Proclamation remembers Idaho internment camp prisoners

Idaho Gov. Brad Little has issued a proclamation to recognize and remember the people of Japanese ancestry imprisoned at the Minidoka prison camp in south-central Idaho during WWII.

Little signed the proclamation Monday in the governor’s ceremonial office in the Statehouse with a former prisoner from the Minidoka camp in the audience.

Ninety-three-old Sadami Tanabe of Boise lived at the camp for four years in the 1940s after being relocated with his parents and three siblings from Oregon when he was 16.

Starting in 1942, when the U.S. was at war with Japan, around 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were ordered by the U.S. government into prison camps around the country.

The camp in Idaho is now a national historic site managed by the National Park Service.