Japanese-American Group to Revisit Manzanar Camp : Relocation: Bearing witness to an anguished memory, former internees and their descendants hope to provide an educational experience for the younger generation.

Kiyo Tanaka was only 14 when Pearl Harbor was bombed 50 years ago, but the memory of being uprooted and shipped off to an internment camp in central California still causes her eyes to well with tears.

On April 14, 1942, Tanaka, her three sisters and her mother arrived at the dusty, barbed-wired gates of Manzanar and stared at rows of tar-paper barracks.

“My mother just cried and cried. She was so scared. We were all so scared,” said Tanaka, burying her face in one hand. “I thought we would be taken to camp and stay forever.”

Tanaka’s journey to one of the most infamous internment camps in the United States will be replayed in April when a Ventura County group of Japanese-Americans makes a pilgrimage to the Manzanar War Relocation Center near Lone Pine.

It will be the 50th anniversary of their imprisonment, half a century after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the order to relocate about 120,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast.

Ten thousand people were imprisoned at Manzanar in a one-square-mile area guarded by sentries. Some former residents have described Manzanar as a death camp.

“Just being in the camp again will bring back memories. That’s what we’re hoping for,” said Joanne Nakano, a spokeswoman for the Japanese American Citizens League of Ventura County. Nakano said she expects others who spent the war at other internment camps to also make the trek.

Nakano, 51, of Westlake Village said her parents were at Manzanar, but few third- and fourth-generation Japanese-Americans have heard the painful stories about the camps. She hopes the journey will be a history lesson for the younger generation.

“We’re hoping grandparents will take their grandchildren along, and they can show them,” she said.

Sue Embrey, chairwoman of the league’s Manzanar committee, said she expects Ventura County residents to join former internees who have been making the annual pilgrimage to Manzanar for the past 22 years.

The crowd will be bigger next year, because of pending legislation that would create a national historic site at the former camp, Embrey said. President Bush is expected to sign the bill into law next month.

About 800 Ventura County residents were scattered across the country in relocation camps in Arkansas, Wyoming, Arizona and California. Uprooted families from Oxnard and Ventura were sent to camps in Gila River and Poston, both in Arizona.

Gene Matsutsuyu, 59, said her family of nine brothers and sisters made a hurried move to Fresno, where, her father believed, they would be safe from the forced relocation. He wanted to move them back to Japan, but was arrested before the family could go.

“It was very scary. These FBI men were young and tall, and they looked like giants to me,” she said. “They just came and took my father away.”

Matsutsuyu and her eight brothers and sisters spent a year in Poston. When her father rejoined them, they were moved to Tule Lake, another camp just south of the Oregon border set aside for families who wanted to return to Japan and for those who refused to vow allegiance to the United States.

Matsutsuyu’s husband, Yuzo, was sent to Manzanar. Though they were not imprisoned together, the Matsutsuyus have revisited Manzanar with their children.

“That was four years of our life,” she said. “We wanted them to see that this was a part of their heritage.”

For Tanaka, it is more difficult to talk about the memories. Her husband, Tad, was sent to another camp when he was 17 for refusing to vow allegiance to the United States.

“None of us speak about it. Not even to our kids,” Tanaka said. “I wish now that when the kids were small, I had made a point of talking about it, because I think it’s something that everyone should know about.”

In the spring, dust storms would swirl into the cracks of her family’s barracks at Manzanar. There was unbearable heat in the summer. Despite the hardships, her family made the best of their incarceration, she said.

A tattered brown copy of her high school yearbook from Manzanar shows students involved in theater and football and basketball teams. In one photo, an 18-year-old Tanaka is shown beaming after she was elected one of the school’s four prom princesses.

Seven years ago, Tanaka revisited Manzanar for a group reunion. She stood on the grounds of the camp and gazed at the beautiful, snow-caped ridges she had lived amid for four years.

“I just wanted to look at the mountains,” she said. “It just floods the memories.”