The Return: Life After Manzanar

With Manzanar officially closed, camp director Mr. Ralph Merritt addressed the staff that gathered at the gates to witness the departure of the last evacuee. (Courtesy of County of Inyo, Eastern California Museum)

 

Be forewarned that this analogy may be a bit shaky, like trying to stretch a bunt into a double. But please bear with this comparison of people’s lives as they emerged from the camps to this 17th century haiku by Matsuo Bashō:

Scholars have said that the pond symbolizes the subconscious mind. The frog jumping into the pond is a metaphor for anything that gets a person to think or act.1

Yet such an interpretation really depends on the individual. For our purposes it could relate to baseball and the camps. As people thought about leaving the camps—yearning for their former lives, consciously and subconsciously—images of what used to be home became their dreams. Unfortunately, for many detainees those images were wisps of memories of a far different time. Sadly, after years in the camps, too many people discovered that their homes, businesses, and communities no longer existed. In other words, a person’s memories collided with depressing reality.

Reality, though, was in flux because no one knew when the nightmare of the camps would end. If the detainees were more or less gathered in groups and subsequently sent to the camps2—that is, sent jumping into the ponds in large groups—the opposite was true about their releases. Some people left early to join the Army, some left at various times to work in agricultural or other jobs, and some waited until the end of the war before leaving and jumping back into the ponds of their prewar lives.

Performance artist and filmmaker Dan Kwong, whose family was incarcerated at Manzanar, put it this way:

“When the government started these camps, they had no exit strategy. It was like, ‘What are we going to do with these people?’ Nobody knew how long they were going to be there.

“There was a sense within the communities of, ‘OK, we’re going to have to make this our world.’ And they began to make community. So they’re building gardens, making baseball fields, teaching classes in arts and crafts. Everything to try and make life as livable as possible.”3

For now, let’s focus on the baseball aspect that Kwong mentioned. As the fictional character Terence Mann said in the movie Field of Dreams, it was baseball that reminded us of all that was good and could be again. That sentiment was true in the conscious and subconscious minds of some (maybe many) detainees.

“Without baseball, camp life would have been miserable,” said Hatsuo ‘George’ Omachi, who lived in the camps and played baseball before and after the war with various teams in the Japanese Athletic Union.4 He later became a major-league scout for several teams.5

As researcher Susan Kamei noted:

“They were American and they knew nothing else except being American. So for them, baseball was an important way to say, ‘Well, I only know how to be American.’ Identifying with baseball … and enjoying baseball was part of how they portrayed being American.

“[Baseball in the camps] was about fighting against that overwhelming prejudice, everything about the policies and the administration of what we call the incarceration.”6

However, even icy hearts melt. People were released, but the ways and times they were released was sporadic and almost the opposite of their arrivals. The actions of 1943, 1944, and 1945 were a slow reversal from what happened in 1942. In the conscious and subconscious minds of politicians, the military, and many in the public, the prevailing thinking during the war was that Japanese Americans could not be trusted. Nationally syndicated conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler wrote what probably many were thinking, “The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.”7

From May to October 1942 the War Relocation Authority (WRA) opened the 10 camps it called Relocation Centers. (They are listed here in order of opening. If the date is the same, then ranked by peak population):

1. Tule Lake, California (May 27, 1942—March 20, 1946), peak population 18,789
2. Colorado River, Arizona, also known as Poston (June 2, 1942—November 28, 1945), 17,814
3. Manzanar, California (June 2, 1942—November 21, 1945), 10,046
4. Gila River, Arizona (July 20, 1942—November 16, 1945), 13,348
5. Minidoka, Idaho (August 10, 1942—October 28, 1945), 9,397
6. Heart Mountain, Wyoming (August 12, 1942—November 10, 1945), 10,767
7. Granada, Colorado, also called Camp Amache (August 27, 1942—October 15, 1945), 7,318
8. Topaz, Utah, also known as Central Utah (September 11, 1942—October 31, 1945), 8,130
9. Rohwer, Arkansas (September 18, 1942—November 30, 1945), 8,475
10. Jerome, Arkansas (October 6, 1942—June 30, 1944), 8,4978

