Mount Saint Helens is only 25 miles as the crow flies from Portland, so we stopped by our southern neighbor for a visit. It was raining, so we opted for indoor activities.

World Forestry Center

The World Forestry Center is next to the Oregon Zoo, and it was a dry place to wait for our next stop to open. It turns out that it is a children’s museum. A new exhibit had just opened so we toured Siberia by train, China by boat, the Amazon by a tree-top crane, and…

South Africa in a 1960s International Harvester Scout. I was ready to go, but the engine wouldn’t start.

Someone left a 22 caliber rifle in this tree back in the 60s, and it became one with nature.

This fake evergreen tree extends to the ceiling in the middle of the World Forestry Center. There were lots of activities for children of all ages, so this is probably a good place to visit with the family.

Japanese-American Museum of Oregon

After discovering forestry around the world, we went to the museum.

JAMO is small, but very interesting.

The early Japanese immigrants lived much like the Chinese, whose accommodations we saw in a previous post. By the 1930s they had established themselves throughout the West Coast, especially the PNW. This is a representative display of a general store.

There were dentists and all the trades because, despite being legal residents–many of them American citizens–they were prevented from fully participating in the American dream.

They lived in nice homes, owned businesses, spoke English better than most of their fellow citizens, but…

There weren’t enough of them to overwhelm the government’s demographers (unlike the German and Italian Americans), so they were rounded up in a show of national security; they were shipped to places where, if they were lucky, they shared a room like this with their entire family.

The JAMO has a lot of documents to read, but I focused on physical objects because I forgot my “museum glasses”, which focus at six feet. You’ll need to visit the museum yourself to learn the true history of the Japanese-Americans.

One brave activist violated curfew after release from a detention center, and found himself in jail for nine months. He eventually won in the courts, but at a high personal cost.

This terrible injustice wasn’t as horrific as what was done to the Native Americans, but it was pretty bad. The U.S. government eventually apologized, in the 1990s, but that was little consolation to those Americans who lost everything during a period of national paranoia. Some of them actually received a few thousand dollars in reparations (I guess they used 1940s dollars, not adjusted for inflation).