Kurt Ikeda
Interviewee: Kurt Ikeda
Interviewer: Robyn Achilles
Description: Listen to Kurt Ikeda, Director of Interpretation and Education, Minidoka national Historic Site briefly discus the impact and the history of the Minidoka Site in Idaho. This is the first episode in a three part series created in partnership with the Friends of Minidoka. Speakers: Kurt Ikeda Director of Interpretation and Education, Minidoka National Historic Site Robyn Achilles Executive Director, Friends of Minidoka
Date: 2022-08-10
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Doug Exton: This program is funded through a more Perfect Union initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Robyn Achilles: Thank you for joining us today for the Connected Conversations program with the Idaho Humanities Council. I'm Robyn Achilles, executive director of Friends of Minidoka. Friends of Minidoka is the philanthropic nonprofit partner of Minidoka National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park Service. Located in Jerome, Idaho. During World War Two, 120,000 Japanese-Americans were forcibly removed from the West Coast and unconstitutionally incarcerated during World War Two.
13,000 men, women, and children from Alaska, Oregon, and Washington were incarcerated at Minidoka. This month, we are commemorating the 80th anniversary of the arrival of the incarcerated and to the Historic War Relocation Center. Today, we have Kurt Ikeda, Director of Interpretation Education at Minidoka National Historic Site, with us today, and he will be sharing information on the history and legacy of Minidoka.
Kurt Ikeda: Thank you Robyn. So I'm very excited to be talking to everyone today for the Idaho Humanities Council as Robyn introduced me. My name is Kurt Ikeda. I use he/him pronouns and I am a second generation Japanese-American and a descendant of the World War two incarceration of Japanese-Americans. And in today's conversation, I'm very, very excited to be able to discuss the significance of the 80th anniversary of the experience of over 125,000 people.
And I think one of the best ways to start this conversation is actually to look at an art piece made for the 20th anniversary back in 2021, the 20th anniversary of many National Historic Sites establishment in the National Park Service. This art piece you see in front of you is done by Eugene Tagawa, a Minidoka survivor, Erin Shigaki, a descendant of the incarceration, and Maria Okuma Johnston, a community member with the Japanese-American community as well.
And these three Seattleites put together their energy and their heart into this art piece, which is a WPA style inspired piece which shows some of those iconic pieces of the Minidoka story, whether it's rows of barracks, which we'll talk about today, a water tower which signified different portions of the three mile long deep residential area of the camp.
Whether it's a family of a person going off to serve during World War Two, or children who are also incarcerated, whether it's the magpies that flew and signified freedom for those incarcerated, and obviously the barbed wire fence, which served as a reminder of this unjust history. When you come visit us here at Mandalika National Historic Site, we hope you'll be able to take an opportunity to also study this mural on a very large recreation on the side of our brand new visitor center.
And I'll be talking a little bit more about that later. But for now, I want to invite you all to kind of take a virtual trip with me, as if we were walking into the visitor center together. And as you enter that visitor center, the first thing you'll see at the very top of the entrance along the breezeway area is this quote by doctor Frank Kitamoto of Bainbridge Island.
The quote reads, this is not just a Japanese American story, but an American story with implications for the world. And I hope the viewers today can hold this notion in their mind as we consider a Japanese American story. But helping us to connect this to the civil rights struggles of the past, the present, and also the future. So when we talk about the World War Two incarceration of Japanese Americans, I want to make sure we have some context and space.
The red star you see in front of you on this PowerPoint shows where Minidoka is in south central Idaho, about 30 minutes away from the town of Twin Falls and not too far away from Jerome, Idaho. But amongst the conversation of incarceration sites, we want to highlight, there's nine more, making a total of ten American concentration camps along the states of California, as well as Idaho, Wyoming in Utah and Colorado and Arizona, and also in Arkansas.
And including those ten American concentration camps are also a total of 75 other camps of incarceration, whether run by the Department of Justice, other US American internment camps, internment camp proper, because those are specifically incarcerating enemy aliens or immigrants who weren't allowed to become citizens during World War Two or until post-World War Two, also including farm labor camps, isolation centers, detention centers where folks spent the summer of 1942.
