BAINBRIDGE ISLAND – Stripped of their homes and livelihoods, hundreds of Japanese-Americans from this island community became the first citizens imprisoned in internment camps during World War II.
On Thursday, residents of what is now an affluent bedroom community on this island west of Seattle dedicated the site of a long-sought memorial called Nidoto Nai Yoni, “let it not happen again.”
The $5 million project will include a stone-and-wood wall leading to a 150-foot pier at the site of the island’s old ferry dock. The wall will contain the names and stories of all Japanese-American residents who lived on the island in 1942. An interpretative center, pavilion and native plantings are planned.
Construction is set to begin Monday with excavation for the planned paths and parking for the memorial.
Frank Kitamoto was just 21/2 years old when he and his three siblings were shepherded by his mother onto a ferry bound for a destination unknown to them.
Like others who were so young at the time, Kitamoto said he remembers little about leaving the island and his home. But of the 31/2 years his family was held in the camps, he said he recalls living as much of a normal life as he could, playing with other children and attending kindergarten.
“It was almost like you didn’t know anything else,” said Kitamoto, 66, president of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community, who talked about his experience before Thursday’s ceremony. “Parents tried very hard to make sure we didn’t know what was going on.
“Our parents, obviously, were aware. They lost everything they’d worked for.”
On March 30, 1942, Army soldiers detained 227 Japanese men, women and children on Bainbridge Island. They were given just six days to gather what they could hold in a suitcase before they were taken on a ferry to Seattle, where they boarded a train to the Manzanar relocation camp in California’s northern Mojave Desert. To be closer to others from Puget Sound, many within a year transferred to another internment center at Minidoka, Idaho.
It was the beginning of the federal government’s forced internment of roughly 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent as a wartime precaution.
“This American story is one that is a cautionary tale and reminder of the fragility of the American Constitution,” said Clarence Moriwaki, chairman of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Memorial Committee. The committee has applied for national historic landmark status for the site.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt on Feb. 19, 1942, signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the detainment of tens of thousands of Japanese people, two-thirds of them American citizens.
At the time, more than 14,000 Japanese lived in Washington state. The first in the nation to be transferred to Manzanar came from Bainbridge Island, many of whose families settled here in the late 1800s to work at strawberry farms and lumber mills.
“My mother told us when we were leaving that this was a special vacation,” said Lilly Kodama, 71. She and about 150 others gathered under towering cedar trees to hear comments Thursday from religious and tribal representatives on hand to bless the 8-acre site at the westernmost edge of Pritchard Park.
At first it was an adventure, Kodama said, but she came to detest the dust storms at the remote Manzanar camp, recalling an outdoor movie that was interrupted by one such storm.
“It was hard on the whole family,” Kodama said of life in the camp, where wooden planks served as floors and there was no indoor plumbing.
More than 60 years later, many of the detainees have died, moved away or never returned to Bainbridge Island. Among Thursday’s gathering, fewer than 10 Nisei – second-generation Japanese-Americans – were present.
The memorial is at the former Eagledale ferry dock where Japanese-Americans boarded the ferry Kehloken to begin their trip south. Already there is a granite marker placed in 2002, the 60th anniversary of the internment. It reads, “May the spirit of this memorial inspire each of us to safeguard constitutional rights for all. Nidoto Nai Yoni.”
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