Remembering the Manzanar internment camp (August 28, 2021)

Manzanar, just outside Lone Pine, is the site of one of ten American concentration camps, where more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated during World War II from March 1942 to November 1945.  Some 70,000 of them were American citizens.  More than half were under the age of 18. To the left of the basketball goal is a guard tower.

Those exiled to Manzanar were largely from the Los Angeles area and ranged in age from newborns to an 86-year-old widower. They were from cities and farms, young and old, rich and poor. Most had never been to Japan. They had only days or weeks to prepare. Businesses closed, classrooms emptied, friends separated. The U.S. government incarcerated a total of 11,070 people at Manzanar between March 21, 1942 and November 21, 1945. They lived within a 540-acre housing section, divided into 36 blocks. Military police manned eight guard towers and patrolled the camp’s barbed-wire perimeter fence. People crowded into barracks apartments, ate in communal mess halls, washed their clothes in public laundry rooms, and shared latrines and showers that aff orded almost no privacy. Within these exposed and cramped conditions, 188 couples married, 541 babies were born, and 150 people died.

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The Japanese Kanji characters read “Soul Consoling Tower.” Master stonemason Ryozo Kado, a Catholic, and Buddhist minister Shinjo Nagatomi designed this iconic monument as a permanent tribute to Manzanar’s dead. Kado built the obelisk with the assistance of Block 9 residents and a young Buddhists’ group, funded by 15-cent donations from each family in camp. Rev. Nagatomi carefully inscribed the monument’s characters—including “Erected by the Manzanar Japanese, August 1943” on the west side.

Life at Manzanar was uncertain, but the prospect of dying behind barbed wire, far from home, may have been unthinkable. On May 16, 1942, Matsunosuke Murakami, 62, became the first of 150 men, women, and children to die in camp. He and 14 others, most infants and older men without families, were laid to rest in this cemetery outside the barbed wire fence in an old peach orchard from Manzanar’s farming era. In the shadow of majestic Mt. Williamson, their somber funerals and memorials were attended by hundreds of mourners.

While some deceased were sent to hometown cemeteries, most were cremated and their ashes held in camp until their families left Manzanar.

Today, only six graves here contain remains; families requested the removal of others after the war.