CM: What was it like for you to go back to Idaho for the first time and see where you were born? And to go back and see the Puyallup Fairgrounds where your family lived?
LM: I didn't go to the Puyallup Fair until I was 33 years old. I purposely avoided it because my family lived there during the war. In the late 1970s I took a group of Vietnamese refugee school kids, because I was working in the bilingual program in the Seattle Public Schools. We took them to the Puyallup Fair and they really enjoyed it. And that was the first time I'd ever been to the Fair. I looked around and it was just a fairgrounds. There was no evidence at all that the Japanese lived there. But now there is one monument in one corner near some of these exhibition halls. I've seen it, and it's a Tsutakawa sculpture, a tall bronze sculpture. The last time I looked there were benches by it and people would put their cigarette butts on the ground nearby.
In terms of Minidoka, I went to Minidoka about six times. The first time, I expected it to be harsh desert land. I didn't know what to think because it was all green fields. It's like the Skagit Valley. I was speechless, it was like someone played a trick on me. I thought, "Wow, time changes everything."
CM: What was it like when you saw where you were born?
LM: Well, I did look for Block 26. It was just rolling hills and fields. Most of the land has been reclaimed as farms. Some of it now is a national historic site. So, there is a barrack that was re-built or refurbished on site. They have one original mess hall standing and the root storage building is falling down. Recently a group put up a guard tower and a baseball field because they used to play baseball there. Looking at one barrack is not like looking at 44 blocks of barracks in terms of scale. There were almost 8,000 or 9,000 people at Minidoka during its height. It was the second- or third-largest town or city in Idaho at the time. But because it was in a ravine, you could drive past it on Hunt Road, but you couldn't see it from the road. Nine thousand people there and you wouldn't even know it.
I did have one recollection when I went to Minidoka. When I went into the barrack, I was struck by the fact that it looked like an Army barrack that I had lived in at Fort Polk, Louisiana. If you've ever been in the Army and gone into a barrack, that's exactly what it looks like because they were built using the Army camp design. The only difference is the latrine was not in the barrack like in the army, but was possibly a block away.