The Forty-Eight Hours, Terminal Island, 1942

On February twenty-fifth, nineteen forty-two, thirty-five hundred people were told they had forty-eight hours to leave everything they had built.

The community on Terminal Island in Los Angeles Harbor had been growing since around nineteen oh-six, when Japanese fishermen began settling on the narrow strip of dredged and filled land between the main port and the open water. They called it Furusato, a Japanese word meaning old hometown, the place you carry inside you when you are far from where you began. What they built there was, by any measure, a complete community: a Baptist church, a Buddhist temple, a Shinto shrine, restaurants, a movie theatre, a baseball team. The men pioneered live-bait fishing techniques for albacore tuna that transformed the commercial fishing industry along the West Coast. The women worked in the canneries on the same island, processing the catch. By nineteen forty-two, Terminal Island was the only Japanese American community in the United States that functioned as both a self-contained neighborhood and a working industrial port operation.

Then came Executive Order nine thousand and sixty-six, signed by President Roosevelt on February nineteenth, nineteen forty-two, ten weeks after Pearl Harbor. The order authorized the forced removal of Japanese Americans from military exclusion zones. Terminal Island, sitting inside Los Angeles Harbor, was among the first to be designated. On February twenty-fifth, the order came down: forty-eight hours.

What followed, in those forty-eight hours, is documented in the records of the Japanese American National Museum and the LA Conservancy. Families tried to sell furniture and household goods at whatever price the buyers, who knew the sellers had no choice, were willing to offer. Valuables were buried or left with neighbors. Some possessions were simply abandoned. When the residents were gone, the accounts agree, neighbors ransacked the vacated homes. The physical structures of the community were subsequently demolished. The canneries the community's labor had built continued operating under other workers.

Terminal Island was the first Japanese American community forcibly removed under Executive Order nine thousand and sixty-six. It was also the only one whose physical community was afterward destroyed. The island today is entirely industrial. A small memorial now stands near the site of what was Furusato. It is the only thing left of the forty-eight hours.