Volume 4, No. 2 Return to Manzanar

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The Aperture Newsletter—Return to Manzanar

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Vol.4, No 2, May 2011

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"When we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test the loyalty of them. But when we deal with the Japanese, we are on an entirely different field." — California Attorney General Earl Warren and latter Governor and Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

The most abhorrent act since the end of slavery in the United States was the relocation of thousands of Japanese-Americans to War Relocation Centers during the Second World War. These relocation centers were located in California, Arizona, Arkansas, Utah, Colorado, Idaho and Wyoming with one of the largest and most well-known was the center at Manzanar in the Owens Valley of California.

Approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese who lived along the Pacific coast of the United States were relocated to 26 camps called "War Relocation Camps," in the wake of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 The internment of Japanese Americans was applied unequally throughout the United States. Japanese Americans who lived on the West Coast of the United States were all interned, while in Hawaii, where more than 150,000 Japanese Americans composed over one-third of the territory's population, 1,200 to 1,800 Japanese Americans were interned. Of those interned, 62% were American citizens.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066, issued February 19, 1942, which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones," from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and most of Oregon and Washington, except for those in internment camps. In 1944, the Supreme Court (Korematsu v. United States) upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion orders, while noting that the provisions that singled out people of Japanese ancestry were a separate issue outside the scope of the proceedings. The United States Census Bureau assisted the internment efforts by providing confidential neighborhood information on Japanese Americans. The Bureau's role was denied for decades but was finally proven in 2007

The Owens Valley is located approximately 180 miles due north of Los Angeles and was once a thriving agricultural area until William Mulholland and the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power constructed an aqueduct to take the water from Owens Lake to feed the growing needs of Los Angeles in 1913 during the infamous California Water Wars.