Manzanar National Historic Site: The First Japanese American Relocation Center, 1942–1945

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war on Japan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. It authorized the Secretary of War to remove American citizens and aliens of Japanese ancestry living in the western United States to camps, because they were believed to threaten national security.

The Army moved 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry to ten camps in the remote deserts and plains of seven states. Manzanar, in California's Owens Valley, was the first. Today Manzanar National Historic Site keeps the stories of the Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens held there — people who, denied their freedom, built a strong community together.

A military dog tag from Manzanar. By the war's end, nearly 26,000 Japanese Americans from all the camps had served in the U.S. armed forces. Courtesy of the National Park Service.

Removal

In March 1942, the Army leased 6,200 acres at Manzanar from the City of Los Angeles, and the first group was moved in. People were given little notice to gather their belongings and decide what to do with their homes, businesses and possessions. Internee William Hohri later recalled having about a week to get rid of everything except what they could carry onto the bus. The rest was sold or left with friends and religious groups; those who could not sell or rent their homes abandoned them, hoping to return soon — but they were held until the war ended.

By August, removals to all the camps were complete; 10,000 of the 120,000 were sent to Manzanar.

The camp

• Inside the wire: a 640-acre rectangle, hastily built by the first arrivals and surrounded by barbed wire and eight guard towers — gone now, though the line of the fence can still be seen.
• Outside: on 5,560 acres, the Army built military police housing, a reservoir, a sewage plant, farm fields and a cemetery. Only the cemetery, a few sentry posts and part of the reservoir remain.
• Housing: 504 barracks in 36 blocks. Each block had a building with shared bathrooms, laundry and mess hall, and housed about 200 to 400 people, usually crowded into 14 barracks. Each barrack had four rooms, a stove, a hanging light bulb, blankets and a few straw mattresses. Only some concrete walls and posts survive.
• Still standing: a large metal building near the main entrance that was the school auditorium, and two stone structures at the main gate, built by internees with touches of Asian design.

A town behind wire

Crowded as they were, the people of Manzanar made the best of it. With the War Relocation Authority, which set up a council of elected block supervisors, they built churches, formed girls' and boys' clubs, played sports and music, danced, planted gardens, and published The Manzanar Free Press. Manzanar ran like a town: internees worked as doctors, nurses, police officers, firefighters and teachers; they raised chickens, built furniture, and made clothing — and camouflage for the Army.

Japanese Americans could not serve in the Army at the start of the war, but many at Manzanar worked to prove their loyalty. Besides camouflage nets, when Japan cut off America's rubber, resident scientists under Dr. Robert Emerson experimented with guayule and succeeded in extracting rubber from the desert plant's woody parts. Their loyalty was fully shown when the Army reinstated the draft for Japanese Americans; by the war's end, nearly 26,000 from all the camps had served.

When the war was over the government closed the camps, and in November 1945 the last internees left Manzanar. It is now one of the best-preserved of the War Relocation Centers.

Visiting

• Manzanar Interpretive Center, in the restored auditorium: 8,000 square feet of exhibits on Manzanar and all the people of Japanese heritage held there — plus the area's earlier history: the Owens Valley Paiute, miners and homesteaders from Scotland, France, Mexico and Chile, and the apple orchard community that gave Manzanar its name (Spanish for "apple orchard"). There are photographs, artifacts, a large model of the camp, a list of the 10,000 people held there, and the award-winning film Remembering Manzanar, shown every half hour.
• A 3.2-mile self-guided auto tour passes the sentry posts, parts of the water system, the cemetery and the ruins of the administrative complex.
• On foot: the gardens in block 22, the chicken ranch, orchards and other sites off the tour road.

Manzanar, a unit of the National Park System and a National Historic Landmark, is 9 miles north of Lone Pine and 6 miles south of Independence, California, on the west side of U.S. Highway 395. Admission is free. See the park's website for hours, and the National Register file's text and photos.

Sources

Based on "California: Manzanar National Historic Site," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain; William Hohri's recollection is rewritten in hubnx's own words. Two claims on the source page — the medal it says was awarded in 2010, and its count of enlisted men who died — are left out.