Press - Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (San Bernardino)
Manzanar WWII camp to open as museum
By Will Matthews, Staff Writer

LONE PINE - Mary Nomura's tale of World War II, one of more than 100,000 similar stories, can be found in few textbooks.

Everybody knows that Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, prompting American entry into the war and forever altering the nation's perception of its place in the world.

It is a day that has been forever ingrained into the American psyche.

But what continues to resonate in Nomura's mind from that era is a very different day - a day in April 1942 that still haunts her more than 62 years later.

It was the day she and her brothers and sisters were forced from their Venice home and banished to an internment camp in the barren desert area of the Owens Valley in eastern California's Inyo County.

"They put us on a bus," Nomura said, "and I can remember that bus as if I was looking at it right now. It was an ugly awful bus. It was no Greyhound, that is for sure."

Nomura, 16 at the time, was one of more than 10,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese aliens corralled in the fervent aftermath of Pearl Harbor, characterized as potential threats to national security and forced to live at the Manzanar War Relocation Center.

It was the first of 10 camps established nationwide by the U.S. government to house more than 117,000 people of Japanese decent until the end of the war in 1945.

On Saturday, the National Park Service will hold the grand opening of the Manzanar National Historic Site Interpretive Center, a new museum on the site of the old Manzanar camp that will house one of the most extensive exhibits documenting any of the nation's 10 internment camps. The idea behind the museum, which cost $5.1 million - allocated by Congress - to construct, is to shed some light on a period of American history that has existed in relative obscurity, park officials say.

"I think Japanese internment is not a bigger part of this country's history because of the shame," Nomura said.

"It is the shame that the American government would allow something like this to happen. I think it is hard to admit that something like that happened, that the government did something like that to its own people. But sometimes admitting mistakes, putting them on display so that people can discuss them, is the best way to ensure that history is not repeated."

Housed inside the restored Manzanar High School auditorium, which hosted its first of two graduation commencement ceremonies for the class of 1944, the interpretive center will include 8,000 square feet of exhibits, two small movie theaters, park offices and a book store.

During the first several decades of the 1900s, a small European fruit-growing settlement named Manzanar - Spanish for apple orchard - was established.

Manzanar first opened its doors to relocated Japanese Americans in March 1942, under the authority of the Wartime Civil Control Administration.

In June 1942, operation of the camp was turned over to the War Relocation Authority, whose mission was to assist in the relocation of people from their homes "in the interest of military security."

At its peak, the camp had a population of 10,121, most of whom were drawn from prewar Japanese communities in Los Angeles County, and in particular the city of Los Angeles.

The camp's population was equally divided between males and females, and nearly a quarter of the camp's residents were school-age children.

Situated on close to 6,000 acres of land leased from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the evacuee living area consisted of a nearly one-quarter-mile expanse dominated by 36 blocks of tar paper barracks.

Most of the residents lived in overcrowded 20-foot by 25-foot apartments.

The area encompassed communal mess halls, laundry facilities and latrines for each block, as well as considerably upgraded living facilities for the War Relocation Authority staff.

Additionally, it contained a hospital, school, church, recreational and cultural facilities, a cooperative store and other necessary amenities that typically would be found in a normal American city of comparable size.

The camp's core evacuee living area was surrounded by barbed wire and overlooked by eight guard towers manned by military police who were quartered a half-mile south of the center of the Manzanar camp.

"In many ways it was just like living on the outside," Nomura said, "except that we were not allowed to go outside."

First forced to relocate in 1942, Nomura, whose parents both died at an early age, was released in January 1945 after three years that she says provided a wealth of both good and bad memories.

In many ways, she says, her life was as it would have been had she been allowed to continue living in Venice: She went to school, she made friends, she participated in proms and, in what she calls the most significant occurrence in her life, she met her husband Shi.

"It was only after we got there that we understood that this was going to be our life for God knows how long," Nomura said. "It was definitely a shocker. But I always tried to make the best of it. That was the only thing I could do. I could say that there were a lot of terribly ugly hard things that happened at Manzanar, but I never dwelt on that. My husband used to tell our children, "If it hadn't been for Manzanar, I never would have met your mother.'"

In fact, the courtship of Shi and Mary became legendary among Manzanar inhabitants.

Known as the "Songbird of Manzanar" because she often sang at dances held at the camp, Mary left Manzanar several months before Shi.

