Fumiko Hayashida, among first Japanese-American internees, dies at 103

The woman's name was unknown, but the picture of her cradling a sleeping baby girl came to symbolize a troubling chapter in American history.

Fumiko Hayashida, a 31-year-old Japanese-American from Bainbridge Island, Washington, was photographed in March 1942 waiting for a ferry to the mainland, the first leg of a journey that would end behind barbed wire. She and her daughter were labeled like suitcases, with large ID tags hanging from strings tied to their bulky coats.

Hayashida was among the first group of Japanese-Americans forced from their homes by federal authorities and shipped to distant internment camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She was unaware that her exile had been recorded by a photographer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper.

Decades later, the image of the mother and her child was widely circulated in campaigns pressing the federal government to make amends for the wartime incarceration of more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans on the West Coast. In her 80s, Hayashida stepped into the spotlight to tell the story behind the photo, which was reproduced on fliers and shown in traveling Smithsonian exhibitions.

"She was nobody and yet she was everybody," Natalie Ong, the baby captured in the iconic photo, said Friday about her mother, who died of natural causes Nov. 2 in Seattle. She was 103.

At 95, Hayashida testified in Washington, D.C., before a House subcommittee, urging lawmakers to never forget the injustice that was done to loyal citizens during World War II. Her testimony is part of a 2009 documentary, "Fumiko Hayashida: The Woman Behind the Symbol," directed by Lucy Ostrander.

Born on Jan. 21, 1911, Hayashida was the fourth of nine children of Japanese immigrants who grew strawberries on Bainbridge Island. In 1938 she married Saburo Hayashida, a fellow second-generation Japanese-American.

On Dec. 7, 1941, they were at home reading the Sunday paper when they heard the news that Japanese bombers had struck Pearl Harbor.

Hayashida remembered feeling disbelief -- and anger. "I wondered to myself: What is wrong with Japan?" she said in her remarks to the House subcommittee in 2006. "I was so mad at Japan. I thought that Japan must know that they can't win a war against America. . . . I knew that we were a much stronger country."

But her emotions quickly shifted to fear. "I realized," she said, "that I now had the face of the enemy."

Three months after the attack, the U.S. Army arrived on Bainbridge Island to begin carrying out President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, which authorized the mass internment.

The very first group of Japanese-Americans removed under the order were 227 Bainbridge residents, including the Hayashida family. They had only six days to find caretakers for their property and settle their affairs.

On March 30, the soldiers loaded them into trucks bound for the ferry.

Allowed to pack only one suitcase, Hayashida wore several layers of clothes and saved the suitcase for flannel that she planned to cut into diapers for her 14-month-old daughter, Natalie, and the baby who would be born at their first camp, Manzanar.

She also had a son, Neal, who was 3.

Five months after arriving at Manzanar, she gave birth to her third child, Leonard.

When she and her family returned to Bainbridge Island in 1945, they found the farm in poor shape. After struggling for several years, they moved in 1951 to Seattle, where her husband had found steadier work as a machinist for Boeing and she worked part time for an import company.