Licensing

Cherry Kinoshita - Internment at Minidoka

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent signing of Executive Order 9066, Cherry Kinoshita and her family were faced with very difficult circumstances. Like hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans on the mainland, their lives had changed in a matter of minutes. Her family was questioned by the FBI, and she constantly felt as though everyone suspected her and her family of being in cahoots with the enemy. And when they had to leave everything behind with the exception of what they could carry, their situation only worsened. Cherry and her family were first stationed at Puyallup Assembly Center, then interned at Minidoka, in Idaho, shown in wintertime 1944 in the photo above.

After the war was over, Cherry and her family resettled in the Midwest, and many years later she and her husband returned to her original hometown in Seattle. In the 1970s she became involved with JACL’s Seattle Chapter, and became educated on civil rights issues within the organization. This led to her interest and later, involvement, in the Redress and Reparations campaign.

Source: Densho Digital Archive, http://archive.densho.org/main.aspx. Visual History Collection: Densho Visual History Collection: Cherry Kinoshita Interview.

Photo: Densho Digital Archive, http://archive.densho.org/main.aspx. Photo/Document Collection: The Manuscripts, Special collections, University Archives Division, University of Washington Libraries Collection.