In my previous two articles in The Nikkei Family 2 series (“Leaving for Camp” and “Camp Harmony”), I recounted my memories of the camp1; here, I share my strongest childhood memories of Camp Minidoka.
These memories do not include the worst of camp. There were riots, inmate deaths, “No -No” questions, a draft notice for Father and in May of 1944, the State of Washington tried to take Dad’s property away because he was married to a non-citizen in a community property state.
Minidoka Interlude records the best of Camp Minidoka. It is the only written, complete photographic record of any camp. I admire the strength, faith, and optimism expressed in it and am very grateful that it exists today.
We lived in Block 28, Barrack 8C. Camp Minidoka was laid out like an army camp in neat rows of tarpaper-covered barracks. I was drilled in our block, barracks, and room number so if I got lost, I could tell adults where I lived. We were to live in a high, barren desert setting in tarpaper barracks buildings for the next three years—a very hot, ugly place.
It is ironic that for the last fifty years, I have lived in a high desert, beautiful to me, but too much like Camp Minidoka in 1942 for my parents, for them to visit for more than a few days.
My first name in camp was Hideko, not Susan, and baby sister Louise was called Teiko. There were lots of children in camp—perhaps as many as 30 percent of the inmates were children—but we had few friends among the many children because Mother limited our playmates to those whose parents she knew.
Mother dominates my memories of camp. Unlike Father, she was with us all day and was our teacher. Though we spoke Japanese to other inmates and had Japanese first names, both Mother and Father felt that the ability to read and speak in English was essential to surviving in America. In our barracks room, we spoke English to one another.
It was my duty to learn the alphabet and to read and write in English. Mother, though dyslexic, taught me to read with her version of phonics. Teiko and I were punished for not knowing the alphabet. We were too young to attend the camp schools. Mother gave us a stern version of home-schooling as soon as we were able to understand her wishes.
Above all, we were to learn to read in English. Mother read nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and children’s books to Teiko and me. I couldn’t wait to be able to read them for myself.
We bathed in community showers, called the shared toilets “latrines,” and ate in “mess halls.” I remember disliking mutton stew, picking out the carrots to eat and leaving the tough, smelly meat in the bowl. We had enough food, but no one I know from camp describes the food as tasting good.
Mother told us stories after camp about how the rattlesnakes disappeared from camp and surrounding areas because inmates learned that the rattlesnakes were good to eat, tasting a bit like chicken when skinned and cooked. I’m sure I’d remember eating rattlesnake meat, for we were taught to fear rattlesnakes.
Dad told of his adventures sneaking out of the barbed wire and catching delicious trout out of the local streams. He collected a rattle—sans attached snake—on one of his fishing trips. Just the sound of the discarded rattle being shaken made me run in fear.
I loved the faintly yellowish but mostly white-colored flecks of homemade butter Mother taught me to make, which magically appeared after shaking milk in a covered Mason jar. I vaguely remember a beautifully decorated cake that was displayed in the mess hall around Christmastime for many days before we were allowed to eat it. When we finally ate the cake, the cake under the frosting tasted very bad, nothing like my beautiful second birthday cake in Camp Harmony.
With a twinkle in her eye, Mother often recalled the story of the time when camp inmates suffered food poisoning. Everyone rushed out of their barracks toward the bushes and the latrines. The guards in the watchtowers surrounding our barbed-wire-enclosed camp turned spotlights and guns—usually pointed outward—inward at us because they thought we were rioting. Luckily, no one was shot.
After the passage of many years, I still find writing about camp, sharing even my best memories with others, deeply depressing. My childhood memories of camp and out of camp after the war are all tinged with sadness. It would be impossible for me to fit these memories into the 1,500-word limit for this article.
Sometimes I think I found closure when a friend who suffered terribly as a starving child of a GI left in Italy during WWII sneered at my tales of camp, saying coldly, “It is my understanding that the camps were created for your protection.” First, I felt rage. But knowing she was dying of cancer, I understood her anger, her need to lash out at me, and forgave her.
I understood why my parents tried to soften their retelling of camp stories with humor. They believed that bitterness and hatred should not be my legacy from camp.2
Notes:
1. camp—for any prison camp resulting from the execution of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1942 Executive Order 9066, including Camp Harmony and Camp Minidoka. When we used the word “camp” in the family, it was always known from the context that we meant camp.
2. The 1988 Civil Liberties Act included an apology and redress payments for surviving former inmates of all camps. The act was signed by President Ronald Reagan, but the apology was signed and $20,000 tax-free “redress” payments were distributed by President George H. W. Bush in 1990.
© 2025 Susan Yamamura
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