Minidoka Was More Than An `Interlude'

ON this day, 50 years ago, Kikue "Kiki" Hagimori heard the jarring news on the radio.

"It was a shock. I was shaking. I didn't know what to do," Hagimori, now 77, remembers.

What Hagimori heard on Feb. 19, 1942, was that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had just signed an executive order that would lead to internment of 120,000 West Coast Japanese-Americans. She would be one of them.

It mattered not that Hagimori was, in the words of the Bruce Springsteen song: "Born in the U.S.A." She, like many others, was an American citizen whose citizenship rights would be obliterated by hysteria over the war with Japan.

Hagimori, a 27-year-old beautician and her husband, Kaoru, a gardner, quickly moved into the International District hotel operated by her parents, Genya and Noe Yamamoto. They wanted to be sure the family was not separated.

"My mother started to cry," Hagimori recalled. "She asked me: `Are they going to line us up and kill us?' "

Hagimori, the first of three generations to graduate from Franklin High School, had a deep faith in the country that interned her. "We knew they wouldn't shoot us," she said, "but the older people didn't."

The Hagimoris and the Yamamotos first were taken to the Puyallup Fairgrounds and kept behind barbed wire at a makeshift facility mislabled Camp Harmony.

"The knotholes kept coming out in the barracks where we slept and you could see the (mounted) machine guns pointed at us. My

mother was scared stiff. I took her out and spoke to the guards. They were very nice. That made it easier for her."

In August of 1942, the Hagimoris and Yamamotos were among 7,050 internees from the Seattle area put on trains for a 27-hour ride to the southern Idaho desert where most would remain until the end of World War II three years later.

The blinds on the train were ordered shut. When the internees got out of the train, they were greeted by scorching heat and a dustbowl known as the Minidoka Relocation Center just outside of Hunt, Idaho.

At Minidoka - named after an irrigation project - internees from Alaska and Oregon would swell the population to almost 10,000. They would turn a desert to green, spartan tarpaper barracks to modestly livable quarters, give birth, marry and die. In camp, Hagimori would give birth to a daughter - now Sharon Yuasa of Seattle.

The camp became a well-organized city with internees doing everything from being farmers to firemen. Hagimori plied her trade as a beautician. Internees were paid $12 a month for clerical work and $19 a month for professional work. Though they were stripped of their right to vote, they were required to pay federal income taxes.

"We just felt what must be done is done," Hagimori says. "We felt we had to make the best of it."

Among her possessions is a reminder of those days in camp. It is a hardbound dark blue book that looks much like high-school annuals of the time. But instead of home-room pictures, internees are lined up outside the barracks of the 44 blocks of the camp. The home of Hagimori and her husband was Barrack 12, Block 19.

The camp annual, produced by the internees, is called "The Minidoka Interlude." Internment was more than an interlude. It was a wrong and tragic deprivation of freedom. This country would acknowledge that many years later with an apology and $20,000 in redress for internees.

Reading "The Minidoka Interlude" is an enlightening look at the unabiding loyalty of the internees to this country. Listen to the dedication, written by internees:

"We, as residents of the Minidoka Relocation Center at Hunt, Idaho, take pleasure in dedicating this book to the `America of Tomorrow' and reaffirm our faith in the principles and ideals of the founders of the United States.

". . . We have every confidence that this nation of ours will lead the way toward a post-war peace which will bring to all everlasting security based upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice and humanity which so many of our sons and brothers are fighting . . . and dying . . . to uphold."

There is a picture of the man who ran the camp, Harry L. Stafford. He is a kindly looking man. "He was really nice," Hagimori remembers.

The message of project director Stafford showed a great compassion - and admiration - for those interned under him. The camp was not of his choosing. Almost 50 years ago, he wrote:

"War clouds have cast their shadows over innocent people throughout the world. Deprivation of liberty has been the accomplishment of the War Lords. The ill fortune of war struck deep in the case of Japanese-Americans and their elders.

"Beguiled of their worldly goods and treasures, these folks were rushed away to the ramparts of incarceration to endure a shattered composure. Fleet-winged vultures of hysteria brought persecution to their midst.

"Chaotic shrouds of barbed wire and bayonets failed to buckle the indomitable will of these people. They gained solace out of the love of the land of their birth and their adoption.

"Their sons went away to war to fight; to prove to all the world their equality, and faith in democracy. Lonely parents, about the shrine of faith, bide the time that Providence engenders tolerance, racial equality and liberty."

The late Harry Stafford was the closest to internment. He knew Executive Order 9066 was wrong. He was way ahead of his time.

Today, on the 50th anniversary of the internment order, a moving exhibit opens at the Wing Luke Asian Museum in the International District. It is entitled "Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After." The exhibit will run through the summer.

Japanese-Americans contributed photographs and other articles of their past. It is a remarkable exhibit that everyone should see. Included is the recreation of the type of Minidoka barracks that Hagimori called home.

It has been difficult for many Japanese-Americans to discuss internment. A hope of the exhibit is to have a healing effect.

The shame of Executive Order 9066 should send a deeper message to the broader community:

Never again.

Don Hannula's column appears Wednesday on The Times editorial page.