Sam H. Ono: Manzanar High, the Army, and a Model of the Camp

Growing up

Like most who shared their stories in these booklets, Sam Ono was a Nisei — born in America to Japanese immigrant parents, his father from Okayama and his mother from Hiroshima.

• His father worked on the railroad and as a farm laborer; when Sam was born, his parents ran a small grocery in Sacramento.
• His mother died when he was six, leaving his father to raise two boys. Moving often for work, the family never had a settled home.
• In 1940 his father became a self-employed carpenter around Los Angeles — until the war.

War

After war was declared, people of Japanese ancestry in California, Oregon and Washington were treated as the enemy, citizens or not.

• A curfew and a five-mile travel limit cut off his father's work, leaving the family on meager savings.
• Then came removal: only what they could carry, with some families given as little as 48 hours to store or sell everything.
• Bargain hunters swarmed the community, and vandals later broke into buildings where families had stored irreplaceable belongings. Because of a few thoughtless people, many lost the keepsakes of their childhood.

Manzanar

After a day on the bus, Sam first saw Manzanar at dusk: brown smoke from oil stoves hanging over black tar-papered barracks.

• They registered, got quarters and blankets, and stuffed a sack with hay for a mattress on an Army cot.
• Rooms had bare floors, exposed rafters and dust sifting between the floorboards; no plumbing. Latrines and laundries served each block of 14 barracks.
• At first several families shared a room — a bachelor, a couple and child, a widow and her grown daughter, Sam, his brother and father — with blankets for walls.

School

Having attended seven schools by tenth grade, Sam graduated from Manzanar High School in summer 1944.

• Classrooms were tar-papered barracks, at first with no furniture — students sat on the floor — and almost no books, lab equipment or blackboards.
• The teachers chose to come to this desolate place to teach people imprisoned only for their ethnicity. Conditions improved, but never matched schools "outside."
• Many students still earned an education good enough for college. Getting an education, he said, is as much the student's responsibility as the teacher's.

After camp

• He left for Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, but after one semester was drafted, serving in the Army Medical Corps without seeing combat.
• On the GI Bill he studied architecture at USC, then transferred to UCLA for engineering, and became a licensed civil engineer — about 45 years in the profession, the last nine as chief engineer of a major roof-structures company.
• He and his wife raised three children and have two grandchildren.

Looking back

As teenagers, he and his friends met it all with a sense of adventure — young and resilient. At first he felt shame at his connection to Japan, but soon realized he had little in common with Japanese nationals; in Japan he would have been as foreign as any American.

His bitterness is not for himself but for the anguish of his father and other parents trying to hold families together. Redress and a presidential apology came, but cannot erase what happened.

His message to readers: those who shared their stories were people no different from you — "Mask our faces and we become just as 'American' as anyone else." 120,000 people, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, were imprisoned without due process. The legacy of Manzanar and the nine other camps is the responsibility never to let such an injustice happen again.

The model

In spring 2004, Sam led a dozen friends from Manzanar High's classes of 1943, 1944 and 1945 in building a detailed scale model of the camp. They volunteered more than a thousand hours, and the model is on permanent display in the Manzanar National Historic Site visitor center in Independence.

Sources

Based on "Sam H. Ono," one of the ID booklets of Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service, written by park rangers with the people profiled and their families; the booklet's first-person account is retold here, with short quotations. The booklet closes with "Wind and Dust," a poem written at Manzanar in 1943 by George Nishimura, age 16, which is not reproduced. For more on the ten camps, see the Park Service's "War Relocation Centers."