Yesterday was the #DayofRemembrance—February 19, the anniversary of FDR’s signing of EO9066, which consigned over 100,000 Japanese Americans to incarceration for the duration of WWII.
I wanted to share a brief tour of a memorial to those who were its victims.
I wanted to share a brief tour of a memorial to those who were its victims.
One of the more memorable photos from that episode is this one, of the first community to be “evacuated” to Manzanar, from Bainbridge Island, WA. These are the “evacuees” being loaded onto a ferry under armed guard on March 30, 1942.
You can go to the site of this tragedy today and see a memorial to the event, dedicated to those who were removed summarily from their homes on the orders of an Army general. Bainbridge is a 30-minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle. The memorial is just outside the town.
The memorial is dominated by a series of friezes depicting scenes described by the evacuees in their correspondence and other writing.
The details are quite moving.
Note the tag in this one, identical (except for the name) to the one you can see in the opening shot (which is from this event).
A close-up.
This panel describes how baseball—which the Japanese had adopted in the 1870s in Japan; many of the immigrants arrived here as highly skilled players—played a role in helping them endure their incarceration.
All in all, it’s a deeply moving experience to visit the memorial. My friend Clarence Moriwaki, left (with our mutual friend Sidney Stock), was the man who made it happen.
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