Image: Kenjiro Nomura. Camp Harmony/Puyallup, 1942. Watercolor on paper. Wing Luke Museum Collection.
To contextualize the impact that EO 9066 had on the local Japanese American community and its thriving Nihonmachi (Japantown) neighborhood in Seattle, you can view and learn from the Wing Luke Museum’s current exhibition, Side By Side: Nihonmachi Scenes by Tokita, Nomura, and Fujii.
This exhibit, on view through May 11, focuses on three Issei (first generation) Japanese immigrant painters, Kamekichi Tokita, Kenjiro Nomura and Takuichi Fujii, who lived in Seattle and painted the alleys, streets, storefronts, and houses of pre-WWII Japantown. Their paintings, along with photos and artifacts from Japanese American owned businesses in the area, bring to life a vibrant and busy Nihonmachi.
Juxtaposed to their success as American artists, this exhibit includes the diary of Takuichi Fujii, which consisted of more drawings, but this time, from within the camps where he was incarcerated during WWII, as well as this painting by Kenjiro Nomura, showing the barbed wire enclosure of the assembly center in Puyallup, ironically called "Camp Harmony."
DAY OF REMEMBRANCE EVENTS
Sunday, February 2-23
Wing Luke Museum & Various Locations
Day of Remembrance is observed on February 19 and marks the date in 1942 that President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This order authorized the forced removal of some 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry and their immigrant parents and grandparents (who were barred from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens) to be uprooted from the West Coast of the U.S. and into concentration camps.
At that time, Japanese American communities on the West Coast were accused of being a wartime security risk. However, in the 1970s, U.S. Congress appointed a commission to investigate whether the incarceration was justified.
In 1983, the commission concluded that the mass removal was due to “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” (quoted from the commission’s report Personal Justice Denied, Dec. 1982).
Each year, Day of Remembrance events are held throughout the month and throughout the country to educate about this breach of civil liberties and to show how its lessons are relevant now.