Eighty years later, Manzanar and what it stands for still resonates deeply

In February, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that led to the forced removal of some 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes. They were sent to live in rural incarceration centers for the duration of the war. At that time, the federal government deemed Japanese Americans to be a threat to national security.

Manzanar was one of two such centers in California. It was the first of the two to open, 80 years ago this week. Now, it’s Manzanar National Historic Site, which is an interpretive center, open to the public and run by the National Park Service. 

In Spanish, the word “manzanar” means “apple orchard.” The apple orchard is gone, as are the rows of barracks that housed thousands of Japanese Americans confined during World War Two. 

Manzanar barrack homes, June 29, 1942.Dorothea Lange / U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

As you walk around the grounds, the first thing you notice is the constant, biting wind and the crunching sand. 

On this day, Rose Masters, an interpretive ranger at the historic site, is leading a group of Japanese Americans through the museum.

The visitors are in their 20’s, mostly, early in their careers. They flew from Chicago to Los Angeles, then rode a luxury bus for five hours up Highway 395. This is a vastly different experience than some of their ancestors had.

In this story, we’re using just people’s first names to protect their families’ privacy.

Sarah, one of the women in the group, stops at a poster-sized black and white photo. It’s of her great aunt, Fumiko Hayashida. In the photo, Fumiko holds her sleeping toddler, Natalie, and the girl’s stuffed animal. Fumiko is wearing a hat with a bow and a bit of netting. Both wear thick coats with white tags. A name. A number. This is how they will be identified.

Masters tells Sarah about an encounter she had with Fumiko. “I got to meet her when she came to visit here at age 100. She was incredible.”

Sarah tells Masters her great aunt has since died, which Masters acknowledges she had heard about when it happened.

With fewer and fewer living survivors of incarceration, old photographs become more meaningful. They fill out the details of family histories. These images were captured not by the people who were confined at Manzanar — the federal government officially banned them from having cameras — but by several professional photographers, including the celebrated Dorothea Lange. Masters thinks Lange captured the essence of the experience well.

Women's ward in the temporary barracks hospital at Manzanar, July 3, 1942Dorothea Lange / U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

“I think if you look at Dorothea Lange’s work, and what she was famous for across the board she was attempting to get to the reality of the situation perhaps,” says Masters, “ I don’t think you can take photos, and select photos, without putting yourself into them. The lens is not an objective thing.”  

By the time World War II started, Lange had already taken her iconic Dust Bowl photo of a “Migrant Mother.” After Pearl Harbor was bombed, the federal government forced Japanese Americans from their homes and hired Lange to document the movement of people along the West Coast and in California’s Inland Empire. She was at their homes when they packed, at train stations when they boarded and at Manzanar when they arrived. Lange was the first outsider, not an incarceree or guard, to see it.

Gary Okihiro co-authored "Impounded," a book of Dorothea Lange’s photographs. He’s a scholar of ethnicity and race. Okihiro says there were reasons Manzanar was situated where it was.

“The government wanted these deserted places away from railroad tracks and any other kind of potential security risk to build these camps and Manzanar was an ideal site in that sense,” Okihiro says. 

Lange’s photos of Manzanar show children sitting on the ground doing school lessons, people lining up for meals, hospital wards, latrines. They show the haze of blowing sand between wooden barracks. But what they don’t convey is how the sand gets in your mouth and settles in your hair. 

Third grade students working on their arithmetic lesson at this first volunteer elementary school. School equipment was not yet available at the time this photograph was taken, July 1, 1942.Dorothea Lange / U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

Okihiro’s co-author is Linda Gordon. She says Lange ran up against Manzanar’s human-made limitations, too, including barbed wire.

“They had watchtowers — often with armed guards, but certainly with guards. She was not allowed to photograph that,” Gordon says.

Some of Lange’s photos were never published. Several were impounded. 

Hiding in plain site

If this is the first time you’ve heard about this incarceration center, you’re not alone. Masters is a local. 

“I grew up six miles from here — six miles,  like, I can bike here in 30 minutes — and we didn’t study this in school. It wasn’t that long ago and so it’s shocking to me,” says Masters, “because I see it as one of the most important stories in American history.”

