Former Japanese-American internees gather to mark 60th anniversary of federal detention order

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Posted 8:45AM on Sunday, April 28, 2002

MANZANAR NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE, Calif. - As a 2-year-old girl forced to live at this former internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II, Iku Kiriyama recalls mostly "kid stuff" about the dark episode in American history. "My only memory is of the Jello going into the hot rice," Kiriyama said. "Being a kid, it was like 'yuck."' On Saturday, Kiriyama, 62, returned to the site tucked between the Sierra Nevada and Death Valley with 500 others -- many former detainees -- to mark the 60th anniversary of Executive Order No. 9066, which empowered federal agents to detain those deemed subversive during the war. Some 120,000 Japanese-Americans were detained at 10 camps nationwide after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. At Manzanar, 10,000 people were interned for several years behind barbed wire. Many of those at Manzanar on Saturday said they saw ominous parallels with people of Middle Eastern descent being detained after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "We have to stop that. There has to be a reason to put people in jail," said Archie Miyatake, whose late father, Toyo, smuggled camera equipment into the camp to secretly document life at Manzanar. "He felt this was such an injustice for the Japanese people that he felt a responsibility to record camp life," Archie Miyatake said. A retrospective of the elder Miyatake's images are on display at the nearby Eastern California Museum. On Saturday, speakers took to a stage at Manzanar amid tumbleweeds and white-capped mountains to offer firsthand accounts of their experiences during the war. Others offered words of support to those who spent time at the camp. Absent from the gathering was Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, author of a memoir titled, "Farewell to Manzanar." She said returning to the site of the former military barracks where she and 10,000 fellow Japanese-Americans lived for several years behind barbed wire is still too painful. "It's very hard. I know a lot of people who can't go back," she said. Instead, Houston, 67, participated in a reenactment of the 1942 roundup of Japanese-Americans. At the event in Watsonville, about 1,300 people reported to a government building, boarded old buses and were transported to an area where they were imprisoned behind metal gates. Houston said it's important not to forget Manzanar. "I hate to say it, we are kind of dying out, we internees," she said. "Let's keep doing it for those of us who can still remember."