Buckley & Buckley Real Estate
Buckley & Buckley Real Estate
Japanese American Internment on Bainbridge Island
Posted on May 4, 2010
In 1942, two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the relocation of 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast in order to incarcerate them in isolated and desolate concentration camps. Exclusion Order No. 1, authorizing the first relocation, targeted the Japanese Americans living on Bainbridge Island, Washington. One of them was 31-year-old Fumiko Hayashida, a pregnant mother of two. She was one of 227 members of her community who, dressed in their best clothes, assembled at the Eagledale ferry landing on March 30th, 1942. As they waited to be taken off the Island by armed military escorts, Fumiko, holding her 13 month old daughter Natalie Kayo, was photographed by a Seattle Post-Intelligencer photographer. This photograph has since become a lasting iconic symbol of the internment experience. Fumiko Hayashida's story reflects the effect of a great historical injustice on the lives and dreams of many immigrant farming families in the early 1900s, and how the futures of an entire ethnic community were changed by that experience. Families suffered hardship, shame, and loss of property because they looked like the enemy. Often separated from their husbands who were in other camps or away fighting to defend the country that had imprisoned their families, the mothers and grandmothers in the Camps maintained the community.
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