August 4, 2014

WWII Japanese American survivors visit Exclusion Memorial site

JORDAN STEAD / SEATTLEPI.COM

Wiping away a tear, Yukiko Nakamura, a Japanese American survivor of the World War II internment camps, visits the site of the newly renamed Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Monday, August 4, 2014, on Bainbridge Island, Wash. The site, designed by National Humanities Medal winning architect Johnpaul Jones, is the only national memorial to the internment of Japanese Americans not located at an incarceration site. (Jordan Stead, seattlepi.com)

The word “Exclusion” is newly added to the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial, and Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Wash., is pressing legislation to get it formally recognized by Congress.

The expanded title was observed by Kilmer, along with Japanese Americans interned in World War II, at what the congressman described as a “pretty extraordinary meeting” Monday at the Memorial.

“One thing strikes me, the notion that not all of our history is pretty:  There is value, importance to telling the entire story,” Kilmer said afterward.

“It is a matter of rising every time we fall.  The community here is recognizing, noting a period of time when our nation’s leadership made bad decisions with horrible consequences.”

Kilmer was joined by architect Johnpaul Jones, who designed the memorial and was recently given a National Humanities Medal by President Obama.

On February 19, 1942,  President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that Japanese-Americans be moved away from the Pacific Coast to often-bleary internment camps in Idaho and Nevada.  The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the internment.

The human consequences can be seen from 72 year old pictures from Seattle newspapers, notably 227 Japanese Americans crowding onto the dock at Bainbridge Island carrying all that they were allowed to take with them. Bainbridge was the country’s first “exclusion zone.”

An elderly woman named Yukiko Nakamura shed tears at the event on Monday.  The stories told showed instances of nobility such as the neighbors who took over the farm of one Japanese American family, and had profits to turn over when they returned.  Others, most, were left with nothing.

“Some of it was awful to hear, hurting,” Kilmer said.

The binding of wounds has taken years.  The Bainbridge Memorial is one symbol, but there are others.  These include:

–The old 5th Avenue federal courthouse in Seattle was renovated in the last decade, and renamed for William Kenzo Nakamura.  Nakamura went to an internment camp with his family, but enlisted in the U.S. Army.  He was killed in Italy on July 4, 1944, and posthumously voted the Congressional Medal of Honor more than a half-century later.

–At the 4,500-foot level on Mt. Lemmon, just outside Tucson in Arizona, is the Gordon Hirabayashi Campground and Picnic Area.  A University of Washington student from Auburn, Hirabayashi was one of two Seattle-area men who fought internment all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

(Hirabayashi was considered such a threat to national security that he was allowed to hitchhike from Seattle to the Arizona internment camp that is now a campground bearing his name.  He would later have his conviction overturned and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.

–Congress voted to compensate surviving internees when it passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Seattle’s U.S. Rep. Mike Lowry was a major sponsor of the legislation.  Amazingly, two other prime sponsors — Democratic Rep. Norm Mineta and GOP Sen. Alan Simpson — met each other as young men. Mineta was interned in Wyoming, where Simpson was growing up.

–Mineta became U.S. Secretary of Transportation under President George W. Bush, the first internee to serve in the Cabient.  Two U.S. Senators from Hawaii, Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga, were part of the much-decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team on the Italian front in World War II.

Walt and Millie Woodward, publisher of the Bainbridge Review, took a tougher stand four decades before all of the sometimes- posthumous honors.  They opposed the removal of Japanese Americans from Bainbridge Island when it was happening.

Once excluded, the internees of World War II went on to do their country proud.  And their country has reason to take pride in them.

Will lawmakers in the other Washington officially put “Exclusion” into the title of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial?

“There are hurdles to getting anything done in Congress,” said Kilmer, in classic understatement.