How Bill Naito Reshaped Portland
As confidence in downtown crumbled, Naito stepped up as a civic leader and revived the city he called home.
In the 1970s, the outlook for downtown Portland was bleak.
Central cities around the nation were crumbling like sand castles before a confluence of historical trends: the growth of suburbs, the rise of the automobile, the demise of the streetcar, rising unemployment, population decline, and a sputtering economy.
A key factor in Portland’s decline was the advent of the suburban shopping mall. Starting in the 1950s, malls like Eastport Plaza, Lloyd Center, and Mall 205 had been siphoning shoppers away from downtown, leaving behind boarded-up storefronts. Downtown was being hollowed out, a crumbling ghost town unable to withstand the relentless march of a cookie-cutter, Disneyfied suburbia.
Bill Naito ’49 was appalled.
Naito was a true son of Portland. Born and raised in the city, he knew its streets and alleys, its schools and libraries, its quirks and prejudices. A relentless entrepreneur, his business was rooted in downtown Portland; he wasn’t going to let it go without a fight.
So he made the biggest gamble of his career.
The remarkable life of William Sumio Naito, and the story of his big bet, is recounted in a magisterial biography by his granddaughter, Erica Naito-Campbell ’04, titled Portland’s Audacious Champion: How Bill Naito Overcame Anti-Japanese Hate and Became an Intrepid Civic Leader, published by OSU Press in 2024.
For the better part of four decades, Naito was an inescapable part of Portland’s political landscape. An entrepreneur, business leader, and civic dynamo, he played an outsized role in scores of projects, big and small, that shaped the city as we know it today: Old Town, MAX, Pioneer Courthouse Square, the Portland Streetcar, Montgomery Park, Import Plaza, Saturday Market, Artquake, the Pearl District.
The book does yeoman service in explaining how Naito revived Portland’s fortunes through his myriad business ventures and civic projects. It also provides an insightful look into the history of the Japanese American community in Portland and the successive waves of hysteria and prejudice that turned their lives upside down.
But the book’s most striking contribution might be its delicate, nuanced exploration of Naito’s turbulent personality. A rebellious child who defied his parents by refusing to eat. A painfully shy teenager who became a world-class extrovert. A young idealist who endured bigotry, discrimination, and exile because of his race but who remained intensely patriotic. A self-made millionaire who felt he had something to prove. A skeptic who loved Christmas—and who was a mainstay of Reed’s annual Boar’s Head holiday tradition.
The unresolved tensions often erupted in extraordinary bursts of ingenuity. Naito had, as Herbert Asquith once said of Winston Churchill, a “zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.” Buy a London
double-decker bus to shuttle shoppers to Old Town. Bring back the streetcar. Give away 100 free bikes for people to share. Make MAX free. Save the Benson Bubbler drinking fountains. Turn the neon White Stag sign into an advertisement for Portland.
Naito was a pivotal figure in the revival of downtown Portland. Along the way, he helped cement the city’s reputation as a haven for the unconventional, the different, the misfits, the dreamers, and the doers—a home, in other words, for people just like him.
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The young man who arrived on Reed’s campus in the fall of 1946 wasn’t just quiet—he was, in his own words, “pathologically shy.” Like many of his classmates, he was a veteran returning from service in World War II. But his Japanese heritage marked him as different—a difference he was acutely aware of. “The ‘T’ for traitor still stung on my face,” he said.
Naito was born in Portland in 1926, the second child of Hide and Fukiye Naito, both Issei (first-generation) immigrants who were part of Portland’s growing Japanese community. Ironically, their presence was in part due to American prejudice against Chinese immigrants. Resentment and fear that Chinese immigrants were taking jobs from white Americans fueled passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, forbidding further immigration from China. The resulting labor shortage spurred a wave of immigrants from Japan, many of them farmers or craftspeople seeking opportunity in the United States. In the 1890 census, Portland counted 20 Japanese residents. By 1910, the number had grown to 1,400. And by 1920, Portland’s Japanese community had grown to more than 4,000 people, most of them living in Nihonmachi (“Japan town”), a thriving enclave north of the Burnside Bridge, featuring hotels, shops, restaurants, doctors, and dentists—all serving the community, which included Issei and their children, known as Nisei (second generation).
