More than 2,000 people traveled to Manzanar in the Owens Valley to mark the 50th anniversary of an annual pilgrimage to the site of the first and best-known wartime camp.
People crowd the cemetery area during the annual Manzanar pilgrimage Saturday in California's Owens Valley.
“I felt ashamed,” Miki said. “As a human being, I feel responsible to learn history and not repeat it.” “Manzanar should not just be a symbol of what is wrong with our nation,” said Embrey, whose mother, Sue Kunitomi Embrey, was one of the first camp survivors to break the silence about the experience. “Manzanar should become a monument to our core values of democracy and civil rights. Our message is simple: Speak out, demand equal justice under the law for everyone no matter who they are or where they come from.
Warren Furutani, a former state assemblyman, told the crowd that he and another student activist at the time, Victor Shibata, were inspired by marches of farmworkers to Sacramento and poor people to Washington, D.C., in the 1960s.People look at a display of all the names of people, who were forced to relocate to Manzanar during World War 2.
That prompted traci kato-kiriyama, a Manzanar pilgrimage organizer, to exclaim, “How beautiful to hear Japanese spoken here!” The tumultuous events led to what Susan Kamei, a USC lecturer in history, called “hyperassimilation,” as many Japanese Americans sought to distance themselves from Japan and prove their American bona fides.
She said the Japanese American wartime experience can help inform the Japanese about the consequences of war and treatment of their own minorities in Japan, especially when international tensions arise between countries. Shimpei Ishii, deputy director of the nonprofit Japan Foundation, marveled at photos of Japanese workers who transformed the desert into fertile fields of vegetables and flowers. They even created a Japanese garden with a pond and bridge. How they pursued daily life under such hardship, he said, was deeply touching.
Afterward, Muslims rolled out rugs for afternoon prayers and pilgrims laid flowers around the monument.The Santa Monica resident, 89, was one of the few people in the crowd who actually had been incarcerated at Manzanar. He was only 11 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and recalls going to school the next day and friends shunning him as talk spread about “getting those Japs.”
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