance, but Bill Naito and Bob Murase persevered and it was accepted. Their proposal was accepted which ultimately eventually turned into the Japanese American Historical Plaza, but went through different thoughts on what to call the project. So Bill says, "Well, what we need to do is form a nonprofit corporation to seek out grants and donations and you need have a nonprofit corporation to do that because people don't want to give to, for-profit corporation for sure." So he talked to the subcommittee, and Bob Murase had submitted his estimate by then. We need to raise $500,000, so we all dropped out of our chair, fell on the floor, but he says, "Oh, we can do it. Each of you can put up a guarantee of $5,000." [Laughs] We picked ourselves up and dusted ourselves off, and we were not totally convinced that we could do it, but we decided it was a worthwhile project.