Images of Manzanar 4

IMAGES OF MANZANAR

All Manzanar photographs are from the National Archives Registry unless otherwise noted. Copies of these pictures can be obtained directly from the National Archives.

These images are some of my favorite. There nearly 500 Manzanar internment images in the National Archives files. I encourage you to visit the archives and peruse the many photographs. Once you click on the icon above and are taken to the archives, type in "Manzanar" and then press "Display Results" and the images will be displayed in sets of nine.
You might observe, as I did, that the internees appear rather unnaturally joyous in these pictures. I don't think that having been dislocated from their homes and businesses, forced to live in a harsh desert environment and confined to barracks with no insulation would have made them this happy. But as Jeanne Wakatsuki points out in her book, Farewell to Manzanar, Japanese Americans told each other very quietly to "Shikata ga nai" ("It must be done", or, as my Japanese friend says, "Suck it up [and get on with life]." Perhaps this is what encouraged them to put a smile on their face.

The photographer for the majority of these images was Dorthea Lange.

Text excerpts followed by a "JWH" are from Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston & James D. Houston's book "Farewell to Manzanar"

Sports at Manzanar

6th grade girls playing volleyball	6th grade boys playing baseball.	Women's basketball.
"In addition to the regular school sessions and the recreation program, classes of every kind were being offered all over camp: singing, acting, trumpet playing, tap-dancing, plus traditional Japanese arts like needlework, judo, and kendo. The first class I attended was in baton twirling, taught by a chubby girl about fourteen named Nancy. In the beginning I used a sawed-off broomstick with an old tennis ball stuck on one end. When it looked like I was going to keep at this, Mama ordered me one like Nancy's from the Sear, Roebuck catalog. Nancy was a very good twirler and taught us younger kids all her tricks. For months I practiced, joined the baton club at school, and even entered contests. Since then I have often wondered what drew me to it at that age. I wonder, because of all the activities I tried out in camp, this was the one I stayed with, in fact returned to almost obsessively when I entered high school in southern California a few years later. By that time I was desperate to be 'accepted,' and baton twirling was one trick I could perform that was thoroughly, unmistakably American - putting on the boots and a dress crisscrossed with braid, spinning the silver stick and tossing it high to the tune of a John Philip Sousa march." (JWH)
Women's basketball.	Members of the Chick-a-dee softball team. The squad leaders, with hands on bat, are: Ritsuko Masuda (left), and Marion Fuji.	Maye Noma behind the plate and Tomi Nagao at bat in a practice game between members of the Chick-a-dee soft ball team.

Journalism at Manzanar

"In the months to come they [my family] would draw together even more closely, just as I would hold to them - my moment of separateness a foreshadowing, but not yet a reality. Our family had begun to dwindle, along with the entire camp population. By the end of 1944 about 6,000 people remained, and those, for the most part, where the aging and the young. Whoever had prospects on the outside, and the energy to go, was leaving, relocating, or entering military service. No one could blame them. To most of the Nisei, anything looked better than remaining in camp. For many of their parents, just the opposite was true." (JWH)
Shizuco Setoguchi assistant in the Manzanar Free Press.	Joe Blamey, editor of the Manzanar Free Press.	Takeshi Shindo, Reporter for the Manzanar Free Press, and his girlfriend Toshiko Mikami.
Manzanar Free Press in operation.	War posters such as this did little to help the Japanese Americans after the internment camps closed.	Manzanar Free Press in operation.
"...it was announced that all the camps would be closed within the coming twelve months and that internees now had the right to return to their former homes. In our family the response to this news was hardly joyful. For one thing we had no home to return to. Worse, the very thought of going back to the west coast filled us with dread. What will they think of us, those who sent us here? How will they look at us? Three years of wartime propaganda - racist headlines, atrocity movies, hate slogans, and fright-mask posters - had turned the Japanese face into something despicable and grotesque. Mama and Papa knew this. They had been reading the papers. Even I knew this, although it was not until many years later that I realized how bad things actually were. In addition to the traditionally racist organizations like The American Legion and The Native Sons of The Golden West, who had been agitating against the west-coast Japanese for decades, new groups had sprung up during the war, with the specific purpose of preventing anyone of Japanese descent from returning to the coast - groups like No Japs Incorporated in San Diego, The Home Front Commandos in Sacramento, and The Pacific Coast Japanese Problem League in Los Angeles. Also, some growers' associations, threatened by the return of interned farmers, had been using the war as a way to foment hostile feelings in the major farming areas. What's more, our years of isolation at Manzanar had widened the already spacious gap between the races, and it is not hard to understand why so many preferred to stay where they were. Before the war one of the standard charges made against the Japanese was their clannishness, their standoffishness, their refusal to assimilate. The camps had made this a reality in the extreme. After three years in our desert ghetto, at least we knew where we stood with our neighbors, could live more or less at ease with them. Yet now the government was saying we not only were free to go; like the move out of Terminal Island, and the move to Owens Valley, we had to go. Definite dates were being fixed for the closing of the camp." (JWH)

