Bainbridge Island, Washington, a 15-minute ride across the Sound by Ferry from Seattle, or about a 90 minute drive up the beautiful Kitsap Peninsula, is nearly literally a breath of fresh air—which is saying something in a region like Puget Sound, where the whole place feels that way sometimes.
A pastoral and bucolic landscape of lush trees, harbor and Sound views, friendly people and a truly quaint downtown area flecked with independent shops, restaurants and wineries, it’s a perfect day-trip for those of us who live in the region, and if you’re visiting Seattle, you could do a whole lot worse than spending an afternoon here. Still, I’ve only been three times in the two years I’ve lived here.
The island is also home to the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial, a National Parks historic site. It’s a quiet, subtle place lined with cedar and pine trees that would make an ideal and easy small trail hike that leads down to a ferry dock with a view across the harbor, and of the interior of the island. The memorial marks the spot where in 1942, the U.S. Government sent soldiers armed with fixed bayonets to round up the entire population of Japanese American citizens living on the island and ship them away to concentration camps in the desert, mostly to the place in Southern California’s Mojave Desert, known as Manzanar. It was a test case—FDR’s government didn’t know if there would be resistance, and if there was, they wanted to contain it by keeping it on the island, and surrounding it with naval vessels if need be. 227 residents of the island were forcibly removed by mustering them to this site, where they were not told where they were going, when or if they would return, their lives completely upended, their farms and businesses ruined and their liberty quite literally snatched from them by the U.S. government.
It’s telling that in all, the government rounded up over 120,000 Japanese Americans, some resident and citizens, some not, up and down the west coast placing them eventually in 10 different concentration camps in the desert west from Idaho and Wyoming in the north to Arizona and California in the south. The government never sought out German American residents, didn’t track them down, didn’t cut their livelihoods, take them from their homes and un-Constitutionally lock them away for the duration of the war. If they had, a larger portion of the U.S. population would be captive, rather than free. And it is also true that Japan had attacked the U.S. in Hawaii directly, whereas Germany had not done so. Nevertheless, this was authoritarian and tyrannical rule by fear—and it worked. The government told Americans that “there was no way to see who was loyal and who wasn’t,” and cast ignorance, doubt and fear across the country, violating the U.S. Constitution’s very basic premise of liberty for all, and using circumstances to enforce the unjust action.
It wasn’t the first time the government had done so, of course. During the Civil War, President Lincoln violated the Constitution on several occasions, restricting freedom of the press, freedom of speech and the writ of habeas corpus, arresting people without bringing them before the court to announce why the person was being detained. Cicero’s prophetic words ring clear: “in time of war, the law falls silent.”
After the war, when Japanese Americans were freed from the camps, about 150 of the 227 arrested on Bainbridge Island returned there. Today, there are still some survivors living here, and their descendants are also on the island. The Bainbridge Community for the most part supported their Japanese American neighbors and friends, and some famously offered to “buy” their farms for the price of one dollar, tending the farms and keeping them in running order, and “selling” them back to their owners for the same price when they returned. That too is a testament, of course, and a reminder of the Colonial era adage that “liberty lives in the hearts of the people,” and certainly not the government. In 1988, then president Ronald Reagan issued an order of reparation and redress, apologizing for the wrong the government had done to these people and offering $20,000 to eligible individuals.
The memorial is relatively new, and just last year, a portion of the dock on which the 227 people would walk, or be carried, to board the ferries which would lead them into the unknown, has been rebuilt with metal statuary in the shape of some of the island’s residents who were removed, and a series of footprints at the end of the dock leading off the edge, bordered by a transparent wall—signifying the peoples’ march into oblivion. None of them knew what would happen to them-and the soldiers carrying bayonets shepherding them onto boats were a frightening symbol that they were not being given a choice. The memorial wall contains the names and ages of each of the 227 residents who were removed. It’s made of local cedar wood, and winds snake-like from the top of the trail gently down to the dock. In the next couple of years, a visitor’s center is planned for the area. Until then, a number of plaques and signs tell this sad story that generated the saying “Nidoto Nai Yoni,” which means, “let it not happen again,” in Japanese.
But, of course, there is always a reason for it to happen again. After 9/11, calls for rounding up Muslim citizens living in the U.S. were heard, though thankfully never acted upon. Not long after the war, Senator Joseph McCarthy called American citizens before the U.S. Congress and ruined a number of lives by accusing them of being Communists in league with the Soviet Union and trying to undermine American values. The issue of slavery, a stain on world history and certainly on the U.S.’s, is in a league of its own for the violation of civil, and human rights.
And then, of course, there is 2020 when fear and doubt were sown by the U.S. government again, this time in pursuit of a deadly virus we were told could be symptomless to us, but kill those we stood near, and that we must lock ourselves away, and we did—a nearly voluntary willingness to end our careers, stop our lives, and have our liberties taken from us that for a while, at least, we accepted. When it surfaced that, in fact, the virus’s real dangers were to the elderly, that children really were not in any serious danger unless they had co-morbidities, that the vaccine being rushed into our arms did not, in fact stop transmission nor even prevent getting ill—and most importantly, that the government had silenced dissenting physicians, epidemiologists and scientists by co-opting their social media platforms and forcing those companies to “shadow ban” or “de-amplify” their voices, the government argued that these things were necessary in light of what we “didn’t know.”
Free speech champions like Noam Chomsky called for “unvaccinated people” to remove themselves from communities and said that obtaining food was “their problem.” Cancel Culture went into high gear, and de-platforming dissenting voices has become a tactic in attempts to win arguments. “Speaking out,” a right protected from the beginning by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, was smothered under a blanket of vitriol and then self-censoring, as people sought to have one narrative—the government’s narrative, however false and untrue, prevail.
None of these examples are exactly the same as what happened to Japanese Americans in 1942. They are, however, variations on a theme. The U.S. government, which is only as effective as the Constitution that created it, has violated that same Constitution throughout its own history, and in so doing, has placed tyrannical despotism in a place higher than individual liberty, which is at its core what the American experiment is about. There are risks in having liberty, and in being free to act as one chooses, because ultimately that same liberty means that we must accept the consequences for the choices we make. From a broad perspective, there is evidence that people are less willing to do that, and more willing to put government in control of decisions we should be making ourselves.
For me, and for those who have come to Bainbridge Island and seen the Japanese American Exclusion Memorial, though-perhaps a memory can be awakened. A person’s race, creed, medical status, belief—is their own, and is not automatically suspect because it doesn’t align with another’s. There will always be a delicate balance between liberty and security, but Ben Franklin’s aphorism must sometime come into play here: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Sure, he was talking about something else-how could it be otherwise? But the aphorism still rings true. We must not continue a heritage of choosing a “little security,” over essential liberty. That path is indeed the march to oblivion.
Nidoto Nai Yoni.
Onward.