Kooskia Internment
Camp Anniversary Picnic, May 25, 1944.
Photo courtesy of Mickey Barton and the Asian American Comparative
Collection,
University of Idaho. The 15 Japanese men pictured are (roughly
left
to right): Sokichi Hashimoto, Tomosaburo Kato (front), Naokichi
(George)
Kobayashi, Goro Mochizuki, Ichita Yoshida, Haruyuki Nagamine,
Tatsuo
(Jumbo) Nishimura, Yoneji Imamura, Motokichi Koda (barely visible to
right
of tree at center), Hisashi Imamura, Riichi Kinugawa, Seisaburo Yogi,
Eiichi
Morita, Masashi Yamamoto (a.k.a. Chiyogi Okamoto), and Keiji
Kijima.
The 4 Caucasian men pictured are: on the left at top center, Milt
Barton,
power shovel operator; to the right of Barton is Ralph Wilhite, head
mechanic;
squatting, lower right, is Merrill Scott, Camp Superintendent (he
replaced
D. A. Remer beginning in late 1943); above Scott, facing away from
camera,
is Hans Werner Kempski, then the camp's German internee doctor.
NEWS RELEASE
AACC PUBLISHES KOOSKIA INTERNMENT CAMP
BOOK!
Photo courtesy Homer Yasui
Scheduled Slide Presentation with
Book Signing
Saturday, June 16, 2012,
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, 1:00
p.m. Hosted by the Human Rights Education Institute, 414 W Mullan
Avenue, and sponsored by
the Idaho Humanities Council Speakers Bureau.
This event is free to the public. This presentation is a part of Asian
Pacific American History Month, and will provide a unique glimpse into
the human rights violations that Asian Americans suffered during World
War II. Please join us to hear about the unique history of Idaho and
the Japanese Internment Camps in the 1940s.
The long-awaited account of Idaho's World War II Kooskia
Internment Camp is now available. Titled
Imprisoned in Paradise:
Japanese Internee Road Workers at the World War II Kooskia Internment
Camp, it describes a unique, virtually forgotten, World War II
detention and road building facility that was located on the remote,
wild, and scenic Lochsa River in north central Idaho at the site of an
earlier CCC camp and a former federal prison camp above Lowell, Idaho.
Between mid-1943 and mid-1945 the Kooskia (KOOS-key) camp held an
all-male contingent of some 265 so-called "enemy aliens" of Japanese
ancestry. Most came from 21 states and 2 territories, but others were
from Mexico; some were even kidnapped from Panama and Peru. Two alien
internee doctors, an Italian and later a German, provided medical
services; 25 Caucasian employees included several women; and a Japanese
American man censored the mail.
Despite having committed no crimes, but suspected of potential
sabotage, these noncitizen U.S. residents of Japanese descent had been
interned elsewhere in the U.S. following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor
in December 1941. They volunteered for transfer to the Kooskia
Internment Camp and earned wages for helping build the Lewis-Clark
Highway, now Highway 12, between Lewiston, Idaho, and Missoula,
Montana, supervised by U.S. Bureau of Public Roads employees. [Highway
12, of course, has lately been very much in the news because of the
controversial proposal to use this wilderness route, the Northwest
Passage Scenic Byway, for transporting
200 oversize (210 feet long, 30 feet tall, 24 feet wide) loads of heavy
equipment (300 tons per shipment) from Lewiston to the oil extractive
tar sands in Alberta, Canada.]
Whereas some of the all-male internees held camp jobs, most of these
paid volunteers were construction workers, operating heavy equipment or
laboring with picks and shovels. The internees found this area of the
Idaho wilderness to be a welcome change from the barbed wire of the
Santa Fe Detention Center and other places where they were previously
confined. For example, Yoshito Kadotani, a landscape gardener from
Santa Cruz, California, called it "… a paradise in mountains!," saying,
"It reminds me so much of Yosemite National Park."
Knowledge of their rights under the 1929 Geneva Convention empowered
the Kooskia internees to successfully challenge administrative
mistreatment, thereby regaining much of the self-respect they had lost
by being so unjustly interned. Here, finally, is their story.
Title:
Imprisoned
in Paradise:
Japanese Internee Road Workers at the World War II Kooskia Internment
Camp
Author: Priscilla Wegars
Price: $19.95
Publisher: Asian American Comparative Collection (AACC), University of
Idaho, Moscow
Format: 6 x 9
Number of pages: 323 + xxxiv (357)
ISBN: 978-0-89301-550-3
Publication date: August 30, 2010
Page count: 323 + xxxiv (357)
Illustrations: 110 b&w photographs, 2 maps
Back matter: Appendix, notes, bibliography, index
Foreword by: Michiko Midge Ayukawa
Distributor: University of Nebraska Press through Longleaf Services,
Inc., 116 S. Boundary St., Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808, Phone:
800-848-6224, Fax: 800-272-6817. To verify account set up prior to
placing orders, please contact Teresa Thomas, Customer Service Manager,
at 800-848-6224 or email customerservice@longleafservices.org.
Publicity contact information: Terry Abraham, (208) 885-7075;
tabraham@uidaho.edu
Additional: All author's royalties benefit the University of Idaho's
Asian American Comparative Collection (AACC),
<http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/LS/AACC/>.
Author information: Priscilla Wegars is the volunteer curator of the
University of Idaho's Asian American Comparative Collection (AACC), a
resource center of artifacts, images, and bibliographical materials
that help a wide range of individuals better understand the history,
culture, and archaeology of Asian Americans in the West. She has a
Ph.D. in history from the University of Idaho, Moscow, and is also an
independent editor, historian, historical archaeologist, and artifact
analyst. Her earlier research focused on Chinese immigrants in the
West, and her book, Polly Bemis: A Chinese American Pioneer (Cambridge,
ID: Backeddy Books, 2003), received Honorable Mention from the Idaho
Library Association as the Idaho Book of the Year for 2003. She is also
the editor of Hidden Heritage: Historical Archaeology of the Overseas
Chinese (Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1993) and is co-editor, with Sue Fawn
Chung, of Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors
(Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2005). She is particularly interested in
locating families of Kooskia Internment Camp internees and employees.