This map shows just how large the incarceration was, but today we want to focus on, as we we're talking about earlier, the one place where over 13,000 people made home in a community behind barbed wire. But to better understand incarceration, I want to talk to us a little bit about the five phases of Japanese American history as we know it today.
And these clips that we're going to talk about are actually from the curriculum that the friends of Minidoka have created in partnership with North Shore Productions, and also with a little bit of help from the National Park Service to talk about this specific history with school students and more youth groups to discuss the importance of this story. And one of the most important parts to understand the story is context.
So I want to just give a quick little overview, and I'll discuss each of these pieces a little bit later. But if we had to break up the Japanese-American story, we could talk about in five phases, the first being immigration and anti-Asian sentiment, the second being the exclusion and forced removal process. Next, the incarceration period, which we'll talk the majority about in this presentation, then the resettlement and redress period after World War two and today, and the remembrance and the community phase, which brings myself to this work as a part of this community.
So let's break this down a little bit more. From the early to late 1800s to about 1940, there was a strong rise in Japanese immigration to this country and also to the Kingdom of Hawaii. Now, despite facing racism and hate, Japanese immigrants and their American born children settled down and created ethnic communities in the United States and also found themselves in other rural farming communities, creating a larger American structure and American culture for their own families, not just one, not just two, but sometimes even three generations wide within their family.
A well-established community was here. And with that came the very direct racism to their establishment and existence in this country. And if we keep that in mind, then it's not hard to believe that in 1941, with the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan and into 1942 leading into an exclusion, and then a later forced removal of over 120,000 people, two thirds of them American citizens, are then forcibly removed from their homes and in prison, and to incarceration centers without due process of the law.
The incarceration period can be something between 1942 to around 1945, and in this case for Minidoka. Over 13,000 people Japanese ancestry from Washington, Oregon, California, and even 135,000 Alaska would be incarcerated in the deserts of South Idaho. But resettlement and redress period is also just as important in the scope of this story, because after the closing of the camps, Japanese-Americans are forced to then rebuild their lives in a resettlement period which originally did not allow them to return back to the West Coast homes.
And for the majority of folks, they didn't have a West Coast home to return back to. This dispersal of the Japanese American community, which we'll talk about a little bit later, would then lead to an inspiring during the civil rights movement by the Black Liberation experience. But the stories of the struggles of those Latinx Americans and folks who are building their own communities in the United States would later inspire Asian-Americans, Japanese-Americans to then demand an apology from the United States government, which would lead to the redress period, where reparations of $20,000, alongside an apology, is issued to each surviving incarceratee,
in 1988, around 30 plus years after the closing of the camps, 40 plus years since the closing of the camps. And last but not least, the 1990s til today. Japanese-Americans continue to honor the camps by preserving and returning to these sites of confinement, mostly through community pilgrimages and personal experiences. To return to these places, and Minidoka National Historic Site serves as one of those places that is now protected and preserved
thanks to National Park Service and in partnership with friends like the friends of Minidoka. So let's start talking about this history in depth. Most importantly, why did this happen? A lot of folks might hold this misnomer that a Japanese-American incarceration was a military necessity. But if we study our history and we look actually towards those reports in the 1940s, 1941, 42, you realize that within the FBI and other advisors to the president, found that there was actually no military necessity for this experience.
And we fast forward in the 1970s, the 1988 congressional study, and then the redress movement, specifically the Civil Liberties Act 1988, you see three specific reasons being cited for the real justification for the incarceration, and the first one being that of racial prejudice. This photo here showing a 1920s photo of a white woman pointing to a sign that uses the J word J-a-p's keep moving,
this is a white man's neighborhood. And this image, once again before Pearl Harbor, shows us that racial prejudice was very real prior to the start of World War Two, and the entry of the United States into this war. The second reason is war hysteria. This image here showing the bombing of Pearl Harborby imperial Japan, this notion that war hysteria alongside propaganda and that racial prejudice would then lead to a populace to support mass incarceration of innocent people. and to put that mass incarceration into order, of course, was political leadership.
