On February 19, 1942, shortly after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and United States entry into WWII, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, calling for the exclusion of all civilians of Japanese descent from "designated military areas." In March 1942 Japanese Americans living on Bainbridge Island were the first in the country to be taken from their homes by the federal government because they were considered a threat to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard on the Kitsap Peninsula. More than 9,000 Japanese and Japanese American people living in the Pacific Northwest were forced into incarceration, most at the isolated Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho, until 1945.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans were required to surrender various items, such as short-wave radios and cameras, to the government. This image shows a room in which the confiscated property was kept. After the war as Japanese Americans returned to Seattle, they began reclaiming their property. As of November 1945, the official in charge of the confiscated property said there were still around 7,000 items unclaimed. They included firearms, knives, radios, cameras, flashlights, and Japanese swords. Many of the items were never reclaimed.

Caption information source: “Japs Moving Back to Coast,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 4, 1945, page 9.
Original title - Property room, Seattle
Written on original envelope: Japanese-Seattle-property, (reclaiming)*
Written on negative: Arline Ward, J.S. Denise