The Tragedy Of Manzanar

May 10, 2022

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. entered World War II. This attack worsened prejudice against Japanese Americans and led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 9066 in February 1942. The Order authorized the Secretary of War to create Military Areas and remove anyone who may threaten the war effort from those areas. Anyone of Japanese ancestry was then given days to settle their lives. They had to dispose of their houses, businesses, and belongings, often selling them at a loss or leaving them with friends and religious groups.

Ansel Adams picture of the entrance to Manzanar. Source: (Wikipedia/colorized).

They were not told where they were going, and each family was given an identification number before they were transported to one of 17 centers before being moved to one of 10 relocation centers, which included Manzanar. All told, approximately 120,000 were sent to the internment camps. Manzanar itself housed 10,000, and about two-thirds of them were born in America. Manzanar itself was located on 500 acres in the middle of the high desert in California’s Eastern Sierra region.

Ansel Adams And Dorothea Lange Photographed The Internment Camp

Ansel Adams photograph of a band performance at Manzanar. Source: (Library of Congress).

In 1943, the photographer Ansel Adams, who was friends with the director of Manzanar, was invited to the camp, where he documented daily life. Adams hated the idea of the camps, and he hoped to create sympathy for the internees in his depictions. Dorothea Lange also tried to capture the realities of Manzanar. Where Adams struggled to photograph the difficult living situations in Manzanar because the internees tried to show the positives of their lives, Lange was able to more accurately document the reality of their lives. The internees were not allowed to use cameras in Manzanar, but Tōyō Miyatake made a homemade camera using a lens that was smuggled in and managed to take around 1,500 photos, becoming the official photographer.