The Japanese Camps: Making The 9/11 Link

By Sora Song

In 1942, at age 10, Mas Okui was sent with his father and two brothers to the Manzanar War Relocation Center, a Japanese internment camp set on a windswept square-mile plot at the foot of California's Sierra Nevada, 220 miles north of Los Angeles. He spent three years there, living in tarpaper-covered barracks, where privacy could be eked out only by stringing sheets between bunks. Later, as a schoolteacher, he conducted tours of the site. But only now does Okui--and others who remain of the 120,000 ethnic Japanese, mostly American citizens, who were held at Manzanar and nine other internment camps during World War II--feel that the full significance of the site is being communicated.

In April the National Park Service, with $5 million in congressional funds, will open an interactive center for visitors to Manzanar designed to "provoke ... dialogue on civil rights, democracy and freedom." Exhibits will include a film that documents the camp's history and side-by-side photos of the U.S.S. Arizona and the World Trade Center, making an implicit link to the anti-Arab sentiment that has followed 9/11. "The exhibits are designed to change, because who knows what issues the country will be facing in the future," says Frank Hays, superintendent of the Manzanar historic site. "Sixty years of looking back on 9/11 will give us the time we've had to look back on Pearl Harbor." Says Okui: "What Manzanar should do is say to people, 'God, we did this. These people were cruelly treated. And I hope it never happens again.'"

--By Sora Song. Reported by Maggie Wittenburg

With reporting by Maggie Wittenburg