Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial

Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial is a short drive from here.  A friend from Anchorage who is also in Seattle visiting grandkids brought two and two dogs to visit us on Bainbridge today.  So I haven't had much time to even think about posting.  But here's a bit.

There's a path here with a series of panels with wooden pictures of the removal of Japanese-Americans, many, not most,  American citizens, from Bainbridge Island after the US declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbor.  Japanese had settled here and many raised strawberries.  The book Snow Falling On Cedars is a novel about this period here on the island.  This path is also the path the internees were walked down to get to ships to remove them on their way to internment camps further from the coast.

There are also quotes here and there from people who experienced this, like this one:

This echoes the sentiment of Holocaust survivors in Europe during World War II.  And give the imprisonment of asylum seekers and the separation of children from their parents there, it seems that we are letting this happen again.

The LA Times today reports that California is going to officially apologize for internment of Japanese in World War II.


Then we walked along the nearby beach, where the dogs had a great time off leash.

Here, the ferry from downtown Seattle is coming into downtown Winslow.