However, the powers that be in Washington, DC, began rethinking detention as early as May 1943, after the Navy destroyed four Japanese aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 and the Marines captured Guadalcanal in February 1943. By then, some in the Roosevelt Administration questioned why Japanese Americans were excluded from the West Coast. In fact, WRA Director Dillon Myer wanted to implement a plan to close the camps. Yet any such plans faced opposition. On April 15, 1943, Lieutenant General John DeWitt protested the return of Japanese American soldiers to their homes on the West Coast, telling reporters “A Jap’s a Jap. It makes no difference if he is an American citizen or not.”9

It wasn’t until May 1944 that Secretary of War Henry Stimson said that there was no strategic military reason for the policy. In a May 26, 1944, cabinet meeting, Attorney General Francis Biddle wrote in his notes:

“The Secretary of War raised the question of whether it was appropriate for the War Department, at this time, to cancel the Japanese Exclusion Orders and let the Japs go home. War, Interior, and Justice had all agreed that this could be done without danger to defense considerations but doubted the wisdom of doing it at this time before the election.”10

Interior Secretary Harold Ickes wrote the president on June 2, 1944, that “The continued exclusion of American citizens of Japanese ancestry in the affected areas is clearly unconstitutional in the present circumstances. … The continued retention of these innocent people in the relocation centers would be a blot upon the history of this country.”11

After Roosevelt was re-elected on November 7, 1944, the War Department began plans to end the detention program. On December 17, 1944, Major General Henry C. Pratt, the officer commanding the Western Defense Command, issued Public Proclamation 21, announcing that the exclusion order would be lifted at midnight January 2, 1945. As the Manzanar camp newspaper reported:

“… leave permits will no longer be required and the only persons not free to leave any WRA center … will be persons who have been put on a stop list which will be established by the army, or parolees and deportees ordered detained by the Department of Justice. All other persons will be permitted to leave a center upon request without applying for a leave permit…”12

All relocation centers were scheduled to close by January 2, 1946. However, that didn’t mean that racism and xenophobia disappeared from subconscious or conscious minds. For example, the American Legion in Hood River, Oregon, erased the names of 16 Nisei servicemen from its honor rolls.13 In response, the national commander of the American Legion fired off a rebuke to the local commander in Hood River, reminding him that the legion “has always maintained that bigotry and race hatred have no place in American life.”14

That wasn’t the only trouble in Oregon. A story in the Manzanar Free Press early in January 1945 reported:

“Anti-Japanese feeling manifested itself in a new way into two Oregon communities this week as signs appeared in store windows warning returning Japanese that ‘No Jap trade’ will be solicited, disclosed the Los Angeles Examiner.

“It stated that placards sprouted through Hood River Valley, where the American Legion Post recently provoked bitter controversy by erasing the names of Nisei soldiers from its community honor roll.

“The Examiner added that repair shops, groceries, filling stations, and hardware stores joined in the move.

“In conclusion, the paper revealed that some of the merchants who were displaying the signs were members of the Oregon Anti-Japanese Inc., which opposed Nisei taking back acreage leased to white farmers during the coast ban.”15

The same Manzanar Free Press issue also reported that “feeling is running high against the Japanese in Imperial County,” and that the California Superintendent of Public Instruction was “unalterably opposed” to Japanese language classes in the state’s schools.16

It wasn’t official policy, but the government made its feelings known when WRA Director Myer said the camp detainees should resettle in the East, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Mr. Myer pointed out that there are some 75,000 Japanese still in the various relocation camps [and stated], ‘They will not be encouraged to come to congested war production centers in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland unless they have the key to the house in their pocket.’”17

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial reprinted in the Manzanar Free Press noted:

“There is ample evidence, however, to show that no real danger existed, but that Army authorities were taken in by the professional anti-Japanese agitators, whose motives were and continue to be mostly economic, partly race prejudice.

