On the desert plains of Jerome County, Idaho, where more than 9,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II, there are few signs of the sprawling camp where they once lived. There are a few empty warehouses, the old entrance way and a slight hill on the otherwise flat terrain.
“It’s just kind of a bump,” architecture student Alisha Snyder said. A timber frame covered in dirt and hay, and receding five or six feet into the ground, barely peeks out of the Earth. “My building is underground. You can’t see it when you go there. And that was a big deal to me, that you leave the site as it is and you don’t see a shiny new building when you go there.”
The structure was called a root cellar, and Snyder chose to use it as the site of an underground museum of the war and the stories of the internees. The plans she sketched and the model she built won’t likely come to fruition at the Minidoka National Historic Site, but she and her classmates spent a term creating ways to memorialize the American citizens whisked away by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The order sent Japanese Americans to internment camps for the duration of the war.
Between 1942 and 1945, Minidoka was the seventh-largest city in Idaho. “This really was a city unto itself and had everything a city needed to operate,” Wendy Janssen, Minidoka’s superintendent, said in a lecture on campus Wednesday. She said the camp had a hospital, baseball fields, basketball courts, a newspaper and a school with an annual yearbook.
The internees ran the city. They even built the root cellar, Snyder said, though it was crafted in a style contemporary to Idaho architecture at the time.
“We have to remember what happened,” junior Aisha Baiguzhina said. To help others remember, her project focused not on the Minidoka site but a façade in Portland’s Old Town neighborhood. A barber shop and other businesses owned by Japanese Americans once occupied the building, before the executive order led to an exodus of the former Japantown.
Some students drafted plans for a museum that could sit on the Portland site as an extension of the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center. Baiguzhina’s project featured a roofless path through the middle of the building between glass walls. The path “symbolizes being in between,” she said, as the internees were.
“It was the feeling of being in America but not having freedom at the same time,” she said. If visitors turned right upon entering her hypothetical museum, they would find on the ceiling of a nearby room an image of a girl with an American flag – “she’s white, she’s Caucasian, she’s happy to be in America,” Baiguzhina said – and then a reflection of a photograph of a Japanese family held at Minidoka.
Another room in Baiguzhina’s building would be very dark and full of concrete. “This shows people what it feels like to be very isolated,” she said.
Nick Tsontakis, another student who chose to design a center to sit behind the façade on NW Third Avenue, said it was important to create a center “not just for Japanese Americans to go to, but a place where all Americans can go and learn about history.”
Until the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, there were about 100 businesses owned by Japanese Americans covering 10 blocks of downtown Portland, architecture professor Kevin Nute said. Nute himself accidentally discovered the façade while walking through downtown.
After discovering the façade, Nute led his students in learning about the history of Minidoka and the internment. He brought internees to lecture, visit with students and critique their work. Nute even brought in Janssen of the National Parks Service to speak about creating a future visitors center at Minidoka. The parks service is working on its own plans for building a memorial or museum on the site, but lacks the funding to make one.
“They obviously think it’s important (to remember the internment) or they wouldn’t be working on improving the site,” Snyder said.
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