The story of how Bainbridge Review publishers Walt Woodward and Millie Woodward defended the civil rights of islanders of Japanese ancestry during World War II may be a familiar one.

Now the large events are rendered in detail in “It Was the Right Thing to Do!” The anthology of newspaper clippings, letters and compelling first-hand reports written was compiled by Paul Ohtaki, who was just 17 when he was “drafted” by Woodward to write a column from Manzanar, the California camp to which Bainbridge’s Japanese-American citizens were removed in 1942.

The anthology has been available in rough form for some time, but was recently bound and made available through the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum, the Bainbridge library, the Bainbridge High School library and Woodward Middle School.

The large, 231-page tome conveys the immediacy of the paper itself, comprised as it is of countless photocopies of news stories, editorials and and letters regarding the internment, in addition to personal correspondence. More recent material includes reflections on the internment up to the point of Woodward’s death in March 2001.

“I want to make sure the story is told,” said Ohtaki, now a resident of San Francisco, Calif. “I don’t want these young people not to know the history.”

Ohtaki was a Bainbridge High School student with a part-time job at the Woodwards’ paper when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He was among the islanders first removed when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 two months later excluding people of Japanese descent from “militarily sensitive” Pacific Coast areas.

Ohtaki’s book makes clear that, in addition to a finely calibrated moral compass, the Woodwards were possessed of both prescience and an ability to act on insight without hesitation.

The night before Ohtaki, and all other islanders of Japanese heritage were to leave for internment at a relocation center in Manzanar, Woodward hired him to send regular reports back to the local paper.

Ohtaki wasn’t sure he wanted the job.

“In fact I tried to refuse,” he recalls. “I wasn’t a good writer. I wasn’t that responsible.”

Woodward wasn’t having any of that; Japanese Americans might be removed, but they wouldn’t be forgotten.

A column from the camp featuring daily life was a sure antidote, Woodward figured, to the government’s move to demonize people who were friends and neighbors.

Remarkably, the newsman had not only instantly grasped the full context of events that were only just unfolding, but had also crafted a plan that would help reintegrate Japanese Americans into Bainbridge life – and Ohtaki was to play a key part in that scheme.

“…Report everything that is happening in the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community after you arrive at your destination,” Woodward wrote to Ohtaki in the camp. “Tell us all the gossip each week. Tell us what you are doing, are you asked to work, if so what kind and all the details, the number of hours, do you get paid, how much?, etc. See if you can find out what people are thinking, what they are planning to do with their farms next season. Tell us if anyone gets sick, injured or passes away.”

The scoop

Woodward kicked off his plan with a stunning scoop; Ohtaki reported on the very journey to Manzanar, handing the copy off to a soldier whom Woodward had contacted, who sent it by wire back to Bainbridge.

The Review published it the next day.

“He was really a newspaperman,” Ohtaki said of his employer. “He knew he had a deadline. The word (of our trip) got there before the last press run.”

But Ohtaki discovered that finding news to report each week “was not as easy as I thought.”

It wasn’t until he missed a few deadlines – and Woodward chewed him out – that Ohtaki began to understand that his writing might have a larger purpose:

“You’ll be welcomed back by the vast majority of us,” Woodward wrote to him, “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 and every year that the Japanese are down there for just a short while and that – by being in the Review every week – they still consider the Island as their home.”

Ohtaki took the assignment to heart.

“The thing was, he was taking a big interest in our welfare,” Ohtaki said. “I started to realize the significance a little bit. I think (the Woodwards) decided they’d take the leadership role to see that things didn’t get out of hand.”

The young man wandered the camp, gathering the daily incident he calls “everyday living in an American-style concentration camp.”

For the reader, there may be no better way to inhabit history than in the homely detail Ohtaki, and later correspondents Sada Omoto, Tony Koura and Sachiko Koura Nakata, sent to Woodward.

“I’d just kind of snoop, I’d talk to people,” Ohtaki said.

In reading the day to day accounts, one learns that 16 year-old Kenneth Nakata had chicken pox; that Masaki Nakata and Miyeko Nishi have been appointed to the Manzanar elementary school PTA; that Yakeo Yamashita wore a white satin gown and a fingertip veil when she wed Kenji Nagaishi.

Significant life cycle events – births, deaths and, as the war progressed, the enlistment of young men in the U.S. armed forces – were duly noted.

Ohtaki faithully forwarded the copy, as did his successors.

“I thought about the people back home, too,” he said. “I wondered what they were thinking.”

As the war wound down, in late 1944, the anti-Japanese bias of a minority of islanders surfaced, just as Woodward had predicted.

Suspicion generated rumors and innuendo.

“Sure enough that’s when all the fireworks began, when we were coming home,” Ohtaki said. “We heard ‘so and so was sending out messages helping the enemy.’ There were those who thought the Japanese farmers had laid out their strawberry plants with the rows pointing to (the naval base at) Bremerton.”

But after an initial meeting protesting the return of the Japanese Americans that drew a crowd of 300 – a meeting Woodward spoke out at and subsequently editorialized about – the movement soon died out.

In the years after the war, as the Woodwards’ bravery began to garner awards and kudos, Ohtaki was mildly uncomfortable, he says, to find himself conscripted into the history books.

He is quick to point out that his observations are not a definitive history of the period.

“There were 250 people (at Manzanar),” he said. “There were many points of view.”

In fact, after he moved to Minnesota in the 1950s, Ohtaki burned some of his correspondence with Woodward.

“I didn’t trust people,” he said, “Some people might make stories of it.”

But Ohtaki’s father Gyozo had preserved many letters his son had left behind. Now, Ohtaki is glad to create a lasting record of the era – and a tribute to the Woodwards.

“They could have had a more comfortable life if they had just not said anything,” he said. “But of course, that wasn’t Walt’s philosophy of running a paper.”