“There were a few disloyal Japanese, to be sure. They were known to the FBI long before December 7, 1941, and were speedily arrested. As for the California Congressman’s 1935 warning about 25,000 armed Japanese on the West Coast ready to take the field in case of war, they proved purely imaginary. So did the ‘army’ of 250,000 alleged by Bernarr Macfadden in a letter to the President in 1936.

“The Army order [of December 17, 1944] will not stop the reactionaires [sic] who have been agitating against this group for years. They are already calling for state laws to bar the Japanese Americans’ return, and for mass deportations of the group to Japan after the war. A big job of education in fair play and tolerance needs to be done on the West Coast to assure these American citizens of their rights.”18

So it’s no surprise that those who had left the camps early wrote to friends and relatives still at Manzanar and other camps that the life they once had was mostly gone as other people moved into their neighborhoods and businesses. An editorial in the Manzanar Free Press noted groups were “using arson, dynamite and rifles in an attempt to intimidate the few returning Japanese Americans and to frighten others from coming back to their homes. Anti-Japanese societies are being formed, merchants are putting up signs that no Japanese trade is wanted.”19

Lambert Schuyler of Bainbridge Island, Washington, wrote a letter to the local newspaper calling people of Japanese heritage “monkey-jawed and yellow-skinned … smiling and inscrutable operators of truck farms and grocery stores. No amount of star-spangled valor on the part of conscripted Japs will change our minds. … [T]hey could never be trusted again.”20

However, most folks on Bainbridge Island apparently rejected racism since more than half of the families forced from the island returned to their homes and previous lives. But the ugliness continued elsewhere. As one detainee put it when describing her family’s life after detention:

“To me, the saddest thing that happened was when my father came out of internment, after being idle for four years. He had to resettle in Chicago, and he didn’t have any money. No capital. No nothing, and even with his education. As you can imagine, a sixty-year-old man trying to get a white collar job—there was nothing available for him. My father kept looking for work, and he couldn’t find anything. Finally, he decided he would try opening some kind of office and do bookkeeping services and try to sell real estate and things like that. He never was able to get back on his feet in the real sense of the word.”21

On the other hand, there were some glimpses of humanity:

“Coming home, I was boarding a bus on Olympic Boulevard. A lady sitting in the front row of the bus saw me and said, ‘Damn Jap.’ Here I was a proud American soldier, just coming back with my new uniform and new paratrooper boots, with all my campaign medals and awards, proudly displayed on my chest and this? The bus driver upon hearing the remark stopped the bus and said, ‘Lady, apologize to this American soldier, or get off my bus.’ She got off the bus.”22

Another sign that previously held detainees would be welcomed back to their lives came from the student executive committee at the University of California, which passed a resolution rejecting racism that said “individuals should be judged by personal merits.”23 Administrators were also involved. Robert Gordon Sproul, president of UC Berkeley, said Japanese Americans would be received in “a friendly and cooperative manner.”24 The UCLA campus newspaper, the California Bruin, stated in an editorial, “Next semester several Japanese will resume studies on campus. For those students there should be a cordial reception—one of goodwill and understanding.”25

Those welcomes weren’t just on campuses:

• Job offers were being posted with relocation offices at camps.26
• Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron officially welcomed Nisei back to LA in a January ceremony at City Hall: “We want you and all other citizens of Japanese ancestry who have relocated here to feel secure in your homes and in your community life.”27
• WRA Director Myer announced on January 12, 1945, that fishermen of Japanese ancestry who were returning to the West Coast could get their boats back.28
• In Italy, 3,000 Nisei troops led the V-J Day parade. Also, it was reported that other American soldiers in Italy asked that Nisei troops be given top priority to return to the States since their readjustment would be difficult.29