A preview of
Imprisoned in Paradise
is also available to audiences as a
slide or PowerPoint presentation. For more information, please contact
Priscilla Wegars using the information at the top of p. 1.
Illustrations:
1. A photograph of the Kooskia Internment Camp buildings is at
http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/aacc/kcamp.tif.
Permission to use is hereby
granted. Credit and caption information: Kooskia Internment Camp, north
central Idaho, 1943-1945. Photographer unknown. Photo courtesy of the
Clearwater National Forest, Lochsa District, Kooskia Ranger Station,
Kooskia, Idaho and the Asian American Comparative Collection,
University of Idaho, Moscow. Far left, water tower; center,
dormitories, wash room, and recreation hall; right, mess hall/kitchen;
administration building, containing offices for superintendent and
censor, and two bedrooms for guards; laundry/warehouse; boiler
room/powerhouse; generator/shop.
2. A photograph of some of the Kooskia internees is at
http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/aacc/kmen.tif.
Permission to use is hereby
granted. Credit and caption information: Kooskia Internment Camp
Anniversary Picnic, May 25, 1944. Photographer unknown. Photo courtesy
of Mickey Barton and the Asian American Comparative Collection,
University of Idaho, Moscow.
3. Other images are available at the University of Idaho Library
Special Collections at
http://contentdm.lib.uidaho.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/spec_kic.
Please apply to them for permission to reprint.
A limited number of review copies of
Imprisoned
in Paradise are
available. To obtain one for review, please contact Linsey Gonzales,
Publishing Assistant, Caxton Press, 312 Main Street, Caldwell, Idaho,
83605-3299, on media letterhead.
Read a
review
of it by Connie Y. Chiang in the
Western
Historical Quarterly, Winter 2011.
Read a
review
of it
(2nd page) by Eric Walz
in
Montana: The Magazine of Western
History, Summer 2011.
Read a
review
of it by Arthur A. Hansen in the
Pacific
Northwest Quarterly, Spring 2011.
Read a
review
of it by Kevin Taylor in the
Inlander,
March 2011.
Read a
review
of it by Katie Schneider in the
Oregonian,
January 2011.
Read a
review
of it by Wayne Maeda in
Nichi Bei
Times, January 2011.
Read an
interview
by Leonard
Chan with Priscilla Wegars in the November/December 2010 issue of
the
AACP [Asian American
Curriculum Project]
Newsletter.
Read a
review
of it by Robert L. Sappington on amazon.com.
Read a
review
of it (scroll down) in
Densho eNews,
August 2010.
See also the
Kooskia
Internment Camp
Archaeological Project, directed by Dr. Stacey Camp.
The Kooskia (pronounced KOOS-key)
Internment Camp is an obscure and virtually forgotten
World War II detention facility that was located in a remote area of
north central
Idaho, 30 miles from the town of Kooskia, and 6 miles east of the
hamlet
of Lowell, at Canyon Creek. The Kooskia Internment Camp was
administered
by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for the U.S.
Department
of Justice. It held men of Japanese ancestry who were termed
"enemy
aliens," even though most of them were long-time U.S. residents, denied
naturalization by racist U.S. laws.
Immediately following Japan's
attack on Pearl Harbor, numerous
Japanese, German, and Italian aliens were arrested and detained on no
specific
grounds, without the due process guaranteed to them by the U.S.
Constitution,
and were sent to INS detention camps at Fort Missoula, Montana;
Bismarck,
North Dakota; and elsewhere. The INS camps were separate and distinct
from
the ten major camps under War Relocation Authority (WRA) supervision.
The
WRA camps, including Minidoka (now the Minidoka National Historic Site)
near Jerome, in southern Idaho, housed some
120,000
American citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry
who
were unconstitutionally removed, relocated, and imprisoned by the
U.S.
government during World War II.
Although there were a number of Justice
Department internment camps
throughout the United States during WWII, the Kooskia Internment Camp
was
unique because it was the only camp of its
kind in the United States.
Its inmates had volunteered to go there from other camps, and received
wages for their work. A total of some 265 male Japanese aliens;
24
male and 3 female Caucasian civilian employees; 2 male internee
doctors, one Italian and one German; and 1 male Japanese American
interpreter occupied the Kooskia
Internment Camp at various times between May 1943 and May 1945.
Although
some of the internees held camp jobs, most of the men were construction
workers for a portion of the present Highway 12 between Lewiston,
Idaho,
and Missoula, Montana, parallel to the wild and scenic Lochsa River.
The
Japanese internees at the Kooskia camp came from Alaska, California,
Colorado, Connecticut, Florida,
Hawai'i, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts,
Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon,
Pennsylvania,
Texas, Utah, and Washington. They included Reverend Hozen Seki,
founder of the New York Buddhist Church; Toraichi Kono, former employee
of Charlie Chaplin; and Japanese Latin Americans kidnapped from their
respective countries, chiefly Peru, by U.S. government agencies.
"Digging in the documents" has
produced INS, Forest Service, Border Patrol, and University of Idaho
photographs and other
records.
These, combined with internee and employee oral and written interviews,
illuminate the internees' experiences, emphasizing the perspectives of
the men detained at the Kooskia Internment Camp.
The Kooskia Internment Camp project was partially funded by an
Idaho Humanities Council Research
Fellowship and by a grant from the federal Civil Liberties Public
Education
Fund (
