"Within the story for the world is the story for an island.When “Snow Falling On Cedars” premieres at Bainbridge Cinemas Sunday, history will fold in on itself, as this community looks back to a day when one in every 17 islanders was forcibly removed by order of the United States government.It was on March 30, 1942, that Bainbridge Island’s Japanese American residents left their homes under armed military escort. Taking what few necessary belongings they could carry, they made their way to a waiting ferry in Eagledale, to begin a two-day trip by rail and bus to the Manzanar concentration camp in the high desert north of Los Angeles. “I thought that, well, we’ll only be gone about six months,” recalls Kay Nakao, of an odyssey that would last 3-1/2 years.“Snow” author and island resident David Guterson is quick to point out that his story is not about Bainbridge – the fictional San Piedro Island in the San Juans is his milieu, a different story his to tell.But for many Bainbridge residents, the most resonant scene will be that departure from the Eagledale dock.“For islanders, I think that’s what makes them think (the story is) about them,” Guterson says.Fiction, Guterson believes, needs “an overarching sweep beyond (the characters’) ability to control it. I realized, in looking at the history of the island, that we have just those sorts of things.”For the 274 Japanese Americans for whom Bainbridge Island was home in 1942, the internment was all of that.This account, from a handful of recent interviews and a glance back through the Review’s morgue books and other newly available documents, is an episodic look at what happened just before the ferry left the dock, and after.* * * * *Issued in March 24, 1942, Civilian Exclusion Order No. 1 gave Bainbridge Island’s Japanese Americans one week to dispose of their belongings and prepare for evacuation.The majority of those affected, as American-born, second-generation Nisei, were United States citizens. No matter: The bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by imperial Japan had touched off a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment that was soon codified.Islander Kay Nakao, then 22, lived on the family farm where the old Commodore school building now sits. She recalls her father ordering the family to burn its Japanese heirlooms to demonstrate the severing of ties with its own heritage.“Everything we didn’t burn,” Nakao says, “went down the outhouse.”Such scenes played out around the island, as homes and strawberry fields were closed up and entrusted to the care of friends and neighbors.A few days before departing for the Manzanar concentration camp, with the community weighed down by the anxiety of war and imminent separation, then-18-year-old Paul Ohtaki experienced what he today describes as “the kind of thing that makes Bainbridge Island a little special.”On March 27, in the season’s first league contest but what would be the final game in Spartan uniforms for the island’s young Nisei, Bainbridge High School baseball coach Walt Miller put every Japanese American into the starting lineup. Despite the team’s collective will to win together one last time, they fell to North Kitsap by a count of 15-2.“I think we lost, I was going to say, 100 to nothing,” recalls centerfielder Ohtaki, who batted leadoff, with a laugh. “I know I didn’t get a hit that day.”* * * * *They gathered at the Eagledale dock in late morning, but their numbers had been thinned. Many men had already been removed in a sweep by federal operatives looking for “subversives,” and would not rejoin their families for months.But the courtesy of the Army detachment in that hour would later be remarked upon by many. As reported in the April 2, 1942, Review, one soldier gave this account:“Why, these people (the Japanese Americans) have completely won us over. Do you know what they did the first day we arrived? They sent four or five of of their young people down to help us get acquainted with the island. They actually helped our men post the evacuation notices. Having to move these people is one of the toughest thing this outfit has ever been told to do.”“There was lots of sadness,” recounts Nakao. “They didn’t tell us where we were going, so we felt like we were hanging up in the air.”* * * * *Paul Ohtaki was a janitor for the Bainbridge Review and owners Walt and Milly Woodward. The newspaper, located in those days on Pleasant Beach, went to press Thursday; each Friday, Ohtaki showed up to help straighten the mess that inevitably resulted. A few days before Ohtaki was to depart for Manzanar and to his great surprise, Woodward conscripted him as correspondent, charged with relaying accounts of life in the camp.“He just told me, ‘get the news and send it back,’” Ohtaki recalls. “Suddenly, I had the responsibility of writing these columns.”