As an editorial in the Manzanar Free Press noted, the closing of the camps meant Manzanar would soon be a memory. Not all of the memories would be good and the subconscious would bury some. Regardless, people would consciously be jumping into “ponds” from the West Coast to the Midwest to the East. As the newspaper said, “[N]ow the time has come when we must find a place for ourselves in a normal community. Our children must know what life is beyond the barbed wires.”30

Baseball gave people a sense of normalcy behind the barbed wire, and when they left the camps it also helped them regain the feeling of belonging that the newspaper editorial spoke about. But as hopeful as that editorial seemed, it didn’t tell the whole story. Numbers do: There were 11,000 people who sought permanent leave by the end of 1944; about 35,000 had already been released as seasonal workers at farms or plants. Also, many had joined the Army.

Seventy percent of those who left the camps in 1943 and 1944 were between 15 and 35 years old. During that same time period, there were about 75,000 people still in the camps, mostly women, men older than 50, and those younger than 17.

“The older Issei31 had grown used to their predictable life. They now saw the camps as safe havens from racist, all-White communities. Only one out of every six Issei had left camp. It had been more than two years since they had lived with White people, and now they were afraid of them.”32

By the end of 1944, there were about 6,000 people still living at Manzanar. For those still in the camps there were also daunting economic forces to face. Representatives from many of the camps met in February 1945 in Salt Lake City, Utah, and said that since the government forced them into the camps it should help them with housing, food, and medical care when they left.33

That was what the numbers reported. But numbers don’t have faces or feelings, so what did the people say?

 

Photograph of a young boy, the last resident to leave Manzanar, standing in front of a barracks at Manzanar. (Courtesy of County of Inyo, Eastern California Museum)

 

Sumiye Takeno was born in 1922 and raised in Florin, California. She was 19 when the war started and she was incarcerated at Manzanar. She was a pitcher and also a catcher on one of the camp’s softball teams. (Her brother Daniel also played on a baseball team at Manzanar.) She was a nurse’s aide in the camp and preparing for nursing school when she was introduced to Roy, the man she would later marry. Roy was a Nisei journalist and they moved to Denver after their wedding in Manzanar because Roy had a job offer with the Rocky Shimpo newspaper.

What made Denver appealing was the presence of a Japanese community there:

“Because he (Roy) was with the newspaper, you do meet a lot of Japanese here, too. And of course since I grew up in a Japanese community it made me feel a little bit at home. I didn’t feel as I was in a strange place. So I was very easily situated here.”35

Her parents, though, stayed at Manzanar until the end of the war and then moved to Los Angeles where her brothers became gardeners.

Henry Nakano was born in 1927 and raised in Los Angeles. His father ran a grocery store and later had a small farm. Henry was 14 when the war started. He played shortstop on a Manzanar camp team, and also played football and basketball.

Henry left before the end of the war to go to UCLA in July 1945. “You know, there’s not many kids can say they got out of camp before the war was over to go to school. … the West Coast hadn’t been open very long.”36

He said he wasn’t intimidated by leaving the camp to go to UCLA, though he did wonder how well he’d fit in and what to expect. It helped that he wasn’t alone. “I was one of three. There were three of us that got in July. And then when the fall semester started…a lot of them came. It was quite a few of them.”37

And UCLA seemed welcoming. “[W]hen I got there, there was no animosity there. The dorm I lived in, everybody [was] accepted as equal.”38

Susumu Iwasaki was born in 1927 and raised in Terminal Island, California. He was in the eighth grade in a Terminal Island school at the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He was a big fan of the Terminal Island Skippers baseball team in a Japanese league before everyone was sent to Manzanar.

When his family left the camp in 1945 they lived in government housing in Long Beach. “I tell you, it [was] a dump. … Like a hell hole over there.”39

Jobs were also hard to find:

“And Long Beach was the worst place in the world to go. Well, because it’s a navy town, see. And of course, most people [were] so narrow minded that they think we were the ones that caused this damn war. And, you know, when I went in the army, came back, I went to see one of the business places, they wouldn’t even serve you. I was in the uniform. It didn’t make any difference to them. That’s how it was.”40

Susumu had joined the Military Intelligence Service and worked as an interpreter in Japan before eventually returning to California.

