The Red Pines

Japanese-Americans in the Pacific Northwest

Imagine: hard-working Japanese-American community members forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to concentration camps simply because of their ancestry. This happened not all that long ago on a forested island near Seattle, Washington.

Early Japanese immigrants came to Bainbridge Island to cut and mill the great forests of the Pacific Northwest. Their children stayed to farm the land and were beloved members of this island community. But in 1942, shortly after The Battle of Pearl Harbor, wartime hysteria and racial prejudice led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to order people of Japanese ancestry to be detained in west coast Japanese Internment. Bainbridge Islanders were the first to go, due to their proximity to naval bases.

The Red Pines is the first-person story of those who grew up feeling "different" even in peacetime, experienced group incarceration, and slowly regained lives and livelihoods upon their return. The film sets the incarceration in the larger context of the struggles of Japanese pioneers from 1908 to the present day.

This story is particularly relevant now, as we watch political waves of anti-immigrant feeling and rhetoric surge through the news. The documentary is a reminder that we should learn from the past. "Nidoto Nai Yoni," - let it not happen again.