Return to Minidoka: Revisiting the imprisonment of my family

A new art exhibit at the Schack depicts the lives of Japanese Americans interned during WWII.
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TWIN FALLS, Idaho — The sun was unrelenting, the air dry and dusty, and the land flat and vast.

Here, 72 years earlier, my paternal great-grandparents, Masahei and Chiyo Watanabe, and their four youngest children were taken from Seattle and kept during World War II. About 510 miles southeast of Coeur d’Alene and 620 miles southeast of Seattle, I walked the ruins and restoration of the Minidoka National Historic Site in June 2014.

My family was among the nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans forced from their homes and livelihoods in 1942.

Masahei and Chiyo emigrated to the U.S. about six years before the turn of the century, and decades before two world wars. They were operators of several hotel businesses throughout Seattle, just down the hill from where I later went to college at Seattle University. So-called alien land laws prevented immigrants from owning property.

They had committed no crimes, no treason. But people of the same ethnicity and country of birth had bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, and President Franklin Roosevelt decreed it a matter of national security to put persons of Japanese heritage living on the West Coast into internment camps built in remote areas.

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