At that time, I was a child and I had no idea that there was a war.

The Army brought posters to downtown Winslow on Bainbridge Island, calling all Japanese persons, both "alien and non-alien," to report for removal.

You were going to be sent somewhere in the United States, but we didn't know where it was going to be.

Mama said it'll be like a vacation.

We're going on vacation.

What?

Yay!

This would be the last time I would see my home for three years.

I remember running.

After what happened last December, father told me to run home after school.

No dilly-dallying.

Father says that this will be our last night at home.

[SHATTERING THUD] [SHATTERING THUD] Oh, no.

I remember very, very clearly, waking up at night listening to this cracking noise.

And I thought, what in the world?

I see my dad standing there and he has a real nice record collection, and he was breaking each record, and I could just see the tears coming down his face.

We only could take so many pounds, and you had to take clothing and whatever tools that you were gonna need.

You didn't know where you were going Nobody knew other than pack up and go.

Exclusion Order Number One gave individuals six days to prepare to leave.

And that meant that property, homes, belongings, jobs, everything had to be taken care of in those six days.

And the instructions further were that you could only bring what you could carry.

Filipino men worked for my grandparents, and then they continued to work for my parents.

And they actually were part of our family.

This is Felix.

And this is Elaulio holding my baby sister, Jane.

When we were to be taken away, my parents arranged for Felix and his cousin to move into our house and take care of the property while we were gone.

My father and his friend owned a fuel business.

They had lots of trucks and equipment and they had to sell that.

And so they got very little for it.

Two thirds of the Japanese were American citizens.

We had our liberty, our freedom, our freedom of choice taken away.

There are things that the country can do to citizens of a foreign country that were at war with.

But even then, every single person in the United States is entitled to due process.

But particularly with regard to American citizens, we do have rights.

Gordon Hirabayashi was a 24 year old student at the University of Washington when he decided that he needed to violate the curfew and the exclusion orders as acts of civil disobedience.

He was convicted at trial and then appealed his case to the Supreme Court.

A couple of things that are really important about Gordon Hirabayashi's case number one, the court said if the government says that its actions are necessary to protect the country, the court has very little if, no role.

It's a frightening proposition.

The government argued and the court agreed, that there was insufficient time to separate those who were loyal from those who might be disloyal and so they had to take action without trying to sift the loyal from the disloyal.

The court agreed that Japanese Americans had certain racial characteristics that made them prone to disloyalty, that Japanese were unassimilated, lived in tight-knit groups.

Japanese American children went to Japanese language schools and again used these things, questionable sociological stereotypes, to say that this showed that Japanese Americans could be influenced by the government of Japan.

Bainbridge, we talk about it being the first location where the Japanese American community was forcibly removed, but it's really a more complex story.

They were expecting to move the entire Japanese in the exclusion zone of the United States to concentration camps, and there were no such concentration camps at the time, so they had to build them.

We think that to move 110,000 people, they had to start small, and Bainbridge Island, at the time, only had a population of 276 Japanese Americans.

When we got to the ferry dock, I saw the entire Japanese population there.

I saw my cousins and my aunties were there, real soldiers with real guns, and I had no idea what was happening in the world.

Everything went so fast.

Hurry, hurry, hurry.

You know, you got to get on the bus and make sure you have your bags.

I'll never forget my principal.

She had the whole school, the staff, the children, everybody standing on the road and to see us and say goodbye.

And she was crying.

It didn't really dawn on us children what was going on in the world.

We were living in like, a little cocoon, protected by our being young, until the day we had to pack up and leave.