A Date That Will Live In Infamy

The Japanese bombs that sunk the U.S.S. West Virginia, U.S.S. Arizona, and pushed America into WWII also radically changed the lives of Japanese Americans living in the Puget Sound.

December 7, 1941, "a date that will live in infamy." These words will never be forgotten, not by a stunned America, or by those with a Japanese ancestry. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. This act based on ethnicity allowed the military to evade the constitutional safeguards of American citizens in the name of national defense. This order barred persons of Japanese ancestry who were living on the West Coast from living and working in certain locations. This traumatic upheaval resulted in 120,000 Japanese Americans being forced to leave their homes, business, schools, farms, jobs and in some cases family members, to be part of a mass evacuation and internment. Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens or legal permanent resident aliens, were kept in custody for up to four years, without due process of the law. They were forced to live in camps behind barbed wire and under surveillance of armed guards.

These camps were ramshackle assembly centers built on fairgrounds such as camp harmony located in Puyallup, Washington. They were known as concentration camps where they would be neglected.

The Japanese-American people became targets of stronger suspicion and abuse after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Some responded with sympathy for loyal Japanese citizens caught in the web of war.

Despite such demonstrations of loyalty, most local residents failed to protest plans to evacuate the Japanese.

Once there, they soon learned the poor food, lack of privacy and the first bitter taste of what war was going to be like as interns.

Council of churches made pleas for citizens to refrain from "prejudice and bitterness" against their Japanese neighbors.

In Washington state, nearly 13,000 people of Japanese descent ultimately were sent to detention centers. Most Seattleites ended up at camp Minidoka near Hunt, Idaho, while the majority of the western Washington interns went to Tule Lake in California.

There, life went on. Their situations were not like that of several hundred German prisoners under the dictator Adolf Hitler who were confined at Fort Lewis and Fort Lawton.

Not one of the Japanese detained was ever charged with espionage or any other crime.

More than 7,000 people spent their summers in the Puyallup assembly center where they lived in makeshift barracks divided into what was called "apartments". They