Manzanar National Historic Site: History & Visitor Guide

There were 10 major camps in all, two in Arkansas, with the rest scattered throughout the country’s most remote desert plains like the Owens Valley or Idaho’s Snake River Plain. The vast majority of Japanese Americans at that time lived on the West Coast, so Manzanar was a standard-sized WRC. At its peak, there were 10,046 people imprisoned just south of Independence.

There was also a standard look to the camps, for all internees had the feared “slanted eyes,” as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston wrote in her first-person account of life as an internee entitled Farewell to Manzanar.

Of the nearly 125,000 men, women and children of foreign ancestry living in America who were arrested following Pearl Harbor, almost all were of Japanese descent. In comparison, only 3,000 Germans and 1,500 Italians who were considered “high risk” were arrested and placed in separate Department of Justice camps.

The real debate about the camps, however, involved the fact that two-thirds of these Japanese American internees were actually born in this country, but were not official citizens (a right that wasn’t granted for Japanese Americans until 1952). So regardless of whether a person was an Issei (born in Japan) or a Nisei (born in the U.S.), they were rounded up and sent to places like Minidoka, Idaho, Poston, Arizona, and Manzanar, California—where they were confined behind barbed-wire fencing and guarded by armed watchtowers.

The act of incarcerating thousands of people who were never tried or found guilty of disloyalty did not sit well with many Americans, including the man tasked with carrying out the order.

As Secretary Stimson wrote in his diary at the time, “this was contrary to law; that while we have a perfect right to move them away from defenses … that does not carry with it the right to imprison them without convincing evidence.”

Even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover opposed the camps.

“Hoover said he’d already gotten all the potential troublemakers and eventually said he was washing his hands of the whole matter,” explained Ben Hayes, a National Park Service Guide at Manzanar.

For decades after its closure, Manzanar remained a difficult subject—rarely discussed openly, particularly among those directly affected.

“No one was ever comfortable talking about Manzanar, particularly the Issei, whose lives were pretty much ruined by it. It was a tragedy that they were ever even interned,” said Ron Larson, co-editor of Camp and Community: Manzanar and the Owens Valley.

It was the next generation, the Nisei, who began to bring broader awareness to what had happened.

“When the Nisei were released from the camps they basically decided that they were going to prove that they were ‘110% Americans,’ and within a generation, they became some of the most successfully integrated people in the country,” Larson said.

In the late 1960s, Japanese Americans began advocating for recognition and justice as part of the broader Civil Rights movement. In 1972, Manzanar was designated a California Registered Historical Landmark.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, formally apologizing for the internment and providing restitution to surviving internees. Manzanar was designated a National Historic Site in 1992, and the Interpretive Center opened in 2004.

READ: Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston is a first-person account of life as a WWII Japanese American internee on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada.

Jeanne was just seven years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Her story offers a deeply personal perspective on life at Manzanar and the lasting impact of internment on her family.

Originally published in 1973, the book is available at the Manzanar Interpretive Center and shops along Highway 395.