Manzanar War Relocation Center

During World War II, people of Japanese ancestry, citizens and resident aliens living on the West Coast were confined to relocation centers. Manzanar War Relocation Center in eastern California, one of such centers, is the destination of the 21st annual pilgrimage today. The pilgrimage is sponsored by the Manzanar Committee in Los Angeles. The committee learned last week that a Manzanar park study has been completed by the National Park Service and sent to the Secretary of the Interior.

ARCHIE Miyatake vividly remembers the scene: Ansel Adams was playing on his sister's toy piano after a family photo session in 1943 at the Manzanar War Relocation Center. "My father named the piece right away and was really surprised that he could play so well," says Miyatake, who was a teenager at the time. "That's when Ansel Adams told him, 'You know, I was originally studying to become a concert pianist.'

Fifty years ago, amid wartime paranoia, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an order that transformed 500 desolate acres in eastern California into an internment camp, ringed by barbed wire and occupied by Japanese-Americans who were feared as possible traitors. Marking the anniversary Wednesday, the House voted 400 to 13 to approve a bill designating the Manzanar camp in the Owens Valley as a national historic site, clearing the way for possible reconstruction of the camp's buildings.

Everyone has two grandfathers. Fortunate is the child who knows both. This is especially so when the child grows up and becomes a writer, a poet whose verse is shaped in large measure by the history of her family--by its struggles intimate and epic. In this sense, Amy Uyematsu has been half-lucky for most of her 58 years.

On the bus ride to the site of the former desert internment camp where he spent three years of his childhood, Takatow Matsuno furled and unfurled a copy of a 46-year-old photograph. It was a portrait of 77 Japanese-American children, among them Matsuno and his siblings, who spent most of World War II in an orphanage behind barbed wire at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in the eastern Mojave Desert. "The FBI took my father away and my mother was in the hospital," Matsuno explained.

The ANGLER IN THIS photograph has no smile and no first name known to us. He's remembered only as Ishikawa, Fisherman -- a sweet and haunting mystery from a dark chapter in U.S. history. Toyo Miyatake made this portrait during World War II at the Manzanar War Relocation Center. It is on display at the Eastern California Museum in Independence, Calif., with other images that Miyatake made inside the camp. No one knows exactly how Ishikawa slipped away to go fishing.

They came from as far as Hawaii and New York to recall Manzanar, a dusty, inhospitable place where they attended school, made friends and forged a community--surrounded by barbed wire and gun-toting guards. It was a reunion tinged with ambivalence, a cherished opportunity for old friends to renew acquaintances while also recalling an experience most deeply wished had never happened.

When Shiro Nomura left the dusty, hot Owens Valley back in 1945, he had hoped he never would return. But the 75-year-old Japanese American and former Manzanar internee did go back. Again and again. "He wanted people to know what happened there and to let them never forget," said Nomura's wife, Mary. It was during a trip up Highway 395, on the eastern side of the Sierras in the mid-60s, that the couple walked into the Inyo County museum.

Guard Tower No. 8 has returned to Manzanar, a vivid symbol of what the place was and what it was not. Above all, it shows that living here, for Japanese American families, was not optional. "The tower represents what the whole thing was about: imprisonment, loss of civil liberties, loss of identity," said 82-year-old Sue Kunitomi Embrey, who was honored Saturday at a dedication for the re-created tower. "The tower was the only icon -- that and the barbed wire."

ARCHIE Miyatake vividly remembers the scene: Ansel Adams was playing on his sister's toy piano after a family photo session in 1943 at the Manzanar War Relocation Center. "My father named the piece right away and was really surprised that he could play so well," says Miyatake, who was a teenager at the time. "That's when Ansel Adams told him, 'You know, I was originally studying to become a concert pianist.'

This week in 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the rounding up of Japanese Americans to protect the country "against espionage and against sabotage." Ten War Relocation Camps were built; ultimately, more than 100,000 people were interned in them. One of the camps was at Manzanar, and when Ansel Adams arrived with his cameras, he saw "a little city, well-governed and alive" in the shadow of Mt. Williamson.

Only as I sat in rush-hour traffic on Interstate 5, on my way to Garden Grove, did it occur to me that I might have conveyed the wrong impression to Ellen's parents. Since I was spending the week in Los Angeles on business, I had called her folks and invited myself down for dinner.

Guard Tower No. 8 has returned to Manzanar, a vivid symbol of what the place was and what it was not. Above all, it shows that living here, for Japanese American families, was not optional. "The tower represents what the whole thing was about: imprisonment, loss of civil liberties, loss of identity," said 82-year-old Sue Kunitomi Embrey, who was honored Saturday at a dedication for the re-created tower. "The tower was the only icon -- that and the barbed wire."

It is not easy to find the UC Santa Cruz Music Center without help, and it is not easy to find help. And maybe that is as it should be. The performance at the University's Music Hall three weeks ago was billed as a "preview of the world premiere" of a symphonic work, "Manzanar: An American Story" -- a work that will be performed again Thursday night at UCLA. This is not an easy subject. This has not been an easy project.

The ANGLER IN THIS photograph has no smile and no first name known to us. He's remembered only as Ishikawa, Fisherman -- a sweet and haunting mystery from a dark chapter in U.S. history. Toyo Miyatake made this portrait during World War II at the Manzanar War Relocation Center. It is on display at the Eastern California Museum in Independence, Calif., with other images that Miyatake made inside the camp. No one knows exactly how Ishikawa slipped away to go fishing.

A direct attack on the United States. Hate crimes against those who resemble "the enemy." Members of that minority group rounded up and detained by the government. Current events can't help but resonate with musicians Rus McCoy and Dan Taguchi. Their fledging musical, "Manzanar: The Story of an American Family," is about the U.S.

A piece of Manzanar came home this week, trucked down U.S. 395 past the snowy teeth of the Eastern Sierra to the empty flats on which it once stood. The return of the weathered mess hall building is a small milestone in a painstaking effort to tell an inglorious American war story: the 1942 roundup of 120,000 West Coast residents of Japanese descent and their internment in government camps.

Everyone has two grandfathers. Fortunate is the child who knows both. This is especially so when the child grows up and becomes a writer, a poet whose verse is shaped in large measure by the history of her family--by its struggles intimate and epic. In this sense, Amy Uyematsu has been half-lucky for most of her 58 years.

A piece of Manzanar came home this week, trucked down U.S. 395 past the snowy teeth of the Eastern Sierra to the empty flats on which it once stood. The return of the weathered mess hall building is a small milestone in a painstaking effort to tell an inglorious American war story: the 1942 roundup of 120,000 West Coast residents of Japanese descent and their internment in government camps.

Frank Hays, superintendent of Manzanar National Historic Site, walks carefully among sage and fallen leaves, near an area where Japanese American orphans were confined during World War II. He stops and reaches for something on the ground. "A marble," he says. He hands it to Alisa Lynch, his colleague with the National Park Service, who holds it in her palm. It is dull and chipped, warm from the sun.