Winter 1941

 Imagine you are born and raised in the United States and live in an Oregon coastal village.  You, your brother and your two sisters have your basic needs taken care of.  Your parents own a modest home, your father--who, when he was twelve years old,  immigrated with his parents to the United States from Japan --works as an accountant in the city.  Your mother--also from Japan--stays at home and tends the house and the family's needs.  Overnight, a tragedy happens. You are at your friend's house getting ready to listen to your favorite Sunday radio program when you hear the news. Some military base named Pearl Harbor has been attacked by the Japanese!

Spring 1942

The day in December 1941 has changed your life because it was caused by people who share similar physical characteristics as you have.  Everyone is looking at you with suspicion. You are required to register for and carry identification cards.  A curfew has been imposed that requires you to be inside your home from 8:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. and you are not allowed to travel beyond five miles of your home.  Signs appear proclaiming that people with your physical characteristics are a threat to the safety of our country.  The president of the United States signs an executive order stating that you have to relocate to an undisclosed location. You must sell all your possessions except what you can carry in a suitcase. What to take? How will you dispose of your remaining belongings?

You are first transferred to Puyallup, Washington. You spend several months waiting for the government to determine where you will be sent.  The big day arrives. After hours of standing in line, you finally register and are assigned bus number 12. Traveling for hours or days your bus finally comes to its last stop.  You retrieve your meager belongings and step outside.

Imagine how it feels to gaze over 33,000 acres of windswept sagebrush and knowing this desolate wasteland was to be your new home for an unknown amount of time.  You have heard the name “Minidoka Relocation Center” but until now it meant nothing.  Now you see construction of what appear to be city blocks laid out like a grid.  Each block has about eight Barracks which are like small apartment buildings and house 250-300 people. Eventually there will be 42 blocks with 12 Barracks each.  Every block will have its own recreational hall, laundry and bathroom facilities, communal showers, and a mess hall where you will eat.

Summer/Fall 1942

As you absorb the scene, you are immediately impressed with the number of people milling about.  Even though they have been there only about six weeks, there are already more than 12,000 individuals from Washington, California and Oregon who now call this relocation center home.  Most of these people look like you, with the exception of one group of siblings in Barracks two.  They speak your parents’ language because even though they are citizens of the United States, they were born in your parents’ country and learned both languages fluently. You and your family are assigned to a single room in Barracks four. The Barracks is nothing more than a wood frame apartment dwelling covered in tar paper. The room is dim, but you can make out one cot  sitting against the wall...and early on it is decided that you and your siblings will have to sleep on the floor. The only other furnishing is a pot-bellied stove up against the wall.  The windows are slightly ajar, letting a breeze play across your forehead.  You remember your soft bed back home, and a tight lump forms in your throat when you think of your dog, Niko, who used to lie at the foot of your bed each night.

After a few weeks, you learn the routine. Get up, get dressed, eat, work, eat again, and retire for the evening. You read or write in your journal until darkness descends.  As the days grow shorter, you read and write by the harsh light of a single light bulb suspended from the middle of the room.

Winter 1942

You have been sick, and someone has provided a rickety cot so you could get off the cold floor. Rising, you hurry across the bare floor through a bare room lit by a bare light bulb to the coal-consuming pot-bellied stove in an effort to avoid the piercing drafts coming through the tar papered walls. You make a mental note to find some material to try and block the cracks as you hurriedly splash your face and wash your hands in a bowl of icy water.   The camp doesn’t have hot running water, nor does it have a sewer system, and you sigh at the thought of the overcrowded outhouse. Nevertheless, you don a thin sweater and slip on your shoes and scurry out into the bitter air. When you are done, you hurry back to your bunk to wash up and get ready for breakfast.  You don’t want to be late for meals.  There is little to be had at best, but after 200 people have been served there is even less.

After breakfast you are assigned to help construct a bathroom for your block.  Eventually communal showers and toilets will replace the bowls and outhouses, and scrap wood will provide means for chairs and tables. But for now you wonder if you will survive the -20^¡F temperatures. You’ve experienced colder weather than this, but that was when you had the comfort of sturdy boots, a wool coat, scarf, hat, and gloves.

Spring 1943

The freezing ice and snow have finally melted, leaving “Hunt Camp” (as the relocation center is now called by the area locals) in ankle-deep mire.  Most of the people here have employment of some kind with local farmers preparing fields for sugar beets or laboring for the North Side Canal project which is designed to transfer water from the Snake River out into the desert.  One can hardly begin to imagine the fertile fields that will one day replace the lava and dust encrusted desert.

