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March 18 - March 19, 2023
Ansel wanted to show the prisoners were hardworking, cheerful, and resilient.
Ansel was careful about what he revealed in his photographs. He didn’t want to show anything that made Manzanar look like a hard place to live.
He left out the crushing boredom of being locked up with no end in sight.
Most of all, Ansel believed the faces of earnest, young Japanese Americans would convince other Americans how trustworthy and patriotic they were.
He was a stranger. An outsider. They would not let him see their sadness or anger. The prisoners smiled for his camera. They were under enormous pressure to prove they were “good citizens.”
“Everything in a picture is not necessarily true.”—TAIRA FUKUSHIMA, Manzanar, Block 5
By November, just a few hundred people remained at Manzanar, and cold weather was closing in. It was time to go.
They were free for the first time in two and a half years. Many prisoners had lost everything, but the Miyatakes still had their house. They took in two other families who had nowhere to go. It was time to begin again.
Most prisoners were unable to go back to the lives they had before the war.
Some people, unable to pay their mortgages on homes and farms while they were incarcerated, had lost everything.
Children went to new schools or were ignored by old friends.
Each person who had been incarcerated was awarded $20,000. The money was a small fraction of what they had lost. At least the federal government acknowledged that the incarceration had been a profound injustice, but it could not erase the heavy emotional and physical cost to the prisoners of what had been done.
The US government intentionally used inaccurate words to cover up what it was doing when it ordered the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war.
The term “concentration camps” is increasingly being used in place of the euphemistic term “relocation camps.”
But while American and Nazi concentration camps were vastly different, both fit the definition: Concentration camps are places where large numbers of civilians are imprisoned, usually in harsh conditions, without a trial. These people are imprisoned due to some aspect of their identity, such as their race, religion, or political party.
Crowded into cars like cattle, these hapless people were hurried away to hastily constructed and thoroughly inadequate concentration camps, with soldiers with nervous muskets on guard, in the great American desert. We gave the fancy name of ‘relocation centers’ to these dust bowls, but they were concentration camps nonetheless.”
The truth is powerful. We need to use honest, accurate language to tell the real story of our history.
The US government has a long history of laws discriminating against people of Asian descent.
It’s clear that racial prejudice and unfounded fears played a huge part in the incarceration.
More than two million foreign-born Germans and Italians were living in the United States during World War II, but only around fourteen thousand were detained during the war. So why were all the Issei and Nisei living on the West Coast considered a threat and incarcerated? A massive amount of anti-Japanese propaganda was created and distributed in the United States during the war, increasing fear of the Japanese and Japanese Americans and igniting anger. It even came from high up in the military.
DeWitt was forced to make several tiny changes, but rumors, lies, and racism became an integral part of a critical government document. Even after careful investigations, no acts of sabotage or spying were ever found to have been committed by Japanese and Japanese Americans living in the United States during the war.
The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states that “no person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” meaning without legal proceedings. Yet this is exactly what happened.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “The forcible relocation of US citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful.… Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and to be clear ‘has no place in law under the Constitution.’”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor went one step further than Justice Roberts. “Today, the Court takes the important step of finally overruling Korematsu,” she wrote, “denouncing it as ‘gravely wrong the day it was decided.’”
The justices were very exacting in the words they chose. But … does this mean Korematsu has actually been overruled? In the “court of history,” yes. But legal scholars disagree if these dicta by Supreme Court justices overrule the Korematsu decision. They are certainly powerful statements from Supreme Court justices that Korematsu v. United States has been discredited. It is clearly looked upon unfavorably by the Supreme Court and should not be used to try to win any further legal arguments. Despite the dicta, Korematsu v. United States still stands, a painful symbol of our country’s racial
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“My question is always, why was I, a child, put into a concentration camp? I was a citizen. That’s against the Constitution.” —Joyce Yuki Nakamura Okazaki
As important as our leaders and our institutions are in our democracy, it depends on all of us to keep it safe. Even in the United States, built on strong democratic ideals, deliberate violations of people’s civil rights can and do occur. No matter what kinds of inaccurate words are used to hide these violations, we can name them for what they are, and speak out against them, loud and clear. We can bear witness to old injustices, learn from them, and do our best to ensure they never happen again.
Today, we can use our cell phone cameras to capture injustice when we see it, and quickly let others know. These images cannot be marked “impounded” and left hidden in a filing cabinet. We each have in our pocket a tool for social justice that earlier generations never could have dreamed of.
It was, she explained later, “the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me.” It also made her deeply empathetic to the suffering of others, and she committed to doing what she could to help.
The photographs that showed conditions Major Beasley was adamant the public should not see were marked “impounded” and buried deep in the files. The military wanted to make sure they did not get released for publication.
Toyo was a talented artist. He wanted to be an oil painter, but his mother was opposed to the idea. It seemed highly impractical to her. Instead, Toyo turned to photography, working in the style known as pictorialism, using the camera to make artistic photographs rather than straightforward photos.
Unfortunately, he didn’t return to the artistic work he had done before the war. He put away the photographs he’d taken at Manzanar and concentrated on moving forward with his studio work and documenting the activities of Little Tokyo.
Ansel was hyperactive and struggled to keep up in school, socially and academically. His parents decided to have him tutored at home, and he was able to spend long hours every day out in nature.
It was the beginning of his lifelong career photographing big, dramatic landscapes as he sought out beautiful places in the wilderness, especially in the American West.
Manzanar was in the middle of some of Ansel’s favorite landscapes. He believed he could showcase the stunning mountains surrounding Manzanar as well as emphasize what a “vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment” the incarcerated Japanese Americans had built. After the war, he wanted the Issei and Nisei to be able to move back to “their rightful place in the stream of American life.”
Ansel put together a book of his images, Born Free and Equal, and was eager to have his photos of Manzanar shown at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. But as the museum considered the idea, it quickly became controversial to have a show on the incarceration. Finally, after a series of meetings, arguments, and misunderstandings, a small, modified show of Ansel’s photographs opened, demoted from the third floor to the basement. Ansel, disappointed and angry, didn’t even bother to go see it.
Deeply committed to protecting the wilderness he photographed, he worked tirelessly for environmental protection and became an ardent activist for the National Parks.
One day when I was in fifth grade, a classmate, Paul Yonemura, told our class that his family had been unwelcome in our neighborhood after the war, because they were Japanese American. I was astonished. Why would that matter? I walked home that day, looking differently at the houses and yards and streets. There were hidden histories and dark undercurrents right in my neighborhood that I knew nothing about.
Over time, I came to understand that Dorothea and her husband were passion- ately against the relocation of the Japanese Americans. They felt racial prejudice, fear, and war hysteria had been the motivation behind the government’s actions.
After the war, Dorothea and Paul spoke out on behalf of the returning Japanese Americans.
What I did always know about Dorothea was that she had a strong belief it was her job to bear witness with her camera. She recorded important, difficult times in American history to make sure others would know what had happened.
