A few years ago, a large group of people from the Long Beach Japanese American church I grew up in hopped on a bus and made a pilgrimage to Manzanar. Most of the old people I grew up with had been interned during the war; some at Manzanar, others at camps all over the west. (My own family escaped internment only because they were in Hawaii, where entirely interning the large Japanese population would have been logistically, economically, and structurally impossible.)
It distresses me to hear the rhetoric of Japanese American internment once again raising its ugly head, this time directed against Muslim Americans. Most recently, internment has been cited as “precedent” for a federal Muslim registry by Carl Higbie, who spoke to a horrified Megyn Kelly on Fox News.
As a way to register my own horror and to address the kind of historical trauma this “precedent” has rooted in the Japanese American community across so many decades and generations, here are a few of the photos I took on that trip. The stories I heard demonstrate the trauma suffered by our elder generations but also their resilience and their creativity.
The photo above shows the memorial obelisk in the Manzanar cemetery, inscribed with the words “soul consoling tower.” It is a pilgrimage site for the internees and their descendants, who leave strands of cranes and other offerings.
Here is a more distant view, which shows the desolation (and also the grandeur) of this place. In the summer, it is amazingly hot and the strong winds frequently whip the dust into choking clouds. Not a healthy place for old people who aren’t used to it; many elderly internees were buried here.
Below is the site of the old “Pleasure Park.” Japanese Americans are good gardeners (many of those who weren’t farmers worked as gardeners or nursery owners), so when they were plopped down in the middle of this arid landscape you bet they tried to transform it into a paradise using the local plants and rocks. They even tried to bonsai sagebrush.
We always knew where Mae was because of her red hat.
In the early 20th century, Manzanar had been a small orchard town (hence the name). A few old pear trees–like the one below–are all that are left. By the time it was an internment camp, there were still pear trees around. Tomi said that they didn’t realize people had been there before them, so they called these “wild pears.” They used to take the fruit, wrap them in newspaper, and put them under their beds so the fruit would ripen.
Below is a reconstruction of one of the barracks, each housing several families.
For the first few years, internees slept on cots they made themselves from straw. Aiko couldn’t get any sleep on these cots (especially with seven people in her family), and Kaz was allergic to the wool army blankets they were given. With so many people crowded together in one structure, there was very little privacy. Fran said that eventually families hung wool blankets up as partitions for greater privacy. (Joyce remembers no privacy in the public bathrooms as well, although internees were eventually able to get the administration to put partitions between the toilets.)
Aiko remembers putting “little things” on the wooden ledges to make herself feel more at home.
At the little museum in nearby Independence: these geta were made from scrap wood. Fran (who had been interned at Heart Mountain in Wyoming) remembered wearing scrap-wood geta to go to the showers and walk through the snow. She remembers the winters being unbearable for a Southern California girl. Here, past and present overlap in the ghostly reflection of my sister’s zori-clad feet.
Scrap wood was used to make all sorts of things, from furniture to tiny decorative painted birds.
I didn’t remember having met the woman on the right in the picture below; she didn’t go to our church, or at least not regularly. I think she was someone’s aunt. Mary (on the left) and So-And-So’s Auntie were asked to point themselves out on the board of old pictures. It was amazing when they pointed out their younger selves in the *same* picture. “Wait–YOU’RE Mariko [Mary]?? I remember you!!” They were in the same class and hadn’t seen each other since 1944.
Hearing our elders’ stories and memories was like meeting them for the first time. As many younger Japanese Americans can attest, our elders don’t often open up about their experiences because of the trauma, humiliation, and shame they felt and continue to feel. This trauma still runs through our communities and shows itself in ways we can’t predict. Shortly after our trip, the church went through an event that can only be described as a betrayal by a larger, more powerful white group that clearly didn’t respect our community or its Japanese identity (I won’t go into details, but this was a group we deeply trusted). The pain we all felt and the way we dealt with that pain was–I think–accurately described for me by a Korean American member of our community: Japanese Americans often have, rooted deep in our communities, the expectation of betrayal. Betrayed by our own government, we have learned to expect and to suffer through similar acts of aggression (“we should have known this would happen…” “shigata ga nai…”). As I said above, historical traumas run deep and they run intergenerationally. It may take Japanese Americans many more generations to finally get over internment.
We have to protect our Muslim cousins from a similar fate. It is possible that the damage would last much longer than the span of this next presidency.
Mooncustafer 