Article - Juliet Wong

Not the Land of the Free, But the Home of the Brave
By Juliet Wong
Manzanar Committee, 5/27/04

Over this Memorial Day weekend, Angelenos can pay tribute to some of the bravest and most decorated soldiers who helped end World War II, the 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team and the Military Intelligence Service, by visiting the home from which many of them came: Manzanar.

Manzanar, Spanish for “apple orchard,” grew from the bitter seeds of racism and war hysteria after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which brought the U.S. into WWII.

It was the largest of 10 internment camps where President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the U.S. military to round up entire communities of Japanese Americans across the western United States, despite FBI proof that they were innocent of any wrongdoing. In these camps, all people from children to elders were penned within barbed wire fences patrolled with guard towers where armed soldiers had orders to shoot any who tread too close to freedom.

Sue Kunitomi Embrey, 81, of Los Angeles, remembers the day she first stepped on the dusty grounds originally inhabited by another forcibly removed community, the Paiute and Shoshone Native Americans.

“On May the 9th, 1942, my family and I, along with about 300 people, all of Japanese ancestry living in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, came to Manzanar under orders from the Western Defense Command of the U.S. Army,” said Embrey.

Recalling the heartbreak of that first night in the internment camp, she said after her family was given their housing assignment, “We struggled through the dark….When we walked in, it was a room of 20x25 feet with canvas army cots and mattresses filled with hay. My mother sat down on one of the cots and said, in Japanese, ‘Ma, konatto ko ni,’ loosely translated, ‘A place like this?’”

Embrey was 19 years old, and her hopes of entering college in the fall were dashed.

Four of her five brothers would eventually serve in the U.S. Army, two of them drafted from camp.

Twenty-seven years later, in 1969, Embrey returned with college-aged students and community activists, including current President of the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees Warren Furutani. They deemed it the first Manzanar Pilgrimage, though two first-generation Japanese ministers, one Buddhist and one Christian, had already been making their own private pilgrimage for 25 years. They journeyed together in 1969, on “the coldest day in Inyo County” in the wintertime, said Embrey.

The barrage of media, including third-generation Japanese American reporter Trisha Toyota, brought national publicity to the story of Manzanar. “But the Japanese American community was very disturbed by the publicity. And several people came up to me and said in no uncertain terms, ‘Don’t bring up the past. And don’t talk about the camps,’” said Embrey.

A mission was born.

On April 24, 2004, the Manzanar Committee, which Embrey founded, celebrated their 35th anniversary pilgrimage to Manzanar with a crowd of more than 2,500 Japanese Americans, National Park Service officials, local Chambers of Commerce and other Owens Valley community members to celebrate the opening of an Interpretive Center museum in the camp’s restored auditorium.

Alisa Lynch, Chief of Interpretation and Cultural Resources Management of the National Park Service, is currently one of the caretakers of Manzanar, now a National Historic Landmark. Through her work at the former internment camp, she has become good friends with Embrey, “…when [the auditorium] opened in 1944, it kind of became a community living room. And there were… plays and dances and musical performances and funerals and meetings and movies,” said Lynch.

A total of 11,070 people were held at Manzanar, about 90% of whom were from Los Angeles, said Lynch. But the internees were not the only tie Manzanar had with Los Angeles.

Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge spoke on behalf of the city during the National Park Service’s official opening after the Pilgrimage ceremonies.

In an interview before the ceremonies, LaBonge said, “This was Los Angeles’ land, owned by the Department of Water and Power. They’d eventually turn it over to the National Park Service to make this very important monument.”

“But what really drove me here [is]…. I’m so impressed with the Japanese Americans in the 442nd [Regimental Combat Team], which is the most decorated unit in WWII. And they came out of these camps, just saying, “I’m gonna fight for America.” And so it’s a tremendous story. That’s why I’m here.”

The rallying cry for these soldiers from the camps was “Go for Broke!”

Together with the 100th Battalion from Hawaii, the 442nd fought fierce battles in Europe with many fatalities and injuries. Among their triumphs was helping to liberate the Nazi death camp Dachau, but “the U.S. army, in a paradoxical quandary, removed the Japanese American soldiers from the picture,” said Manzanar Advisory Commission Chair Rose Ochi.

Over 300 of those young soldiers in the 442nd as well as the Military Intelligence Service were from Manzanar, according to Terry Kuwahara of the Go For Broke Educational Foundation Resource Center.

One gains a true appreciation of these soldiers’ strength by seeing the actual conditions in which they lived at Manzanar.

In addition to artifacts donated by former internees and their families, the Interpretive Center also has on display one of the actual barracks where families lived and a replica of one of the guard towers.

“Part of [the National Park Service’s] mission is telling the stories. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to have this here and nobody understand what it is and what it means…. the interesting thing about Manzanar is the site just speaks to so many people. It’s a very powerful site,” said Lynch.

In the bathroom of the Interpretive Center, there is a photograph of the latrine facilities of the camp. Recollections from former internees such as Mary Tsukamoto are inscribed on the photograph, “Standing in line in front of the latrines, standing in line for our bath. That was a shock…we got sick…we couldn’t go…we didn’t want to go. It was smelly and it was dirty…there were no partitions, and it was so cramped that we almost touched each other. It was very humiliating.”

Experiences such as these shaped the life of Rose Ochi, Chair of the Manzanar Advisory Commission. As a child, she had to stay with her family in the horse stables of the Santa Anita race track for six months before being sent to another internment camp on native lands, Rohwer, Arkansas.

In her speech at the National Park Service opening ceremony, Ochi said, “This is such a great day to have finally arrived at this major milestone in our long journey to memorialize this tragic blot on our nation’s history…. People ask me why it’s important to remember and keep Manzanar alive with this Interpretive Center. My answer is that stories like this need to be told, and too many of us have passed away without telling our stories. The Interpretive Center is important because it needs to show to the world that America is strong as it makes amends for the wrongs it has committed, and that we will always remember Manzanar for that.”

During the opening, Director of the National Park Service Fran Mainella said, “For those of us who work in the Department of the Interior, this is an extra lesson because it was our department that managed the war for relocation centers, including Manzanar here in California…We cannot take pride in the purpose of these centers. We can and do take pride, though, in assuring that they are remembered and with dignity and honor…If telling the story were enough, place would not matter. But the true appreciation of the meaning of Manzanar needs to be felt at Manzanar.”

When asked about the opening of the Center, Embrey said, “This is the validation. I mean, our stories are going to be here forever. It’s a first-class Interpretive Center.”

Manzanar’s Interpretive Center is now open to the public everyday from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information regarding the Interpretive Center’s hours, call (760) 878-2194 or email MANZ_Superintendent@nps.gov. The Eastern California Museum in nearby Independence, California, is also hosting an exhibit of photographs from Manzanar by Toyo Miyatake through August 1, 2004. For visiting hours and more information, (760) 878-0364 or 878-0258. For more information about the Manzanar Committee visit: www.manzanarcommittee.org.