Japanese Internment Camp
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| Historical entrance to the Manzanar war prison; The two sentry towers are original; the administration area beyond it have since been demolished. // photo my own |
They say that the victor writes history.
As such, I didn't learn much about Japanese Internment Camps in school. Maybe I fell asleep that day in class. Maybe it's because I went to a public school. I'm not saying it wasn't ever mentioned. It just wasn't discussed a whole lot, at least in the '90s, so I didn't know a whole lot about it outside its mere existence.
Nevertheless, I had wanted to visit the Manzanar Japanese Internment Camp for a long time and I finally got to do it, after visiting Liberty Sculpture Park and Mojave National Preserve.
It was not what I expected.
In one of the uglier moments in this country's history, I was picturing more or less military barracks, guard towers and a mess hall in an ugly setting.
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| Historical photo of the barracks at Manzanar // photo by Dorothea Lange (public domain) |
It was actually at the foothills of the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountain range, and was set up as somewhat of a small town. I learned that some could even get granted leave to travel to Reno or explore the Sierras. Though still a grave violation of human rights, it wasn't as much of a destitute situation I had in my mind. Then again, what I had in my mind was pretty bleak.
At least I was right about the barracks and guard towers. Several barracks and one guard tower was recreated and highly visible from the highway. Most of the structures had been demolished.
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| It looks to me that there's enough room to add "by Franklin Roosevelt" at the end of the first paragraph. // photo my own |
Manzanar was a town that began in the 1910s, but it was largely abandoned by the time the Great Depression hit. When the executive order was penned, the federal government used the town to incarcerate over 11,000 Japanese people there for no reason other than their appearance. Ralph Lazo, a non-Japanese teenager who voluntarily interned himself at Manzanar in protest when he saw many of his friends being shipped off to camps, wisely remarked, "These people hadn't done anything that I hadn't done, except go to Japanese language school."
By 1944, one placard at the site read, the town was nearly self-sufficient. This was perhaps the biggest surprise to me. I had previously thought would be more of a prison, with nothing to do but to play ball in the yard and work in the mess hall, like a state penitentiary. On the contrary, the town had shops and even a newspaper run by the incarcerated. Nevertheless, life was still, obviously, hard at the camp. As one would expect from a hastily thrown together town by central planners, shortages were abound, resulting in long lines as a fact of life, for food, laundry, and even the toilet. Very few were accustomed to the cold winters and blistery hot summers. Many unaware of what was happening to their homes and businesses. They were largely not allowed to leave the premises.
Another activity done on site by approximately 500 Japanese Americans, voluntarily, was manufacturing of netting, used by the US Army. These people were working for the war effort, showing their loyalty to the United States and they were still rounded up like animals.
Day to day life was a worry for most, if not everyone interned there. One placard at the mess hall showed a quote of rumors that float around camp regarding the food supply, presumably in the earlier day before agriculture started to take hold: "If prices go up or there's a food shortage, they're going to forget us here and starve us."
This was particularly striking since the Great Depression, its effects at least, depending on who you ask, still lingered. Probably still fresh in peoples' minds were the crazy New Deal programs in the 1930s that injected money into the agriculture industry to not produce food, causing food prices to skyrocket from shortages. Unsurprisingly, that bit of context was not on the placard.
Even more striking was the quote on a different placard, of Martha Shoaf, a 4th grade teacher that worked in Manzanar: "The children would talk to me, and they would ask questions like, could I leave the camp? And I said, 'Yes.' He says, 'Won't the soldiers shoot at you?' And I said, 'No.' And that rather surprised them because I think they thought...since I lived in the camp, that I wold have been treated the same. But that didn't happen that way. And I think they had a hard time accepting that."
Most of the non-Japanese workers there reported that the Japanese were always very polite and courteous to them, although there was always an unspoken tension when intermingling. Who can really blame them for distrusting their captors? The suspicion even grew among several to the point where a group accused someone of being an FBI informant, beating him severely, and a riot broke out, resulting in several people getting killed by the Military Police.
After three years of operation, the camp shut down in November of 1945. Many had to find their way home and some had even refused to leave, since this imprisonment left them effectively homeless. They were forcibly removed from the site anyway.
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| Cemetery at Manzanar // photo my own |
The only ones that remained are six bodies still buried in the cemetery, out of 150 that died in the camp. The remainder were shipped back to their hometown cemeteries, few wanting their deceased loved ones to rest in a place they had been subjugated to for three years.
One of the graves contained a baby, Jerry Ogata. The only home he ever knew in his short life was a prison.
