SEATTLE — Kai Vanderlip just wanted kids to remember. And books, he thought, might be the best way.
Now a 17-year-old junior at Tesla STEM High School in Redmond, Washington, Vanderlip was in fifth grade when he first learned about the Japanese American incarceration brought about by Executive Order 9066. That order, issued 80 years ago this year by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, ultimately uprooted more than 100,000 Japanese Americans on this country's West Coast. Labeled threats to national security, they were forced to leave their homes, and were sent to guarded prison camps for the duration of World War II.
It was a topic with which Vanderlip had a personal connection: long-ago family members — a great-grandfather's brother and brother-in-law — who were incarcerated. And it surprised him that he hadn't learned about this before. He spent months researching the topic for a special project at school, becoming an expert on the details. In 2017, when he was in sixth grade, he participated in a workshop led by Lori Matsukawa, then a KING 5 reporter, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the incarceration, and asked her at what age she thought kids should be learning about this.
