37 Japanese Americans who resisted WWII draft focus of new Museum of Idaho exhibit
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IDAHO FALLS – A new exhibit at the Museum of Idaho sheds light on a piece of history that isn’t widely discussed.
“Nisei Trials: 80 years — Remembering the Minidoka Draft Resisters” opened on Sept. 11 and tells the story of 37 men who were incarcerated at the Minidoka War Relocation Center during World War II and later defied draft orders. “Nisei” means second generation and refers to the children of Japanese immigrants who came to the U.S. between the late 1880s and 1920s. They were Americans by birth.
On Feb. 19, 1942, months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing the U.S. military to gather up 120,000 people of Japanese descent, even those who were American citizens, and place them in concentration camps scattered throughout the U.S.
“Why would they fight for a country who is putting their family in prison for no reason?”
More than 10,000 Japanese Americans were housed at the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Jerome County between 1942 and 1945. It’s now recognized as a national historic site.
Rod Hansen, the Museum of Idaho’s director of exhibitions, tells EastIdahoNews.com the draft of Japanese Americans was going on at the same time that many of them were being incarcerated.
“These individuals (who resisted the draft) supported the United States, but they weren’t allowed to be full citizens,” Hansen says. “Why would they fight for a country who is putting their family in prison for no reason?”
Chase Clark and the Nisei Trials
In May 1942, then-Idaho Gov. Chase Clark, who was from Idaho Falls, made a disparaging remark about the Japanese while speaking at a Lion’s Club meeting in Grangeville.
“Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats. We don’t want them permanently located in our state,” Clark is reported to have said.
Clark said “the Jap problem” could best be solved by returning all people of Japanese descent to Japan and “then sink the island.”
Clark, who supported the relocation of Japanese people to the Minidoka camp, lost the election later that year but was later appointed as a federal district judge and presided over the Nisei Trials in Idaho.
“You had a judge who was blatantly racist,” Hansen says. “They get to make the decision whether they’re too biased to take on a case, (and he) didn’t recuse himself.”
Hansen says the jury pool for the case was small, and they “were pretty much rubber-stamping them.” Thirty-five of the resisters ended up going to prison.
“It was obvious that the civil rights of these individuals were violated,” he says.
About six months after the war ended, the convictions were overturned, and the case was dismissed.
Those affected never spoke of it again, and few people know about it decades later as a result, Hansen says.
Racial hostilities in Idaho Falls
The exhibit contains artifacts and quotes from local people who were impacted by the events of the day. Among them is Jon Ochi.
In an interview with EastIdahoNews.com last year, Ochi said that his father, Fred, who passed away in 2007, lived through this time. Fred was never incarcerated and wasn’t among those resisting the draft, but he did experience a lot of racial hostility and was a member of the Japanese American Citizens League, the largest Asian American civil rights organization in the U.S.
There was a fairly large population of Japanese Americans in Idaho Falls at the time, Hansen says, and they had curfews and other travel restrictions imposed on them.
“My dad was here (in Idaho Falls),” Tim Morishita says in one of the exhibits. “The day after Pearl Harbor, he went into town, and they would not let him cross the Broadway Bridge.”
This restriction on the Broadway Bridge almost prevented one of Fred’s most famous encounters.
Fred painted portraits of numerous politicians over the years, including one of President Harry Truman, who visited Idaho Falls in 1948.
“Fred … attempted to show it to the president,” a separate exhibit says. “Security and regular citizens tried to keep Ochi from the president’s car. However, Truman, possibly recognizing an important opportunity to show inclusion after wartime aggression against Japanese Americans, invited Ochi onto his railroad car (and signed it).”
The autographed portrait is now displayed at the Museum of Idaho, but it is not part of the Nisei Trials exhibit.
Making amends and learning from history
Though efforts were made to make amends for the treatment of Japanese Americans — Truman pardoned the Nisei draft resisters in 1947, according to a museum exhibit, and President Dwight Eisenhower established the sister cities program (through which Idaho Falls has had an ongoing relationship with Tokai-Mura, a city northeast of Tokyo, since 1981) — it was more than 40 years later before FDR’s executive order was officially rescinded.
President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988, which provided a signed apology and $1.6 billion in reparations to “formerly interned Japanese Americans or their heirs.”
“We must recognize that the internment of Japanese Americans was … a mistake,” Reagan said in a 1988 speech. “Throughout the war, Japanese Americans in the tens of thousands remained utterly loyal to the United States.”
Years later, the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred in New York City, which Hansen says began another period of racial hostility towards Americans of Middle Eastern descent.
“It was a different group of people, but they were still ostracized and (treated unfairly),” Hansen says.
That was part of the reason for debuting the Nisei Trials exhibit on Sept. 11.
Hansen says it’s important to remember the Nisei Trials so we can avoid making the same mistakes.
A Day of Remembrance is held on Feb. 19 every year to “educate others on the fragility of civil liberties in times of crisis, and the importance of remaining vigilant in protecting the rights and freedoms of all,” according to the JACL’s website.
The Nisei Trials exhibit will be on display through February 2025. The Friends of Minidoka are showing a video reenactment of the trial on the third floor of the Artitorium on Sept. 18. It’s happening from 7 to 9 p.m. and is open to the community.
