“More than 11,000 people would pass through Manzanar before it was shuttered on Nov. 21, 1945.”

By Naomi Hirahara and Heather C. Lindquist

FOLLOWING JAPAN’S ATTACK on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government rounded up and forcibly detained some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the West Coast and elsewhere.

About two-thirds of those imprisoned were American citizens; the remainder were Japanese-born aliens banned by law from attaining U.S. citizenship. All were subsequently confined in American-style “concentration camps” for the duration of the war.

Manzanar, located about 60 miles west of the Nevada state border near Independence, California, was the first of 10 such facilities to open. It initially was known as the Owens Valley Reception Center, but was later renamed Manzanar War Relocation Center. The War Relocation Authority (WRA), a civilian-run government agency, administered all ten of the camps.

Here are nine important statistics about Manzanar and the families who were imprisoned there.

10,046:

The number of people incarcerated in Manzanar in 1942.

The overwhelming majority of Manzanar’s peak population in September of 1942 derived primarily from pre-war Japanese-American communities in Los Angeles County, particularly the city of Los Angeles, which was the pre-war commercial and sociocultural capital of mainland Japanese-America. Some detainees, however, were brought to Manzanar from as far away as Bainbridge Island, Washington. More than 11,000 people would pass through Manzanar before it was shuttered on Nov. 21, 1945. The inmates were nearly equally divided between male and female, with one-quarter of them school-aged children.

541:

The number of babies born at Manzanar during the war.

Alan Nishio was born in captivity at Manzanar, yet the story of his birth remained a closely-guarded family secret. It wasn’t until the 1960s, while poring through the stacks of books at University of California, Berkeley library, that Nisho accidentally discovered the truth about his birthplace. He knew he had been born in a place known as Manzanar, but he had always assumed it was a farm labor camp in Northern California. The paper he found on campus identified Manzanar in quite a different way: as one of ten detention camps that held Japanese Americans during World War Two. He tried to discuss his birthplace with his family when he returned home for vacation, but was met only with silence.

Decades later, Nishio took part in a movement that would break that silence for his and many other families. As part of the growing push for redress and reparations, activists on the West Coast and elsewhere sought out individuals who would be willing to share their firsthand experiences of incarceration. These hearings went on to inform an official government report by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians Act (CWRIC), established by the Carter Administration in 1980.

As a founding member of the Los-Angeles based National Coalition for Redress/Reparations (NCRR), Nishio sought to ensure the CWRIC hearings would be open to all, especially the elderly and average working people, who he knew could speak with “great strength and conviction.” Along with many other Sansei (third-generation Japanese Americans), Nishio testified at the hearings, later noting that they helped lift the taboo of talking about the years spent in the camps.

“They made it okay for people in the community to tell their story,” he recalled. “All of a sudden, it became more of a dinner-table conversation.”

101:

The number of kids held in Manzanar’s “Children’s Village”

From 1942 to 1945, more than 100 youngsters were housed in a special youth facility at Manzanar. Many of the children had been removed from pre-war foster homes and orphanages up and down the West Coast and sent to the camp. Others had been orphaned before the war. Tragically, a few were separated from their parents when the latter were detained by the FBI shortly after the war’s outbreak. Some infants born to unwed mothers in other camps were also sent to the Children’s Village.

Many of the kids held at Manzanar (like Karyl Matsumoto) were eventually adopted into loving homes and families. The parents included both former incarcerees and non-Japanese. Others came of age at Manzanar and were eventually forced to find their way in the world as young adults without the support and care of a family. Once the war ended and the camps closed, many of the unwanted children became wards of the counties to which they were returned, while others (like Annie Shiraishi Sakamoto) entered the foster care system.

25:

The amount in dollars awarded to people when released from Manzanar and the other camps.

Upon discharge, inmates were given just $25 dollars and a one-way bus ticket to try to start over. Some ventured east to places like Denver and Chicago, others returned to Southern California only to face discrimination and an alarming scarcity of housing and jobs. It would take many of the former inmates years, even decades, to rebuild their lives.

4,000:

The number of Japanese Americans who lived in trailer homes and old army barracks in Southern California after leaving the camps.

Those “freed” from the camp were resettled in conditions that were not all that dissimilar from those they had just left behind. As stated in the Pacific Citizen newspaper, “families will live in single rooms of 12 to 20 feet, partitioned from larger frame structure barracks abandoned by the Army some time ago. The FHA supplies an iron cot, mattress and two blankets per person, and the only other household article provided is a heating stove. There is no running water or toilet facilities in the rooms, and the evacuees will be fed from a community kitchen.”

5,724:

Number of U.S. citizens who gave up their citizenship after the war.

Joe Kurihara, a Hawaiian-born veteran of World War I, was one of thousands of Japanese and Japanese-Americans who left the United States after being released from the camps. Many, like Kurihara, moved to Japan. Never having lived in in the Far East, he struggled to adjust to his new life. Ironically, once abroad, he landed a job working for the U.S. military. By the mid-1950s, most renunciants had applied for reinstated citizenship and eventually resettled, but Kurihara refused to return to America until he was “invited” to become a citizen again. The U.S. government proffered no such invitation. Kurihara died of a stroke on Nov. 26, 1965 in Japan, almost 20 years to the day that he had left the country of his birth.

6:

The number of bodies that remain buried in the cemetery at Manzanar.

As many as 150 people died at Manzanar during World War Two; 15 of them were laid to rest in the Manzanar cemetery. Most of the deceased were cremated, their ashes held in camp until their families left Manzanar. In April 1946, when Sangoro Mayeda and others began returning to Manzanar to honor the dead and perform services for those buried there, only six graves remained. Three were older men with no living relatives in the United States, two were premature babies whose parents had been sent to Tule Lake Segregation Center, and one was an unidentified stillborn baby.

The annual Manzanar pilgrimage has since evolved from a private religious ceremony to a well-attended public gathering dedicated to raising awareness about the past and to ensuring that nothing like Manzanar ever happens again.

0:

Number of Japanese-Americans interned who were ever convicted of aiding the enemy.

Of the 120,000 men, women, and children ordered from their homes and detained in American-style concentration camps during World War II, not one was convicted of espionage or sabotage.

9/11:

The date that energized Manzanar survivors to speak out against racial profiling.

For many Americans, the Sept. 11 attacks of 2001 was seen as another Pearl Harbor. For John Tateishi and other Manzanar survivors, 9/11 also served as a call to action. Then national director of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), Tateishi immediately sent letters to President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft. He exhorted them to not “make the same mistake” their predecessors had made in 1942. He also sent copies to JACL’s regional offices and press releases to the national news media.

“Within half an hour, I started getting phone calls,” Tateishi recalled. “What I really emphasized was that this is only the second time in the history of this country we were attacked on our own soil, [and] that in 1942 the government’s response was to round up and imprison every Japanese American regardless of guilt or innocence and in total violation of the Constitution.” But this time, thanks to the work of the CWRIC, and specifically to its publication of the report Personal Justice Denied, there was federally recognized evidence that “substantiated how terribly wrong that was and gave remedies to try to prevent it from happening again.

Naomi Hirahara and Heather C. Lindquist are the authors of Life After Manzanar. Hirahara is a writer of both nonfiction books and mysteries. A former editor of the Rafu Shimpo newspaper, she also curates historical exhibitions and writes articles and short stories. Lindquist is the editor of Children of Manzanar, a co-publication by Heyday and Manzanar History Association, which received an award of excellence from the Association of Partners for Public Lands in 2013.