Stories in the Dust

Frank Hays, superintendent of Manzanar National Historic Site, walks carefully among sage and fallen leaves, near an area where Japanese American orphans were confined during World War II. He stops and reaches for something on the ground. “A marble,” he says.

He hands it to Alisa Lynch, his colleague with the National Park Service, who holds it in her palm. It is dull and chipped, warm from the sun. She studies it briefly then returns it to the ground, where stories live, and covers it with sand.

The orphans, some as young as 6 months old, were among 11,000 people held at the Manzanar Relocation Center, located in the high desert 212 miles northeast of Los Angeles. In all, there were 10 such camps, confining about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast.

Little remains of Manzanar. Like the concrete foundations, ceramic chips and rusted nails scattered throughout, the marble is a small part of a story that is not simply told.

“There’s some controversy within the Japanese American community over what the camp really was all about,” says Lynch, chief of interpretation at the site. “For some people, it was the most devastating experience of their lives. A hundred and forty-three people died here. In some camps, there were suicides. Then there were people who learned their professions here, who met their mates here. There were 541 babies born here.”

Much of the controversy addresses terminology. Was Manzanar an “internment camp,” “relocation center,” “concentration camp?” Were those who were forced to live there “internees” or “prisoners”?

For a year and a half, the National Park Service has been gathering information, creating focus groups and conducting meetings around the state to determine how the story should be presented in exhibits at the camp’s new interpretation center. (The center, along with administrative offices, will be housed in the old high school auditorium, which is being restored. The $5-million project is scheduled for completion next year.) On Saturday, Lynch will travel to Los Angeles to gather the opinions and impressions of the project from area Japanese Americans with ties to Manzanar.

Planners want to take into account the tremendous social, religious and political diversity among those interned. They were Buddhist, Catholic and Protestants; issei, nisei and sansei (first, second and third generations in America) of varying political beliefs and alliances.

They were as diverse as Manzanar itself. Located in the Owens Valley, the site is part of Inyo County, which includes most of Death Valley National Park as well as 14,495-foot Mt. Whitney in the Sierra Nevada range. The seasonal range of temperatures can be more than 110 degrees.

In other ways, too, Manzanar is a place of contrast. National Park Service exhibits will describe how the area was inhabited by members of the Owens Valley Paiute dates back centuries. In the 1800s, ranches were homesteaded, and on July 11, 1863, about 1,000 Paiute were herded almost 200 miles to Sebastian Indian Reservation near Fort Tejon in response to confrontations with white settlers.

In the early 1900s, the area was subdivided and the town of Manzanar was founded. An orchard community developed until the city of Los Angeles bought the land for water rights. The federal government leased the property from the city during the war to build the camp.

In contrast to the government guns pointed at the Paiute, marching them away, the government guns of World War II were pointed at those of Japanese descent, forcing them to stay.

In a matter of months after the camps were mandated by executive order on Feb. 19, 1942, Manzanar became the most populated community between Los Angeles and Reno.

There were eight guard towers surrounding 36 residential blocks, each with 14 barracks as well as communal facilities. The camps were intended to be as self-sufficient as possible, so, in time, there were churches and schools, a 250-bed hospital, bank, catalog store and a newspaper known as the Manzanar Free Press. Internees built parks and gardens, an outdoor theater and recreational facilities including a nine-hole golf course. There were chicken and hog operations, a garment factory, and a food-processing unit that produced shoyu (soy sauce), bean sprouts and tofu.

In its first year of operation 700 tons of vegetables were harvested from the farming operation.

Manzanar evolved quickly during its three years. Wallboard and linoleum were installed in barracks. Security became less stringent. What remained constant was the fact that most of the internees were American-born citizens, and those who weren’t were subject to laws prohibiting naturalization.

Eventually, survivors were issued redress checks for $20,000 and received an apology signed by President George Bush. The country’s response to injustice, reparations, says Lynch, are at the heart of her work at the site. “Part of it was paying redress. Part of it was the apology, and now part of it is to say that on top of those things, we’re going to preserve this place and we’re going to make sure we tell the story of what happened here.”

