Minidoka National Historic Site | Japanese Internment Camp in Idaho
(Daily Video #4) In the agricultural community of Jerome, Idaho near Twin Falls rests the remains of Hunt Camp, a Japanese Internment Camp. Known today as the Minidoka National Historic Site, very little is actually left of the original camp itself. On December 7, 1941, a surprise aerial attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, by the Japanese was the final straw that pushed the United States into aligning itself to fight along side the Allied Powers against the Axis powers. The wave of fear swept the U.S. after the Pearl Harbor attacks. The country panicked, believing that every Japanese person could be a spy. An excess of 120,000 Americans with Japanese ancestry were rounded up and forced to move to these isolated camps. The most striking structure at the Minidoka National Historic Site is a recreated guard tower that was built in 2014. Hunt Camp was in existence from 1942-1945. Also, commemorated here are the Japanese Americans who died serving in the military during World War II.
Sources:
Idaho: Minidoka Japanese Internment Camp
Minidoka National Historic Site is a National Historic Site in the western United States. It commemorates the more than 9,000 Japanese Americans who were imprisoned at the Minidoka War Relocation Center during the Second World War.
It all happened so quickly. The people of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) on the West Coast of the United States had made lives for themselves in spite of discrimination, but on December 7, 1941, everything changed. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, panicked people believed every Japanese person could be a potential spy, ready and willing to assist in an invasion that was expected at any moment. Many political leaders, army officers, newspaper reporters, and ordinary people came to believe that everyone of Japanese ancestry, including American citizens, needed to be removed from the West Coast.
In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that moved nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans into 10 isolated war relocation centers in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. These temporary, tar paper-covered barracks, the guard towers, and most of the barbed-wire fences are gone now, but the people who spent years of their lives in the centers will never forget them. This is the story of one of those centers: Minidoka
The Minidoka War Relocation Center was in operation from 1942–45 and one of ten camps at which Japanese Americans, both citizens and resident aliens, were interned during World War II.
The Minidoka irrigation project shares its name with Minidoka County. The Minidoka name was applied to the Idaho relocation center in Jerome County, probably to avoid confusion with the Jerome War Relocation Center in Jerome, Arkansas. Construction by the Morrison-Knudsen Company began in 1942 on the camp, which received 10,000 internees by years' end. Many of the internees worked as farm labor, and later on the irrigation project and the construction of Anderson Ranch Dam, northeast of Mountain Home. The Reclamation Act of 1902 had racial exclusions on labor which were strictly adhered to until Congress changed the law in 1943. Population at the Minidoka camp declined to 8,500 at the end of 1943, and to 6,950 by the end of 1944. On February 10, 1946, the vacated camp was turned over to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which used the facilities to house returning war veterans.
The Minidoka War Relocation Center consisted of 36 blocks of housing. Each block contained 12 barracks (which themselves were divided into 6 separate living areas), laundry facilities, bathrooms, and a mess hall. Recreation Halls in each block were multi-use facilities that served as both worship and education centers. Minidoka had a high school, a junior high school and two elementary schools - Huntville and Stafford. The Minidoka War Relocation Center also included two dry cleaners, four general stores, a beauty shop, two barber shops, radio and watch repair stores as well as two fire stations.
The U.S. Army opened military service to Japanese-Americans in 1943. Enlistees from Minidoka accounted for 25% of total volunteers and Minidoka suffered more casualties, male and female, than any other camp. The Minidoka Internees created an Honor Roll to acknowledge the service of their fellow Japanese-Americans. Although the original was lost after the war, the Honor Roll was recreated by the Friends of Minidoka group in 2011 following a grant from the National Park Service.
The internment camp site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 10, 1979. A national monument was established in 2001 at the site by President Bill Clinton on January 17.
Minidoka Internment Camp
Frank Hall says it's important to revisit history especially when it's in your own backyard. In 2001 Camp Minidoka was named a national monument by former president Bill Clinton.
Jerome Museum Tour; Minidoka Japanese Detention Camp WW2; Idaho;
The Japanese camp is supposed to be 15 miles east of here.
