Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial gets donation, grant to boost $4M addition
After the end of World War II, when Japanese Americans returned from U.S. concentration camps to their home on Bainbridge Island, some insurance companies refused to serve them. The stated reason was that the companies were scared that white juries would be prejudiced and rule against the Japanese Americans in liability lawsuits, but they may have simply wanted an excuse not to serve the Japanese Americans.
A Bainbridge Island insurance agent, Kenneth Myers, thought that the policy was wrong, so to get his manager to sympathize, he showed her a letter from a Japanese American soldier whose four brothers also served in the army. According to Myers’ autobiography, “she said, ‘God damn you, Ken Myers, for bringing me this letter. How can I say, No?’ So she wrote the first policy on a Japanese American after the war.”
More than 75 years later, Myers’ son, David, has pledged $500,000 to complete the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial. The donation from the David & Carol Myers Foundation will supplement a $613,150 grant from the National Park Service. Those donations and other private contributions now make up a significant portion of the funding needed to complete the last phase of the memorial: a $4 million visitor center which will likely be completed between the end of 2024 and the start of 2025.
The 1,545 square foot visitor center will include offices for National Park Service guides, restrooms, a small space for interpretive materials, and a larger area with seating and audio-visual media to educate visiting students. Currently, the only National Park Service presence is a small cabin staffed by a ranger from Friday to Sunday during the summer months. Most visitors must use the informational signs and story wall to guide themselves through the site.
The memorial marks the location of the Eagledale Ferry dock, where 227 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from Bainbridge Island on March 30, 1942. They were the first of over 120,000 Japanese Americans to be expelled from the West Coast. Unlike other places on the West Coast, which were more segregated, many Japanese Americans and white Americans on Bainbridge Island were friends or went to school together. The Bainbridge Review was one of a few newspapers nationwide to dissent, saying, “These Japanese Americans of ours haven't bombed anybody...They have given every indication of loyalty to this nation. They have sent… their own sons — six of them — into the United States Army.” Established to commemorate the first site where Japanese Americans were removed, the Bainbridge Island Memorial is the only memorial to Japanese incarceration not located at the actual site of a camp.
Ellen Sato Faust, the executive director of BIJAEMA, the association which created the memorial, explained some of the reasons why the government chose to remove the Bainbridge Island Japanese Americans first. First, the purpose of Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 was to protect “against espionage and against sabotage” by excluding Japanese Americans from military areas. According to Sato Faust, the U.S. government had a “secret listening operation [on Bainbridge Island], an 800 foot tower… tall enough to intercept Japanese communication.” In addition, there were several other military sites which have now been converted into parks such as Battle Point Park and Fort Ward Park. Second, the geographically closed nature of the island meant that the Japanese American residents were a “relatively small group. It was a good test case. They were able to round them up in one day.”
Sato Faust plans to submit permit applications for the visitor center by the end of this month. She is hopeful that the plan will be approved in six months, so that they can break ground on the project by the start of 2024 and finish construction after a year’s work.
To reach the final goal, the organization will launch a capital campaign for public donations in the fall. The memorial’s grant from the National Park Service comes from a fund for Japanese American Confinement sites (JACS grants). Since the fund was established in 2009, the memorial’s grant of $613,150 is the third largest out of 302 to be awarded. The money will be used to complete sitework and install utilities such as water, electricity, and communication lines. Originally, the memorial was designed to be a two-story meeting space with a research center on the second floor. However, the proposed research center was “not consistent with how the memorial looks and feels,” and the visitor center’s size was reduced because the cost of building has increased since planning began in 2006.
The visitor center’s design is reminiscent of traditional Japanese architecture, but Sato Faust emphasizes that they are really careful not to make this a Japanese story. Two-thirds of the residents who were forcibly removed were American citizens.
“[The memorial is] not about Japanese culture in any way,” she said, “This is about an American historical event.” According to Johnpaul Jones and Colleen Thorpe, two architects who designed the memorial, “the internees did not want a Japanese temple memorial, but rather a design that would simply represent who they are: Japanese-Americans of Bainbridge Island.”
In 2013, when the Bainbridge Island community decided to add the word “Exclusion” to the name of the memorial (originally just the “Bainbridge Island Japanese American Memorial”), U.S. Representative Derek Kilmer sponsored the bill which officially recognized that decision. Rep. Kilmer references that moment as an example of his ongoing collaboration with stakeholders: “That was a request from the community to have the name of the memorial more accurately reflect [what happened].”
As the memorial has continued to develop, Rep. Kilmer says that he has “visited the site numerous times,” from informal volunteer weeding sessions to guided tours. “Like a lot of people who visit the site, I’m very moved by it.”
The memorial was designed to evoke difficult emotions. Johnpaul Jones and Colleen Thorpe began with the premise that “memorials are always connected to very traumatic, emotional, difficult events. Experiences that most of us would rather not be reminded of.” To create the concept for the design, the architects began with the internees’ “raw emotional experience: the internment day, the sense of outrage, the difficulty of being forced to leave their longtime homes, and the confused look of the internees in photos of that day.”
It is important to return to the memorial and not look away from the dark side of America’s past because the memorial does not only mourn a specific historical injustice, but also warns of future ones. According to the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community, “Nidoto Nai Yoni, translated as ‘Let It Not Happen Again’ is the motto and mission [of the memorial].” Similarly, Rep. Kilmer points to the site as a “reminder that we need to be vigilant in fighting prejudice and discrimination.”
By: Phillip Chin
Source: Kitsap Sun