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Henry Shigehiro Sakamoto, a civic leader in Portland’s Japanese American community who also shaped Oregon’s grain economy, died in November at the age of 98.
His son, Blake Sakamoto, said in a social media post Friday that his father — who is largely responsible for downtown Portland’s iconic cherry blossoms — “passed away peacefully” on Nov. 25.
The lifelong Portland resident leaves behind a legacy of business and civic accomplishments over the course of his nearly century-long life, including the growth of Oregon’s international wheat trade with Japan, serving as the first president of the Oregon Nikkei Endowment and helping to create the Japanese American Historical Plaza on Portland’s waterfront, his son said.
In a 2017 interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive, Sakamoto — then 90 years old — said that he was born in Portland to two Japanese American immigrants, who raised him and his brothers while managing a hotel they ran in downtown Portland.
Portland was home to over 1,680 people of Japanese descent at the time he was growing up, and the thriving community collectively owned 100 hotels and apartments, 64 grocery stores and 39 laundry services, while others managed barbershops and restaurants.
But that all changed in the aftermath of the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in December 1941, when Sakamoto was a 15-year-old Lincoln high school student.
Overnight, the Federal government and many West Coast citizens turned a suspicious eye on residents and citizens of Japanese descent. Mounting racism and xenophobia prompted non-Japanese employers to fire Japanese employees without cause, while FBI agents roamed communities, arresting people and confiscating personal items — including the teenaged Sakamoto’s Brownie camera.
“That was a hysterical period,” Sakamoto told an Oregonian reporter in 2017. “All the Japanese families just started throwing away anything Japanese.”
Months later, in May 1942, Sakamoto and his family were ordered to abandon their homes and businesses, surrender themselves and move to federal prison camps. Along with more than 100,000 other Japanese Americans, they found themselves living behind barbed wire fences, with substandard healthcare and uncomfortable living conditions.
He said that Minidoka War Relocation Center — the camp where his family was incarcerated for years — had no running water in its family living quarters, and was “very dirty and very uncomfortable.”
Sakamoto’s brother, Tom, developed meningitis while the family was incarcerated there, and the poor medical care at Minidoka’s hospitals offered did little to stave off the infection. He died in 1943 at age 18.
Despite the hardships of the federal prison camp system, Sakamoto applied to Ohio Wesleyan University and got an education pass to leave the camp when the college accepted him as a student.
He studied there for two years, and found himself drafted into the U.S. army in 1946, not long after the camps that housed Japanese American prisoners closed in the wake of Japan’s surrender in 1945.
He returned to Oregon after he finished his military service, and continued his education at the University of Oregon, where he majored in business. Shortly after he graduated, he landed a job at the United States Department of Agriculture.
Blake Sakamoto said that his father worked there for over 30 years, managing grain inventories across the western states and shoring up trade between Oregon wheat farms and Japanese buyers.
In the late ‘70s, Sakamoto started speaking out about the injustices that Japanese Americans experienced at the hands of the U.S. government during World War II, and he shared his experience at Portland’s first Day of Remembrance for the mass incarceration.
In 1988, Congress passed a bill that gave each incarceration camp survivor $20,000 — which Sakamoto and a few others put toward creating the Japanese American Historical Plaza in Tom McCall Waterfront Park.
He also served as president of the Japanese Ancestral Society and commander of the Oregon Nisei Veterans, and his decades of service eventually earned him a “Heart of the Community Award” in 2011 and, in 2021, the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays from the Government of Japan.
“He will be greatly missed by all of us,” Blake Sakamoto said in his Friday statement. “Henry Sakamoto’s legacy endures in Portland’s civic life, its cherry blossoms, and the generations he inspired.”
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