The internment project begins to take shape as a national park site.
Sixty-five years ago Monday, with the drying of presidential ink, Nobie Sakai Omoto’s feet were forced in an unwanted direction.
Then a senior at Bainbridge High School, Omoto had spent the waning winter months of 1942 eagerly awaiting the walk on stage at her graduation.
Instead, following the Feb. 19 signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she and 226 other islanders found themselves preparing for a more somber procession, down the hillside on the north shore of Eagle Harbor and onto a boat bound for internment.
“I was scared and sad,” Omoto said Monday, near the spot where she and other Bainbridge internees cast off. “We didn’t know where we were going.”
Omoto was among 30 Bainbridge internees who gathered Monday at the “Nidoto Nai Yoni” Japanese Internment Memorial, just west of Pritchard Park, to tour the site on the anniversary of the signing of the document that sent so many islanders striding toward uncertainty.
Nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly sent to internment camps during World War II. Internees from Bainbridge were the first to be sent away, heading first to Manzanar Relocation Center in California and then Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho. After the war was over, many didn’t come back to the island.
“I used to say that the worst thing is that we would all be scattered,” said Masako Nishimori, who was 22 when she boarded the boat in Eagle Harbor with her four sisters and one brother. “I knew some of us wouldn’t return.”
On Monday, though, many of the survivors did return to the site that marked the beginning of their exile, and is now being transformed in remembrance of their hardship.
Work on the $5 million memorial began last spring. Over the summer, about 30 craftsmen from the nonprofit Timber Framers Guild came from all over the country to erect two ornamental gates and a 15-foot-tall informational pavilion at the center of the five-acre property.
The framers, who used Japanese carpentry techniques in crafting the structures, were housed and fed by islanders during their stay.
Work has continued since then, with trails and boardwalks now weaving through the trees and connecting different points on the site to one another.
Almost $2.5 million has been raised to pay for the project, which when finished will include a “story wall” – on which the names of all Japanese Americans living on the island in 1942 will be inscribed – and a 150-foot pier where the Eagledale ferry dock once stood.
On hand Monday among the internees, family members and media was Congressman Jay Inslee, a Bainbridge Democrat, who last year introduced legislation to make the memorial part of the National Park System.
The bill was approved unanimously by the house earlier this month, and is awaiting consideration by the Senate.
“This will be an important learning facility,” said Inslee, adding that the memorial’s proximity to Seattle will make it more visible than the nation’s other two, more rural internment memorials. “During this time of terrorism, people know what fear can do. This will be a living statement that we will never again let fear overtake liberty.”
The bill would make the memorial a satellite site of the Minidoka Internment National Monument in Idaho.
“Things sure have changed,” said Omoto’s younger sister Yae Yoshihara, who was 13 when the internment order came. “From a time of discrimination and fear to this, it’s been a 180 degree turnaround.”
Fumiko Hayashida was 31-years-old and had two young children in 1942. Now 96, she is the oldest surviving Bainbridge internee.
Hayashida testified in front of Congress last fall in support of Inslee’s legislation, and said she was thrilled to see the project coming together.
“I’m so proud to be here,” she said, clutching her cane as she surveyed the scene. “I hope I get to see it when it’s finished.
“So far, so good.”