Rokuro Kurihara was born in 1927 in Glendale, California, where his parents had a farm. He played basketball and first base on a baseball team from his block in Manzanar. Some members of his family stayed in the camp until it closed, but his brother, Richard, left for a job in Cleveland. And Rokuro went to work in New Jersey in the summer of 1945.

Despite the ordeal of having his life turned upside down, Rokuro saw one benefit that came from the camps:

“… the camp was probably the best thing that ever happened to him (Richard). There was a little bit of prejudice along the West Coast. But as soon as he applied, he got a job in Cleveland from camp.

“[The camp] spread us all over the place, especially Chicago. And those groups are still in Chicago, many of them. And the groups that went to Cleveland are still there. And many of ’em went to New York and New Jersey.”41

Eventually the family returned to California. They were one of the lucky families who had someone take care of their home while incarcerated.

“During all that, all that time, this family called the Vanloons, they were friends of ours from church, and they took care of it.

“We were one of the fortunate ones that we did have that house.”42

Masahiro Nakajo was born in 1927 in Moneta, California, and lived for 10 years in Garden Grove, where his parents had a farm. In 1937, the family moved back to Japan and lived there for several years before returning to the United States. In February 1942, the family was told they would be sent to a incarceration camp. His father had to sell the family’s truck and whatever else he could.

“I think he sold it for dirt cheap, just get rid of it. ’Cause we couldn’t keep it. Try to sell it, you know. Because time is short and everything. In fact, they got so many days to get our things packed. Either store or sell it. Well, a lot of people [tried] to store, so they left it with a friend or something. But when they came back from camp it’s all gone. Nothing was there. So the people that had it, they must have sold it or something. So actually when we came out of the camp we didn’t have nothing. Pop didn’t have anything.”43

Masahiro’s father was a pitcher on a Japanese baseball team as a teenager, but lost interest as an adult and didn’t notice the games in Manzanar.

Masahiro’s brother, Jim, was furloughed to work harvesting beets in Idaho. “So actually he stayed in camp about not even a year…So finally he found a place in Pocatello, Idaho.”44 Masahiro also was furloughed in the summer of 1943 for seasonal work in Pocatello. In 1944, he went with another incarceree to work the tomato canneries in Utah, Idaho, and Oregon.

Although he said he didn’t encounter overt racism, “You could feel it. So you try to kind of stay away.”45

The family left the camp permanently in September 1945 and moved to Riverside, California, where they had to convert a chicken coop on a farm into their living quarters. Soon after they moved to Van Nuys to sharecrop on an asparagus farm. Masahiro served in the Army during the Korean War and settled in East Los Angeles. In 1958, he was one of the founding members of an American Legion post.

“[W]e wanted to ask [the family of Congressional Medal of Honor recipient] Sadao Munemori if we could use their name for the post. So we were given permission to do so. So we formed a fifteen-man charter member, what they call American Legion Sadao Munemori Post 321. … but [the] American Legion, they opposed [naming the post] for [a] Japanese American…So after that I just pulled out of American Legion.”46

The name change was finally approved in 1988.

Robert Katsuto Fujioka was born and raised in LA, where his parents ran a farm before his father became a gardener. He and an older brother played baseball. “I became a reasonably good fielder, but a terrible hitter, and he became a good all-around baseball player to the point of being selected as a city all-star player.”47

Robert was able to leave Manzanar in the summer of 1943 to attend Hyde Park High School in Chicago. However, his sponsor died and he couldn’t pay the tuition on his own. Fortunately, though, his sister had left Manzanar for Minneapolis and found out he could go to a public high school there without paying tuition.

