Manzanar: Ten Thousand People the Government Tried to Forget

There is a stone obelisk in the desert here, about four feet tall, with Japanese characters carved into its face. The characters read: soul consoling tower. The people who carved and placed it in nineteen forty-three were prisoners. They had been brought here by the United States government, without charge, without trial, and without the process their Constitution promised them.

In March of nineteen forty-two, the US Army began removing Japanese American families from the Pacific Coast. Manzanar, in the Owens Valley desert, was the first of ten camps constructed to hold them. At its peak, ten thousand people lived here, behind barbed wire, watched by guard towers, in tar-paper barracks that were stifling in summer and inadequate against the desert winter.

What the government created was a concentration camp. That word is not inflammatory. It is accurate. The people held here had committed no crime. Two-thirds of them were American citizens.

Inside the wire, people built what lives they could. They organized schools and hospitals. They planted gardens in the dry soil. They formed a community council and a newspaper. Jack Iwata, a photographer, documented one hundred sixty-six images of daily life between nineteen forty-two and nineteen forty-five: faces at mess hall tables, children in classrooms, people working and waiting. The photographs exist; the normalcy they document was built over the fact of incarceration, not despite it.

The government's accounting came slowly. In nineteen eighty-eight, the Civil Liberties Act provided a formal government apology and twenty thousand dollars to each surviving internee. Congress called the incarceration a grave injustice. By then, more than half of those who had been held here were dead.

Manzanar became a National Historic Site in nineteen ninety-two. The obelisk the internees built in nineteen forty-three is still standing. It is the oldest surviving structure at the site. It outlasted the barracks, the watchtowers, and the wire.