Seventy-four years ago this week more than 120 Japanese-American islanders were forced to leave Vashon, bound for Seattle and then on to Tule Lake Concentration Camp in California later that summer.

Among those leaving their island lives behind were family members of a man who is now assisting the Japanese Presence Project, a local group working to share the contributions of the Japanese-American members of the Vashon community and the hardships they endured.

David Perley, a Los Angeles dentist, traces his roots back to Vashon, where his great-grandfather, Hatsuguma Tanaka, from Kumamoto, Japan, and great- grandmother, Momoye Tateyana — who had come from Japan as a picture bride — settled in 1916 with their two young daughters.

Perley’s grandmother, Pauline, was 3 years old at the time of the Tanakas’ move to the island from Seattle, and he says the memories she wrote down late in her life included those of being a young child on Vashon: living in a five-room house with an attached Japanese bath, her family heading to Seattle once a week to sell their produce, Japanese young people gathering to roast hot dogs and marshmallows over bonfires and playing basketball against other Buddhist youth teams in Seattle.

As a young woman, in 1934, she married a man named Daniel Sakahara; the couple first settled in Tacoma and then Puyallup.

Perley tells a story of a family active in their communities and dedicated to this country.

“As of now there really is no written record of what my family’s life and accomplishments were on Vashon Island and the internment camps,” he wrote in a recent email. “I would like for them to be remembered as being very pro-America.”

Perley’s grandfather Dan Sakahara was the manager of the Tacoma Lettuce Association, he said, and served as president of the Puyallup Japanese American Citizens League, where he assisted Japanese immigrants in getting drivers’ licenses and helped put on carnivals so that non-Japanese people could become more familiar with Japanese culture.

By 1940, Perley said, his grandparents had two young daughters of their own — Arlene, who later changed her name to Suzanne, and Lois, his mother — and the family moved back to Vashon to care for the Tanakas.

On Vashon, the Sakaharas leased 69 acres of land adjacent to the Mukai strawberry processing plant. There, Perley said, his grandmother recalled that they grew strawberries, gooseberries and fruit trees.

“We made a good living,” she wrote. “We did all right.”

Island historian Bruce Haulman, one of the founders of the Japanese Presence Project, noted that at nearly 70 acres, the Sakahara farm was one of the largest on the island, as most were 10 to 12 acres. Their farm, he said, is now part of the Mukai Circle neighborhood and Island Center Forest.

In 1940, the family life changed, as Perley’s great grandfather died, and his great grandmother remarried in 1941 and moved to Yakima. The Sakaharas remained on the island, he said, and were active in the Vashon community. His grandfather became the president of the Vashon Japanese Club and helped hire a teacher to teach Japanese to the young Japanese children. Additionally, records show that his grandparents were among the first to be become involved with Vashon’s civil defense organization, even donating their truck to be used as an ambulance.

But on Dec. 7, 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the lives of countless people changed, including the Japanese-Americans on Vashon.

“We heard it over the radio,” Pauline Sakahara said in an audio recording. “The head people of the island came and shook hands with my husband. ‘Sorry this happened, but if you don’t mind, we will take care of our people, and you take care of your people.’ That is how it started.”

In about two weeks’ time, she added, the sheriff and FBI agents came and ransacked their home because her husband’s brother was considered an “alien” and was living with them.

“We were told we should burn, throw or tear up everything Japanese, like records. It could be very innocent, but it could tie you to being a criminal. So that is what we did,” she wrote.

In February of 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which resulted in 120,000 Japanese Americans being sent to internment camps, and in the coming months, Haulman said, the federal government systematically removed the Japanese Americans up and down the West Coast. From Washington’s islands, Haulman noted, the Japanese Americans on Bainbridge Island were the first to be removed and were initially taken to the Puyallup Fairgrounds, where many families lived in animals stalls.

One week after they were given notice they had to leave, on May 16, 1942, all Vashon’s Japanese-American residents gathered at what is now Ober Park and were taken to the ferry dock in Army trucks under armed guard. There they boarded a specially designated ferry to Seattle and were its sole passengers.

“Two hundred islanders showed up to say good-bye,” Haulman said. “It wrenched a community apart. There were friendships broken asunder.”

Perley’s grandmother captured that time in her recollections.

“They took us on a ferry, and then we went off the dock [in Seattle]. We were marched in fours. You could see people on the bridge looking down at us as if we were criminals,” she wrote.

At the King Street Station, they boarded a train, and for two days traveled with the curtains down and with little food, Haulman said.

“My daughter would say over and over, ‘Let’s go home, Mother,'” Pauline Sakahara said.

After their journey, they arrived at the Pinedale Assembly Center in the California desert and were sent on to Tule Lake on July 21, where they remained until 1944.

At the camp, Perley said, his grandfather continued to be a community leader, serving as a councilman, block leader, chairman of the Tule Lake chapter of the Red Cross and temporary chairman of the Parent Teacher Association.

Before they left Vashon, the Sakaharas were among several island farmers who leased their businesses to Finn Shattuck, who had served as the island deputy sheriff, but they did not receive compensation from him, Perley said. Letters he has from that time indicate that Daniel Sakahara wrote Shattuck repeatedly, requesting the money they and others were owed, but it was not forthcoming.

Weighing in on this element of Vashon history, Haulman said he believes Shattuck originally had good intentions, but then grew overwhelmed with the work of tending to 11 farms and did not know how to right the situation.

“My best conjecture is I think he and they signed the contracts in good faith,” he added.

He noted that when members of the Japanese Presence Project are able to take another trip to the National Archives, they will be able to learn more about what transpired between the farmers and Shattuck from the records there.

In 1944, the Sakahara family was able to leave Tule Lake, but families were not allowed simply to leave, Haulman said. They had to have somewhere to go and until 1945 were not allowed back to the West Coast. The family left Tule Lake Concentration Camp in March of 1944, Perley said, but Daniel Sakahara dropped his wife and daughters off at Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming with other family members while he secured work and a home. Pauline and Lois Sakahara were able to leave the camp three months later and join him to begin their new life in St. Louis, and Arlenes joined them later.

The Sakaharas did not consider coming back to Vashon, Perley noted. They had lost all their belongings except for what they each had been able to carry in two suitcases; they were aware a home on Vashon belonging to Japanese residents had been burned, and they knew some political leaders in Washington, including the governor, has spoken out about Japanese-American’s returning, so the created their future elsewhere.

“Vashon turned from a warm, loving home to a place where the no longer wanted to return,” Perley wrote recently. “I wonder how different their lives would have been if they were allowed to stay on Vashon.”