“So I packed my bags, said goodbye to everybody, and went to Minneapolis. And I had to find a place to stay, and fortunately, God is always watching over me … the Wesley Foundation, in the basement of the Methodist church off of campus of the University of Minnesota, was housing Japanese students primarily, college students. … So there were about six of us. Couple of them were working, couple of them were going to college, and two of us were going [to] high school … trying to finish my senior year.”48

He graduated at the end of the winter term in 1944 and had several jobs before being drafted into the Army. Ironically, he had previously tried to join the armed forces without any luck.

“I’ll sign up for the [Army] Air Force. Sorry, they’re not accepting Japanese people in the Air Force, [or] the Navy. …And so I started at the University of Minnesota, and after a quarter and a half, I think it was, then the government says, ‘We’ll draft you,’ so they drafted me into the infantry.”49

Although Robert expected to be in the infantry, with the end of the war nearing he instead was tabbed to learn how to perform as a captured Japanese soldier “to teach [Army interrogators] how…Japanese prisoners were going to respond and act. So I had a hard time trying to be a tragic prisoner of war…I just could not do it.”50

He returned to California and enrolled at the University of Southern California and earned a degree in industrial design.

***

But their stories don’t end there. In 1978, the Japanese American Citizens League formed a committee to meet with politicians in Washington, DC, to establish the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. On February 24, 1983, the commission’s report said that Executive Order 9066 “was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it—detention, ending detention and ending exclusion—were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and failure of political leadership.”51

What came of that was the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 that gave surviving Japanese Americans $20,000 in reparations and a formal apology from President Reagan for their incarceration during World War II.

Although welcomed, the action and reparations were also bittersweet, as Susumu Iwasaki noted:

“Well, something’s better than nothing, that’s what I thought. … But, the only bad thing about it was I was kinda pissed on that was, people that were in there and had died before the thing came about. They didn’t get anything. … My brother and my dad, they didn’t get it because they passed away before the bill came through. They should have got their twenty thousand, too. Or … their family. But what can you do? Nobody was gonna fight for you. It would probably have taken ten years before you [could have gotten] that money.”52

JOE MARREN is a retired professor from the Communication Department at SUNY Buffalo State University. Prior to his 29-year career in academia he was a newspaper reporter and editor for 18 years in the Buffalo area. Although he never played baseball in school, he did often misjudge balls hit to the outfield in playground games and often struck out. He was also lousy at backyard football and playground basketball with his Canadian friends at the family’s cottage in Crystal Beach, Ontario. He knows all the words to “O Canada,” largely through watching Roger Doucet sing it en français on TV from the Montreal Forum. However, Marren hasn’t sung in public since Father McCarthy kicked him out of the choir in the fourth grade.

 

NOTES

1 “The Old Pond,” Poem Analysis, accessed February 27, 2025, https://poemanalysis.com/matsuo-basho/the-old-pond/.

2 Philip Byrd, “Baseball Behind Barbed Wire,” Smithsonian: National Museum of American History, March 18, 2015, https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/baseball-behind-barbed-wire. Byrd writes, “They were given 48 hours to sell their homes, businesses, and possessions. They could only take what they could carry, typically two suitcases per adult.”

3 Gabe Lacques, “Baseball Boosted Japanese Americans During Internment. A Field in the Desert May Retell the Story,” USA Today, April 26, 2024, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/columnist/gabe-lacques/2024/04/25/japanese-american-manzanar-internment-camps-baseball/73425826007/.

4 Byrd.

5 Bill Nowlin, “George Omachi,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, accessed August 6, 2025, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/george-omachi/.

6 Akira Olivia Kumamoto, “Baseball’s Return to Manzanar,” Nichi Bei News, January 2, 2025, https://www.nichibei.org/2025/01/baseballs-return-to-manzanar/.

7 Westbrook Pegler, “Fair Enough,” Atlanta Constitution, February 16, 1942: 12.

8 Susan H. Kamei, When Can We Go Back to America?: Voices of Japanese American Incarceration During WWII (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021), 531.