Naito’s father, Hide, ran a successful shop in downtown Portland selling curios and imports such as Japanese paper, prints, porcelain, decorated candles, haori jackets, and garden shears. When the Great Depression struck in 1929, Hide adapted by selling cheaper goods, including house plants, novelties, ashtrays, and salt and pepper shakers.
Bill’s childhood was full of challenges. As a young child, he suffered from rickets, which required him to wear leg braces. Because the family spoke Japanese at home, Bill went off to his first day of first grade without knowing a word of English. When he rode the streetcar, white people refused to sit next to him.
But the toughest obstacles he faced stemmed from the complex dynamics of his own family. He was in constant conflict with his strict mother, Fukiye, who favored his elder brother, Sam. Bill sometimes rebelled by refusing to eat, which may have contributed to his rickets. He always seemed to be in trouble with his parents, which stoked an overwhelming dread of disappointing them. The right side of his face was partially paralyzed, a condition his mother blamed on his disobedience.
A tide of anti-Japanese sentiment was on the rise during the 1930s. A series of racist laws took aim at the Japanese American community. Japanese immigrants could not become US citizens, and were forbidden to own property in Oregon by Oregon’s Alien Land Law of 1923. The National Origins Act of 1924 clamped down on immigration. Rising tension between the US and Japan, especially over Japan’s actions in China during the Sino-Japanese war, stoked local incidents. In 1939, more than 2,500 people rallied in Portland to shut down iron shipments to Japan.
Despite the tension, the Naito family scraped by—until the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. “Bill had gone to bed on Saturday as an American and had awakened on Monday as an enemy of the state,” Naito-Campbell writes.
Overnight, the nation plunged into hysteria and panic. Rumors circulated that the Japanese were planning to blow up the Bonneville Dam, bomb Portland, and launch a full-scale invasion. Oregon’s governor ordered all Japanese immigrants to stay in their homes. Sam hid the shortwave radios he built as a hobby; Bill threw his BB gun in the pond in the backyard. The authorities ransacked the Naito home and shut down Hide’s business. The Portland City Council revoked the business licenses of all Japanese immigrants. Editorials in The Oregonian thundered that the US had been too “lax, tolerant, and soft” toward the Japanese community and claimed that Shinto temples were spying on the US. Bank accounts were frozen, children were fingerprinted. The atmosphere of paranoia culminated with President Franklin D. Roosevelt issuing Executive Order 9066, which authorized military commanders to “evacuate” civilians of Japanese descent (roughly 120,000 people) within 200 miles of the western coastline. They could leave the zone voluntarily or be forced into prison camps.
For most Japanese Americans, voluntary resettlement was impractical. The community was heavily concentrated on the West Coast, with few relatives living inland. Landlords were unwilling to rent rooms or apartments to a population that had been labeled as a security risk. Japanese Americans had nowhere to go, and with their bank accounts frozen, they had no way to pay for it anyway. Given the short deadline, only 10% of Japanese Americans were able to avoid imprisonment.
The Naitos were among the lucky few: Fukiye’s sister lived in Utah, which hosted a small Japanese American community. The Naitos piled their belongings into the family car, took back roads through eastern Oregon and Idaho (Japanese Americans were banned from the highway), and set up a new home in Salt Lake City. There Bill showed an early flair for seizing opportunity. He suggested that they raise chickens. The family built two coops in the backyard and began selling eggs. Eventually they raised as many as 600 chickens, providing a crucial source of income to tide the family through the war.
Bill graduated from high school in 1944 and signed up with the US Army, joining an elite unit of military translators known as the Zebra Platoon. By the time he had completed his training, the Japanese Empire had surrendered, but Bill was dispatched to Japan anyway to assist in the occupation. After two years of service, he arrived back in Portland, ready for the next adventure—Reed.
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For most of his young life, Bill had been a loner and an outcast, beset by crippling social anxiety and low self-esteem. For the most part, he had been able to escape into books and an inner life. But Reed challenged him to open up. The college was built on the premise that intense discussion and debate was the way to create scholars and thinkers. Naito-
Campbell quotes Reed President and longtime trustee E.B. MacNaughton [1948–52]: “It’s the academic and scholarly atmosphere,” he said. “We specialize in it as much as West Point specializes in a military tradition. The scholar is our hero.”