Summer/Fall 1943

The bitter winter has given over to scorching heat of summer.  Trying to keep cool in the North Side Canal, a young boy drowned.  Now you are helping to build a swimming hole so that fellow internees can safely escape the oppressive heat.  You are constantly being watched--watched by the local townspeople from Eden and Hazelton, Minidoka, Paul, Jerome, and even Twin Falls.  These people stare curiously at you and some make caustic remarks that sting your ears and bring tears to your eyes.  You are watched by armed guards who stand poised in the watchtowers and seem ready to shoot at the slightest infraction of their rigid rules.  You are surrounded by barbed wire. You are watched by the neighbors in the next Barracks.  You are watched by your parents.

Nevertheless, as you clear the desert, you begin to see beauty in the landscape.  Finding interesting stones and native plants you begin to landscape your barracks.  Soon you notice others around you doing the same.  When did the family in Barracks eight plant such a nice garden?  As you inquire, they tell you they owned a nursery in Chehalis, Washington and had brought seed packets in their belongings.  They assure you that they will share the produce and (cringing at the thought) will even save seeds for you to plant your own garden next spring if you are still detained. You all hope that you will never need those seeds, but you can't wait to tell your mother who has a special way with a garden..

Another family in Barracks six has invited you to a small ceremony wishing luck to their son who has signed up for military duty.  Assigned to the 442^nd combat unit, he is to report to Camp Shelby in Mississippi the following week.  You attend and marvel that the boy’s parents are serving real tea—a treat in these times of ration and scarcity.

Winter 1943

Coal supplies run low, you supplement it with sagebrush that seems abundant.

Spring 1944

Summer 1944

The camp has become a self-supporting community.  Everyone has “Victory Gardens” vegetable gardens that are grown to help war efforts.  The hog and chicken farms are producing enough to supply local businesses with pork and eggs.  There is no shortage of work.  Local farmers are eager to have Hunt residents come work their fields and your back is tight with the pain of bending over sugar beets.  Your friends are equally busy at lumber mills, canneries, and in potato fields.

You hear that the young boy from Barracks 6 who went to fight in the army was killed in Italy on a hill called “Little Casino.”  You wonder if anyone on the “outside” noticed…

The baseball team is becoming a regular.

Winter 1944

Coal supplies are running low again.  This year there isn’t much sagebrush to supplement the stoves…it has been cleared away for agricultural land.

Spring 1945

Summer 1945

You are beginning to hear rumors of freedom.  Freedom.  True these rumors have been passed around for the past three years, but there seems to be some ring of truth to these words of hope.  Everyone seems to throw an extra effort into work and play.  The Baseball team is undefeated.

Fall 1945

It isn’t until the last papers are signed and those who have become your family are packed onto busses.  Waves of good-bye and promises to keep in touch send a wave of something like nostalgia wash over you.  In the same moment you resist the nostalgia and with victory and triumph in your heart you board the bus for home…wherever that may be.

Reflect

1.      In your opinion why were U.S. citizens afraid of Japanese Americans?

2.      Japanese-Americans were required to fill out a “Loyalty Questionnaire” before being assigned to a camp. The “loyal” Japanese-Americans were sent to Hunt or other camps while the “disloyal” Japanese were sent to Tule Lake (CA). Why do you think they were segregated? How else might have the U.S. Government determined loyalty? 

3.      How did Idaho respond to the Japanese-American relocation to Hunt and Kamiah?

4.      Japanese Americans were removed only from California, Oregon and Washington—why not Hawaii, Minnesota, or other states?

5.      Do you agree or disagree with General DeWitt’s decision to relocate Japanese Americans? List the evidence that you use to determine whether the decision was right or wrong.

6.      Some of the families had sons serving in the U.S. Army while they were detained in barracks with armed guards and barbed wire preventing them from leaving.  What is wrong with this picture, if anything?

7.      Identify at least three other times in history when a specific racial, religious, or gender group has had different rules from those of the rest of the population.

8.      Could this happen again?  If so, what would be your response if you were told that there would be a relocation camp for Arab-Americans set up near your town today?

9.      What are the similarities and differences in the ways the U.S. responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor with the attack on New York City’s World Trade Center?

http://www.nps.gov/miin/home.htm

http://www.katonk.com/442nd/442/page1.html

http://www.boisepubliclibrary.org/Ref/guideinternmentcamps.shtml

http://www.mtexpress.com/2004/04-06-30/04-06-30minidoka.htm

http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1679.html

http://www.uen.org/themepark/liberty/japanese.shtml

http://www.uen.org/utahlink/tours/tourFames.cgi?tour_id=14717

http://www.uidaho.edu/LS/AACC/KOOSKIA.HTM