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Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community
Fumiko Hayashida: The Woman Behind the Symbol

Produced by Stourwater Pictures in association with the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community.

In 1942, two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the relocation of 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast in order to incarcerate them in isolated and desolate concentration camps. The government’s justification was to protect the country against espionage and sabotage by Japanese Americans. Those rounded up included everyone who had at least 1/16th of Japanese heritage—from newborn babies, young children and orphans, to the elderly and the infirm. They were interned between 1942-1945 in ten states from Idaho to Arkansas that were surrounded by barbed wire and soldiers with machine guns facing inward.

Exclusion Order No. 1, authorizing the first relocation, targeted the Japanese Americans living on Bainbridge Island, Washington. One of them was 31-year-old Fumiko Hayashida, a pregnant mother of two. She was one of 227 members of her community who, dressed in their best clothes, assembled at the Eagledale ferry landing on March 30th, 1942. As they waited to be taken off the Island by armed military escorts, Fumiko, holding her 13 month old daughter Natalie Kayo, was photographed by a Seattle Post-Intelligencer photographer. The photograph has since become a lasting iconic symbol of the internment experience.

Fumiko Hayashida's story reflects the effect of a great historical injustice on the lives and dreams of many immigrant farming families in the early 1900s, and how the futures of an entire ethnic community were changed by that experience. Families suffered loss of property, hardship, and shame because they looked like the enemy. Often separated from their husbands, in other camps or away fighting to defend the country that had imprisoned their families, the mothers and grandmothers in the Camps maintained the community.

More information:

Visit the BIJAC website for additional information on the history of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American community. For further information on the entire internment experience visit Densho.