In Hum 11 conference, there was nowhere to hide. When his professors called on him, Bill had to find something to contribute. Hesitant and stammering, he began to participate. As he did so, he found something he had never had before: people who believed in him.
In the years following WWII, Reed’s student body included many returning veterans who went to college on the GI Bill— veterans who saw in Bill a kindred spirit. At Reed, he would form strong bonds with students like Bill Daw ’49, Orval “Bill” Clawson ’49, Don Morey ’50, and Dan Momyer ’48. After class they would debate socialism and government intervention over games of bridge and bottles of beer.
Bill also found a mentor in Prof. Art Leigh [economics 1945–88]. Nearly blind, Prof. Leigh hired students to read aloud articles and papers to him so he could keep up on research in his field. Leigh hired Bill as one of his readers, despite Bill’s shyness and stammering. (Ironically, one word Bill struggled with was “entrepreneur.”) With Leigh’s support, Bill learned to build his confidence, find his voice, and speak his mind. “My hero,” Bill called him.
Anti-Japanese prejudice still ran deep in American society, and Oregon was no exception. Zealots in Pendleton and Albany bellowed that Japanese Americans would soon “out-breed” white people and called for them to be exiled to a remote Pacific island. In Hood River, the local chapter of the American Legion struck the names of 16 Nisei soldiers from the honor roll of residents who died in the line of duty during WWII.
But Reed offered flickers of hope. In 1945, MacNaughton (who was soon to become president of Reed) organized a public meeting with Oregon Governor Charles Sprague attended by more than a thousand people. In what was called “the greatest speech of his life,” MacNaughton urged Oregonians to trust in Japanese Americans as they trusted in the Constitution.
Bill majored in economics and wrote a thesis comparing how the federal government funded WWI and WWII to see if there was any improvement. (“In typical Reed fashion, the answer was yes and no,” writes Naito-Campbell.)
Bill considered his time at Reed to be one of the happiest in his life, and his friends and mentors helped buoy him through the prejudice he faced. (An adviser at Reed told him not to go to law school, because no one would hire a Japanese American attorney. “Bill, you’ll starve,” he warned.)
After graduating in 1948, Bill set off for the University of Chicago, where he studied under the influential economist Milton Friedman. Bill became an enthusiastic proponent of an open society and a free market. He also met his future wife, Micki. They wed in Chicago in 1951 (Oregon law forbade mixed-race marriage). Bill intended to stay and finish his PhD, but his family called him back to Portland to help out with the family business.
In the teeth of ongoing anti-Japanese prejudice, Bill’s father, Hide, had successfully revived his import business. The business thrived selling all kinds of goods, from bone china to coffee mugs to furniture. Bill worked late hours, puffing on cigars, turning over expense reports, always on the hunt for new opportunities. Over time, Bill and his brother Sam played an increasingly dominant role in running the company. The brothers frequently disagreed; employees learned not to linger in the walkway between their two desks lest they get caught in the crossfire. But Bill and Sam had a strong working partnership, even if their personal relations were sometimes frosty.
In 1962, the Naitos bought the Globe Hotel, a notorious flophouse whose creaky bunks cost 50 cents a night, and transformed it into Import Plaza, a retail mecca stocked with goods from around the world: wooden shoes from Holland, lingonberries from Sweden, Buddhas from India, wicker furniture, hookahs, and a generous assortment of obscure delights.
Like any retailer, Bill had a vested interest in the fortunes of the neighborhood. But his fascination with Portland ran deeper than that. He taught himself about architecture. He roamed the streets of Portland (often pedaling a squeaky old Schwinn) trying to pinpoint what made a neighborhood feel charming, what made it feel bleak. Led by Bill’s nose for a deal, the Naitos began to buy up worn-down historic buildings in Old Town at bargain-basement prices, restored their architectural splendor, and gave them new life, often by offering steep discounts to artists and hippie entrepreneurs chasing half-baked dreams. (One of them was Phil Knight, the founder of Nike.)
Bill’s track record of reviving old buildings came at a time when business confidence in downtown Portland was crumbling. The doubts and uncertainty came to a head in 1974, when the Rhodes Department Store finally closed its doors.
