81 years ago, Japanese Americans were forced to leave Bainbridge Island

Eighty-one years ago to the day Sunday, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, launching a mass incarceration of Japanese Americans and designating them “threats” to national security.

Just over a month later, the U.S. government would begin forcibly removing residents and citizens with Japanese ancestry from their homes, incarcerating men, women and children in isolated, desolate camps during World War II. 

It started here, at Bainbridge Island. On March 30, 1942, 227 residents were forced to uproot their lives, packing what they could carry and boarding a ferry to an uncertain future. They were ultimately put on a train to Manzanar, California, with most ending up in Minidoka, Idaho.

In the end, almost 13,000 people of Japanese ancestry from Washington, and about 120,000 Japanese Americans overall, would be incarcerated at guarded prison camps mostly in the Western interior. Many permanently lost their businesses and properties during their imprisonment, and emerged from camps with few job prospects, limited housing options and little, if any, savings.

Fueled by years of anti-Japanese fearmongering, racial prejudice and war hysteria propped up by news outlets and the U.S. government, the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II now is widely viewed as a blatant violation of civil rights. 

It remains a haunting memory for survivors and their descendants, but one that many are fighting to preserve.

Feb. 19 is now observed as the Day of Remembrance, which acknowledges the signing of Executive Order 9066 and the wrongful incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Last year, President Joe Biden issued a proclamation reaffirming the federal government’s formal apology to Japanese Americans, whose lives, Biden said, “were irreparably harmed during this dark period of our history.”

The Seattle Times A1 Revisited project last year addressed the harm caused by the paper’s 1942 coverage of the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans:

A day of remembrance event at the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial will be held Sunday. The Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Association, the Bainbridge Island Parks and Trails Foundation and the Bainbridge Island Metro Park and Recreation District organized the event. 

A stewardship work party held from 10 a.m. to noon, volunteers will help care for the grounds as part of the event. Register for the event online here.