On the road to Minidoka: A pilgrim of a different kind
Not long after Nibs Sakamoto took the seat next to me on the bus in Seattle Thursday morning, he turned to me with quiet curiosity and said, “May I ask why you are going on the Minidoka Pilgrimage? You are obviously not Japanese.”
How odd, it occurred to me, that it would seem odd that I was there. But as I looked around, I realized that out of about 75 people traveling on two chartered buses 600-plus miles or so to Twin Falls, Idaho, there were only a handful of my kind.
Some of my fellow travelers lived in the Minidoka camp, near Twin Falls, during the World War II years following Pearl Harbor. They were making the trip to share their history. Others, children and grandchildren of those incarcerated, were coming to learn a significant part of their family history. Others were on this journey in honor of a brother or a grandfather, now gone, who saw several years of their lives evaporate there.
To help pass time on the 12-hour trip, we interviewed seatmates to introduce them to the rest of the group. I learned that Nibs lived at Minidoka during his early teenage years. This pilgrimage is his third, and he’s meeting his daughter and granddaughter, who are coming from California, in Twin Falls. This will be his granddaughter’s first experience on the pilgrimage, and he believes his testimony about life in Minidoka will make the history’s legacy more powerful for her.
As the scenery morphed from Washington’s lush, green mountains of majesty to the sculpted hills and valleys of Oregon and finally to Idaho’s yellow sagebrush flatlands, I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the thousands of Japanese Americans who made this trip on a train in the 1940s — their hosts armed military personnel with rifles topped by bayonets. These families were ripped from their homes, and, in some cases, families were torn asunder when fathers went to one camp and mothers and children were assigned to another, often with hundreds of miles in between. They had little idea of where they would end up or what life would be like there.
Don Shimono, a member of the pilgrimage planning committee who was born in the Tule Lake Segregation Center in northern California, told me about that camp, infamous as the destination of the “no-nos” — those men who refused to sign a statement pledging allegiance to the U.S. government. Tule Lake was a prison, Don said, for those who refused to be quiet about the injustice visited upon them and their families by the U.S. government.
Putting Japanese Americans behind barbed wire following Pearl Harbor is “a black eye in the face of American history,” Don said.
Merriam-Webster defines a pilgrim as “someone who travels to a holy place.” For all the pain of a people forcibly separated from their homes, their livelihoods, their very lives, Minidoka stands as a holy symbol of the underside of human nature — an underside fed by wartime hysteria and the misuse of power.
Those who lived there, as well as their children and grandchildren, are pilgrims seeking healing from injustice, trying yet to understand how the U.S. government could sanction depriving 120,000 Japanese Americans of their civil liberty.
I am a pilgrim of another kind. My kind cannot share the legacy of injustice leveled on Japanese Americans simply because of their heritage. But I can connect with fury at a government senselessly destroying thousands of lives and the subsequent omission of this embarrassing chapter from our American history books.
So, Nibs, here’s my answer to your question: Your story is a story that desperately needs to be told. I’m just doing my part.
