Japanese-Americans Fight to Preserve Wartime Internment Camps

As invasion worries dissipated, in January 1945, the government announced that the internees could return to the West Coast, offering them $25 and a one-way ticket anywhere in the country. Most families didn't know what to do. "We had nowhere to go," says Abe, whose father had lost the lease on their farm when he was interned. Her family, like many others, stayed in the camps until the end of the war, when they were told to leave.

After the internees were gone, the camps were quickly dismantled. By 1947, the Manzanar site had returned to dust. Along with a few stone structures, the only evidence of life there were some rock gardens constructed by the internees and the empty concrete slabs where the latrines once stood.

The internees, meanwhile, were as silent about their experiences as the landscape. "My parents never talked about it," says Takahashi. He took his children to visit Manzanar 25 years ago, but his parents had no interest in joining him. The camp, he found, was a mystery. "There was nothing there," says Takahashi.

The government's apology in 1988 began to change that. Former internees finally felt they could hold their heads up. "I started talking about it more openly only when my grandkids grew," says Abe, now 82. "They would ask me all these questions, and I began telling them about it. It wasn't pleasant. It wasn't pleasant at all."

A desolate place. Conversation slowly turned to action. In 1992, Manzanar became the first camp to be named a National Historic Site, protected and administered by the National Park Service. Jeff Burton, a park service archaeologist, remembers being surprised to find how desolate the place was. "The park just had a plaque; that was it," says Burton. "You could drive anywhere you wanted. People were cutting down trees for firewood; there were cattle all over the place."

The other sites, he wrote in a report in 1999, were no better. The two camps in Arkansas, apart from a few outbuildings, had mostly vanished. Granada and Topaz had their watchtower foundations. Stone sentry posts still stood at Minidoka, along with the fire station. A few buildings remained from Heart Mountain's hospital complex. The jail at Tule Lake, the camp where "disloyals" who failed the loyalty questionnaire were sent, sat abandoned in a highway maintenance yard.

Burton's findings inspired renewed preservation efforts across the camp system. At Manzanar, a reconstructed guard tower now looks over the camp, as does a WWII-era mess hall. An interpretive center with a state-of-the-art museum opened in 2004. Progress has been slower at the other camps. Bill Clinton declared Minidoka a National Monument, but the site still lacks visitor services. Most of the other camps have been designated National Historic Landmarks. The Tule Lake jail is now fenced in, but local preservation groups, there and elsewhere, are scrambling to fund their efforts to buy land or build museums.

Because the camps were deliberately built in the middle of nowhere, drawing visitors to the sites may be difficult. Still, some are more accessible than others; Heart Mountain, for example, is only about 50 miles from the entrance to Yellowstone National Park. A local group is working to raise funds to build an interpretive center on the site. "When I first heard this [internment] story, it absolutely floored me," says David Reetz, 62, president of the Heart Mountain, Wyoming Foundation. "I had no idea this confinement had taken place right in my own backyard." Reetz, who estimates that more than 80 percent of people he meets "don't know this happened," is determined to leave the site as a reminder.

Japanese-American groups in Washington have been pushing for a more comprehensive preservation plan. The bill signed by Bush in 2006 authorized funds for everything from oral history projects to the physical reconstruction of camp buildings. But funding is still stuck in a House subcommittee, staff members say, caught up in a broader, election-year spending tussle between the White House and Congress. Some political experts believe no appropriations will be made until next year.