Nidoto Nai Yoni (Let It Not Happen Again)
NOTE: This article was originally published on 7/27/2017 at KCTS9.org.
7/27/2017 - Kay Sakai Nakao looks out at the shore from the back porch of her Bainbridge Island home. She has lived nearly all of her 97 years on the island — excluding the years during World War II when her family, along with the rest of the Japanese-American families on Bainbridge, became the first to be sent to Japanese incarceration camps in the United States. Seventy-five years later, for Nakao, the memories of that difficult period remain vivid.
“What we went through, nobody should have to go through that,” Nakao says.
“When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, I didn’t even know where Pearl Harbor was or what it was or anything,” she says. “We were just country bumpkins on the farm.”
Kay Sakai Nakao was born and raised on Bainbridge Island in Washington State. She was 22 years old when her family and all other Japanese American families on the island were incarcerated.
On February 19, 1942—two months after Japanese forces attacked the U.S. Naval Base Pearl Harbor in Hawaii— President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to declare certain areas in the county as military or ‘exclusion’ zones. The order led to the forced incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, who were forcefully removed from their homes all along the US West Coast and sent to 10 concentration camps setup across the western United States.
When the order was signed, Nakao’s family was part of a close-knit community of Japanese immigrant farmers on Bainbridge.
“The Japanese immigration story is really similar to other immigration stories in America,” says Tom Ikeda, executive director of Densho, a Seattle-based organization dedicated to preserving the oral histories and photo archives from the period of incarceration of Japanese American families. “They came for a better life.”
“My dad left Japan in 1914 and landed in Canada,” Nakao says. “Then he came into the United States and got a job [before settling on Bainbridge to start his own farm].”
Kay Sakai Nakao walks with her son at the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial.
The first Japanese immigrants came to the Pacific Northwest in the late 1800s to work in lumber mills, railroads, and canneries. At the time of World War II, Japanese immigrants had been in America for over half a century. They had put down roots, working, running businesses, and raising their families.
“Two-thirds of these individuals [who were incarcerated] were U.S. citizens,” Ikeda says. “They did nothing wrong. The only criteria [that was applied] under Executive Order 9066 was one: Were they of Japanese ancestry?; and two: Were they in an exclusion zone?” he says.
Words Matter: Densho and historians have adopted the term ‘incarceration’ in place of ‘internment’ out of belief that the former is a truer representation of the experience of Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in concentration camps for over three years, two-thirds of them being U.S. citizens.
Manzanar concentration camp in California was one of 10 camps in the United States where Japanese-American families were imprisoned without due process after being forced from their homes along the West Coast.
Executive Order 9066
The presidential order never mentioned Japanese Americans specifically.
It allowed the military to designate any area in the United States as an ‘exclusion zone’ from which any persons deemed a threat could be excluded.
Records from History: Music Collections of Early Japanese-American Immigrants
“It was cleverly written,” Ikeda says.
The military command designated America’s West Coast as an exclusion area and then ordered all people of Japanese descent to be excluded, or removed, from that area. Ikeda’s own grandparents were incarcerated along with all of their children, including Ikeda’s father.
At the time, the West Coast had the densest concentration of people with Japanese ancestry. “But it was also considered a very sensitive region just because of proximity to Japan,” says Karen Yoshitomi, daughter of former internees and the executive director of the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Washington (JCCCW).
Sitting in her home on Bainbridge Island, Nakao recalls the uncertainty her family felt when they were ordered to leave the island.
“We were never told where we were going, how long we were going to be gone,” she says. “Even after we arrived at Manzanar camp, there was nobody to tell us, ‘This is Manzanar, this is where you’re going to live.’ Nothing. ”
“[The camp] was one square mile, 10,000 internees, wired fencing all around, seven watchtowers, soldiers with machine guns,” she says.
Men, women and children were kept as prisoners inside the camps. Soldiers with machine guns served as a warning that “if you dared to go outside the barbed wire fence, you [would] be shot,” Nakao says.
Leaving Nihonmachi (Japantown) and returning to the Hunt Hotel
Across the Puget Sound from the island, Shokichi Tokita was growing up in Seattle’s Nihonmachi (Japantown) neighborhood in the area now known as the International District. Tokita was eight years old when his siblings and Japanese immigrant parents were forced to leave their home to be incarcerated, like all other Japanese American families living on the West Coast. Now, visiting the JCCCW building, the site of the historic Hunt Hotel that served as temporary housing for Japanese families after the war ended and prison camps were closed, Tokita recalls the painful experience of incarceration.
Shokitchi Tokita was 8 years old when his family was incarcerated. They were sent to Minidoka concentration camp.
“It’s a lot of anger because of what happened,” says Tokita, whose father was painter Kamekichi Tokita. “Everything was taken away from us. Even though my mother and father were not citizens — they weren't allowed to be [due to immigration laws that denied citizenship to Japanese immigrants] — all the children were citizens, born and raised in the United States,” Tokita says.
The Tokita family was sent to Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho. The parents and eight children were assigned to one-room section of a hastily built barrack. “Some of the people had to stay in horse stalls,” Tokita says. The incarceration of Japanese Americans lasted more than three years.
Nihonmachi (Japantown) neighborhood in Seattle before World War II. Photo courtesy Densho.
Despite the government’s treatment of his family, like many other Japanese men who went through internment, Tokita went on to serve in the U.S. armed forces.
Shokichi Tokita’s father was painter Kamekichi Tokita, who kept a diary of his family’s experience during incarceration. It was published along with his artwork by University of Washington Press, Signs of Home: The Paintings and Wartime Diary of Kamekichi Tokita.
“My first career was in the air force,” Tokita says. “Once in a while, we had to get up and [speak] about what our backgrounds were. And my opening sentence was, ‘I was a P.O.W. of the United States of America in a concentration camp,’” he says.
An exhibit on a wall of JCCCW commemorates the Hunt Hotel, the name given to the building when the language school was turned into temporary housing for families returning to Seattle after incarceration.
“‘Temporary’ being 14 years,” Yoshitomi says. Having lost their homes, businesses and jobs, the families had limited options, many remaining in the cramped rooms of the Hunt Hotel for years. Tokita’s family lived there for two years before they were able to move out.
Lessons from the past, hope for the future
At JCCCW, Yoshitomi reflects on what the past teaches us.
“I think we lost sight of the principles upon which we were built as a nation — this whole idea of immigration and being a place of opportunity, equality and that we value diversity," she says and stresses that we have an obligation to ensure that history does not repeat itself.
From her porch, Nakao smiles with pride as she surveys her garden — lush-green vegetation that glimmers in the warmth of the island sun.
“I always tell people, Bainbridge Island is such a wonderful place,” she says.
Yet, she has a stern message about what happened to her family and community during World War II, “it should not happen to anybody ever again.”
President Ronald Reagan apologizes for a ‘grave wrong’
In 1988, more than 40 years after the last incarceration camp closed, President Ronald Reagan offered an official apology for a “grave wrong” done to Japanese Americans “based solely on race.” Following the signing of the Civil Liberties Act — which provided monetary restitution to each of the surviving internees — Reagan said, “Here we admit a wrong. Here, we re-affirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.”