And this case in 1988, this cited that there was a failure of political leadership, not just of the President, Franklin D Roosevelt, but also his advisors, who were facing their own feelings of war hysteria and very overt racism, which would then lead to the signing of Executive Order 9066 in February of 1942, which would put into action the forced removal and later incarceration of this population of people.
So Minidoka Relocation Center, as it was called during World War Two, opened in August of 1942. This aerial photo shows you just how wide this over 33,000 acre land space was. set aside for the Bureau of Reclamation and with a deal with the War Relocation Authority, originally intended to be used as Japanese-American farm labor to later irrigate to create and re recreate and repurpose this land from sagebrush desert into arable farmland, which we'll talk a little bit about later.
And then this operation, over 13,000 people came through the barbed wire fences and would then be working, living and also eating within these over 640 buildings that you could see in this aerial photo. As I said earlier, the majority of this population were from the Pacific Northwest, a population that was not particularly used to the high desert, southern Idaho heat, very cold winters
that they would have to face during three years of their incarceration. This map right here shows us a little bit more about the community that would then be created at Minidoka National, Minidoka Relocation Center from block one to left hand side to block 44 in the bottom right hand corner, you see that Minidoka had approximately 1000 or so acres that made up the residential area, surrounded by a five mile perimeter fence and with eight guard towers surrounding that area, from block one to block 44 was approximately three miles within walking, to get to each part of this camp.
As you could see here, the camp itself was not created into a grid system like many of the other World War Two incarceration camps were at that time, but were more in kind of a crescent shape. And alongside that crescent shape which followed the canal and also was forcibly, made in that way because of the basaltic rock which was in the area,
You also see in the top right hand corner some of the examples of the farm and the farming that was being done by Japanese-American incarcerees. Whether it was the cultivation of potatoes, and also in the outside areas, as Japanese-Americans supported the farm labor of that time in sugar beet farming to support the war effort, but also things like broccoli and eggplant.
And when you look closely, you see Napa cabbage and Gobo root. Japanese-Americans would also later farm, culturally relevant and culturally significant vegetables to help supplement their very, very poorly made diets, by the War Relocation Authority. You know, one statistic I like to throw out is that the amount of money that was being spent for each person was about $0.50 per person per day, and you could translate that into 2022 numbers.
It's about $5 per person per day, which is not enough money to create a nutritional meal, let alone having Japanese Americans eating within mess halls with over 300 people in a cramped space. This map shows us a community on the bottom left hand corner. Whether it was an elementary school, the high school that was built, a library, a social hall or an amphitheater, baseball fields.
But we all must remember that this community, the seventh largest city of Idaho at that time, was created a necessity to survive. Notions like Gaman, to bear the unbearable or Shikata ga nai, it can't be helped, were words that were felt and heard all around those barrack buildings that barely provided any shelter from the harsh winds and the heat and the cold.
In 1940 to 1945. And when we continue to think about this story, I think it's most important that we hear about these reflections in the voices of those survivors. So as we look at this picture of a few folks doing the farm labor they were forced to do and would be provided very little compensation for their work. I think of this quote from Hanaye Matsushita.
It is unendurably hot and dusty. Though eventually I'll get used to it. I think about these children who attended schools and the 100, 200 hundred white War Relocation Authority employees who also administered the site. And I think about this quote from Sylvia Kobayashi. I want to forget the day we were herded like cattle into a prison camp. What did we do wrong?
What was our crime? I think about these young children, innocent and their experiences, and the only specific thing against them was their ethnicity. I think about those folks who created community, like those at the baseball field. And we have a recreation of center field here, thanks to our friends group, friends of Minidoka. I think about this quote from a survivor who provided a glimpse into their experience during a public hearing.
It reads Minidoka was part of my childhood. I would like to see my grandkids understand what happened here. I think about those who gave their lives, the over 1000 folks from Minidoka who had family, or they themselves were incarcerated at Minidoka, who would then go on to serve bravely, both on the European front and also the Pacific front.
