Japanese intern camps

Barabara ni naru

Civilian Exclusion Order No. 79

Effective Friday 22 May 1942

On this fateful day the evacuation of 100,000(+) Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens during World War II were forced into incarceration (internment compounds). These compounds were placed inland throughout the Western

United States. The Japanese peoples of the greater Seattle and Puget Sound areas were forced to leave their homes, schools, temples (and churches), and shut down family businesses in Seattle’s Nihonmachi (Japantown) community area.

In the basement of the “Panama Hotel”, at the corner of sixth and main street, a time capsule of eight days of diaspora that scattered Japanese American

Heritage exsists. Because the Federal government acting upon President Roosevelt’s signed Executive Order 9066, employed agencies including the FBI and the Army, giving those Japanese peoples only eight days to settle their personal affairs while processing them for wholesale evacuation from Seattle’s Nihonmachi community, and forcing their culture into internal exile.

The internees were allowed to take only what they could carry with them.

All other items were to be discarded or left behind, such as the many personal items placed into suitcases and trunks found in the basement of the “Panama Hotel. In that darkened basement room, an accidental time capsule, can be seen worn suitcases and trunks adorned with travel tags from Tokyo or Kobe, along with stacks of other household belongings left behind 57 years ago when the American government incarcerated its own Seattle citizens and shipped them via truck, bus, and train to internment compounds like Idaho’s Minidoka and yet closer to Seattle was the Puyallup Assembly Center.

More than, 7,000 Japanese spent the spring and summer of in the Puyallup Assembly

Center, an internment camp, located on the Washington State fair grounds.

They were greeted by barded wire and armed guards and placed into bad housing.

The whole fair grounds area was to house 7,000 (+) . Living in every space around the race track and under the grandstands. Japanese men were immediately employed to build and set up further livingquarters, mess halls, and administrative buildings.

The living quarters were comprised of barracks that were 15 by forty feet buildings and each divided into 6 rooms, each room was 20 square feet. Each room would house a Japanese family. Euphemistically called “apartments” the furnishing consisted of army cots, family personal items and suitcases, one window and one light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

The apartment walls gave no privacy for they did not reach the ceiling.