But it may not be one story at all, she says. Perhaps Manzanar is a place of many stories. In addition to a documentary, photographs, a chronology of events and glossary, the exhibits are expected to reflect personal accounts of some of those interned and, perhaps, at least one who refused to go: Hideo Murata of Pismo Beach.

Murata was a United States World War I veteran who, rather than be interned, committed suicide. The book “Years of Infamy,” by Michi Weglyn (Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1976) describes how he was found dead clutching an honorary citizenship certificate in one hand.

Then there is the story of the late Ralph Lazo, of Mexican and Irish descent. When he discovered, at age 16, that buddies from his Bunker Hill neighborhood were being sent to Manzanar, he went with them. Lazo later served in the Army and received a Bronze Star.

Blue-star banners were displayed on barracks of those with family members in the military. Gold-star banners were given to the families of those who died. The Munemoris had one of each.

Sadao Munemori of the famed 442nd Combat Team was awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic acts in Italy. Munemori sacrificed his life by throwing himself on an enemy grenade, saving the lives of two comrades; and, as he fought, his family was confined at Manzanar.

48-Hour Notice

Each person who entered Manzanar has a story to tell, and many of those stories will be written on name tags given to visitors to describe how individual lives were affected during the war.

Wilbur Sato’s story begins a couple months after Pearl Harbor was bombed, when at age 12 he was escorted from the principal’s office to his locker to gather his possessions and then out of the school he was attending on Terminal Island.

Those of Japanese ancestry were given 48 hours to leave the island, he says, so his family rented a house owned by friends in Boyle Heights, and he began attending a different school. It seemed as if they were going to stay, he says. They hung pictures on the wall, but then Executive Order 9066, establishing the camps, was signed into law by President Roosevelt.

The period before their departure for Manzanar seems a blur, he says. They were packing their possessions for storage and preparing to leave. His parents were “enthusiastic” about going, he says, as it enabled them to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States. His mother was a volunteer in the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. Sato arrived at Manzanar in early April wearing his Sunday best.

On April 26, his 13th birthday, his mother surprised him. Despite all that weighed on her before leaving home, he says, she had remembered to buy him a gift. Sato collected stamps, and his mother had taken time to buy new ones to add to his collection.

From that moment, the collection he once loved has served only as a reminder of Manzanar. “I could never stand to look at the stamps after that,” he says. “I still have them somewhere, but I can’t look at them.”

His memories of being rounded up and imprisoned fill him with a sense of loss, he says. “You lose your sense of identity. You’re made to feel that you’re not American anymore.”

“There are so many stories,” says William Michael, director of library and museum services for Inyo County and also a member of the advisory commission charged with helping decide what the exhibits should reflect.

“The history of prejudice against Asians in this country has to be a part of this story, the laws that did not allow Japanese to naturalize and become citizens or own land. That has to be told to give the context of how easy it was to take 120,000 people and put them into camps.”

A Sense of Sadness

Sue Kunitomi Embrey was 19 years old in 1942, when her family traveled by train then bus from Los Angeles to Manzanar, arriving in darkness. Her brother had volunteered to help set up the camp and was there to greet them. He had prepared their bedding, so they did not have to stand in line and stuff their canvas mattresses with hay that first night.

“We were lucky,” she says.

Embrey chaired the Manzanar Historical Site Advisory Commission and is co-founder/chairperson of the Manzanar Committee, which sponsors an annual pilgrimage to the camp.

Whenever she returns, she says, it is with a sense of sadness. Sometimes it’s as if she has traveled back through time, and voices are just beyond her reach. She can almost hear music and shouting--confusion--and, from the shade of an apple tree bearing sweet fruit, the hushed sobs of her mother.

