“It makes you think, when you go to places, I have the instinct to question, to wonder what the history behind it is,” said Zelaya, one of approximately 55 students enrolled in the class in Richmond Public Schools. The curriculum is meant to cover the history of its development, from its earliest inhabitants to its current incarnation as a growing metropolitan hub in King County’s Eastside.
Japanese incarceration isn’t the focus of the Bellevue Then and Now unit. It’s a history that still stings: In 2020, the president and vice president of Bellevue College left their jobs after they allowed a mural of two Japanese American children in an incarceration camp to be altered by whiting out a reference to anti-Japanese agitation by area businessmen.
In 1942, those families were ordered out of their communities by the U.S. But in 1940, it was an unincorporated area of about 1,000 people, including 300 Japanese Americans who put in the hard work of clearing the once-heavily timbered land to make it suitable for growing popular crops, like strawberries, and for building houses. Today, Bellevue - a city of 150,000 just east of Seattle - is a thriving center of commerce.