Minidoka Relocation Camp National Historic Site
I recently visited the Minidoka National Historic Site, which is managed by the National Park Service. Located near Hunt, Idaho, the Minidoka Japanese Internment Camp was a WWII internal relocation camp. Thousands of Japanese Americans were ordered to report to transports which brought them to remote locations where they lived in bleak conditions, surrounded by barbed wire. Today, the wind howls through the grass and you can almost hear the voices of the departed residents. Minidoka sits as a reminder of this shameful chapter in our nation's history, that we should not repeat it.
This video was made to accompany the article that appears on Splotpublishing.com read that article here:
Blog.
Historical photos were taken from:
The National Archives
Official US Military Photographs and the US Army
National Park Service historical photos
The Asian American Museum Archives
Minidoka Memory
Lilly Kitamoto Kodama was among the thousands of Japanese Americans held at the Minidoka internment camp outside of Jerome, Idaho after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor set off a wave of anti-Japanese hysteria. She was among the 190 former internees who participated in the annual pilgrimage to the camp site, now a national monument, in June.
Inside of Barracks (Minidoka Internment Camp)
Minidoka National Historic Site
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Minidoka National Historic Site is a National Historic Site in the western United States.It commemorates the more than 9,000 Japanese Americans who were imprisoned at the Minidoka War Relocation Center during the Second World War.Located in the Magic Valley of south central Idaho in Jerome County, the site is in the Snake River Plain, a remote high desert area north of the Snake River.It is 17 miles northeast of Twin Falls and just north of Eden, in an area known as Hunt.
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Nice Concentration Camps 1942-1945 for USA citizens
Japanese-American internment was the relocation and internment by the United States government in 1942 of approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese who lived along the Pacific coast of the United States to camps called War Relocation Camps, in the wake of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes each referred to the American camps as concentration camps, at the time.The internment of Japanese Americans was applied unequally throughout the United States. Japanese Americans who lived on the West Coast of the United States were all interned, while in Hawaii, where more than 150,000 Japanese Americans composed over one-third of the territory's population, 1,200 to 1,800 Japanese Americans were interned.Of those interned, 62% were American citizens.President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066, issued February 19, 1942, which allowed local military commanders to designate military areas as exclusion zones, from which any or all persons may be excluded. This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and most of Oregon and Washington, except for those in internment camps.In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion orders,[8] while noting that the provisions that singled out people of Japanese ancestry were a separate issue outside the scope of the proceedings.The United States Census Bureau assisted the internment efforts by providing confidential neighborhood information on Japanese Americans. The Bureau's role was denied for decades but was finally proven in 2007.In 1988, Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation said that government actions were based on race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.The U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion in reparations to Japanese Americans who had been interned and their heirs.Almost 120,000 Japanese Americans and resident Japanese aliens would eventually be removed from their homes in California, the western halves of Oregon and Washington and southern Arizona as part of the single largest forced relocation in U.S. history.Most of these camps/residences, gardens, and stock areas were placed on Native American reservations, for which the Native Americans were formally compensated. The Native American councils disputed the amounts negotiated in absentia by US government authorities and later sued finding relief and additional compensation for some items of dispute.Under the 2001 budget of the United States, it was also decreed that the ten sites on which the detainee camps were set up are to be preserved as historical landmarks: places like Manzanar, Tule Lake, Heart Mountain, Topaz, Amache, Jerome, and Rohwer will forever stand as reminders that this nation failed in its most sacred duty to protect its citizens against prejudice, greed, and political expediency.Japanese American internment DOJ Internment CampsDuring World War II, over 7,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese from Latin America were held in internment camps run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, part of the Department of Justice. In this period, Latin Americans of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and transported to American internment camps run by the U.S. Justice Department.These Latin American internees were eventually, through the efforts of civil rights attorney Wayne M. Collins,offered parole relocation to the labor-starved farming community in Seabrook, New Jersey.Many became naturalized American citizens or Japanese Americans after the war.There were twenty-seven U.S. Department of Justice Camps, eight of which (in Texas, Idaho, North Dakota, New Mexico, and Montana) held Japanese Americans. The camps were guarded by Border Patrol agents rather than military police and were intended for non-citizens including Buddhist ministers, Japanese language instructors, newspaper workers, and other community leaders.In addition 2,264 persons of Japanese ancestry[48] taken from 12 Latin American countries by the U.S. State and Justice Departments were held at the Department of Justice Camps.Approximately two-thirds of these persons were Japanese Peruvians(Wikipedia)
Enoch H. Kanaya Part 2 Interview on the Internment of Japanese-Americans
Enoch continues the story of the incarceration of US citizens during World War II.
