Dr. Frank Kitamoto, a third-generation American, was born on Bainbridge Island in 1939. When he was 2-1/2, he and his mother and sisters were sent to an internment camp. They returned to Bainbridge when Frank was 5. After graduating from the University of Washington in 1965, he began a long career as a dentist on the Island. He has been described as an historian, a cultural resource specialist, and a philosopher. Most of all he was a teacher of lessons from history about the injustice of racism and war, and about what it means to be an American. His slide presentation of his family’s personal story told in a straightforward way — without blame or polemics — what it was like to be the subject of the evacuation and internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Frank led the collecting of community historic resources — photos, oral histories, memorabilia —that became the largest funded touring exhibit ever funded by the Washington Commission for the Humanities. But it was his firsthand account delivered in programs for schools and groups across the nation, that brought the facts home. We suddenly realized that the events recorded in his slides did not happen to a character in a book or a figure in history; they happened to this man, to our neighbor, to our dentist, to Sharon‘s husband, to Derek’s dad.