* * * * *The first thing everybody noticed about Manzanar was the heat.Kay Nakao recalls looking out from the bus window to see men at work on rooftops, their shirtless bodies bronzed by the desert sun, and being glad this wasn’t her destination. It was.In fact, the Manzanar camp, still under construction when the internees arrived, was a dramatic change in both climate and comfort from their island homes. In one of the first the letters from the camp to be published in the Review on April 9, 1942, the Igatani family told readers:“We are living in barracks that are divided into four large rooms. Each room has room for 10 army cots, only we are allowed one room per family. We eat in a large mess hall and we get enough to eat, even if they sling it at us...“The ground is very dry and dusty. There ‘just ain’t no valley,’ the way I figure, and the only water I’ve seen comes out of a faucet.”With Ohtaki as its eyes and ears, the Review continued to cover the Japanese American community as though it hadn’t left the island. In a letter to his correspondent dated April 24, 1942, Woodward wrote:“Dear Lazybones:“...You’ll be doing your own people a great harm if you quit sending us all the local gossip from down there. Here’s what I mean. When this mess is all over, you people are going to want to come home. You’ll be welcomed with open arms by the vast majority of us. But those who don’t or won’t understand will not feel that way. They may actually try to stir up trouble.“But they’ll have a hell of a hard time of it if, in the meantime, you’ve been creating the impression every week that the Japanese are just down there for a short while...and still consider the island their home.”Ohtaki responded with weekly dispatches for the next year. Thus did Review readers know of minor outbreaks of measles and chicken pox that waylaid several youths after their arrival; of the funeral of Nobuzo Koura in May; that Sa Koura (later Nakata) placed third in the Miss Manzanar beauty pageant in July; and that Gerald Nakata finished fifth in batting in the camp baseball league with a .413 average.When the BHS senior class members graduated in absentia, their names were included in the Review; their island classmates mailed down an autographed yearbook to the delight of their friends.“I realized it was very important that I get these articles (to the Review),” Ohtaki says today.Nakao, who kept busy as a file clerk and typist at the camp hospital, recalls a buzz of activity in recreation halls, dances, canteens. That is not to say that the accommodations were pleasant.“You know, when you have 10,000 people in one square mile, that’s crowded,” she recalls. “People were lining up for everything – the mess hall, the shower, the latrine. I knew people who got up at 2 a.m. to take showers.”Around it all was a barbed wire fence, towering guard posts, and machine guns with their barrels pointed inward.Their community, Nakao and Ohtaki say, was buoyed by a cultural respect for the authority of the United States government, and the ubiquitous phrase shikata ga nai – “it can’t be helped.”“I knew someday I was going back to Bainbridge Island,” Nakao says. “Anytime I was bitter – ‘back to Bainbridge Island, back to Bainbridge Island.’”* ** * *While the war raged on many fronts around the globe, the battle for moral high ground played out in the opinion and letters columns of the Review. The Woodwards had, from their “War Extra” of Monday, Dec. 8, 1941, staked out the position for which they are honored to this day.“These Japanese Americans of ours haven’t bombed anybody,” Walt Woodward wrote in his first post-Pearl Harbor editorial. “In the past, they have given every indication of loyalty to this nation. They have sent – along with our boys, their own sons – six of them – into the United States Army. They, in this edition, are quoted as pledging anew their loyalty.”It was a stand unique among West Coast newspapers, and one the Woodwards restated repeatedly throughout the war – that the internment was a violation of the constitutional rights of American citizens of Japanese ancestry.The debate was rekindled as the war drew to a close, and islanders began to discuss how – or indeed, if – their former neighbors would be greeted on their return.“My boy is going to fight the Japs pretty quick,” one islander said in an anti-Japanese community meeting reported in the Dec. 1, 1944 Review. “If he comes back maimed, I don’t know how I’ll react. I don’t think I’d want to harm any island Japs. But I don’t think I’d want to see them every day.”Others were far more hostile: “They’re humans, undoubtedly, but they’re a different animal. They’re treacherous.” But others offered words of support for the Japanese, and the Review. Said one:“People who are willing to stick their necks out are likely to get stepped on, but perhaps it is worthwhile to be a ‘stepping stone’ if it leads to a higher concept of democracy and freedom.”“We did what we did because it was a violation of (the Japanese Americans’) constitutional rights, of everyone’s rights,” Woodward told San Francisco’s Hokubei-Mainichi publication in 1986. “Since then, we have come to love them very much...but we did it because it was a violation of their rights.”All now credit the Woodwards with fostering an environment of safety for those who returned.