Fumiko Hayashida (1911-2014), was one of the first Japanese Americans to be incarcerated during World War II. Her parents were berry farmers on Bainbridge Island, and she married another berry farmer, Saburo Hayashida. On March 30, 1942, 227 Bainbridge Island residents of Japanese descent, including Hayashida, her husband, and their two children, were forcibly removed from their homes. Hayashida and her family were incarcerated for a year at Manzanar before moving to Minidoka to be closer to relatives and friends. After the war, Hayashida and her family were able to return to their farm on Bainbridge but moved to Seattle in 1951 after financial difficulty. In 2006, Hayashida testified in favor of a proposed memorial for Japanese American incarcerees on Bainbridge Island before a U.S. congressional committee. The Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial was opened in 2011.

This image shows Hayashida at her home on Beacon Hill in 2001. The photograph was taken for a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article about the US Census and how it has changed since first conducted in 1790. Reviewing her family's record in the 1920 census, Fumiko was surprised to learn that, inexplicably, only her mother and two siblings were counted but she, her father, and three of her sisters were not.

Caption information source: "Obituary: Fumiko Hayashida, 103, the face of WWII internment," by Elaine Woo, Seattle Times, November 21, 2014, retrieved from https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/obituary-fumiko-hayashida-103-the-face-of-wwii-internment/
Caption information source: "U.S. Census is the bare bones of history - buried as deep as 1790 are the skeletons of countless stories," by Lisa Stiffler, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 21, 2001, page A1.
Caption information source: "From Bainbridge Island to barbed-wire camp - She tells Congress of need for internment memorial," by Charles Pope, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 29, 2006, page A1.