Somber Reunion at Manzanar

Mitsuo Okamoto looked out at the sagebrush and dirt and dead trees, searching for landmarks that would jog his 54-year-old memories of this wind-swept piece of the Owens Valley.

It was his first trip since 1945 to Manzanar, the internment camp to which his family and 10,000 other West Coast residents of Japanese descent were banished during World War II because the U.S. government considered them a security threat.

Returning for the 30th annual pilgrimage to Manzanar this past weekend, Okamoto and other former internees were far outnumbered by busloads of Los Angeles high school students and others curious about a time and place when the American impulse for democracy faltered from racism and wartime hysteria.

The youngest of those with personal recollections of Manzanar and nine similar camps scattered around the West and Arkansas are now in their 60s and 70s. Their ranks are thinning with every passing year, their impressions of time behind barbed wire and guard towers far from simple.

Okamoto, a retired chemist from Tempe, Ariz., who grew up on Terminal Island, didn’t even really want to come back. It was one of his nieces who suggested he and two of his brothers make the trek to Manzanar, 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

“To me there’s no advantage in remembering something like that,” Okamoto, 72, remarked as a cold wind whipped across the campsite where little remains except two stone guardhouses and a community center. “I’d rather think about the present.”

He was 15 when his family was shipped to Manzanar in April of 1942. But for him, it was not unpleasant. His family arrived before schools were built, so he didn’t have to attend classes for several months--something he didn’t mind at all.

More wrenching for Okamoto were the days immediately following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, when authorities went to the Japanese fishing village on Terminal Island off Long Beach and gave his family and the rest of the community 48 hours to get out. The men, including Okamoto’s father, were hauled away on unfounded suspicions that as fishermen, they may have been helping the Japanese fleet.

“That was more tragic than coming here,” Okamoto recalled.

They had to leave most of their belongings on the island, and lived briefly in a Japanese school in Gardena and then a Los Angeles hotel before they were brought here. After a year in detention in North Dakota, Okamoto’s father joined the family in Manzanar.

Okamoto left the camp in the final months of the war in 1945, when he was drafted into the U.S. Army. In one of the great contradictions of federal policy, the government was eager to make soldiers out of men whose families remained under guard in the camps. He later went to college on the G.I. bill, while his family, who had nothing to return to in Southern California, went to New Jersey to work in a frozen-food plant.

Okamoto’s unwillingness to dwell on the internment seems fairly typical. In remarks during Saturday’s memorial program, Alan Nishio spoke of how his parents told him so little about Manzanar, where he was born in 1945, that it wasn’t until he came across a reference to Manzanar in college that he realized it was an internment camp.

“I just thought that Manzanar was a small farm town in Central California,” said Nishio, a Gardena resident who, once he understood the reality of Manzanar, became active in eventually successful efforts to gain government reparations for surviving internees.

Despite his parents’ silence, Nishio said they never fully recovered from the uprooting of the war years. When they were ordered to Manzanar, Nishio’s father sold his downtown Los Angeles grocery story at a steep loss. The belongings they had stored with a neighbor were gone when they returned after the war--supposedly stolen from a garage.

Nishio’s father became a gardener and detested every day of it.

“I see my father as a very unhappy person who hated his job and in many ways his life,” Nishio said. “He had something he was building on and it was taken away.”

Before the war, there was widespread bigotry against Japanese Americans, and after Pearl Harbor, considerable hostility toward them. Few if any voices were raised in their defense, and even the internees followed orders largely without protest.

“In Japanese culture you just complied with the rules and regulations. So we went along,” remembered Joe Nagano, 78, of Los Angeles, who was forced to withdraw from UCLA after the evacuation order was handed down in early 1942. “We didn’t know what the future would be. We didn’t even think about that.”

Audrey Tawa’s parents were sent to a camp in Arizona, a fact she finds difficult to grasp. “It seems almost unimaginable to me that something like that could happen in the United States,” said Tawa, who was in the area for a weekend trip and stopped at Manzanar with her husband when they saw the pilgrimage activities.

Glancing around at the high school students, she added. “I think it’s good for kids today to learn about it. It wasn’t that many years ago and it could happen again unless people understand what it’s like to ship others off and put them aside.”

Several of the former internees said they believed Americans and American society had changed so much that they doubted there would ever be a recurrence of the camps on U.S. soil.

But with the headlines full of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and a high school shooting rampage by two Colorado teenagers with Nazi sympathies, the news has been haunting.

“These last couple of weeks I have been kind of disturbed,” said Sue Embrey, chairperson of the Manzanar Committee, which organizes the pilgrimages. Scenes of the frightened and dispossessed streaming out of Kosovo have reminded her of her family’s evacuation to Manzanar more than five decades ago.

“Those kinds of things bring back memories you thought you had forgotten. But they don’t disappear.”