Minidoka

When we visited the Hagerman Fossil Beds, we got a two for one bonus!  Minidoka National Historic Site is located in Idaho, but there are no facilities on-site.  Therefore a temporary exhibit has been created inside the Hagerman visitor center.  So we technically didn't visit the actual site of the internment camp, but we saw the temporary visitor center.  Growing up in California I'd read about the internment camps of World War II, but I'm pretty sure that I never actually visited the site of one.  I do remember though seeing a sign in Canada once for an internment camp that had been used for people of Turkish descent during World War I (when the Ottoman Empire was one of the Central Powers fighting against the allies).  It is a complicated history and one that can seem easy to judge across the years, but it is definitely well worth studying and remembering.  It is a story of injustice, a story of fear, a story of patriotism (many Japanese-Americans enlisted in the US Military and fought very bravely in Europe, earning many medals), and more.

In the mid-1890s Toyo Kisen Kaisha (Oriental Steamship Company) was organized in Japan to enter the transpacific trade.  The Nippon Maru began its monthly voyage to Honolu and San Fransicso on January 1899. 

It had a yachtlike appearance, yet at 6,047 tons, it was one of the largest vessels to enter San Francisco.  Nippon Maru had accomodations for 98 first-class passengers, 40 second-class, and 1,000 Oriental steerage.
--caption for above picture

The exhibits were mainly comprised of a series of pictures and captions.  They started off talking about Japanese immigration into the US, exploring the attack on Pearl Harbor, the decision to create internment camps, and the reality of the movement to the camps and life in them.

I assume that whenever the visitor center is constructed on the site of the internment camp that there will be more artifacts, but there wasn't room for too many of them within the Hagerman visitor center.  And actually I thought that pictures and text communicated things rather clearly.

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--from NPS website

Of course I love maps, so I made sure to grab a picture of this map.  I think that maps can really help you place things, especially in the context of the whole west coast of the United States.

I'm not sure what the Minidoka site will eventually end up looking like, because I don't think too many of the original structures are left.  But I do look forward to visiting when they have an official visitor center up and running at the main site.  I don't think these camps were anywhere near the same as Nazi concentration camps (though they were definitely not pleasant--an understatement I know) they are well worth remembering.  I recall the oft-quoted words "those that do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it."

~Matt