Words from our Co-Chairs

We are honored that Jim Azumano and Julie Abo have joined our 80th Anniversary We Are Minidoka campaign as co-chairs. Julie and Jim have long been involved with Minidoka and our efforts to preserve the past while educating the future. Thank you, Jim and Julie!

Jim Azumano

Does time heal old grievances, or do we just bury our trauma of the violations of our civil liberties during WW II?  It’s 2022 and new people continue to discover for the first time the shocking truth that our own government detained our elders in secure custody without a hearing.  Do we want to create a future where the truth about America’s concentration camps is more accessible and available?  

We have been peeling the onion to research the oral histories and manuscripts for the impact on the lives of the incarcerated 110,000+.  Your leaders have transformed a civil liberties nightmare to a standing teachable moment of a National Historic Site.  They forged innovative partnerships to bring some of the original concentration camp buildings back to the camp site; started an annual civil liberties symposium featuring the best speakers in the country; recreated one of the baseball diamonds which were known to provide a passionate outlet for the energy; converted the original maintenance shop into a versatile multi-purpose  Visitor’s Center and they recreated the Honor Roll of volunteer military recruits that came out of Minidoka.  This is just the beginning.  We have more work to do. 

We used to say we are preserving our story, so it won’t happen again, but it IS HAPPENING AGAIN!  The political environment in America today is bringing back suspicion, hate, and fear of Asians.  The temperature is rising, and The Friends of Minidoka want your help to open the minds of the next generations of Americans to value the civil liberties earned by the blood and sacrifices of our elders. 

The Friends of Minidoka need more financial support beyond my traditional one-year gift, if we are to create effective, long-range plans to educate the public.   We need your personal commitment to be a more active participant in the preservation of the legacy of our elders for all Americans.   

The failure to provide ‘due process’ to my grandparents, aunts and uncles is inconsistent with the strongest features of our Constitution.  My Uncle Mineo Inuzuka was one of the many decorated soldiers of the 442nd, recruited out of Minidoka.  If we didn’t continue to find new evidence that President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 did in fact happen, America’s Concentration Camps would be relegated as disinformation.   

There is still work to be done.  We need a stable financial resource to develop a long range plan including the funding of our personnel.  President Clinton was one of our early visionaries when he signed the proclamation in 2001 to establish the Minidoka Internment Camp Historic Site.  We can give the Friends of Minidoka what we can afford. 

Would you consider placing the Friends of Minidoka in your estate planning?  I am.

Julie Abo

If not us, then who?

On December 8, 1941, my mother's father, Shonosuke Tanaka, was immediately arrested by the FBI as an "enemy alien" and separated from her mother, Nobu Tanaka, and three siblings, Alice, Bill and John, for two years. Later, in 1942, the rest of my mother's family was forcibly removed from the U.S. Territory of Alaska to Minidoka, in Jerome, Idaho where they were incarcerated along with members of the Tlingit Nation and others for three years. My grandfather wasn't reunited with them until 1944, two years and three months later.

I grew up hearing the difficult stories of this incarceration and was instilled with a strong sense of civil rights, but I was never active in the post-WWII, post-Redress Japanese American community as a whole, nor the Minidoka community.

Now, in my mid-fifties, as the older generation slowly passes on, I feel a deep responsibility to be part of the stewardship of this instructive part of American history. Every day, I feel that we must convey the many histories of this land and be sure the World War II incarceration of Japanese and Native Americans are not forgotten to inform our understanding and implementation of democracy and the future of our country. I think of our family and how that could easily be my daughters and me in this day and age.

I hope you will join us and make a donation for the education of current and future generations.

It's never too late!