Enoch was born and raised in Portland, OR and served with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in France and Italy. The 442nd was made up solely of Japanese Americans and had an official casualty rate of 93 percent, although some sources place it many times higher. The 442nd became the most decorated unit in U.S. military history.
Enoch's story is similar to thousands of other Nisei, or second-generation Japanese-Americans. Even as they fought in Europe, most had family members who were among the 120,000 forced to spend up to four years in U.S. internment camps.
Though Kanaya's older brother, Jimmie, had volunteered for the U.S. Army before the outbreak of war — and would eventually rise to the rank of colonel — Kanaya, his parents and sister were considered security risks (as were all West Coast Japanese- Americans down to 1/16 blood) and held at an internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho, following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
We were behind barbed wire, Kanaya said. I was born in America and wanted to fight for my country.
He was initially ruled an ineligible enemy alien because of his Japanese ancestry and forced to work as a potato picker. The doubts of his fellow Americans only made him keener to prove his patriotism, he said.
Eventually re-classified as 1-A, he was drafted in 1944, and won the Bronze Star for his efforts as a bazooka man in bloody battles with the Germans, including his role in the brutal battle to seize the Gothic Line in Northern Italy in April 1945.
He and the other surviving members of the 100th Battalion, 442nd Regimental Combat team were recently awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest possible civilian award, in ceremonies held in Washington, DC on November 2, 2011.
Enoch H. Kanaya Part I Interview on the Internment of Japanese-Americans
Part 1 Interview of Enoch H. Kanaya of Chicago, IL. on the Internment of Japanese-Americans and his war time experience. Part 2 can be found here:
Enoch was born and raised in Portland, OR and served with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in France and Italy. The 442nd was made up solely of Japanese Americans and had an official casualty rate of 93 percent, although some sources place it many times higher. The 442nd became the most decorated unit in U.S. military history.
Enoch's story is similar to thousands of other Nisei, or second-generation Japanese-Americans. Even as they fought in Europe, most had family members who were among the 120,000 forced to spend up to 4 years in U.S. internment camps.
Though Kanaya's older brother, Jimmie, had volunteered for the U.S. Army before the outbreak of war — and would eventually rise to the rank of colonel — Kanaya, his parents and sister were considered security risks (as were all West Coast Japanese- Americans down to 1/16 blood) and held at an internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho, following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
We were behind barbed wire, Kanaya said. I was born in America and wanted to fight for my country.
He was initially ruled an ineligible enemy alien because of his Japanese ancestry and forced to work as a potato picker. The doubts of his fellow Americans only made him keener to prove his patriotism, he said.
Eventually re-classified as 1-A, he was drafted in 1944, and won the Bronze Star for his efforts as a bazooka man in bloody battles with the Germans, including his role in the brutal battle to seize the Gothic Line in Northern Italy in April 1945.
He and the other surviving members of the 100th Battalion, 442nd Regimental Combat team were recently awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest possible civilian award, in ceremonies held in Washington, DC on November 2, 2011.
First Impressions of Minidoka as a Teacher - Robert Coombs
Robert Coombs was a teacher in Sacramento, California, when World War II broke out. In 1942, he was hired to teach high school at the Minidoka concentration camp, Idaho. In this clip, he talks about first arriving in Minidoka and describes the high school principal there, Jerome Light.
This clip is an excerpt from Robert Coombs' Densho oral history interview conducted August 2, 2003. To see the complete interview, visit the Densho Digital Archive (
For more information:
Minidoka:
Meet the Locals of the Japanese American Internment Museum in McGehee
The Japanese American Internment Museum in McGehee preserves the history of the internment camps located in Rohwer and Jerome in southeast Arkansas. In 1942 after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Government decided to place Japanese American citizens in internment camps for reasons of security. Meet the historians and curators of this museum who help tell the stories behind this time in United States history.
