Not many Portlanders know that the cavernous halls of Portland’s EXPO Center were known at one time as the Portland Assembly Center, which incarcerated nearly 4,000 Japanese and Japanese American people in the summer of 1942 before they were shipped to concentration camps in desolate parts of the U.S. West. 

This June 1, 2025 event represented the culmination of a two-week festival including art exhibits, theater productions, concerts, panels, videos and oral histories celebrating the former residents of the diverse and ill-fated community of Vanport, a wartime city that was destroyed in 1948 by a Columbia River flood, and the Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in the Assembly Center (see article by Dmae Lo Roberts). The event, titled We Are Still Here, reflects a collaboration among Laura Lo Forti, Co-founder and Director of Vanport Mosaic; Shohei Kobayashi, Associate Conductor of the choral group Resonance Ensemble; and Chisao Hata, Director of the Portland Assembly Center Project.

The main event of the day, held in Hall A, was a series of productions featuring music, poetry, stories, dance, and choral singing by Resonance Ensemble, known for their collaborative performances and focusing on issues of justice and healing. Their focus is inherent in their mission statement: Creating powerful programs that promote meaningful social change.

Stories of This Land

Those of us who came early were able to peruse several exhibits. Near the entrance were large posters describing life in the Vanport community, whose racial and cultural diversity was radical for that time.  Another exhibit was a middle-school project where individual students had each selected a Japanese American imprisoned in the Assembly Center, to write the details of that person’s life and post their picture.

Further down the hall, large posters gave information about at the pivotal events of that time: President Roosevelt’s infamous Executive Order 9066, the forced removal and incarceration of more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, and a map of the U.S. showing the location of all ten of the camps and the sixteen temporary holding centers. Other posters devoted to vocabulary corrected the hypocritical language of the time, substituting “incarceration” and “imprisonment” for “internment” (which, unfortunately, is still widely used today) and “forced removal” for “relocation.” One poster, titled “This is an Oregon Story,” revealed how Oregonians participated in the decision to incarcerate the Japanese Americans and the role played by racism and exploitation of this largely immigrant population. Those who stood up for their neighbors were courageous and few. 

Toward the center of the room was a collection of bonsai and miniature potted pines and an information table with books for sale. They Never Asked, published by the Oregon State University Press, is a book of senryū, a type of Japanese poetry similar to haiku, collected and translated by Shelley Baker-Gard, Michael Freiling, and Satsuki Takikawa. These particular senryū were composed by a group of poets during their incarceration at the Portland Assembly Center. The poems, several of which were recited by members of the PACP Reader’s Theater during the concert, reflected the poets’ thoughts and feelings experienced living in inhumane conditions and under the threat of violence.

The Concert

The Great Spirit Drum Circle gave a prolonged “Opening Call” to announce the beginning of the program. This was followed by a mission statement by Chisao Hata, Director of the Portland Assembly Center Project, who talked about this project, years in the making, which brings together storytellers, artists, musicians, and poets, and how, in her words, “remembering is an act of resistance.” This concert brought Resonance Ensemble together with Vanport Mosaic to raise awareness about the history of Portland and to advocate for a meaningful future.

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Part I: Displacement and Memory

Resonance Ensemble set a tone of both beauty and urgency in its rendition of Caroline Shaw’s Her beacon-hand beckons, from her six-movement piece for chorus and string quintet, To the Hands, which in turn is a reply to an early work by the 17th Century composer Dieterich Buxtehude. Shades of Buxtehude’s harmonies gave a hymn-like atmosphere to the music. The words projected on a screen to the left of the stage, as they were for every presentation, are taken from the Emma Lazarus poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty in the New York Harbor. The chorus emphasizes repeated utterances of “give” and “give to me,” followed by others from the famous poem: “tempest-tossed” and “yearning to breathe free.”

Each of the musical pieces of this section was followed by a senryū from the book They Never Asked displayed for the audience on the screen to the left of the stage. This poem by the poet, Sen Taro, is a reminder that justice had nothing to do with the decision to incarcerate:

they never asked
suspicious or not —
just put us away

The mood changed with Tōru Takemitsu’s romantic arrangement of the traditional Japanese song, “Sakura,” bringing reminders of spring, and also the fleeting nature of everything.

Cherry blossoms, cherry blossoms,
In fields, mountains and villages,
As far as the eye can see.

After another senryū, the ensemble sang a beautiful five-section piece with lyrics consisting of five kaiko haiku poems collected by Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, a prisoner at the Tule Lake camp, and written by her fellow inmates. Composer Eric Tuan titled it Tule Lake Sketches. The music is tender, and at times serene despite the cruel setting.

Thin shadow of tule reed,
blazing sunset
on barbed wire fence

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Following another senryū, Resonance presented “Shift,” by Ayanna Woods, ending with the powerful lines, “I want a monument … a monument we grasp, and heave, and pull in a long arc, bursting through the cracks in the story you tell, America.”

At this point the ensemble joined composer and violist Kenji Bunch for the arrangement by Shohei Kobayashi of Bunch’s composition “Minidoka” (see also ArtsWatch article of 6-10-25). For this piece the composer uses a variety of extended techniques, including tapping the bow on the strings and the body of the viola, simultaneous bowing and plucking, and sul ponticello bowing to produce the harsh, raspy sounds that could signify the camp’s desolate environment or the anguish of the imprisoned population. Without any written text, the ensemble provided a humming and vocalized accompaniment, in addition to the soft, moaning kind of vocalizing by the violist himself.

Part II: The Portland Assembly Center Project

The second part of the program, conceived and directed by Chisao Hata, Director, and Heath Hyun Houghton, Co-Director of the Portland Assembly Center Project, consisted of a reenactment of the events of the time and their impact on Japanese American families. These events were spoken, sung, enacted, and danced by the Community Ensemble. After a recording of Executive Order 9066 in the actual voice of FDR, actors filed across the stage with their suitcases and their children wearing their Sunday best, telling of Executive Orders coming one after another, of being incarcerated in filthy race-track stalls smelling of manure, and how not only their homes and businesses but their whole lives were stolen. They pose the enduring question: “Is this who are are? is this America?” And they conclude that it is not enough to say “Never again.”

The performance was augmented with music by Korean American “violinist-looper” Joe Kye in a song called “Over There Somewhere” followed by the traditional “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” sung by Kiah Dunne. During this section dancer Toshiko Namioka was accompanied by recorded viola and piano, making sharp, abrupt dance movements to express the feelings of fear and anger on the part of the abused people. Toward the end of the section the cast drew our attention to America’s current situation and the deportation of immigrants. “It’s all American history,” they warn us.

Part III: On This Land

The performance of On This Land was the world premiere of a work by composer Kenji Bunch, commissioned and performed by Resonance Ensemble. Based on the poetry of Chisao Hata, it is scored for two choirs. Bunch describes his choice as based on two elements in the poetic text: one describing the history of the Portland Assembly Center, and the other asking the reader to imagine how the prisoners felt about their conditions. He describes it this way in the program: “To highlight this duality in the words, I split the choir into two antiphonal groups, one delivering facts and the other asking for our empathy. Gradually the two groups begin to merge and finally come together at the very end.”

Here are some of its heartfelt lines:

Choir 1: On this land, at this very place
Choir 2: Look up at the same rafters

Choir 1: On this land…people were born and people died
Choir 2: How would you feel?

Choir 1: Our mouths frozen shut
Choir 2: America

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And after a long crescendo, from both choirs:

Breathe the same air