Press - Whittier Daily News

Whittier Daily News 4/23/04
Return to Manzanar
Japanese Americans assemble education exhibit at former prison
By Ben Baeder, Staff Writer

This time, they're going because they want to.

About 1,000 Japanese Americans who were pushed off their land and imprisoned in 1942 after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor are meeting today at what used to be the Manzanar War Relocation Center in Central California to open an education exhibit they hope will serve as a vivid reminder of what it is like to lose one's freedom.

"The hope is that people forever will understand that this happened right here in America to Americans,' said Whittier resident Grace Nakamura, who was 15 in 1942 when her family was forced to move from Los Angeles to be interned 200 miles away in Manzanar.

The $5.1 million Manzanar Interpretive Center is in the old Manzanar High School gymnasium in what is now the Manzanar National Historic Site.

The Interpretive Center features two movie theaters and 8,000 square feet of exhibits that portray what daily life was like for the camp's prisoners, as well as the other 110,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast who were ordered into the camps on Feb. 19, 1942.

"It tells the story of all the camps,' said Alisa Lynch of the Manzanar Historic Site. "We are trying to emphasize it as American history because it's relevant to everyone's history.'

With quotes from world leaders, interned citizens and everyday people, the exhibits capture the mood of the time, Nakamura said.

One quote at the exhibit made in 1942 by Lt. Gen. John DeWitt reads: "The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.'

Also featured is the art of Toyo Miyatake, who sneaked a camera lens into the camp to take pictures.

"The main reason he wanted to record camp life was so that there would be a record of how things were,' said Miyatake's 79-year-old son Archie, who went to Manzanar High School during his internment and now lives in Montebello.

"The reason for that is that he didn't want this to ever happen again. The evidence is in the photographic record.'

Nakamura lived at the camp in 1942 and 1943. She said the camp was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. During school, children sat on cracked floors.

When the wind blew, dirt flew up from the cracks and filled the classroom, she said.

"I hated the desert for years because of that,' Nakamura said.

Once, when the Japanese Americans got together to protest the alleged stealing of food by government employees, a soldier fired into the crowd and killed Nakamura's friend, Jimmy Ito, Nakamura said.

Manzanar closed in November 1945. The last internment camp, Tula Lake in Northern California, closed in 1946.

Manzanar is the best preserved of these camps and in 1972 was designated a California Registered Historical Landmark.

Nakamura said the new interpretive center is more important now than ever.

She notes that the United States after Sept. 11, 2001, detained terrorist suspects at Camp X-Ray in Cuba without trials or even officially charging them with a crime.

"Locking people up without due process and taking them without hearings or any prospect of a trial it's happening again. But now to another group of people who look different.'

"Americans need to be sensitive and not get caught up in this hysteria again,' she said.

Staff Writers Cindy Chang, Karen Rubin and Dana Bartholomew contributed to this story.

-- Ben Baeder can be reached at (562) 698-0955, Ext. 3024, or by e-mail at ben.baeder@sgvn.com .