Hello to Manzanar

Back in 7th grade, when I read Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir, Farewell to Manzanar, the wind and sand had buried most remains of the Japanese internment camp that Houston described so eloquently in her 1973 memoir. By the early 1970s, people had pretty much forgotten that the United States detained thousands of its own citizens in internment camps during World War II.

As a 12-year-old, the book blew me away — how could this have happened to families in the United States? I don’t remember asking my parents or grandparents about the camps, and we never learned about them in school. But Jeanne’s story stayed with me. Years later, when I was designing a humanities class called “Multicultural America,” I added her short but powerful book to the reading list. Now, I talk with students about Jeanne’s story, so she’s still with me (and still alive and living in California, as of 2018).

This past summer, I visited Manzanar National Historic Site, just south of Independence, California. As with Jeanne’s book, visiting Manzanar blew me away.

A replica of the original sign for the “Manzanar War Relocation Center.”

If I had come to Manzanar as a teenager, or even in my 20s, there wouldn’t have been much to see. The government dismantled the camp after the war, and the harsh winds of the Owens Valley had blown sand over the gravesites, gardens, and other camp remnants, literally erasing Manzanar and its history.

But thanks to Houston’s book, and the work of Manzanar Committee  — spearheaded by writer/activist and former incarceree Susan Kunitomi Embrey — we won’t forget Manzanar and the nine other detention camps set up for Japanese-American citizens and their older Japanese immigrant relatives.  These older immigrants — the Issei — were not citizens because until the 1952 passage of the McCarran–Walter Act, only white immigrants could become naturalized citizens.

Incarceree Ryozo Kado, a stonemason, built this memorial at the Manzanar cemetery in 1943. The Japanese inscription says “Monument to console the souls of the dead.” During the war, 143 people died in the camp, and 15 were buried here, although only five graves remain, including those of several babies or toddlers.

The residents of Manzanar made the best of a terrible experience, which to some people may suggest that “it wasn’t all that bad.” It sounds pretty bad to me. I can’t imagine the government tell me I had a couple of weeks to get my affairs in order because I was going to be held indefinitely behind barbed wire fences. Many Japanese-Americans lost businesses, homes, and lives they had built for themselves and their families.

Replica of  a family’s assigned room in the barracks at Manzanar.  On the August day that I visited, the temperature had cooled to the high 90s after a long stretch of 100 degree-plus days, which is typical summer weather in the Owens Valley, and this room was hotter on inside than outside. In the winter, cold wind blew through cracks in the hastily-constructed structures.

Life in the camp was extremely stressful, as is always the case when people are packed together in close quarters with little control over their own lives. At one point, a riot broke out in which two people were killed. In her memoir, Jeanne describes her father’s descent into alcoholism, and how the camp impacted family dynamics in other more subtle ways. For example, kids often ate with other children instead of their families, so the feeling of family togetherness gained through eating together was lost.

Replica of the bathroom building at Manzanar. My students always comment on Jeanne’s description of the bathrooms, which lacked stalls; Jeanne’s mother and other older Japanese women found using the bathrooms especially humiliating.

The government selected Manzanar because it was an abandoned town site, with land available for lease from the City of Los Angeles. Earlier in the 20th century, Los Angeles had more or less tricked the local farmers into selling off their water rights, and then drained the once-fertile valley dry by building a series of water-delivery canals. The land was originally home to Paiute Indians, driven off by the military in the 1860s.

Eventually, the involuntary residents of Manzanar built a community here, including basketball courts, numerous Japanese-style gardens, and a shady oasis known as “Pleasure Park.” Kids went to school, mothers birthed babies in a makeshift hospital, and teams played baseball and other sports.

The marker for Pleasure Park, also known as Merritt Park.

The gardens at Pleasure Park.  The Park Service  has excavated these gardens over the past 20 years, as the relentless Owens Valley wind had buried everything with sand. This park would have been lush and green during the war because the internees maintained it as oasis.

Manzanar National Historic Site was established in 1992. Controversy surrounded memorializing the camp from the moment the state of California designated it as  a historical site in 1972, and erected a roadside marker describing Manzanar as a “concentration camp.”  In the 1990s, when the Park Service first began to excavate, develop, and preserve the site, it was flooded with letters of protest, with at least one writer suggesting the camp was a “guest house.”

I’ve come across this desire to sanitize history in my own community, and it’s hard for me to understand. Some people seem to think that we should whitewash “the bad parts,” maybe because they think it reflects poorly on the community (locally) or, in the case of Manzanar, on the United States.

Many of the protestors  were WW II veterans. Perhaps some felt that an official remembrance of the Japanese internees in some way diminished the sacrifices they had made. During the war, they were fighting for an honorable cause. Reminding the country that Americans were held against their will perhaps made the cause seem less honorable. Or perhaps the veterans also felt forgotten. I know some would argue that this push to keep history “clean” results from systemic racism — controlling the narrative helps to maintain power — and I wouldn’t entirely disagree, but it’s complex. History provokes feelings that are often deeply personal.

After the war ended, Japanese-American families left the camps to pick up the pieces of shattered lives. Anti-Japanese sentiment and prejudice remained rampant, as this Manzanar exhibit illustrates.

Visiting Manzanar was an emotional experience for me, and I noticed other visitors dabbing at their eyes as they viewed exhibits. I wanted to ask some questions but had to pull myself together.  I mentioned Farewell to Manzanar, and the ranger told me that their chief interpreter, whose name I later learned is Alisa Lynch, also  was deeply impacted by Jeanne’s story, after seeing the movie version of the book in 1976.  The ranger told me that  lots of families visit Manzanar each year, often because children ask their parents to take them there because they  learned about the camps in school.  Many have read Jeanne’s book.

Sources and resources

“Bitter Feelings Still Run Deep at Camp,” by Martin Forstenzer, Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1996.

Dorothea Lange Gallery, Manzanar  National Historic Site, National Park Service. Lange, famous for her Depression-era photos of migrant Dust Bowl families, also took many photographs at Manzanar during World War II.

“Return to Manzanar,” by Nicolas Brulliard, National Parks Conservation Association, Fall 2016.

“Whitewashing Manzanar : Various veterans groups want to (bully) the government into denying the site of its historic meaning,” by Robert A. Jones, April 10, 1996.