Next week, islanders will recognize a painful portion of U.S. history with a ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of the forcible removal of Japanese American residents from Vashon.

The event, called Day of Exile and Imprisonment, will begin at noon Tuesday at Ober Park — three-quarters of a century after more than 120 Vashon residents were taken under armed guard to the north-end ferry, beginning a journey that ended several weeks later at Tule Lake concentration camp in California. The event will feature speakers, including Mary Matsuda Gruenewald, who will either read a passage from or have one of her children read from her book, “Looking Like the Enemy,” recounting the day of removal in 1942. Islander Barbara Steen, who was a teen at the time, will recall the pain she and others felt at losing friends from the island, and Miyoko Matsuda, Mary Matsuda’s sister-in-law, will read the names of people removed that day. There will also be a reading of some of Lonny Kaneko’s poems. Kaneko, an islander and writer who died in March, spent his early years at the Minidoka incarceration camp in Idaho and wrote about his experiences there.

Local historian Bruce Haulman helped organize the event and said the theme will be clear.

“The message will be that this should not happen again,” he said.

Haulman also recounted some of the local and national details of that time.

In 1942, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of Japanese Americans and others from specific areas of the United States. Weeks later, on March 30, Bainbridge Island was the first community to see its Japanese American residents removed and incarcerated — more than 200 people, a small fraction of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast who were sent to 10 different prison camps. Vashon, the 68th community, followed on May 16, after the more heavily populated areas had seen their residents removed, leaving those in the predominantly agricultural areas. At the time, Haulman said, Ober Park was the site of an old grade school, which had been turned into a community center called the Island Club. On May 14, a representative from each of the affected families had to register there, and two days later in the late morning, the families made their way to designated assembly locations on the island, allowed only two suitcases each. There, Haulman added, workers with the War Relocation Effort assigned each family a number and each person a letter and gave each person a tag with that information on it, which had to be fastened to their clothes and suitcases. Army soldiers were present, with rifles and fixed bayonets, and transported the Japanese American residents to the ferry dock, which they were forced to board, leaving much of their lives behind.

In Gruenewald’s book, she recalls that day — loaded into an Army truck and passing the Methodist church she knew well and going by the grade school and gymnasium, now the location of the Harbor School and VES Fields, where she had played with her friends. She also recalls the moment she was given her identification tags, with her family number, 19788.

“The tag was to dangle clearly in view wherever we were. Now I had to become just a number, counted and labeled as the enemy,” she wrote.

Islanders gathered at the ferry dock to see off their neighbors, many expressing sadness at the situation. At 12:30 p.m., the ferry pulled out, then traveled to Kingston and then on to downtown Seattle. There, they disembarked and boarded a nearby train, with cars that were dirty and foul smelling and with the windows tinted so the occupants could not see out.

“Our train rumbled toward an unknown destination, some place, somewhere, for some unknown length of time, and possibly to our death. Uncertainty was all we knew.”

The train carried them to the Pinedale Assembly Center, a temporary detention center in California, where they stayed for several weeks and then were sent on to Tule Lake, a concentration camp, also in California

In 1943, Haulman noted, all the residents of the camps were required to fill out a questionnaire to determine if they were loyal or disloyal to the United States. One of the several questions asked if the person was willing serve in the military, and the next question asked if they would be willing to renounce their Japanese citizenship. Both questions were problematic, Haulman added. People were being asked to fight in a war while their rights were being violated, and going to war would mean breaking up their families, leaving behind some members in the camps. Moreover, some of the first-generation immigrants had been denied U.S. citizenship, and if they denounced Japan, they would become stateless individuals, with no government to protect them.

“It put them in a lose-lose situation no matter what they said,” Haulman added.

The questionnaire led to the fragmentation of Vashon’s Japanese American community, he noted, as Tule Lake became a camp for those who had responded negatively to both of those questions. Vashon’s former residents had the choice to remain there or move to another camp; the result was they were spread to five camps.

“It really shattered the community,” he said.

In the end, one-third of Vashon’s former Japanese American residents returned after they were released from the camp.

The upcoming event is sponsored by several organizations, including the Vashon Japanese American Research Project, which Haulman helped create to recognize the contributions of the Japanese American community on Vashon and the losses its members endured. Haulman noted the importance of events such as this, which recognizes that the Japanese American residents were an accepted, important part of Vashon, and the government took action to have them forcibly removed.

That destroyed the Japanese American community on Vashon, and it changed the nature of the Vashon community, he said. “We do not want that to happen to happen to anybody — because we are all immigrants. It could happen to any of us.”

The Day of Imprisonment and Exile will be held at noon, Tuesday, May 16, at Ober Park and is expected to be 30 to 40 minutes long.