80 years ago today, 272 Japanese Americans living in Bainbridge Island were forced into internment camps. They were the first people subjected to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
On the island, it meant the mass forced removal on March 30, 1942, of 227 Japanese Americans. Days earlier, more than four dozen other Japanese Americans had been arrested by the FBI; or had moved to Moses Lake, which was not in an exclusion zone; or were serving in the military. Two-thirds of those removed were U.S. citizens.