KENJI’S STORY

I used to have a recurring nightmare until I was about 11 or 12 years old. The dream was so vivid that I often woke up covered with sweat. Images included a dark but featureless street, the haunting hum of war machinery, and a woman whom I took to be my mother. An underlying feeling of fear dominated. The dream was real and frightening.

I am 82 years old today. In March 1942, I was four when my family boarded a bus at the beginning of our journey from Seattle, Washington, to Minidoka War Relocation Center, a fenced-in, 600-building compound in southern Idaho that would become our new home for the next three years.

I felt my mother’s anxiety on that bus, facing an uncertain future without clear answers to her questions: Where will we ultimately be sent? Japan? Will we still be Americans? Will we be harmed? Can we ever return home? Looking back, I feel a strong connection between my nightmare and my mother’s anxiety on that bus.

And what do I remember about camp? How much of it is colored by my later experiences, maturation, and my adult understanding of the fundamental violations of our civil rights? I search my memory for experiences of Minidoka as a kid aged four to seven, trying not to impose my adult perspective, keeping in mind that I’m seeing these events through my reconstructed childhood eyes.

I HAVE ONLY A FEW MEMORIES from before the war, such as enjoying a fried egg sandwich in Seattle’s old Oregon Hotel, and tripping over a man’s leg in front of the court house that left me with a scar on my face—but the majority of my life at that early age is a blank.

I remember camp years better. My