The First to Be Forcibly Removed
On March 30, 1942, just 40 days after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, 227 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry were forced to leave their homes on Bainbridge Island. They were the first of more than 120,000 people—two-thirds of them American citizens—to be removed from the West Coast and incarcerated during World War II. Given only six days' notice, they gathered at the Eagledale ferry dock, the very site where the memorial now stands under the watch of armed U.S. Army soldiers.
Their destination was unknown to them. They were first taken to the Manzanar concentration camp in California, and many were later moved to the Minidoka camp in Idaho. The removal of the Bainbridge Island community was a trial run for the mass incarceration that followed. In a rare display of public support, the local newspaper, the Bainbridge Review, edited by Walt and Milly Woodward, consistently published editorials opposing the exclusion. The paper also published correspondence from the incarcerated islanders, ensuring their voices were not erased from the community they were forced to leave.
The memorial is a quiet, reflective space. A 276-foot-long story wall, made of old-growth red cedar and granite, lists the name of every one of the 276 Japanese Americans who were part of the island community at the time of the exclusion. The wall's length is symbolic, with one foot for each person whose life was upended by the order.
The Paradox of the Nisei Linguists
While their families were imprisoned behind barbed wire, thousands of second-generation Japanese Americans, or Nisei, served in the U.S. military. From the Bainbridge Island community, 66 men and two women served during the war. Sixteen of these men served in the decorated 442nd Infantry Battalion in Europe. Another sixteen from the island served in one of the war's most effective secret weapons in the Pacific: the Military Intelligence Service (MIS).
These Nisei soldiers were recruited for their fluency in Japanese, a skill the U.S. military desperately needed. They translated captured enemy documents, interrogated prisoners of war, and used their linguistic abilities to persuade Japanese soldiers to surrender. Their work was dangerous and highly sensitive; they often operated on the front lines, sometimes having to prove their loyalty to suspicious American soldiers.
The impact of the MIS was immense. Major General Charles Willoughby, General Douglas MacArthur's chief of intelligence, credited the Nisei linguists with shortening the war in the Pacific by two years and saving close to a million American lives. This created a painful paradox: young men were fighting and dying for a country that was simultaneously incarcerating their parents, siblings, and friends based solely on their ancestry. The memorial stands as evidence of this injustice and the complex story of the Nisei who served with distinction. The motto of the memorial is "Nidoto Nai Yoni"—a Japanese phrase meaning "Let It Not Happen Again."