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Related: National Monument Status Stirs Memories — and Controversy Clinton's Proclamation to Make Minidoka National Monument

National Monument Status Stirs Memories — and Controversy

Former internee recalls life in Japanese American internment camp

Chiyeko Hayashida and her husband Seichi were among the 120,000 Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast who were forced to leave their homes during World War II. Photo courtesy of Idaho Public Television.

By Melanie Carroll/AP

Seichi Hayashida remembers the 1943 train ride from Seattle to the Japanese American internment camp in south-central Idaho.

“We traveled only at night,” Hayashida, a second-generation American said. “The blinds were drawn so no one could see in or out.”

Hayashida, 81, of Caldwell, was one of 120,000 people of Japanese descent who were interned at the Minidoka Relocation Center and nine other similar sites during the anti-Japanese hysteria that followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

On Jan. 17, President Clinton named the Minidoka center as one of seven newly selected national monuments, preventing commercial use of more than 1 million acres of federal land.

“We believe that our future and our land, air and water are one, that we must not only protect our historical treasures, but our natural treasures as well,” the president said.

Little remains of the Minidoka site, northeast of Twin Falls, where Hayashida spent two years. Tumbleweeds slide over smooth lava rocks where tarpaper-covered bunkers housed 9,400 Japanese from 1942 to 1945.

The remnants of a stone guard tower and a visitors waiting room remind Hayashida of the time he spent at the camp — from age 22 to 24 — and why he supports making it a national monument.

“It’s very important so it does not happen again. The Japanese citizens didn’t matter,” Hayashida said. “If you were one-eighth Japanese, you were taken away. It was almost as bad as Nazi Germany.”

Hayashida worked as a farmer — growing strawberries and other produce in Bellevue, Wash. and selling the goods in Seattle — before he was ordered to turn himself in.

Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on Feb. 19, 1942, effectively ordered the evacuation of all Japanese Americans from the West Coast as a wave of paranoia swept the country.

Before being transported to Idaho with his two younger sisters and mother — who were each allowed one suitcase — Hayashida recalls seeing Chinese people in Seattle who feared being mistaken as Japanese.

“They wore badges that read ‘I am Chinese,’” so officials would not come after them, Hayashida said. “A lot of Caucasians cannot tell the difference between the two.”

As a prerequisite of being released in 1945, the young man had to answer numerous questions about his political allegiance to the United States.

“You had to answer a lot of questions to prove your loyalty,” Hayashida said.

When he returned to the farm he leased in Washington state, all his equipment had been sold.

“There was a government bill of sale,” he said. “Everything including the tractor was gone.”

So Hayashida settled in Idaho, and after working on a Nampa farm for four years, became the co-owner of a local bowling alley. After his partner died, he became the sole proprietor of the Nampa establishment, and managed it for 46 years before retiring.

The place where he spent two years is still very much alive in his mind.

“Those camps were hastily built,” Hayashida said. “They used green lumber and there were half-inch cracks in the floor.”

The National Park Service will manage the Minidoka camp and roughly 90 acres of adjacent federal land as a unit of the Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument.

“I have mixed feelings about it. It’s a part of our history and we need to remember,” Rod Malone, the principal of Valley High School, about 10 miles from the former camp, said. “I’m a little bit opposed to the government coming in and taking over. It would be infringing on people’s rights.”

U.S. Senator Larry Craig, R-Idaho, echoed that sentiment.

“While I joined the rest of the delegation last week in supporting the designation of the Minidoka site as a national monument, I am disappointed that the president has decided to take this eleventh hour, unilateral action to designate without addressing the concerns of the local communities of interest affected in the Magic Valley region,” Craig said in a prepared statement.