Where the Departure Deck ends, wartime exile began.
New interpretive artwork at the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial at Pritchard Park recalls the day in March 30, 1942, when 227 Bainbridge Islanders of Japanese descent, most American citizens, departed from this site for wartime exile. Their destination: concentration camps in Manzanar, Calif.
The works, by artists Anna Brones and Luc Revel, were inspired by photographic images taken on the exclusion day. An imposing mid-span gate is by Port Townsend craftsman John Buday of Port Townsend.
Oxidized steel figures depict the men, women and children carrying their scant belongings down the deck to a waiting ferry. Towering soldiers with bayonets in reverse-silhouette loom over the approach, while a pivoting steel plank underfoot evokes the clang of bars, of incarceration. Near the end of the deck, a lone “ghost figure” defined by negative space suggests absence and loss.
Subtle details like profiles of departing families, and the identification tags they wore, are cut into the figures left and right. The curved cuts of the families juxtaposes the rigidity and hard angles of the soldiers overhead.
“This is a physical departure, but we also hope it will also be an emotional departure, and a connection to the feelings that everyone felt at that time,” Clarence Moriwaki said at the September dedication ceremony. “They buried it – it was decades of silence because of the blame, guilt, shame, fear, anger …. Hopefully this allows all that to come out.”
The work’s most decentering feature may be its most subtle: the Departure Deck now ends at a low glass wall – fixed, but transparent – with steel footprints trailing away into the void of uncertainty, danger, fear.
“There’s no railing, there’s (a sense that) there’s nothing to protect you,” Moriwaki said. “There was nothing to protect them, either.”
Said Brones: “That’s the power of art in general, is to use different mediums to get people to feel something. That feeling elicits a sense of empathy, and becomes a bridge to learning and understanding what happened.”
BIJAEMA next plans an interpretive center at the site.
Also forthcoming: a documentary film on the interpretive artwork by island filmmaker Katie Jennings. The film was commissioned by BIJAEMA in partnership with the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation, with support from the City of Bainbridge Island’s Civic Improvement (LTAC) Fund.
Jennings followed Brones and Ravel through the design and fabrication process in the Vaughn, Wash., studio to the artworks’ installation at the memorial over the summer. With new footage from the dedication event, Jennings is now editing the film to completion.
“The artwork creates a feeling that needs no explanation,” Jennings said. “I hope the film is a window into the intention that informs its design.”
VISIT THE MEMORIAL: The Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial is at 4192 NE Eagle Harbor Drive on Bainbridge Island. The site is open daily and staffed by a National Parks Service Ranger. Information: info@bijaema.org.
