Finally, Sharing Manzanar’s Bitter Tale

Hundreds of Japanese Americans who had been held in World War II internment camps gathered here Saturday for the first public look at an interpretive center that tells the bitter story of their imprisonment with stark pictures and blunt words.

The sign at the entrance of the new National Park Service museum sets the tone: “In 1942, the U.S. Government ordered more than 110,000 men, women and children to leave their homes and detained them in remote military-style camps.”

Manzanar, a square-mile plot sandwiched between the Sierra Nevada and the Inyo Mountains, is the only one of the 10 relocation camps across the county to have such an exhibit.

From 1942 to 1945 the camp housed 10,000 people of Japanese heritage who had become instant suspects after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. None had been convicted of espionage or sabotage.

“I guess they thought we were spies,” said Celeste Teodor, who was only 5 years old when the government moved her and other children from a Los Angeles orphanage to Manzanar.

For much of the morning, visitors wandered the old camp, meeting old friends and telling their stories to any stranger who asked. Although a few wiped at tears, the mood was often far from somber, as many former prisoners expressed relief that the government had finally built something permanent to mark the camp’s existence. Many people praised the exhibits as being unflinchingly honest.

Some, like Frank Emri, 87, of San Gabriel, were pleased to find themselves in the exhibits at the interpretive center.

He sat beneath a reprint of a newspaper article from the 1940s that had his name in it. Emri, who was imprisoned at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, had opposed efforts to force him into the Army as the only way to gain his freedom from the camp. As a result, he spent 15 months in federal prison. “I’m glad this all came about,” he said about the new museum at Manzanar. “I think it’s educational.”

For years, Manzanar was marked by nothing but a roadside sign and an old guard shack, with no explanation to passersby about the historic nature of the wind-swept Owens Valley site 220 miles north of Los Angeles.

Veterans of Manzanar and other camps had long been trying to build a monument to what they consider an especially grim chapter in American history. An official apology for their treatment was signed by President Reagan in 1988.

“Stories like this need to be told, and too many of us have passed away without telling them,” a former Manzanar prisoner named Sue Embrey, 81, of Los Angeles said in a speech to the more than 2,000 people who showed up Saturday. The exhibit “shows to the world that America is strong as it amends for the wrongs it committed,” she said.

The $5.1-million museum includes the guard shack, a mess hall and the interpretive center, whose exhibits explain the background behind the government order to detain Japanese Americans. In the back of the building, the names of all 10,000 internees at Manzanar are printed on a screen that stretches across the auditorium. There is also a scale model of the camp and regular viewings of old color movies that were shot here during the war.

The Park Service hopes to restore more of the camp and has erected signs showing where dozens of buildings once stood. It also wants to acquire enough money to reconstruct one of the towers where armed guards kept prisoners under a watchful eye.

Japanese Americans are fiercely proud of the fact that they made the best of a bad situation at Manzanar. In its heyday, there were lovely gardens, baseball fields, hospitals, a fire station -- even a newspaper dubbed, with some irony, the Free Press.

Many former internees spoke with mixed feelings about the camps.

Eiichi Norihiro, 77, of Simi Valley stood on crutches in the camp’s cemetery. He had been imprisoned at Manzanar when he was 15, but was transferred to a camp at Tule Lake in Northern California after being labeled a troublemaker partly because he wouldn’t wear a shirt that read “POW.”

He contracted tuberculosis at Tule Luke, and he lost his right leg in the early 1950s. He recalled his parents’ bitter feelings about the camp. “We were a family of eight, and we lost what little we had,” he said. “We went back to Japan after the war, then lost our land there. We lost on both sides of the Pacific.”

His memories of internment are filtered through the experience of playing baseball games and socializing with the many girls who were his own age. Now a retired accountant, he returned Saturday because “I don’t want to forget it, and I don’t want the government to forget it.”

For many Japanese Americans, the most nightmarish aspect of the camps was the suddenness with which they were imprisoned. Many had to quickly sell homes or businesses, often at a great loss. Some husbands and wives were separated for months or years because they were sent to different camps.

The FBI plucked Japanese fishermen off the streets of Terminal Island and sent them to Department of Justice camps. They feared the fishermen would work with the Japanese navy to help plan attacks on the West Coast.

And yet Manzanar was also filled with stories of births and marriages and lifelong friendships made there.

“I remember my kindergarten teacher in Los Angeles crying and I couldn’t understand why,” said Teodor. She recalled the teacher explaining that “ ‘it’s because you have to go to camp.’ They gave me this rubber doll.”

The Japanese American children from the orphanage and much of its staff took up residence in the children’s village at Manzanar. On Saturday, Teodor, now 67, studied a photo another former internee had brought. It was taken on Easter Sunday in 1944 and showed all the children lined up in rows.

“There I am in the second row -- the cute one,” joked Teodor, looking for another familiar face. “And this is my friend Annie Sakamoto.... We’ve been lifelong friends.”

As a child, she thought Manzanar “was a wonderful, loving place. Everybody was so sad to leave. We had grown so close. After we left the camp, we had to go into foster homes.”

It was only years later that Teodor began thinking about the camp’s purpose and what it represented. “It was the adults who suffered terribly,” she said. “The government tried to tell us it was for the protection of Japanese Americans, which was” wrong, she said.

The National Park Service has long been known for protecting some of the nation’s most famous natural and historic sites, from the Grand Canyon to the Washington Monument. Director Fran Mainella said the agency was also pushing to explain the nation’s less-savory and unpleasant moments. “There’s pain in this story here ... but there’s also healing in these stories,” she said. The agency, for example, is moving to build a similar center at a former relocation camp in Idaho.

Although there were many Japanese Americans in attendance Saturday, they were far outnumbered by tourists who weren’t of Japanese descent. Many said they felt compelled to recognize what they consider an important chapter in the nation’s history.

Brenda Romero, 54, of San Diego said she has driven past Manzanar many times on her way to Mammoth Lakes. But the old camp remained a blur in the window. When she read that it was being cleaned up and that an exhibit hall was opening, Romero and her husband, Gus, decided to make the 300-mile-plus journey.

“I just wanted to be here to honor the people and make sure it never happens again,” she said. “This actually happened in the United States. Human beings were put through this.”

Romero spoke in the camp’s cemetery, where several dozen former prisoners are buried, mostly in graves with no tombstones. Behind the cemetery sits the Sierra Nevada, an inviting wilderness visited only by camp residents who were bold enough to escape for a day or who got rare permission from Manzanar administrators to go for a hike.

The graves are mostly mounds of loose rock and dirt, all situated around a tall white obelisk. As visitors of all races wandered among the graves Saturday, many reached in their pockets and flung coins on the dirt, an old Japanese custom.