My first visit to World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho
The Peregrine Fund works with various worldwide organizations to help in the conservation of raptors around the world.
Map Rock Petroglyphs || Native American Rock Art || Nowhere Pacific
Located only about 30 minutes from downtown Nampa, Idaho is Map Rock. The most well-known petroglyph panel in Idaho. It is a sacred spiritual site for the Shoshone-Bannock indigenous peoples that pre-dates white settlers. It is simply awesome to behold and definitely worth the trip!
#NowherePacific #GoNowhere
Minidoka National Park Historic Site | In violation of civil rights
Minidoka National Park Service Heritage Site in south-central Idaho commemorates the hardships and sacrifices of 13,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated here during WWII. Read more below.
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ABOUT MINIDOKA NATIONAL HERITAGE SITE
It all happened so quickly. The Japanese on the West Coast of the United States had made lives for themselves in spite of discrimination, but on December 7, 1941, everything changed. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, panicked people believed every Japanese person could be a potential spy, ready and willing to assist in an invasion that was expected at any moment. Many political leaders, army officers, newspaper reporters, and ordinary people came to believe that everyone of Japanese ancestry, including American citizens, needed to be removed from the West Coast.
In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that moved nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans into 10 isolated relocation centers in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. These temporary, tar paper-covered barracks, the guard towers, and most of the barbed-wire fences are gone now, but the people who spent years of their lives in the centers will never forget them. This is the story of one of those centers: Minidoka
The Minidoka Relocation Center, as it was called during the war, operated from August 1842 until October 1945. It comprised 33,000 acres with 600 buildings. Individuals from Washington, Oregon and Alaska were held here in violation of their civil and constitutional rights. The site preserves a portion of the camp's original acreage and buildings.
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Missoula Art Museum Roger Shimomura: Minodaka on My Mind
Roger Shimomura's paintings and prints, including this series, Minidoka on My Mind, address social and political issues of Asian America, and have most often been inspired by diaries kept by his late immigrant grandmother that span the 56 years of her life. Minidoka on My Mind is the fourth major painting series generated by Shimomura based on his World War II internment experience. Shimomura states,
It is the culmination of years of my perusing images culled from books, magazines, government publications, personal recollections, and the internet. The result of this search has been a visual distillation of tar paper barracks, barbed wire, and desolate landscapes, which are inhabited by muted occupants standing in line to eat and to clean, quietly interacting, contemplating their fate...and to wait.
Roger ShimomuraIn Minidoka on My Mind, Shimomura challenges our notions of history and uses images rooted in popular culture to thrust us headlong into the racial conflicts of World War II, a time that witnessed the unjust imprisonment of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans. In this body of work, Shimomura presents us with richly designed and seamlessly executed paintings that convey the emotions associated with the internment experience; emotions associated with innocent imprisonment within a country unwilling to address institutional racism. What also comes through is the resilience of the human spirit and a recommitment to remember the stories of internment camps such as Minidoka so they never happen again.
Roger ShimomuraThe name Minidoka is of Dakota Sioux origin meaning a fountain or spring of water. Minidoka was first used in 1883 as a name for a Union Pacific, Oregon Short Line spur in the middle of the Snake River Plain which later became the site of a watering station. However, The Minidoka National Historic Site is in Jerome County, Idaho, northeast of Twin Falls and just north of Eden, in an area known as Hunt. Under provisions of President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, persons of Japanese ancestry were ousted from the West Coast of the United States. Minidoka housed more than 9,000 Japanese-Americans, predominantly from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. The remote high desert site was selected for the Minidoka War Relocation Center lasting from 1942-45, and is one of ten camps at which Japanese Americans, both citizens and resident aliens, were interned during World War II. Notably, 60% of the Japanese imprisoned were American citizens. Fort Missoula, just outside the town of Missoula, MT also served as a site for a War Relocation Center under this executive provision.
Through Minidoka on My Mind, we can reach for and gain insight into our past, and by sharing and revisiting these stories, we garner a more accurate version of our history. Ominously, Shimomura writes, I offer this exhibition as a metaphor for the threat posed by current times, and as a warning and reminder that during international crises our government seems to consistently lose its memory regarding past mistakes.
