Memorial Proposed For Bainbridge Island Internment Camps
63 years ago, 227 Japanese Americans were forced off Bainbridge Island and placed in internment camps. They were the very first, of the 120,000 Americans forced from their homes after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.
Now, the National Park Service is in town to talk about a proposal to make an 8-acre stretch of the island a national historic memorial.
"If this is accomplished, I think it would be great," says Frank Kitamoto.
Kitamoto, a dentist, was just 2 years old when he and his family were forced from their home on Bainbridge Island and sent to an internment camp in California.
The memorial would be part of a proposed city park on the south side of Eagle Harbor. The memorial would include a huge story wall, chronicling those painful years.
Kitamoto could write a book about those years.
"When I go talk to the schools, one of the fourth graders asks me why I had to go to concentration camp and I said they thought we might be spies, and she looked at me and said 'how could you be a spy if you were only 2 and 1/2?' "
No final decision is expected until the fall. The National Park Service is also looking at the possibility of having the memorial in Idaho at the site of the internment camps.