Mukai Farm & Garden will mark the 80th Day of Exile with special guests to honor the Japanese-American families of Vashon Island who were forcibly removed from their homes during World War II. This event will be held from 1 to 2 p.m. Sunday, May 15.

On May 16, 1942, armed soldiers forced 111 Japanese-American residents of Vashon-Maury Island onto trucks outside Ober Park to be transported to detention camps in Pinedale, California. Only about a third of the population of Vashon who were forcibly removed returned.

Their eviction came after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and incarceration of all Japanese Americans in the West Coast Exclusion Zone.

Visitors to the commemorative event will be invited to take and hold tags with the names of those who were banished on that day.

Rita Brogan, president of the Mukai Farm & Garden Board, will give a welcome message, and Paula Wong and Abbott Koshin Cain of the Puget Sound Zen Center will lead the ringing of a temple bell for each displaced family, as well as offer a blessing.

Participants will also have the opportunity to preview a display under development in a partnership between the Vashon Island School District, the Vashon-Maury Heritage Museum and Mukai that commemorates the 1932 gift by Vashon’s Japanese community of 100 cherry trees to express their appreciation for the education of their children.

Only three of the original trees remain today, and the Vashon Fruit Club is now propagating replacement trees grafted from the 90-year-old original trees. The exhibit will include the names of all youth who were evacuated in 1942.

At the ceremony, the Friends of Mukai, a non-profit dedicated to the operation of the Mukai Farm & Garden, will unveil a new piece of art created by Lauren Iida, a Seattle-based artist who has exhibited works throughout the Pacific Northwest, to recognize the multigenerational impact on families of those interned.

Iida just finished an artist-in-residence program at Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project, a Seattle-based nonprofit with an aim is to “to preserve and share history of the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans to promote equity and justice today.”

Iida uses her Japanese American ancestors’ pre-World War II household photographs as a reference for her work.

“Having been robbed of my cultural heritage by the unjust incarceration of my ancestors, and the subsequent lack of education they offered me as I child, I had had to turn to historical artifacts to learn about my own ethnic roots as an adult,” Iida remarked about the mural.

Throughout the summer, her artwork will be on display on the south wall of the Mukai fruit barreling plant. The artwork, part of a 30-foot-long public art project called “Memory Net,” uses intricate paper cutaways, a classic Japanese art technique, and was cut by hand from a single piece of paper.

For more information about the public art installation, visit bit.ly/3OaTuDP.