The Road to Minidoka

While my great grandparents and their daughters were imprisoned by the US government, their sons were in the military fighting for our freedom. Two fought overseas for the USA. Their names are on this memorial sign.

August 12, 2026

I didn’t expect to cry.

But a few miles before we reached Minidoka, the tears started.

And they kept coming.

Most of my family was imprisoned there during World War II.

Minidoka was one of ten incarceration camps created after President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast and incarcerated. Most were American citizens.

Nearly 13,000 people would pass through Minidoka between 1942 and 1945, most of them from communities in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. At its peak, more than 9,000 people lived there.

Including my family.

Minidoke was more than 33,000 acres of high desert in southern Idaho.

Sagebrush.

Dust.

Basalt rock.

Temperatures that could climb above 100 degrees in the summer and fall well below zero in the winter.

Hundreds of hastily constructed barracks covered in tar paper.

Barbed wire.

Guard towers.

I knew all of this.

I’ve always known what happened to my family.

But knowing something and standing where it happened are very different things.

I walked through what remains of the buildings.

The fences.

The lookout.

I looked across that barren Idaho landscape and tried to imagine arriving there without knowing where I was going.

Forced from my home by my own government.

Allowed to bring only what I could carry.

Leaving behind a home, possessions, businesses, pets, communities.

A life.

Then traveling to an unknown place and discovering this was where I was expected to live.

Dust and heat and cold.

Rattlesnakes and ticks.

Almost no privacy.

Communal bathrooms and dining.

Family members sent to different places.

And no way of knowing when any of it would end.

I cried for my family.

I cried for what happened to them and for the ways it affected them long after they came home, even though they almost never spoke about it.

I cried for all the Japanese Americans I didn’t know.

For the families packing what they could carry.

For the parents trying to take care of their children while having no idea what was going to happen to them.

For the people looking around at that barren landscape and realizing this was now home.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would mean if it happened today.

I would be the one sent away.

My children would be sent away.

We would be the family packing what we could carry and leaving everything else behind.

That realization did something to me.

Because it is easy to look at something that happened more than eighty years ago and experience it as history.

It is something else entirely to stand inside that history and realize that the only thing separating you from the people who lived it is time.

And yet, grief wasn’t the only thing I felt.

I thought about resilience.

My family came home.

They rebuilt their lives.

They served their community.

They raised families.

They built businesses.

My family was also extraordinarily fortunate.

They had something to come home to.

Many Japanese American families did not.

I don’t want resilience to become a way of making what happened somehow okay.

It wasn’t.

What happened at Minidoka never should have happened.

And it did.

Both of those things are true.

So is the resilience of the people who survived it.

So is the damage they carried afterward.

So is the silence many of them carried with it.

So is the life they created anyway.

And standing there, I found myself wrestling with questions I hadn’t expected.

A government has a responsibility to protect its people.

Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

The country was at war.

The fear was real.

What does a government do in a moment like that?

How far should it go to protect its people?

And how does it do that without taking away the rights and freedoms of the very people it is supposed to protect?

I don’t pretend those are simple questions.

I also know that what happened at Minidoka never should have happened.

And I know something about its consequences firsthand.

Not because I was there.

But because I grew up with people who were.

My grandparents were imprisoned at Minidoka.

My father was their son.

Their daughters are my aunts, women I grew up around.

The people who came home from this place weren’t historical figures to me.

They were my family.

I knew them.

I loved them.

I grew up inside a family shaped, in part, by something they almost never talked about.

Maybe that is what I was crying for before we even arrived.

For my grandparents.

For my family.

For the things that happened to them.

For the things they carried home with them.

For the things they never said.

And for the resilience that lived alongside all of it.

I don’t know exactly what a government should do when its country is attacked and its people are afraid.

I do know that decisions made in those moments don’t end when the crisis ends.

Sometimes their consequences come home with the people who lived through them.

Sometimes they settle into families.

Sometimes they are carried quietly for generations.

And sometimes, more than eighty years later, a granddaughter drives across the Idaho desert toward a place she has known about her entire life and starts crying before she even gets there.