Although it is a place of long ago, Manzanar still lives inside of her. She remembers how she and her friend each night after dinner would walk around the inside of the five-strand barbed-wired fence surrounding the camp, talking about freedom and dreams and all the things teenagers talk about. And she remembers her mother telling her years later how, for weeks after they arrived at Manzanar, she would go to the apple orchard, where she could be alone, and cry.

A Record, a Responsibility

The exhibit likely will include photographs taken by the late Toyo Miyatake, who had a studio in Little Tokyo before the war. When he and his family were held, he sneaked a camera lens and film holder into Manzanar.

Archie Miyatake, his oldest son, was 17 at the time. He remembers awakening after his first night in the camp, looking down at his bed and seeing the outline of his head in a layer of sand that blew in during the night through cracks in the floor.

He was outside one day when his father, a friend of master photographer Edward Weston, called him inside.

“He told me to sit down, and I was wondering what I had done wrong,” Archie Miyatake says. “He said, ‘As a photographer, I have a responsibility. I have to record what’s going on in camp so this type of thing will never happen again.’ ”

A carpenter built a wooden box for the camera, a friend in auto maintenance connected the lens to a piece of pipe, and soon Miyatake’s father was documenting life inside the camp.

He eventually received permission to take pictures--as long as a Caucasian person was there to release the shutter. Over time, he was allowed to push the button himself, as long as he was accompanied by a Caucasian person. Then, finally, camp officials allowed him to work alone.

After the war, the Miyatakes returned to Los Angeles and opened their doors to many former internees who had nowhere to stay. Eventually Archie Miyatake took over his father’s studio and moved it to San Gabriel. His two sons also are photographers.

When he thinks back to his time spent at Manzanar, Archie Miyatake thinks about the injustice, the feelings of longing as he stood inside the fence watching cars drive to and from a small, nearby town called Independence.

But it was also at Manzanar, at a dance, that he met his future wife. Life did not stop, he says, and most people tried to make the most of it. He was drawn to the mountains that cast long shadows late in the day, and when darkness came, he sometimes escaped to them and waited for daylight to search for trout in deep pools and for lost feelings of peace and freedom.

Memories of Children

All but a few of the approximately 800 structures at Manzanar were removed after the war. Remaining, in addition to the auditorium, are two sentry posts in front and in back, a cemetery monument where visitors leave everything from flowers and paper cranes to articles of clothing and, on one occasion, a tape of the Grateful Dead.

A mess hall moved to the Bishop airport after the war will be returned as part of a demonstration block. Plans call for recreating a guard tower and refurbishing some gardens so visitors will have an understanding of what it was like.

But beyond the exhibits and what remains, some stories will remain buried in the ground. Tamotsu Isozaki, 76, of Monterrey Park lived in the Manzanar orphanage known as Children’s Village, home to about 100 children.

They came from Alaska, Washington Oregon and California, most of them from orphanages or foster homes; and although they attended school with the other children at Manzanar, they lived in their own barracks, one for girls and one for boys, and had their own mess hall.

He remembers how a volunteer, Sohei Hohri, who had just graduated from Manzanar High School, would tell them stories from memory that would continue for weeks, among them Homer’s “The Odyssey” and Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.”

They would listen carefully, says Isozaki, and just when the story reached an exciting crescendo, Hohri, now 77 and retired after 31 years as curator at a private maritime museum in New York, would end the episode, causing them to wait another day for the story to resume. In such manner, time--and war--passed.

Perhaps it was because of their youth, or maybe it had to do with being orphans. Uncertainty was not new to them, he says, and they were blessed with an ability to be easily distracted in a way that most adults were not.

Isozaki remembers that they played basketball and baseball, and a game called Prisoner of War, where if you left your home base, you were subject to imprisonment by the opposing team. And sometimes he could forget what was happening in his life and in the world by simply sitting upon the ground, drawing a circle in the sand and grasping a shiny marble in his hand.

Preliminary plans for the Manzanar interpretation center exhibits will be available for review and comment 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. 1st St., Little Tokyo in downtown L.A. They also will be displayed 6-8 p.m. Tuesday at the American Legion Hall in Independence, near Manzanar.