Manzanar is the size of nearly 500 football fields. It was one of two incarceration centers in California, along with another near the Oregon border at Tule Lake. There were also short-term detention centers where Japanese Americans were held for a couple of months before they were sent to a long-term facility. One was in Sacramento.

At the interpretive center, Manzanar’s gym has been reimagined: with tall partitions and cases displaying images and other artifacts, including children’s games and books, crafts, household items, newspapers from the Manzanar Press, suitcases. A video of President Ronald Reagan plays. It’s his 1988 speech apologizing for the incarceration of 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent.

At the back of the gym is a large wall of names — the size of a movie screen — with 11,000 names of the people who were held at Manzanar.  

Before the visitors head outside to try to find where their families had lived, Masters passes out brown envelopes to those in the tour group who had relatives held at Manzanar. Each envelope has a copy of the camp roster: it has names, ages, dates on which they arrived, dates of release or dates of death. The roster also gives the locations of the families’ barracks. 

Sisters Breanna and Brittany came to locate where their relatives were housed while incarcerated at Manzanar.

Breanna and Brittany at the Manzanar National Historic Site in 2019.Donna Apidone / CapRadio

Outside, Masters walks with the sisters to help them find their family’s home. The barracks are gone, but water spigots pop out of the ground every so-many feet. Signs with numbers identify the spot where a building once stood. Masters asks the sisters for the names of their family members held at Manzanar. 

“The one I talked to was Koji Yorida,” Breanna responds. “But it was his family. He was a young boy and so he was here with his older brother and his parents, and I think they had a younger brother, Toshio, who was born here.”

One of the sisters had visited Manzanar before, but on that visit hadn’t found the location of where their relatives lived. 

This time, they do find their relatives’ home. It’s now labeled as Block 36.

'A shameful thing for them'

For the people who were confined, there was shame after the war. They didn’t talk a lot about their experiences. Paul Kitagaki is an acclaimed photographer. His aunt and grandparents were incarcerated.

“We learned about it outside the home,” he says. “I think that generation didn’t want that experience to cloud our experience. They wanted our lives to be more positive. They didn’t want that to drag us down or to be angry about what happened in the family. Or shameful. It was like a shameful thing for them. To be a citizen and then locked up, just because of your ethnicity. If you’re a businessman or had something successful, I mean all that stuff was pretty much taken away from you.”

Kitagaki recreates Dorothea Lange’s photographs by staging survivors in the same or similar landscapes. One of these recreations is of Lange’s famous photo of a grandfather with his toddler grandson at Manzanar. Mount Whitney — the tallest mountain in California and in the contiguous United States — provides the backdrop.

Okihiro, who wrote the book about Lange’s photos, sees her picture of that toddler as the promise of the future.

Grandfather and grandson at the Manzanar incarceration center, July 2, 1942.

“The angle is really important on that photo, shot from the ground upwards, to make him — the grandfather — appear monumental, like the mountain. But the grandchild is the future that that grandfather sees. That means that their family will continue. That is very important in Japanese culture because ancestors and the descendants of those ancestors form a continuous line so one can be remembered,” he says.

Coming to terms

As the Manzanar tour comes to an end, a woman named Kat speaks openly with the group for the first time.

A woman named Kat at the barrack where her grandparents lived at Manzanar during World War II.Donna Apidone / CapRadio

“I just stood at the site of the barrack where my maternal grandpa and great-grandparents stayed during World War II,” she says. “I mean I never really got to talk to my grandpa about it cause he died when I was really young. It’s definitely powerful. I don’t think you can quite, like, picture the camps until you’re literally on the crunching desert soil and you feel the wind and the heat that they would have felt.”

As Sarah takes her own pictures, she says she’s thinking about her great aunt. She was the one in the photo with the baby and the tags hanging from their coats.

“She didn’t have control of what photo that was taken of her or how she was portrayed, but she had her own narrative when she told the story herself.”

Ranger Rose Masters agrees.

“I think that’s what makes history powerful because we can relate to other people’s individual experiences, other people’s individual stories. People can find connection to this history but I think that they really find it when they get that connection with another person.”