But during their time of separation, Shi wrote Mary love poems, which Mary set to music and later recorded.

The two married in June 1945.

Wilbur Sato and his family were living on Terminal Island in the harbor area in February 1942 when they and the rest of a Japanese community of about 4,000, based primarily around the cannery industry, were ordered from their homes.

"Once the war came, all the fishermen were deemed to be suspect," said Sato, whose mother worked in one of the island's canneries. "So they gave us all 48 hours to get out. People had no money, no cars, no place to go, no transportation of any kind. And people lost everything they had - their fishing boats, their hardware stores, their restaurants. They lost everything."

Sato, 12 at the time, and his family moved temporarily to Los Angeles, but they were quickly uprooted again when they were ordered in April to report to train stations from which they were taken to Manzanar.

"We were told we could take only what we could carry," Sato said. "But despite this, my mother seemed to have a certain feeling about the whole thing, an optimism. We were going to go because the government told us to go and we were going to go with good cheer."

That optimism dissipated soon after Sato and his family arrived at the Los Angeles train station they were told to report to, he said.

"We were put in these old, beat-up trains, and all of the windows were shuttered. We couldn't see outside and it was dark inside. The only thing we were given to eat was a box lunch of a peanut butter sandwich and an apple. The attitude of people changed. They were crying and they were angry. They didn't know where they were going."

The train took most of a day to take Sato, his family and crowds of other Japanese Americans to Lone Pine, where they were all put on buses for the final leg of the trip to Manzanar.

Upon arrival, they were given sacks filled with hay - their mattresses.

"We didn't think about whether what was happening was right or wrong," Sato said. "We all just felt like we were losing our identity. Here we are in America, and we were wearing pins as identity."

Sato, too, speaks fondly of the community that was built among the Manzanar inhabitants.

Like Nomura, he participates in annual reunions with his fellow internees, an important opportunity, he says, to reconnect with old friends and to reflect on their common memories.

But Sato also remembers clearly how difficult it was for him to adjust to life outside of Manzanar after his release in 1945.

He and his family initially lived in a Japanese American community in Iowa before returning to Los Angeles, where Sato graduated from Dorsey High School.

"That whole thing of alienation really affects you," Sato said. "In Iowa, I didn't really know where I fit in. I think I had only one friend. Even after we got back to California, I never really quite felt like I fit in and was really a part of the school. You don't know whether you belong."

Sato says he harbors no anger or resentment about having to spend his seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade years at Manzanar.

But he also says it is essential that efforts be made to preserve the World War II experiences of Japanese Americans to ensure that history is not repeated.

"Things like the opening of the interpretive center are important because it is going to tell the story of the Japanese internment," said Sato, who has been actively involved for decades in Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress, an organization committed to highlighting Japanese internment and fighting for redress for those affected.

"Japanese internment is really the story of the trashing of the Constitution. If we can call attention to the need to protect and defend the Constitution and the rights that are in the document, then that is important."

Though close to 60 years have passed since the last of the relocation centers were closed, Sato worries that society still has not changed significantly, and that a repeat of the Japanese experience is still a possibility.

"There is always the danger of history repeating itself," Sato said. "Especially in times of national crisis, leaders don't think twice about taking away people's rights when they feel threatened. Our Constitution even now is being interpreted in a very narrow sense that can be non-inclusive for non-citizens and even citizens."

The same sense of desire to make sure that history never forgets the interned Japanese Americans of World War II motivated Victor Muraoka of Northridge, who was interned until November 1945, to compile his experiences in a book he gave to his children and grandchildren.

"My daughter says it is therapeutic to get all of that stuff off my mind," Muraoka said. "But mostly it is just very important to me that these experiences are passed on and remembered generation to generation."

Nomura, as well as Sato, will be at Manzanar on Saturday, and she says she will be celebrating what she believes is the possibility the new interpretive center could forever cement in history the lessons of Japanese internment.

"The Japanese know what happened to them during World War II. But most people don't know," Nomura said.

"If you were to stop people on the street and ask them about what happened to the Japanese during World War II, I'll bet 75 percent of them would not know. These stories need to be told. It might sound like "Here goes those rabble rousers again,' but these stories need to be told."

Will Matthews can be reached by e-mail at w_matthews@dailybulletin.com or by phone at (909) 483-9333.