Minidoka Internment Camp, Eden UT
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| Returned Mess Hall &Barrack |
Our morning ride took us just a short way to the actual site
of Minidoka Internment Camp.
We always
hold our breath a little as we are coming up to these places where thousands of
Japanese Americans were held against their will. Some sites are now just cornfields
with a small plaque or monument, but Minidoka was a really impressive
site. The National Park Service is doing a good job of reacquiring the land, purchasing and returning buildings, and providing a walking tour with great interpretive signs.
Most of the camps we had previously visited had been populated primarily with individuals and families from California. Minidoka had virtually no one from California. Here Japanese-Americans from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska were interred. These internees went from the moist, temperate coastal areas to the dry, temperature extremes of the high desert of Idaho.
This land, prior to the war, had not been particularly productive. Most farms were at a bare subsistence level. Many of the Japanese-Americans were highly skilled farmers who figured out how to make the land produce so much more. One example of this productivity was the Root Cellar. This huge structure was able to store the equivalent of over 50 rail cars of root vegetables, including nearly a million pounds of potatoes plus carrots and cabbage. By the third year, the camp became self-sufficient, producing the meat, vegetables, and fruits that they consumed. Farmers in the area began to adopt the farming methods used by the internees.
One of the really tricky parts of the internment camp process
was a loyalty questionnaire given to all adults in the camps over 17 years
old.
They were asked a whole variety of questions but
included a questions asking if you would serve in the military in war if
requested, and if you would forswear any loyalty to Japan and the Emperor.
These questions were open to some interpretation,
and both women and the elderly were concerned that if they marked Yes, that
they would be sent to war.
Also there
were many young men who said that they would indeed fight in the war once their
families were released form the camps, but not while they were locked up.
And some felt that if they said they were forswearing
the emperor, this was like admitting you had loyalty to the emperor before
(kind of “When did you stop beating your wife? type of question.) Throughout
all of the camps, there was lots of controversy about these.
In the end, the men who answered these two
questions with “No” (they were called the “No, No Boys” were all rounded up and
sent to Tule Lake Internment Camp in Northern CA.
There all of the supposed "disloyal" Japanese
Americans were gathered together.
This
included about 3 percent of those who were in Minidoka, the lowest percentage
of all of the camps.
These men
experienced not only additional punishment from the government, but also were
often ostracized form their own community.
We were struck again by the differences in how the camps were administered and the reactions of local people to their presence. Many people around Minidoka assumed that the internees were being coddled because they had food provided and had running water. The internees were assumed to have many luxuries, including not having to abide by rationing. Having entered the camp with only what they could carry in a suitcase and light package, these internees had had to give up everything else they had owned and now lived behind barbed wire. In other camps the movement in and out of the immediate area of the camp became more lax. Guard towers were no longer manned with soldiers with machine guns. At Minidoka, the towers remained armed and a new barbed wire fence was erected just a year before the camp closed.
As you can tell, this story continues to really move us, and
as we walked around the nearly two mile trail highlighting much of the camp’s
activities, we felt like we were paying honor to those who suffered there.
Following the closing of the camps
in 1945, the buildings were sold off and taken away. Here in Idaho, they sold the land in 90 acre
plots and threw in two barracks and another building or two. It was in one of these barrack buildings that our Ranger, from yesterday, had grown up without realizing its origins.
One particularly interesting group of buildings had been
part of a project called “Farm in a Day” where a thousand volunteers
came
together to create a modern farm and farmhouse in 1 day. They leveled
the fields, removing the foundation blocks used to hold up the camp
buildings, and built a farm house. The farm included a former barrack
and a fire-station, both repurposed into farm outbuildings and a barn.
This was done in
1950. It has the sounds of one of the Disneyland,
Carousel of Progress. The plots of land
were available to the public, with an emphasis on Veterans, but The Japanese
former internees were not allowed to participate.
We had several more hours drive and then arrived in Wolf
Creek Utah, at our nice resort where we would take a much needed three day rest
as we move into the end of our journey.
We were very pleased to use both the hot tub and the washing machine as
we cleared off some the grime of another week out on the road
“The
very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy
of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no
greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a
new and different sun.”
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