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Japanese American Memorial site receives official nat'l park status Copyright 2007 - Bainbridge Buzz Thursday, 08 February 2007
The U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill this week authored by Bainbridge resident U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) that would give national park status to the Pritchard Park site on Bainbridge Island , from which the first Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps during World War II. "Congress took a strong stand by making the Nidoto Nai Yoni Memorial part of our national heritage - let it not happen again," said Inslee on Tuesday. "This victory has been a long time coming. I've been pushing this for years, but more importantly, my constituents - survivors, their families and friends - have been waiting for decades.
On March 30, 1942, 227 Japanese-American residents on Bainbridge were forcibly removed from their homes under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 and Civilian Exclusion Order No. 1. They were assembled at the now defunct Eagledale Ferry Dock on the island near Seattle and transported to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California . In 1943, most were transferred to the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho , and were among the last internees to return home at the conclusion of the war. Inslee's bill, the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Monument Act, H.R. 161, would make the former Eagledale Ferry Dock and a memorial currently being constructed there a satellite site of the Minidoka Internment National Monument in Jerome County, Idaho. The legislation is cosponsored by U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), whose district includes the existing monument in Idaho , one of two U.S. internment camps that now has national-park designation. They introduced the first version of their bill in July 2006 and re-filed it in the House on the first day of the 110th Congress, Jan. 4, 2007.

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