NO MORE MANZANAR

This story was originally published in the May 3, 2025 Issue.

The mood was different this year at the annual Manzanar Pilgrimage. It was more focused, more defiant, more engaged. And for good reason.

The ongoing chaos around immigration, free speech, and civil rights on the national stage was not theoretical or abstract to the bulk of the 2,500 people at the pilgrimage, held on April 26 at the cemetery of the former internment camp under dark clouds and biting wind. 

The issues roiling America today are personal when your family or friends or classmates or community has experienced the devastation of being forcefully removed to a distant internment camp without due process in a court of law and a chance to challenge the removal order, or without a notice of what law was broken to prompt being jailed after being forced to either sell at a discount or give away homes, businesses, cars and even furniture and clothes. 

The Alien Enemy Act of 1798 was used as the legal basis for President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 that allowed the military to round up and then place about 120,000 Japanese Americans in 10 incarceration camps in 1942. But there is more. As several speakers pointed out, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the US Department of Justice detained and held in jails at “secret sites” many leaders in the Japanese communities on the Pacific Coast, said keynote speaker Dr. Satsuki Ina, who was born in the Tule Lake Segregation Center. Again, no due process, no chance to defend against nebulous charges, and no notice to families or churches about where the men had been taken and for how long they would be held. Some were held in various jails, detention centers or incarceration camps for the duration of the war. 

The brutal economic impact of the forced relocations affected generations, Ina said. The 120,000 incarcerated people lost jobs, homes they owned, successful businesses and their personal effects (famously, the internees were ordered to bring to camp, “only what they could carry,” typically a couple of suitcases per person). That dislocation and loss of wealth created “decades of trauma” for the West Coast Japanese, she said. 

Ina noted during World War II, anyone already in a camp who did not answer a “Loyalty Questionnaire” correctly was shipped out to Tule Lake, which essentially served as the prison camp during internment. It held the largest number of Japanese Americans during the war, more than 18,000. The current administration demanding “loyalty” to the president’s goals and policies is chilling to anyone remembering the Loyalty Questionnaire. 

The Alien Enemy Act is being used today to deport immigrants and place them prisons in El Salvador without due process, a court hearing or the chance to challenge any evidence the US government is using to arrest, deport and jail those immigrants.  The use of the act has “opened a Pandora’s Box of even more despicable acts” that violate basic civil rights, Ina said. “It’s a nationalistic, fascist policy” driven by “white supremacy.” 

In the face of the renewed use of the Alien Enemy Act, “we cannot be silent,” said MC Glen Kitayma. “We must stand up” and protest, he said. While the link between Japanese Americans in the 1940s and South Americans in 2025 might seem tenuous, Kitayma added later, the US government “didn’t target us just because we were Japanese, but because we were immigrants.”

And despite living in the United States in some cases for decades, working, paying taxes, owning homes and business, and raising families, there was no “path to citizenship” for Japanese immigrants. They were legal immigrants but were barred from attaining citizenship until 1952. Roughly two-thirds of 120,000 Japanese in the camps were American citizens because they were born in the United States, thus granted “birthright citizenship.” Ironically, that included those born in camps, such as Dr. Ina, behind barbed wire. When the current administration moves to outlaw birthright citizenship, it strikes a deep chord with those whose great-grandparents came to the US and were denied citizenship, while their children became US citizens automatically. 

That history, and large swaths of similarly unpleasant US history is under attack by the current administration, which is galling to the Manzanar Committee, the volunteer group that organizes the pilgrimage in an effort to make sure the nation’s “concentration camp” history is not forgotten and not repeated. The theme of this year’s pilgrimage was “Truth, Justice and Democracy.” 

The truth about America’s history is being removed from government websites in an attempt to erase it, said Bruce Embry, chairman of the committee, whose mother Sue Konitomi Embry was one of the original organizers of the pilgrimage. He noted the Pentagon had taken down the history of the all-Japanese American WW II units, the 442 Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion. Both units saw combat and suffered some of the highest casualty rates in the war. In a bitter twist, volunteers came out of the incarceration camps to fight for their country while their families remained behind barbed wire. 

The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles also takes its mission to preserve history seriously and has rejected the Trump Administration’s demands to end DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programs or cede any attempt to censor its exhibits or contents. 

Erasing or trying to rewrite history “isn’t just insulting, it’s dangerous,” Embry said. “Narratives matter,” since the narrative that Japanese Americans were a threat to national security led to the camps. Then the narrative shifted eventually, after a long and arduous fight, when the Civil Rights Act of 1988, signed by President Ronald Reagan, presented a formal apology (noting the internment was driven by “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership”) and $20,000 in reparations to survivors. The changing narrative also led to the creation of the Manzanar National Historic Site in 1992. 

“We cannot stand by while history is being erased,” Ina said, “or history will repeat itself.” 

The scope of American history, the incarceration of the Japanese “was not an aberration,” Embry said. The nation has had “many trails of tears,” from treatment of Native Americans, colonization, slavery, Jim Crow, white supremacy, and the fight for civil rights. Now, “xenophobic hysteria” is leading to stifling free speech and other attacks on due process and freedoms. 

“We cannot lose our democracy,” Embry said, “Never again is now; no more Manzanars.” 

Some of the loudest cheers for that statement came from the large number of college students at the Pilgrimage. 

  More than 300 college students from across the state attended the Manzanar at Dusk program that evening, filling the Lone Pine High School gym after the Pilgrimage event, and probably hundreds more were at the Pilgrimage. 

Again, current affairs are personal. 

College students have seen the administration threaten to withhold federal funds from universities and colleges if they don’t stop their DEI programs or alter their curriculum and educational goals. Students have seen international students’ visas revoked and threats of deportation. Academic freedom and free speech, especially around Isreal and Gaza, has been attacked and celebrated and debated. 

Student speaker Jillian Stineman, from the UCLA Nikkei Student Union, whose family lived at Terminal Island, which was completely bulldozed after all the residents were forced into camps, recounted those issues and urged everyone, and especially younger people, to work to ensure “never again” is not a hollow promise. A good start, she noted, was attending the pilgrimage.

“It’s inherently political to come to Manzanar.”    

Jon Klusmire of Bishop will let Karl Marx have the last comment: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”