I first visited the Manzanar Relocation Center on a hot summer day several years ago. It was late July, the sun blazing from a cloudless sky, as I drove my vehicle around the 6,000 acres of where the United States government interned approximately 10,000 people of Japanese heritage from March 1942 to November 1945. There was not much there, other than the remnants of the old gymnasium (since opened as an interpretation center), the guard house, and the foundations of the barracks that used to house the inhabitants of this wartime relocation camp. In the background were the majestic Sierra Nevada Mountains, with the highest peak—Mt.Whitney—at 14,495 feet (4,418 meters) of elevation.

After Japan bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, concerns about the loyalty of Japanese in America increased. By February of 1942, politicians, community leaders, and businessmen on the West Coast had put enough pressure on the White House for President Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 9066, authorizing the creation of military zones from which all civilians had to be removed.

There was no special mention of the Japanese, but the Order was applied in areas on the West Coast (not in Hawai’i where the attack had occurred and where the numbers of Japanese Americans were higher) where there were heavy concentrations of this population. In the end, nearly 120,000 people of Japanese lineage—most of whom were American-born Nisei, and therefore, American citizens—were sent to ten relocation camps built and overseen by the military. Manzanar in California’s Owens Valley was one of the ten, its occupants coming mostly from the Los Angeles area, 225 miles to the south.

From assembly centers to relocation centers

Without due process, the government gave everyone of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast only days to decide what to do with their possessions. They did not know where they were going nor for how long. Each family received an identification number and they were loaded into cars, buses, trucks, and trains, taking only what they could carry. They were first transported, under military guard, to temporary assembly centers from which they were moved to the relocation centers once the military had finished constructing them. About two-thirds of those interned at Manzanar were American citizens by birth. The remainder were Japanese nationals, many of whom had lived in the United States for decades but who, by United States law, were denied citizenship.

In June of 1942, the War Relocation Authority took over the control of Manzanar and the other camps—although not with much change in the daily routines. Barbed wire still surrounded the 500-acre housing section, and the eight guard towers with searchlights continued to look over the camp, patrolled by military police. Outside the fence, military police housing, a reservoir, a sewage treatment plant, and agricultural fields occupied the remaining 5,500 acres of the camp.