The following is a reprint from an article I wrote for the March 30, 2005 edition of the San Francisco Bay Guardian:
Civil wrongs
Speeding
down scenic Highway 395, many drivers
don’t notice much beyond the snow-covered vistas of Mount Whitney and its environs. And the view is indeed breathtaking. But the land has also borne witness to an unsettling history. From 1942 to 1945, barbed wire and guard towers
mounted with machine guns ringed a dusty square mile of Owens
Valley, housing 11,000 Japanese American internees at the Manzanar War
Relocation Center. Admittedly, visiting
a former concentration camp doesn’t top many vacation wish lists. Manzanar closed sixty years ago, but it
remains a time capsule too chillingly important to ignore.
The
bombing of Pearl Harbor set off a hysterical backlash against people of
Japanese origin. Within two months,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved Executive Order 9066, resulting in the
wholesale removal of all Japanese Americans from the West Coast. On little more
than a week’s notice, 120,000 people, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens,
were forced to sell their homes and businesses at hastily arranged bargain
basement prices. Their fates uncertain,
they were transported to a dozen isolated “war relocation centers” scattered
throughout the country.
During
this period, Manzanar became the largest city between L.A. and Reno. Now
tumbleweeds bounce across the windswept high desert plain, easily outnumbering
cars and people. When the camp closed, the
military sold off most of the buildings or gutted them for scrap. The remaining landscape is shaped by absence
and memory. At
the sentry post entrance, brochures map out a self-guided auto tour. Row upon
row of cement slab foundations stretch across the camp’s vast footprint,
crisscrossed by a grid of now-empty roads. Shaded rock gardens and empty pond
basins exude a curious tranquility, hinting at grace under pressure.
In
2004 a spacious $5.1 million interpretive center opened in the camp’s former
high school auditorium. The names of the Manzanar detainees fill an
entire wall inside, and a movie shows former residents recounting their
experiences with relocation and racism. One area recreates a typical room in the flimsy tar paper
barracks, including the invasive noise level from living in close quarters. Newspaper clippings depict the virulent
anti-Asian sentiment of the late 1800s, and there are displays of toys and
furniture that residents created from scrap material.
There are personal
testimonies, including that of Ralph Lazo, a 16-year old Mexican-Irish boy who felt
so strongly about the injustice of the internment that he lied about his
ethnicity in order to accompany his friends. Toyo Miyatake, a studio
photographer, smuggled in a camera lens and eventually became the official camp
photographer, although camp officials made him employ a white assistant to
click the camera shutter. Orphans of even partial Japanese ancestry
were interned in Manzanar’s Children’s Village.
Touring
the grounds, it’s hard to come to terms with the existence of overtly race-based
prison camps in the United States. Even
harder to deny are the striking parallels between the discrimination against
Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor and the treatment of Arab and Muslim Americans
after September 11. And the government’s
admission of fault and reconciliation towards the Japanese American community
has been slow. In 1988, Congress formally
apologized and authorized reparation payments, and in 1992, after decades of
official neglect, Manzanar became the only former camp to win designation as a
National Historic Site.
It
wasn’t an easy journey. The Los Angeles-based
Manzanar Committee organizes a yearly camp pilgrimage, now in its 36th year. “When we started, a number of
local people didn’t want us here,” notes Sue Embrey, the Committee’s chair and
a former Manzanar internee. Although
local opinion is now much more favorable, during discussions about preserving
Manzanar’s wartime history, “there were daily letters of opposition to the
newspaper, and the first superintendent received death threats.” The group spent years advocating for Manzanar’s historic site status, and its work with the
National Park Service shaped the insightful
content of the interpretation
center.
A
split-rail fence traces the border of the camp graveyard, casting sinuous
shadows on the grassless ground. Hundreds
of brightly-colored origami cranes, symbols of peace, festoon the fence posts. A
brilliant white obelisk thrusts skyward, evoking the jagged snowy peaks just
beyond. An inscription in Japanese reads “Monument to console the souls of the
dead.” At the base of the marker lie empty
china teacups, bottles of sake and unopened letters.
A
comment book inside the interpretation center records the emotional reactions of
visiting adults and children: How could this have happened here? Why didn’t we know? During 2005, there are plans to reconstruct
one of the guard towers that originally stood on the busy highway next to the
camp, a provocative lure to those who might otherwise speed past and never ask.
![]() |
36th annual Manzanar Pilgrimage (2005) |
IF
YOU GO
Manzanar National Historic Site is on U.S. Highway 395 between the California towns of
Independence and Lone Pine. The site itself is open dawn to dusk year-round,
and interpretive center hours are generally 9am-5pm. Admission is free.
The 48th annual Manzanar Pilgrimage will take place on April 29, 2017. The program reunites former internees, their families, and community members, and
includes an interfaith ceremony and cultural performers. Members of the public are welcome. For more information, contact the Manzanar Committee.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.