Roger ShimomuraShimomura was raised in Seattle, earned his B.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle, and his M.F.A. from Syracuse University in New York. He taught at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS and has recently retired. He has had over 125 solo exhibitions nationally.
This exhibition will be the educational foundation for the Fifth Grade Art Experience, co-sponsored with a grant from the Art Associates of Missoula. Additional funding for this exhibition is provided by the Wide World of Travel and the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula. MAMbers Reception sponsored by NewWest.net.
Related Events:
MAM Members and Donors Reception with Roger Shimomura, October 1, 5 PM
Distinguished Artists Lecture: Roger Shimomura, October 1, 7 PM
Artist Reception and Gallery Talk, October 2, 5-8 PM
Artini: Minidoka on My Mind featuring pianist Lydia Brown, October 15, 5:30-9 PM
Cats of Mirikatani: Film, November 1 & 8, 1-2 PM
Singled Out
Singled Out: Jerome and Rohwer
Friendly Concentration of USA citizens in Camps: Official News 1942 - 1945
Japanese-American internment was the relocation and internment by the United States government in 1942 of approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese who lived along the Pacific coast of the United States to camps called War Relocation Camps, in the wake of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes each referred to the American camps as concentration camps, at the time.The internment of Japanese Americans was applied unequally throughout the United States. Japanese Americans who lived on the West Coast of the United States were all interned, while in Hawaii, where more than 150,000 Japanese Americans composed over one-third of the territory's population, 1,200 to 1,800 Japanese Americans were interned.Of those interned, 62% were American citizens.President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066, issued February 19, 1942, which allowed local military commanders to designate military areas as exclusion zones, from which any or all persons may be excluded. This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and most of Oregon and Washington, except for those in internment camps.In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion orders,while noting that the provisions that singled out people of Japanese ancestry were a separate issue outside the scope of the proceedings.The United States Census Bureau assisted the internment efforts by providing confidential neighborhood information on Japanese Americans. The Bureau's role was denied for decades but was finally proven in 2007.In 1988, Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation said that government actions were based on race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.The U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion in reparations to Japanese Americans who had been interned and their heirs.Almost 120,000 Japanese Americans and resident Japanese aliens would eventually be removed from their homes in California, the western halves of Oregon and Washington and southern Arizona as part of the single largest forced relocation in U.S. history.Most of these camps/residences, gardens, and stock areas were placed on Native American reservations, for which the Native Americans were formally compensated. The Native American councils disputed the amounts negotiated in absentia by US government authorities and later sued finding relief and additional compensation for some items of dispute.Under the 2001 budget of the United States, it was also decreed that the ten sites on which the detainee camps were set up are to be preserved as historical landmarks: places like Manzanar, Tule Lake, Heart Mountain, Topaz, Amache, Jerome, and Rohwer will forever stand as reminders that this nation failed in its most sacred duty to protect its citizens against prejudice, greed, and political expediency.About Japanese American internment DOJ Internment CampsDuring World War II: over 7,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese from Latin America were held in internment camps run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, part of the Department of Justice. In this period, Latin Americans of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and transported to American internment camps run by the U.S. Justice Department.These Latin American internees were eventually, through the efforts of civil rights attorney Wayne M. Collins,offered parole relocation to the labor-starved farming community in Seabrook, New Jersey.Many became naturalized American citizens or Japanese Americans after the war.There were twenty-seven U.S. Department of Justice Camps, eight of which (in Texas, Idaho, North Dakota, New Mexico, and Montana) held Japanese Americans. The camps were guarded by Border Patrol agents rather than military police and were intended for non-citizens including Buddhist ministers, Japanese language instructors, newspaper workers, and other community leaders.In addition 2,264 persons of Japanese ancestry taken from 12 Latin American countries by the U.S. State and Justice Departments were held at the Department of Justice Camps.Approximately two-thirds of these persons were Japanese Peruvians(Wikipedia)
Life in Minidoka Camp - Interview with Irene Mano (Nisei Nikkei) -
From Hiroshima to Washington State. History of migration and memory of before and during the war at Japanese interment camp. Interviewed by Minami Hasegawa, Intern at the North American Post, In June 2018.
*Life in Minidoka Camp (full article in Japanese) :