Erin Shigaki was getting ready to start her day when she learned through a friend’s text message that her art installation at Bellevue College had been defaced. Shigaki’s mind immediately went to the children.

“I was shocked but not surprised, and angry and a little humiliated and sort of all the things that happen when your work is silenced,” Shigaki said.

The Japanese American artist is familiar with feeling this way when it comes to her art. It’s not the first time her art has been censored in Bellevue, Wash., a city just across Lake Washington from her hometown, Seattle.

In 2019, Shigaki, whose father was born in an internment camp, was invited to participate in the Bellwether festival and created two sculptures drawing from her Japanese heritage. One of them recalled the local Japanese American community's historic role as strawberry farmers. In her artist’s statement, Shigaki mentioned anti-Japanese rhetoric from local businessmen, including Miller Freeman, whose family’s name is steeped in the city’s history. It was changed without her knowledge, she said, and the city never offered an apology.

So it was a sense of deja vu on Feb. 20 when a school administrator removed a line referencing anti-Japanese agitation by members of the local community from a placard describing her art installation.

“After decades of anti-Japanese agitation, led by Eastside businessman Miller Freeman and others, the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans included the 60 families (300 individuals) who farmed Bellevue,” read the line.

It accompanied an image of two Japanese American children incarcerated under Executive Order 6066. Shigaki installed the wheat paper mural for the Day of Remembrance, Feb. 19, the date President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order establishing Japanese internment camps in 1942.

“I originally chose the photo because it shows so clearly the fear and anxiety on these two children’s faces as they’re about to be put into prison camps,” Shigaki said. “I think their humanity is captured really well and I think it's powerful to remember that children then and children now are being put into prisons.”

The image, taken by photographer Dorothea Lange, was so powerful, in fact, that the Army withheld it from the public until after internment. Unlike the photos, however, many incarcerated Japanese Americans never got their land or jobs back after they were released.

“Even in this community where the Japanese American population is larger and they have a long history, people don’t know, people living right here don’t know and acknowledge the economic impact of these kinds of things,” said Leslie Lum, a business professor at Bellevue College and one of the people responsible for bringing the installation to the school.

Of the 300 Japanese American families from Bellevue that were incarcerated, some never returned to the strawberry farms the city had once been known for after internment ended in 1946. Those who did return came back to a changed city, one where Freeman and his son, Kemper Freeman Sr., had begun developing the city's first major shopping center, Bellevue Square. The property is now part of Kemper Development Company, run by Miller’s grandson Kemper Freeman Jr., who made the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in 2016.

“It may or may not have been intentional, but that sentence does not just contain his name, it also contained the number of families who were forcibly removed from Bellevue,” said Shigaki who has received a formal apology from the college.

Lum anticipated some resistance over the inclusion of the storied Freeman name in the artist's statement. But Miller’s history of anti-Japanese rhetoric is well documented, and Lum collected the receipts for a display in the college’s library about him.

She wasn't told either about the change made by Dr. Gayle Colston Barge, vice president of institutional advancement, who apologized in an email to the Diversity Caucus. Dr. Barge has been placed on administrative leave as the school's administration takes steps to address the fallout from the incident. Neither her nor other administrators have given a reason for why the phrase was taken out.

In an email to the college community, President Jerry Weber said, “It was a mistake to alter the artist’s work. Removing the reference gave the impression that the administrator was attempting to remove or rewrite history, a history that directly impacts many today.”

At a forum on Feb. 24, students voiced strong opposition to the removal of the name. Lum and Shigaki credit the Asian American and Pacific Islander community at the school for putting pressure on school administrators and asking for an apology.

“This is endemic in higher institutions, it is ingrained. This is just one administrator out of a whole bunch of them who probably would do the same thing. We need to transform, we have to change our educational process. It’s not just this incident,” Lum said.

The college has invited Shigaki back to restore the installation on March 3 and leaders from the Japanese American Citizens League, Tsuru for Solidarity and Densho have been invited for a remembrance ceremony. The artist said she will leave the changed description up and install a second plaque with the original description.

“People need to know what happened and, for better or for worse, it has sparked a lot of conversation on that campus and hopefully in that city, so we thought it would be more powerful to keep all of that on the wall,” she said.