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Manzanar, Back on the Map

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A dozen or so years ago, it took determined sleuthing and one or more U-turns on Highway 395 to find Manzanar, site of the internment camp that housed 10,000 residents of Japanese descent during World War II -- nearly all of them citizens, and none of them ever convicted of espionage or sabotage. Even at the site, a searcher found little to explain what happened there; windblown weeds and sage obscured the history.

But last month the federal government righted a wrong and opened an interpretive center to show visitors pictures of barracks, kitchens, guard shacks and a cemetery for those forced to abandon their property and freedom from 1942 to 1945.

Even before the opening of the center, the National Park Service had installed simple signposts to let people willing to exercise their imagination understand what life was like so many decades ago. It’s easier now, thanks to the new, $5.1-million display, which includes a mock-up of a mess hall and guard shack. A scale model of the whole camp and home movies shot there during the war also offer glimpses of life during wartime.

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The sign at the camp entrance calls it the War Relocation Center, but it did not take long before Washington officials from President Roosevelt on down referred to Manzanar and other such facilities as concentration camps. There were any number of ironies, from the newspaper called the Manzanar Free Press to the chief avenue of legal escape, joining the U.S. military.

Japanese Americans who were interned at Manzanar and other camps across the country enlisted in the Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Its fighters, with their motto “Go for Broke,” were among the war’s most decorated. Their exploits, including liberating civilians from Nazi concentration camps, unfortunately didn’t stop someone from defacing the Go for Broke monument in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo section in March.

Apologies to those who were interned came late and sometimes grudgingly. President Reagan signed an official apology in 1988, and the first President Bush issued another when the government started sending $20,000 checks to survivors two years later.

California’s then-attorney general, Earl Warren, pushed for the camps and went on to become the state’s governor and then chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Warren later called his actions regarding the uprooting of American citizens and legal immigrants his worst mistake. The country needs its history, warts and all; putting Manzanar back on the map illuminates a dark chapter.

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