Agriculture at Manzanar

Plots 10 x 50 foot "hobby gardens" between blocks of barracks.	Plots 10 x 50 foot "hobby gardens" between blocks of barracks.	Plots 10 x 50 foot "hobby gardens" between blocks of barracks.
"In June the schools were closed for good. After a final commencement exercise the teachers were dismissed. The high school produced a second yearbook, Valediction 1945, summing up its years in camp. The introduction shows a page-wide photo of a forearm and hand squeezing pliers around a length of taut barbed wire strung beneath one of the towers. Across the page runs the caption, 'From Our World . . . through these portals . . . to new horizons.'" (JWH)
Guayule rubber experiment project lath house.	Ogura Shuichi, plant statistician for the guayule rubber experiment project.	Frank Hirosawa, research rubber chemist (seated) trying to access the guayule rubber production.
"Then the word went out that the entire camp would close without fail by December 1 [1945]. Those who did not choose to leave voluntarily would be scheduled for resettlement in weekly quotas. Once you were scheduled, you could choose a place - a state, a city, a town - and the government would pay your way there. If you didn't choose, they'd send you back to the community you lived in before you were evacuated. Papa gave himself up to the schedule. The government had put him here, he reasoned, the government could arrange his departure. What could he lose by waiting? Outside he had no job to go back to. A California law passed in 1943 made it illegal now for Issei to hold commercial fishing licenses. And his boats and nets were gone, he knew - confiscated or stolen. Here in camp he had shelter. The women and children still with him had enough to eat. He decided to sit it out as long as he could." (JWH)
Johnny Fukazawa, foreman of fields Numbers 3, 4, 5, and 6, heading a 20-man field crew on the farm project.	George J. Yokomizo, hybridizer for the guayule rubber experiment project.	Spades for garden work at Manzanar.
"Papa read the papers and studied the changeless peaks, while all around us other families were moving out, forcing our name ever higher on the list. Every day bus loads left from the main gate, heading south with their quotas, filled with Mamas and Papas and Grannies who had postponed movement as long as possible, and soldiers' wives like Chizu, and children like Kiyo and May and me, too young yet to be out on our own. Some of the older folks resisted leaving right up to the end and had to have their bags packed for them and be physically lifted and shoved onto the busses. When our day finally arrived, in early October, there were maybe 2,000 people still living out there, waiting their turn and hoping it wouldn't come." (JWH)
H. Kawase, 20 (left), and M. Sakai, 22, operate tractor preparing ground for sowing onion seeds.	War posters such as this did little to help the Japanese Americans after the internment camps closed.	Johnny Fukazawa's farm crew.

	Ghosts of the Past 3 - Bruce Morgan's '49ers
	20-Mule-Team History
	More Manzanar Japanese Internment Camp Images
	More Manzanar Japanese Internment Camp History
	Manzanar High School Portraits & History
	More Manzanar History & Manzanar Free Press

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This page was last updated on 23 August 2007