By August 1942, the United States Army was ready for the large scale removal of Japanese and Japanese Americans from Seattle, King County and the rest of western Washington State. The Puyallup Assembly Center, euphemistically named "Camp Harmony," was a processing facility at the Puyallup Fairgrounds and accommodated 8,000 people at a time. In the rush to process so many people, some family members were separated from one another and spent the war in different incarceration camps.

This photo, taken in August 1942, shows a crowd of people waving to friends and family members as they leave the Puyallup Assembly Center processing center by bus. From Camp Harmony, the incarcerees were sent to Minidoka and Manzanar concentration camps in Idaho and California, respectively. Minidoka and Manzanar were two of ten large camps operated by the War Relocation Authority in which Japanese Americans were incarcerated during WWII.