Whether it was in the 442nd Presidential Combat Team or the Military Intelligence Service, or the Army Nurse Corps and the Women's Army Corps, I think of all those people, almost 33,000 Japanese Americans who bravely served in total during World War Two, who gave their lives, some of them, to fight for the freedoms that their families were not afforded.
I also think about the resisters. This page here, a specific clip from a very important book. Talking about the resistance of those Japanese-Americans by Frank Abe and this specific scene in Boise in a courthouse. And I'll read the scene out loud to you. Since none of you have lawyers, I'm ordering every attorney in town to come represent you.
And this Japanese-American reads, hey, that's Chase Clark, who used to be governor here. And these specific Japanese-Americans, around 30 of them were resisting the draft. And you later read into that panel, and you realize that governor Chase Clark, who is now serving as judge in this case of the draft resisters, had extremely strong feelings, very racist feelings about how Japanese-Americans would be treated in the state of Idaho.
He continues, I won't take any of them in Idaho except under guard and confined in concentration camps. And this book specifically discusses these conversations through graphic novel using those direct quotes. And that direct quote is indeed from the governor of Idaho at that time. So I think that this quote by Gina Kutsuu a resistor, a draft resistor, and he says, I never swore any allegiance to Japan.
I've always been an American, pledged my allegiance to our flag all my life. And these are just snippets of the experience of those Japanese Americans and their families. And I'm extremely excited for the rest of this program to be able to introduce the listeners to a little bit more and to better understand what that experience was like and the many different ways Japanese Americans continue to process the story.
And talking about continuing to process. I want to show this very incredible map from our partners at Densho, the Japanese American Legacy Project. And on this website, they have a sites of shame map which shows in the yellow where Japanese Americans were coming before camp to Minidoka and almost more surprisingly, the blue. The blue line showing where Japanese Americans would later, quote unquote, resettle both during World War Two and after World War two.
And what surprises me the most with this data is just showing how widely dispersed the Japanese American community from Minidoka later went to, whether it was in the Midwest, like places like Chicago or in states like Iowa or Minnesota, and even as far as the East Coast, places like Seabrook, New Jersey or New York or Massachusetts. And this later showing us just how large the dispersal of Japanese-American community was. and the amount of cultural loss in those small Japan towns that were in Portland, or Seattle and across California and in places like even Alaska, and just how much this community has lost, not just financially, but culturally in this experience.
Minidoka National Historic Site today is preserved and protects this legacy and story. We are located in Jerome, Idaho, and we have now around 6 to 7 historic buildings of the 640 original ones to be able to tell the story. We have a replica guard tower, a military police station at the entrance which shows the test of time.
Where over 80 years of history has been seen by these basaltic rock buildings. At the entrance to this concentration camp, a reconstructed honor roll shows and continues to tell the story of valor of those Japanese-Americans who bravely served during World War Two. A mess hall and a barrack has been returned back to the site, and continues to tell the story of those Japanese-Americans who were forced to live in these cramped spaces and eat amongst the community and the breakdown of that community.
And Ranger-led tours provide visitors an opportunity to walk into that history. You'll hear more from the Rangers about the experiences. A state of the art visitor center was opened in 2020, and continues to tell this story through various state of the art exhibits, videos, and even a 30 minute park film that has the stories of the survivors in their own voices.
And last but not least, for the folks who are joining us from the Pacific Northwest, we even have a partner site, Bainbridge Island Japanese-American Exclusion Memorial, which is connected and also administered through the Klondike Seattle, Seattle area National parks. And we highly encourage folks to take that ferry ride from Seattle to Bainbridge to learn more about the very first community of Japanese Americans who were forcibly removed from their homes, which would then start the incarceration experience
and the stories from here on in. So across these 407.5 acres, we continue to protect the story. And we highly encourage everybody here on this call to consider joining us in protecting the story, and to learn more about our American history. And I want to call us back to Doctor Frank Kitamoto. As we all remember, this is not just a Japanese-American story, but American story with implications for the world.
Thank you for joining me. And please continue to enjoy the rest of this program.
Robyn Achilles: Thank you, Kurt, and thank you to Idaho Humanities Council for including Minidoka National Historic Site and Friends of Minidoka in the Connected Conversations Program.