Sunday, May 19, 2024
Ober Park on Vashon Island
Event Starts: 2pm
Artist Talk: 2:30pm at Vashon Library
Several Vashon organizations will present a Day of Exile commemoration at 2 p.m. on Sunday, May 19, at Ober Park.
The Day of Exile commemorates May 16, 1942, when armed soldiers forced 111 Japanese American residents of the Vashon-Maury Island onto trucks outside Ober Park. They were ultimately scattered into seven of the nine West Coast concentration camps, which shattered the Vashon Japanese American community.
Only about a third of the population of Vashon who were forcibly removed returned.
Their eviction came after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and incarceration of persons of Japanese Americans in the West Coast Exclusion Zone.
The commemoration on May 19, presented by Mukai Farm & Garden, Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust, Vashon Heritage Museum, Vashon Library, Vashon Park District, Puget Sound Zen Center and 4Culture, will include an artist talk by Miya Sukune, and the announcement of a year-long campaign to install a permanent sculpture at Ober Park — the assembly site for the displacement and mass incarceration of the island’s Japanese American residents.
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