9 Associated Press, “DeWitt’s ‘A Jap’s a Jap’ Upsets Administration Plans,” Passaic (New Jersey) Herald-News, April 16, 1943: 19.

10 Kamei, 267.

11 Kamei, 268.

12 “War Relocation Authority Stops Leave Clearance Processing,” Manzanar Free Press, December 23, 1944: 1.

13 Nisei is the Japanese word for children born in the United States to Japanese immigrants. The first generation of Issei refers to the immigrant parents.

14 “Reputation At Stake,” Manzanar Free Press, February 3, 1945: 2.

15 “Anti-Nisei Feeling Hits Coast Stores,” Manzanar Free Press, January 20, 1945: 1.

16 “Discuss Nisei Return To School Classroom,” Manzanar Free Press, January 20, 1945: 1.

17 “Encourage Evacuees to Eastern States,” Manzanar Free Press, January 20, 1945: 1.

18 “Now A Bigger Job,” Manzanar Free Press, January 13, 1945: 2.

19 “Reputation At Stake.”

20 Kamei, 271, 279-280.

21 Kamei, 277.

22 Kamei, 282.

23 “U.C. Welcomes Relocated Nisei,” Manzanar Free Press, January 6, 1945: 1.

24 “Nisei Assured of Warm Welcome to University,” Manzanar Free Press, January 31, 1945: 1.

25 “Nisei Assured of Warm Welcome to University.”

26 “West Coast Job Offers Received,” Manzanar Free Press, January 6, 1945: 1.

27 “Mayor Bowron Greets Nisei,” Manzanar Free Press, January 24, 1945: 2.

28 “Agencies To Permit Japanese Fishermen To Operate Vessels,” Manzanar Free Press, January 27, 1945: 1.

29 “Nisei G.I.’s Lead V-J Day Parade,” Manzanar Free Press, September 1, 1945: 1.

30 “The Last Step,” Manzanar Free Press, September 1, 1945: 2.

31 Issei is a Japanese word that means a first-generation immigrant to the United States.

32 Kamei, 268-269.

33 Kamei, 271.

34 Kamei, 291-292.

35 Sumiye Takeno, interviewed by Richard Potashin, Manzanar National Historic Site, Oral History Project, July 5, 2008, https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-manz-1/ddr-manz-1-36-transcript-309ecc6654.htm.

36 Henry Nakano, interviewed by Richard Potashin, Manzanar National Historic Site, Oral History Project, December 5, 2008, https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-manz-1/ddr-manz-1-58-transcript-3d7439d8ba.htm.

37 Nakano.

38 Nakano.

39 Susumu Iwasaki, interviewed by Richard Potashin, Manzanar National Historic Site, Oral History Project, April 11, 2009, https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-manz-1/ddr-manz-1-63-transcript-0e44ff231e.htm.

40 Iwasaki.

41 Rokuro Kurihara, interviewed by Richard Potashin, Manzanar National Historic Site, Oral History Project, May 10, 2010, https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-manz-1/ddr-manz-1-69-transcript-716df49bbc.htm.

42 Kurihara.

43 Masahiro Nakajo, interviewed by Richard Potashin, Manzanar National Historic Site, Oral History Project, April 4, 2011, https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-manz-1/ddr-manz-1-117-transcript-1cce4152d4.htm.

44 Nakajo.

45 Nakajo.

46 Nakajo.

47 Robert Katsuto Fujioka, interviewed by Kristen Leutkemeier, Manzanar National Historic Site, Oral History Project, June 20, 2012, https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-manz-1/ddr-manz-1-126-transcript-6091a84dba.htm.

48 Fujioka.

49 Fujioka.

50 Fujioka.

51 The National WWII Museum, “Redress and Reparations for Japanese American Incarceration,” August 13, 2021, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/redress-and-reparations-japanese-american-incarceration.

52 Iwasaki.