“Walt really paved the way – I don’t think anybody had a problem returning,” says Nakao. “I was kind of afraid for a while, looking over my shoulder. (But) I think in my heart, I knew nothing drastic was going to happen.”“They deserve the highest honor,” Ohtaki says.* * * * *The internment did not end at Manzanar. By early 1943, most island internees were moved to a similar camp, Minidoka, in Idaho. Some were soon allowed to leave and move east to pursue farming, education and other opportunities. Many of the Bainbridge Island contingent enlisted in the military and served in the European Theater. Three islanders – Art Koura, Billy Okazaki and Mo Nakata – served with the 442nd Regimental Battalion of Japanese American soldiers, rescuing a Texas unit lost in hostile territory, in France in 1944. Each report from the Japanesse community was carried in the pages of the Review.Ohtaki himself decamped for the Midwest, enlisting in the Army in 1944 and ending up in military intelligence in the Pacific Theater.* * * * *In early 1945, sensing that the executive order would be struck down by the courts, the United States government announced that Japanese Americans were allowed to return to their West Coast homes.About half of the Bainbridge families, mostly those who had owned no land, chose not to return, staying in California or Idaho or relocating to the Midwest. The Takemoto family returned in April 1945, to find their Rolling Bay home damaged and possessions gone, their strawberry farm overgrown with weeds. Frank Kitamoto Jr., his parents and sister returned to their Fletcher Bay home in July, to no ceremony, but also to none of the overt hostility that marred other communities.Kitamoto, who left as an infant and returned as a 6-year-old, recalls marveling at how green the island was compared to what he had known for the past three years. His recollections are largely those of his father, Frank Kitamoto Sr.“Some people would say ‘hi, Frank, good to see you back,’” Kitamoto says. “Others would turn their backs. It was just mixed feelings.”* * * * *Time takes its own toll on the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community, as members pass on and the stories of wartime Bainbridge fade from the collective island consciousness.Kitamoto, Nakao and others look back with candor and no resentment. They will discuss the internment at a community forum Sunday.“For a while, I thought, let well enough alone,” Kay Nakao says. “Then I decided if we don’t teach and bring this out in the open, it could happen again – and I don’t want to see it happen again.”“It’s all behind us,” she adds. “There’s no bitterness. We do what we can for the community and move on.”Of those wartime families, many legacies endure. Kitamoto, president of the community association for most of the past two decades, has a dental practice on High School Road.Akio Suyematsu, whose family also was interned at Manzanar, continues to work the earth at the island’s last significant farm, on Day Road East. Bainbridge Gardens thrives under the care of Junkoh Harui, who with his family avoided internment by moving east of the Cascades and out of what would become the restricted West Coast area. The Nakatas continue as highly successful grocers with Town and Country and other markets.Art Koura, Bainbridge Island’s resident World War II hero, and brother Nob still live on Bay Hill Road, not far from the road that bears their family name. Other families – Moritani, Hayashida and others – also remain.Paul Ohtaki lives in the Bay Area, while the Woodwards have a school named after them. Milly died in 1989; Walt continued as a columnist for the Review until 1997, and now is a resident of Island Health and Rehabilitation Center.* * * * *Walt Woodward wrote again of those days many times over the years, perhaps most poignantly in a column that appeared in the Seattle Times on Dec. 7, 1969. In it, Woodward recalled that final baseball game of March 1942.“Yes, they went away smiling,” Woodward wrote, “in the tradition of their fathers. But others did not smile. I never, never will forget the incident I witnessed in a deserted corridor of Bainbridge High School. I had been there to cover a baseball game, the last one before the evacuation and one which the team had promised to win for the fellows who were going away. It was a promise they could not keep; Bainbridge lost.“Here, in the dejection of defeat, the Bainbridge Nisei catcher, still wearing his bulky chest protector and dragging his mitt and mask, came clumping down the corridor to the locker room. Suddenly, a beautiful blonde appeared and ran after him. Her face glistening with tears, she caught up to him, threw her arms around his sweaty bulk, kissed him, and ran off sobbing.”* * * * *“Snow Falling On Cedars,” directed by Scott Hicks and based on a novel by David Guterson, makes an exclusive three-showing premiere at Bainbridge Cinemas Dec. 5. Tickets for the noon and 6 p.m. screenings are still available at the box office. Proceeds benefit multicultural education on Bainbridge Island. Information: 842-2773."

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