Ordeal of WWII Internment Recalled at L.A. Reunion

They came from as far as Hawaii and New York to recall Manzanar, a dusty, inhospitable place where they attended school, made friends and forged a community--surrounded by barbed wire and gun-toting guards.

It was a reunion tinged with ambivalence, a cherished opportunity for old friends to renew acquaintances while also recalling an experience most deeply wished had never happened.

About 600 Japanese-Americans and their friends, some meeting for the first time in 45 years, gathered at the Westin Bonaventure Saturday for the second reunion of the veterans of the Manzanar War Relocation Center. The first was held in 1984.

Home for 10,000

The center, located in the high desert of Owens Valley 212 miles north of Los Angeles, was the first of 10 internment camps set up for people of Japanese ancestry after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The square-mile camp was the threadbare home to 10,000, most of them from Southern California.

“You were somewhere where you didn’t even know what was happening,” said Rose Matsumoto, whose family was uprooted from East Los Angeles when she was 18. “You had to give up your home and everything in two weeks.”

Not surprisingly, one of the major topics of conversation at the reunion was a bill pending in Congress to pay $1.3 billion to the 60,000 surviving Americans of Japanese descent who were held in internment camps. Each surviving detainee would get $20,000 under the terms of the measure.

“It took four years out of our lives,” Matsumoto, now 63, said of the internment.

Many of those gathering around tables festooned with red, white and blue balloons, however, said this was like any other reunion--primarily an occasion to see old friends.

New Friends Found

“Under the conditions of the camp, people made very close friendships,” said Sue Kunitomi Emery, one of those honored Saturday for her efforts to keep the memory of Manzanar alive.

“People met others and got married in the camp. The basic reason they wanted to get together is to remember the friendships and keep together over the years.”

Amid hugs, handshakes and kisses, many talked of their careers, their children and the youthful experiences they shared when they were too young to realize the meaning of their detention. “You were the quarterback!” one middle-aged man exclaimed after initially failing to recognize an old teammate.

They recalled the classrooms, Boy Scout troops, softball teams and friendships. Some said Manzanar was the first place where they had met many other Japanese-Americans. But there were other, darker memories as well.

“You’re a U.S. citizen,” recalled Bo Sakaguchi, a Northridge dentist who was 16 when his family was moved from North Hollywood. “You think about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and then your rights are taken away. I’ve always felt like a second-class citizen. It took me 35 years until I felt, ‘Hey, I’m equal.’ ”

Memories of Guards

As they searched for their barracks on the model of Manzanar, others remembered armed guards circling the camp on half-tracks to quell riots, or a mess hall filled with people sickened by the food.

In addition to Emery, who chairs the educational Manzanar Committee, Saturday’s honorees included Millie and Walter Woodward, journalists from Bainbridge Island, Wash., who editorially opposed the internment camps. Bainbridge Island, home to a U.S. naval training base, was one of the first places from which Japanese-Americans were rounded up.

Walter Woodward, 77, movingly evoked the Manzanar experience.

“Welcome, citizens, to Manzanar, a barren, forsaken, wind-swept plain where the cold was chilling, the heat was intense, where home was a crowded, semi-public tar-paper shack, and where the future was limited by barbed wire fences and soldiers carrying loaded rifles.”

Woodward, who had published the 2,000-circulation Bainbridge Review with his wife, recalled that men in the camp, rather than despairing that their rights had been violated, aided the war effort of the nation that had herded them into internment.

Cited for Bravery

“You fought--and many of you died--with supreme bravery,” Woodward said. “You proved, once and for all, that no citizens, before or since, ever have been more loyal or more dedicated to the United States of America.”

An exhibit of photographs, paintings, items made in the camp, a roster of Manzanar detainees and a large-scale model of the camp will be open for public viewing from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. today at the Bonaventure.