Childhood Lost: the Orphans of Manzanar

The U.S. Army took 3-year-old Annie Shiraishi Sakamoto away in the summer of 1942.

Before the soldiers came, Annie lived at a Catholic orphanage in Los Angeles, the unwanted baby of a single mother and a married gardener.

Maryknoll nuns took care of the girl--first brought to them as a 2-pound premature infant, sick with double pneumonia--until she was forced to leave the only home she knew.

She was one of 101 Japanese American orphans and foster children--some as young as 6 months--quietly rounded up by soldiers during World War II. The children, some with as little as one-eighth Japanese ancestry, were sent to a hastily built orphanage at the Manzanar internment camp, 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

The story of the orphanage, known as Children's Village, is a largely untold chapter in the history of the camps. For more than 50 years, the orphans rarely talked about their war years, and the few remaining government documents on Children's Village are in vaults at the National Archives in Maryland.

Now, scholars at Cal State Fullerton are beginning the first comprehensive study of the orphanage. Their project has taken on a sense of urgency with the recent deaths of several orphans and the fading memories of others.

The orphans want to see the history of Children's Village written before it's too late.

"[We need] to cite the injustice of innocent young people being targeted by prejudice," said Sakamoto, 57, a Highland Park registered nurse. "It shows what human nature in any history is capable of doing."

Even without the hindsight of history, Manzanar's top official denounced the government's treatment of the orphans in his final 1946 report on the camp.

"The morning was spent at the Children's Village," Manzanar director Ralph P. Merritt wrote, describing Thanksgiving Day, 1942, "with the 90 orphans [to date] who had been evacuated from Alaska to San Diego and sent to Manzanar because they might be a threat to national security. What a travesty [of] justice!"

Some former internees say the Army's decision to detain the children, who were already institutionalized, underscores the wartime anti-Japanese hysteria. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Army evacuated about 120,000 residents of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast in its zeal to guard against espionage and sabotage.

San Diego resident Francis L. Honda was a 7-year-old orphan when authorities moved him to Children's Village, the only orphanage among the 10 war relocation camps.