Works In Progress Category

Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial - Phase II - MERIT AWARD
Jones & Jones Architects and Landscape Architects

Project Description:
Inspired by the raw emotions captured in the photographs and of the first internees destined for concentration camps, the Exclusion Memorial is designed to evoke the feelings Japanese-Americans endured that day. In their gray, grim silence, the photographs are an especially moving record of the event.

When visitors undertake the "Memorial Walk," their shoes crunching along a gravel path flanking the curvilinear Memorial Wall that delineates the Exclusion Memorial experience, the designer's intent is that visitors will gain a deeper appreciation for the fear, isolation, confusion, shame, anger and loss that Americans of Japanese ancestry felt as they were rounded up and packed off to an unknown fate on a cold March day in 1942.

At the same time, the meditative nature of the walk, its serene setting along the Puget Sound and nearby Pritchard Park, and interpretive message of courage, dignity and perseverance will combine to honor the victims and inspire visitors to actively safeguard constitutional rights for all.

From a parking lot and bus turnaround on the 8-acre site, a series of (ADA compliant) boardwalks and paths meander through native forests and wetlands. The trails lead to the 276-foot-long "Story Wall," (a foot for every Japanese American living on Bainbridge Island at the start of the war) where visitors begin their walk in the footsteps of history.

While the Story Wall is a distinct division in the landscape, the Memorial Walk focuses on the distant perspective and the unknown. As they take in the internment story and each name inscribed in the Wall, visitors trace the steps made by the Islanders as they were herded down the old road by armed U.S. soldiers and taken aboard the awaiting ferry "Kehlokan" at the former Eagledale Ferry Landing. Visitors step off the land and onto a 150-foot-long "Remembrance Pier," a symbolic re-creation of the ferry dock: point of departure on a journey toward the unknown.

Today many community members are once again offering their support. Hours of volunteer labor—from ivy removal to professional services—have gone into the Memorial's planning and development.

Jury Comments:
It is difficult for a nation or community to commemorate its sites of shame, but it is essential for an honest reading of history. Executive Order 9066 in 1942 led to the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans (the vast majority full citizens) to be interned in camps located largely on desolate sites in the American West. The first community to be evacuated nationally was from Bainbridge Island, which had a thriving Japanese-American community. This memorial, dedicated to Nidoto Nai Yoni, Let it Not Happen Again, explores that experience. The design communicates a history that dishonored the nation, but to which the community responded to with courage and resilience, with layers of symbolism. It takes the form of a Story Wall culminating in a Remembrance Pier, with an Interpretive Center and Meeting Room. The design deftly tells the story in word and image, but also through its manipulations of a spatial sequence, as well as the choice of materials, with clear allusions to the Japanese craft of garden design and construction in the use of stone and wood.