Embracing Controversy: National Park Service Faces Manzanar’s Past

Ansel Adams/Library of Congress

Manzanar camp buildings.

“You may think the Constitution is your security–It is nothing but a piece of paper.” With these words, spoken by a Supreme Court Justice, author Michi Nishiura Weglyn found a stark statement for an equally stark place–a landscape of desert and sagebrush at the foot of southern California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. The words recalled her years at Manzanar, captured in her book Years of Infamy, and stand as an epigraph for the Japanese American experience during World War II.

Today visitors confront this difficult history, and its implications for democracy, at Manzanar National Historic site, a reminder of liberty’s frail nature. This spring, the park opens an 8,000 square-foot interpretive center, the result of extensive outreach and a case study in how the National Park Service is dealing with what historians call “sites of social conscience.” The center is the result of an effort to embrace all perspectives of an uneasy past, an inclusiveness that sums up what the staff has been doing since Manzanar became a park in 1992.

In conceiving the center, says Superintendent Frank Hays, “we did a lot more public review than I think is typical with our interpretive media.” He and his staff took the exhibit and its accompanying film, both in the formative stages, to the Japanese American community and to many local groups. Open houses served as forums for public input. This led staff to attend reunions of the camp high school where they recruited alumni to narrate the film. “The park stands for dialogue,” Hays says. “We want to provoke discussion.” Manzanar continues to consult with a variety of groups as it develops the park’s educational programs.

Racism and wartime hysteria prompted the construction of places like Manzanar. Nearly 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent, considered potential spies and saboteurs, were forced to move into detention camps, all of them in remote, desolate areas of the West.

Manzanar’s designation as a national historic site is a significant milestone in telling the hard stories that shaped America, a trend in the National Park Service. The park faced a formidable challenge in communicating the history of a place where 10,000 men, women, and children were detained in primitive barracks. Not everyone was eager to hear the story. Envisioning a national park to commemorate the event suggested a long and grinding campaign of conflict resolution. Yet, says Hays, “right from the start, I made it our policy that we were going to take it to the public.”

Park staff aggressively sought out the Japanese-American community, local residents, ranchers, and Native Americans, all constituents with ties to the land and a stake in how the park’s story would be told. “We went to where we know interest groups gather, rather than always expecting them to come to us,” says Hays. This meant attending reunions of former internees and other gatherings, getting on agendas, and bringing along a traveling exhibit and plenty of information to explain the park’s intentions.

One of the earliest challenges was how to recreate the Japanese American experience. There was concern that visitors, confronted with the natural beauty of the place, would get the impression that the internees whiled away the war years in a desert idyll. Japanese Americans strongly urged the re-creation of guard towers, barracks, barbed wire, and latrines. Reconstructions are controversial in the preservation world, and the least-favored method of commemoration in the National Park Service. Manzanar made the case, and eventually, the re-creations were built.

The paraphernalia of imprisonment was not the only thing that should tell the story, staff learned through consultation with Japanese Americans. Former internees wanted the camp’s rock gardens to be preserved. “It is so characteristically Japanese,” said a former Manzanar resident, “the way lives were made more tolerable by gathering loose desert stones and forming with them something enduringly human.” These individual monuments to the human spirit can still be seen today.

The park’s outreach made such an impact that articles and letters started appearing in the Los Angeles Times. One letter writer, who opposed the idea of commemorating the camp, called the National Park Service a “groveling sycophant.” Manzanar staff engaged critics in the dialogue, in one case interviewing a veteran of the war in the Pacific as part of the park’s oral history.

Archie Miyatake, whose father Toyo smuggled a camera and film into the camp, recalls playing outside the barracks with friends one day. His father called him inside, explaining what he planned to do: “As a photographer, I have a responsibility to record camp life so this kind of thing never happens again.” Today, Toyo Miyatake's pictures of life at Manzanar are a part of the park’s exhibit–a validation of the dire words that Michi Nishiura Weglyn found so compelling.

The trend toward embracing sites of social conscience is what some call “a profoundly democratic vision of history.” Manzanar National Historical Site’s approach to the hard story that unfolded in the California desert is the essence of that vision.

For more information, contact Frank Hays, Manzanar National Historic Site, P.O. Box 426, Independence, CA 93526-2932, (760) 878-2932, frank_hays@nps.gov, http://www.nps.gov/manz.