Manzanar War Relocation Center

Jill's Journal: One square mile, enclosed with barbed wire. Remote, barren location under military guard. Brutal living conditions. Ten thousand people imprisoned for no crime. Some called it the “Jap Camp.” The politically correct of the time called it a “War Relocation Center.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other officials called it a “concentration camp.” And yet, inexplicably, it wasn’t in Germany or Poland or anywhere else. It was right here in America, right here in California. More than 65 years after it has closed, its footprint and its searing memory remain. It is Manzanar.

Words cannot express how powerful, how piercing, how incredibly moving it is to visit Manzanar National Historic Site near Independence, California. Our girls are far too young to fully grasp what happened there, but Rob was profoundly affected by our time at Manzanar and I was moved to tears.

We all know about the racism that gets headlines practically every day, but much more poignant is the quiet and forgotten racism directed toward Japanese-Americans right here in the United States during World War II.

In early 1942, two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, prevalent racism combined with fear of where loyalties might lay compelled President Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 9066. That meant 120,313 Japanese-Americans, mostly on the West Coast, were given just days to leave their homes, close their businesses, and disperse all their personal belongings. Their weapons, short-wave radios, and cameras were confiscated. They were allowed to take only what they could carry and, unless they had kind Euro-American friends willing to help them out, lost everything else, things like houses they’d worked a lifetime to earn.

It occurred to me during our time at Manzanar that German-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc. suffered no such forcible upheaval during the same war.

Many of these incarcerated Japanese-Americans – two-thirds of them, to be exact – were second or third generation Americans, born here in the U.S. They spoke English. They had no foreign accent. They worked hard. They paid their taxes. They saluted the American flag. They were American through and through. Their only crime was a Japanese ancestry.

(Most of the others were aliens, legal aliens, who had been in the United States for decades but were prohibited by law from obtaining citizenship. They too paid their taxes and were American with the exception of their birthplace and the country on their passport.)

As a rule, the Japanese-Americans were stoic and went willingly, for the good of the country. Not a single one of them was convicted of espionage, sabotage, or any other sort of war crime. Some had sons, brothers, or cousins fighting in the war as part of the American troops. Some of the Manzanar detained lost their own sons in the war – fighting for America – and yet we kept them locked up as prisoners in these camps.

These people were not allowed to leave. They were under military guard. They were told the guard towers, the guns, and the bayonets were there to protect them. Yet, the guards and the guns weren’t watching the grounds outside the camp…they were guarding the borders of the camp to ensure no one left.

And life wasn’t easy inside Manzanar. The barracks were crude, tar-paper structures with eight people assigned to each 20x25 space, no matter if they were family or not. The constant wind blew sand in through the holes. There was no heat in the freezing winters other than meager oil stoves. Temperatures in summers reached 110 degrees. But worse, there was no privacy, there were no walls. There were not even partitions between the toilets or the showers. The people were forced to eat in mess halls. Family meals were a thing of the past.

“Children have not seen a kitchen stove, a bath tub, a family dinner table, or the privacy of a backyard for two years… Their poems, stories, and pictures reflect a barren world of watch towers, barbed wire fence, tar-papered barracks, desert flora, and high mountains capped with snow.”
--Dr. Genevieve W. Carter, superintendent of education

Of the 800 buildings once here, only three original structures remain today. One is the auditorium (shown here), a hub of community life. In it is now housed the Interpretive Center. This is an absolute must during any visit to Manzanar, as is the auto tour which directs one around the property and shows exactly how every bit of the "camp" was laid out.

Manzanar was one of 10 such “War Relocation Centers” in the United States. It officially opened (as it was being built) in March, 1942, and closed in November, 1945. A total of 11,070 Japanese-Americans – men, women, children, and the elderly – were incarcerated at Manzanar during those 3 1/2 years. When released after the war, they were given a one-way bus ticket, a meager $25 to rebuild their lives, and an expectation not to be a burden on society.