Marriage and Honeymooning in Camp

By Camille Daw, Graduate Fellow

Early Spring through early fall is often known as the “wedding season,” where most young couples get married and celebrate their elopement with warm weather. At Minidoka, a handful of individuals chose to get married, some following Christian traditions, with others preferring Buddhist nuptials. 

Many Japanese Americans who dated before the attack on Pearl Harbor also chose to get married immediately after FDR signed Executive Order 9066. As the removal orders came, several chose to marry their love so that the War Relocation Authority sent them to the same confinement camp. Others, like Kay Teramura, met their future spouse at a detention center. He later married her at Heart Mountain concentration camp, then returned to Minidoka together. Similarly, Milton and Molly (Kageyama) Maeda married at the Portland detention center, beginning their new lives together at Minidoka. 

The conditions surrounding the war also played a major role in the decision to marry. Some married because of the draft. In April 1944, seven couples married in one weekend – as more and more men received their orders to appear.

Couples married at Minidoka went to Twin Falls for a day, then returned to Minidoka after a one-night honeymoon in town. According to an oral history interview from Tad Kuniyuki, the marriage license cost $2, and the marriage with the justice of peace took less than an hour. For religious couples, many returned to Minidoka the day after their elopement to hold a religious ceremony in one of the barracks that Japanese Americans had converted into a church. Some brides wore new white dresses, ordered from the Sears & Roebuck catalog for the occasion; others wore their Sunday best – all they owned and could afford. Similarly, some did exchange rings until the war’s end because of cost. Most families chose not to bring family heirlooms, such as their mother’s wedding gown.

Many married sooner to leave Minidoka concentration camp for work in other states. In some instances, work required the couples to be apart for months while one worked enough to secure housing while the other remained at Minidoka. As newly married couples, this put strain on the relationship early on, but many eventually managed to reunite. 

Weddings, marriage, and relationships at Minidoka were constantly tested by the stress of removal and incarceration, coupled with factors that Japanese American couples were forced to endure. The lack of privacy, lack of family organization, stress from work and over money often aged the couples, either forcing them apart or drawing them closer together.