"NEVER AGAIN" has become the rallying cry of the Trump era. Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order incarcerating Japanese Americans is just one of the reminders why it's important to remember our history. Credit: USTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
NEVER AGAIN has become the rallying cry of the Trump era. Franklin D. Roosevelts executive order incarcerating Japanese Americans is just one of the reminders why its important to remember our history.
“NEVER AGAIN” has become the rallying cry of the Trump era. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order incarcerating Japanese Americans is just one of the reminders why it’s important to remember our history. JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

This year marked the 75th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order No. 9066, which allowed the United States military to forcibly remove about 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes. The anniversary of the racist order was especially poignant in 2017 with the rise and fall (and rise and fall) of President Donald Trump’s executive orders attempting to ban Muslims from entering the country.

But today marks a specific 75th anniversary for the Puget Sound region—the day Bainbridge Island’s Japanese American residents were taken from their homes and incarcerated at a government camp that would become California’s infamous Manzanar War Relocation Center.

In 1942, The Bainbridge Island Review and its publishers, Walter C. Woodward and Mildred Logg Woodward, were one of the few newspapers in the country to speak out against internment. From the University of Washington:

Although no official word of an exact date for evacuation would come until the end of March, the March 5, 1942 issue of the Review made clear the fact that residents on the Island knew that the Japanese Americans would be leaving. In an editorial on the front page entitled, “Many Who Mourn,” the Review put the issue into a very personal tone by reminding everyone of the bigotry involved in the evacuations. The Review pointed out that the Japanese Americans would be shipped off to unknown parts where they would not be welcomed. All but one governor from the inland states opposed the relocation of the Japanese Americans to their states. This same editorial brought with it an apology to the Japanese American residents for not being able to do enough to have them stay, and expressed a sense of failure: “The Review—and those who think as it does—have lost.”

Bainbridge Island’s Japanese American community had less than a week to pack up before being sent off to Manzanar, HistoryLink.org notes.

After the war, only about half of the island’s Japanese American residents returned. …

More than a few of those who did return to Bainbridge Island noted the role that Walt and Milly Woodward played in the positive reception they received. While the Bainbridge Review‘s staunch opposition could not prevent the internment, the paper’s regular reports on the Japanese American islanders’ activities in the camps—the Woodwards employed interned islanders as camp correspondents for the Review—kept them in their neighbors’ thoughts during their absence, and its advocacy for welcoming them home provided support to other islanders who felt the same way, which did not exist in communities where the press was actively hostile to returning Japanese families.

Today, the Wing Luke Museum writes, there is a marker at the Eagledale Ferry Dock, the place where U.S. soldiers forced Japanese Americans to board a boat to the camps. The marker includes a “memorial whose motto and mission is ‘Nidoto Nai Yoni,’ translated as ‘Let It Not Happen Again,'” they write.

Ana Sofia Knauf reports on Neighborhoods for The Stranger. When she’s not commuting to work by bus, she’s worrying about Seattle’s rising rents, giving herself headaches thinking about race, or trying...