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In truth, the sad day had been a long time coming. The stately Rhodes building, constructed in 1910, had once been the home of Olds, Wortman & King, the biggest department store in the Pacific Northwest. Occupying an entire city block at the intersection of two streetcar lines, the store practically oozed glamor, boasting a giant skylight, a graceful atrium, grand stairways, an elegant tea room, and the legendary Big Top Circus Toyland.
Over the decades, however, the building lost its luster and changed its name several times. The streetcars stopped running. There was nowhere to park. Cheap renovations buried the skylight and robbed the interior of its grandeur. The opening of Washington Square, a sprawling retail colossus in the suburb of Tigard, was the final nail in the coffin. The Rhodes struggled on for several months and shut down on a bleak day in February. Portland’s civic leaders shivered. Every time they passed the empty, boarded-up building, they tried not to see it as a monumental gravestone.
Naito didn’t share their pessimism. He sensed an opportunity.
The Naito brothers bought the rundown building for $565,000—a song. They stripped the structure down and opened it up, restoring the dramatic atrium and skylight. They stripped back the false ceilings and exposed the pipes and ductwork. They stuck 114 parking spaces in the basement. They named the project the Galleria. It was one of the nation’s first urban shopping malls.
Instead of generic national chains, the Naitos recruited scores of quirky local retailers to fill the building, like London Underground, Josephine’s Dry Goods, Galadriel’s House Plants, Mario’s, and Antique Estate. For the grand opening, they held a parade with a hand-drawn fire engine and two brass bands.
The response was overwhelming. Shoppers came in droves. They flooded in from Gresham, Beaverton, Hillsboro, and Milwaukie, drawn by the unique mix of shops and restaurants and the undeniable atmosphere of Portland authenticity. Naito-Campbell quotes journalist Maggi White in the Downtowner: “All these people, the hustle bustle, the hum of activity, the organist playing, the restaurants full, people eating ice cream, and a mailman drinking coffee and watching people go by.” The Oregonian hailed it as “the most exciting development in downtown merchandising in several decades.”
The Galleria marked a turning point for downtown Portland. Emboldened by its success, civic leaders launched a string of projects designed to revive the central city, such as the Nordstrom building and Pioneer Courthouse Square.
As business boomed, the Galleria inspired a wave of urban malls around the nation. “Bill Naito is intuitively a genius at putting things together,” an industry analyst concluded.
But Naito was just getting started. A lifelong railway fan, he pressed Portland’s political leaders to build a light rail system to bring suburban commuters downtown; the first MAX line opened in 1986. He also worked tirelessly to bring back streetcars to help people move around the central city. (Before a single foot of track had been laid for the streetcar, Naito bought four wooden trolleys from Lisbon, shipped them to Portland, and displayed them in one of his buildings to build momentum for the project.) “His true talent was shameless persistence,” writes Naito-Campbell.
The full list of Naito’s projects would take many pages to enumerate. He served on the Urban Forestry Commission, overseeing the planting of more than 30,000 trees. He championed a bond measure to restore the elegant Central Library, where he had spent so many hours as a boy. He revived a disused Montgomery Ward warehouse and turned it into a retail and business center named Montgomery Park (saving money by changing only two letters on its landmark neon sign). He even lent a hand to the visionary Yellow Bike Project, which collected worn-out old bikes, repaired them, painted them yellow, and released them onto the streets of Portland for anyone to borrow and ride.
Naito had an outsized impact on Reed. In 1974, President Paul Bragdon [1971–88] recruited him to join Reed’s board of trustees, where he supported the college in many ventures, including the Campaign for Reed, which raised $65 million. After he died, Naito Hall was named in his honor.
One of Naito’s most significant legacies, however, lies in Old Town. Head north on the waterfront from the Burnside Bridge, and you’ll find the Japanese American Historical Plaza, a public park that Naito worked tirelessly to create. Dedicated in 1990, located just a couple blocks from the historic heartbeat of Nihonmachi, the park is a monument to the resilience of the Japanese American community. One of the stones carries this inscription:
With new hope
We build new lives.
Why complain when it rains?
This is what it means to be free.
It is a fitting tribute to one of Portland’s most influential citizens.
Tags: Alumni, Diversity/Equity/Inclusion