The Time When America Imprisoned Thousands of Citizens

the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii picture being rounded up and forced to live in a jail like camp within your own country sounds pretty crazy right but in the 1940s that's exactly what happened to japanese-americans so I've come to Jerome Idaho to the old Minidoka camp which was one of ten u.s. government built camps meant to hold japanese-americans during World War two they were not soldiers of any kind they were just Americans and they were plucked from their lives their businesses their jobs their families they were all forced to live in this jail like camp barbed wire fences armed guards and guard towers around each corner there's a lot left behind to see so I felt like I would come here and give you a tour walking through the property to show you what it looked like here this is the original guard shack to the camp the foundation and its walls are still here very small in here now this outer part here also had a roof over it so probably was a lot bigger than it seems now and over here this used to be a waiting room where people used to sit and wait to visit people who were in this camp fairly small place for a camp that had thousands of people staying in there so there are some active restoration projects going on here throughout the property one of which is this reconstruction of this guard tower originally there were seven of these all around the huge property that made up the camp and I can only imagine how scary it must have been being watched by armed guards from these towers so if this was back in the 1940s there would have been buildings all over here the actual site was something like 33,000 acres but most of the buildings were squeezed into like a 946 acre area now there are some buildings that remain some that have been preserved some that were removed and actually brought back at a later date when they originally got here there was nothing out here it was just sagebrush and dust and dirt and they transformed this land into actual farms where they could grow crops and make their own food they were very resilient for being placed in confinement like this so I believe this is one of two fire stations that were located inside the camp that end right there is where the fire trucks were parked so remembering that there was 33,000 acres here and thousands of people here there was a lot of potential for fires so it was good that they had two fire stations here so this building here was one of many many barracks that were throughout the camp and everything is all locked up but we can take a look inside and see what it looked like obviously it's in very different condition than it was back then the next building here was the mess hall and it's pretty sizeable as you can see just that basic wood with tar paper covering it look at that it's hard to see in there but it gives you an idea this is the building this is the barracks that we just walked by and it shows you how many there were just in this area Minidoka became Idaho's seventh largest city called hunt after its postal designation with a peak population of nine thousand three hundred and ninety-seven internees here by 1944 the camp operated much like a small sufficient city powered by the sweat and ingenuity of the japanese-americans confined here the camp grew much of its own food had 196 bed hospital an internal police force a library two elementary schools a junior high school and a high school with 12 hundred and 25 students they had barber shops watch repair shops fish markets Boy Scouts Girl Scouts movies art exhibitions they truly made it as normal as they possibly could here so down below me is a recreation of what once was a baseball field baseball was very popular in a sense of normalcy and they took it very seriously it was a way to take a break from being incarcerated like this and they got pretty into it in fact even teams from outside of the gates from outside of this camp would come in and compete with play games with them so it was very important for them and pretty nice that they recreated this so we can see what it looked like so this area behind me was once all farms in fact some of it still is these japanese-americans transformed these dusty useless fields into productive farm lands in fact they were really dependent on themselves to make their own food this huge root cellar up ahead here is what's stored all that food so this root cellar was very vital for the winter and throughout the year in 1943 attorney farmers produced nine hundred and seventy nine thousand pounds of potatoes seventy-nine thousand pounds of carrots and one hundred and one thousand pounds of cabbage all cold storage crops were stored here until it was needed I can show you from the side here that's a good look in there now you can see the construction of it quite sizable inside coming up on the swimming hole this is it Wow so this swimming hole was dug because the summers were so hot here in Idaho really amazing to see what it looked like so one of the reasons why they dug this swimming hole is because back in 1943 two young boys were swimming in the river or the canal whatever is right here and they actually drowned so this provided a much safer environment and a much needed break from the heat and the boredom of this internment camp so the picture that is online actually lines up somewhere right in here you can actually see that's one of the information signs right there this is it it's almost like a heart shape from this angle the information sign here says this popular spot measured 20 feet wide by 200 feet long and five to nine feet deep camp children learn to swim here adults enjoyed being near the water one of few camp landscape features to remind them of home it's really hard to imagine people walking around in here kids playing people working eating playing baseball I mean this was an entire gigantic community in fact they got so used to living here that when the war ended and the government said they had to leave most did but some refused and were actually forced to leave shortly after that I mean you have to think about that they lived here I mean this was it became their home they were uprooted from their normal lives and forced to live here so it makes sense that some of them definitely felt that the US government owed them something more than just saying sorry about this you're out of here so it was interesting to find the swimming hole I didn't know I was going to be able to find it but it's clearly marked so if you come out here you will be able to see all the different places that I just took you to for yourself in fact since it is an ongoing restoration site in a few years there may be even more to see but the history definitely never changes it's definitely a dark part of our American history here but I hope you liked it I feel like a lot of people maybe didn't even know about this so maybe I brought that to your attention and maybe you learn something new today I know I definitely did so thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video [Music] you you

Channel: Mobile Instinct

Views: 112,997

Rating: 4.8938208 out of 5

Keywords: where is minidoka, japanese prison camp, mobile instinct, idaho minidoka, wwii prison camps, world war 2 history, wwii history, how many japanese imprisoned, things to see in idaho

Id: Uu2_XEp3voE

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2019