On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the incarceration of all people of Japanese descent, including American citizens, from "designated military areas." Just a few weeks later, the U. S. Army began posting notices detailing the Civilian Exclusion Orders issued in cities along the West Coast. As instructed on these signs, incarcerees could take with them only what they could carry, including clothing, bedding, and toilet articles.

Pictured here is a poster describing the requirements of Exclusion Order No. 80, issued to King County, Washington. The order states that "all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien, will be evacuated from [King County] by 12 o'clock noon, P.W.T., Wednesday, May 20, 1942." Many incarcerees from Washington State were first sent to a "temporary assembly center" established in Puyallup euphemistically named "Camp Harmony" before being taken to concentration camps in Idaho and California. By the war's end in 1945, more than 13,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans from Washington State had been incarcerated in camps across the western United States.

Caption information source: "Camp Harmony (Puyallup Assembly Center), 1942," by Louis Fiset, HistoryLink.org Essay 8748.