Bainbridge Island, Nineteen Forty-Two: The First Forced Removal

The ferry dock at Eagledale on Bainbridge Island is a quiet place. It faces the water toward the mainland, toward Seattle across the Sound. On March thirtieth, nineteen forty-two, two hundred twenty-seven people stood at this dock with sixty pounds of belongings each. They were Japanese American residents of Bainbridge Island, many of them farming families with decades on the island, some with children born here, some themselves born here. They were the first Americans ordered from their homes under Executive Order nine zero six six, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on February nineteenth, nineteen forty-two. The order authorized the forced removal of any person deemed a military risk from designated military zones on the West Coast. Bainbridge Island, near the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, was in such a zone.

The Army gave them six days' notice. They were allowed to bring what they could carry. They were not told where they were going. They boarded a ferry, crossed the Sound, boarded a train, and were taken first to a temporary assembly center at the Puyallup fairgrounds south of Tacoma, which the Army had named Camp Harmony with a deliberateness that the people inside did not find amusing. From there, most were sent to the Minidoka War Relocation Center in the Idaho desert.

Most lost their farms on Bainbridge Island. Crops were unharvested. Leases lapsed. Some neighbors helped preserve property; others did not. The story of the return after the war is documented in oral histories at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, and in a memoir by Mary Matsuda Gruenewald titled "Looking Like the Enemy," which draws on the diary she kept from Bainbridge Island through Minidoka.

The Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial opened in two thousand eleven at the exact spot on Eagledale where the two hundred twenty-seven residents boarded the ferry. The memorial is a series of wooden panels arranged along a path to the water, inscribed with names and accounts. A phrase in Japanese at the entrance means "nidoto nai yoni": "let it not happen again."

The words are addressed to the future. The view from the end of the path is still the ferry dock, still the water, still the mainland across the Sound.