OWENS VALLEY, Calif.» The wind blows out of the south, relentlessly tugging at tree branches, shirt sleeves and Dennis Ogawa’s memory as he walks through the desolate landscape of Manzanar.
He has come here, across an ocean and through a desert, to connect with his past. Somewhere on the sandy, pebbled valley floor are the remains of one of the nation’s largest World War II internment camps and the place where he was born.
"It’s the place where I took my first breath of air," Ogawa says.
He’s been to Manzanar before, several times in fact, but not for 33 years — and not since the National Park Service mapped the locations where camp structures once stood and put up signs. Back then it was a place barely visible from the highway.
Now, Ogawa can find the location of the hospital where he was delivered and the spot where the Army built the barracks his family called home.
"We are going to look for Block 18," he says, striding with purpose as Manzanar’s 6,200 acres of open space spread out before him on a cool March afternoon.
The Park Service made Manzanar a national historic site in 1992 as a reminder that civil liberties are not to be taken for granted.
More than 10,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated at Manzanar, part of a larger government effort that forcibly removed them from the West Coast. It was one of the nation’s darkest hours. Presidential Executive Order 9066 authorized the military to relocate 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry from California, Oregon and Washington and house them in isolated camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.
Ogawa, a longtime University of Hawaii professor of American studies, knows the story of Manzanar better than most. He has taught and written about Japanese-American studies and ethnic identity since the late 1960s.
But Manzanar also was a crossroads for his family.
In the spring of 1942, shortly after the camp opened, Ogawa’s father, mother and maternal grandparents arrived there by bus. They had to leave everything behind in Santa Monica, where Ogawa’s father owned a popular neighborhood grocery store near the beach.
"From a business standpoint it annihilated them," Ogawa says. "My dad had a store and had bought a home, and they lost everything."
When the family was released after the war in 1945, two new children now included in the mix, Ogawa says his father had to become a dishwasher, and his mother cleaned houses.
"They had to start from scratch," he says.
FEW original structures remain at Manzanar, which is just off U.S. Highway 395 about 200 miles north of Los Angeles.
There’s a stone guard checkpoint at the entrance and an auditorium the Park Service turned into an interpretive center in 2004. Two replica barracks were built on their original locations, and a World War II-era mess hall was moved from Bishop, Calif.
And at the western edge of the camp, rising above the Manzanar cemetery, is a 15-foot-tall white obelisk. Built by camp residents in 1943, its Japanese kanji translate to "Monument to console the souls of the dead." Visitors leave origami cranes, coins and pieces of barbed wire.
The rest of Manzanar consists mostly of concrete foundations and steps. At latrine sites the holes are so close that camp residents must have been nearly elbow to elbow.
When Ogawa visited here years ago, he led groups of American-studies students with his best friend and colleague, the late folklorist Glen Grant. They were never sure whether they were trespassing when their buses drove onto the gated property.
"It was total isolation," Ogawa says. "It was more desolate. And there was nothing, no reference points. It was just … dust. We’d look at a picture, and we would figure out this has to be this and this has to be that — big-time winging it."
Ogawa hoped his students, many of whom had never heard about the camp until his class, would come away with a deeper understanding of what happened there. But Ogawa connected as well.
"I was part of a family that was part of a concentration camp and the immigrant story," he says.
As he tours the interpretive center on this day, Ogawa finds two displays that cement his place in that story: a list of his family in a bound camp roster, which includes his name and birth date, as well as his brother’s penciled-in information; and a list of family members included on a large, hanging sheet of cloth with every camp resident’s name printed on it.
It looms over the 68-year-old Ogawa, a small man with a thick head of black hair. Normally quite an animated fellow, he grows quiet.
He was too young to remember anything about camp life, he says. His memories are in the form of stories shared by his mother. She told him that his first words were in Japanese.
Ogawa has a photo of himself from that time — 16 months old and all chubby cheeks and baby fat. After the war, when his grandparents moved back to Japan, that was the only photo they had of Ogawa — the only one they ever had, he says.
"My mom always said I made my grandfather and the elders very happy," Ogawa says. "There were very few babies in Manzanar. She said I was so cute and always so goofy and funny."
MANZANAR lies at the base of the massive Sierra Nevada Range. Mount Williamson, which at 14,389 feet is the second-tallest peak in the range, towers above the site. Ogawa believes the mountains were more than an impressive backdrop in the middle of nowhere. They were an inspiration to the families locked away by prejudice.
"To me when you look at Manzanar, it’s about families, and it’s more about the inner strength that families have," he says. "And I can see why my grandfather and my grandmother would be so happy that a child was born, even in the camp, because fundamentally, my grandfather had made a choice that the future of his generations would be in America."
Ogawa sometimes gets emotional thinking about his grandfather, a former carnation farmer named Ichitaro Tanaka who had emigrated from Japan to the United States in the late 1880s. After the war he took his wife back to Japan because she was dying, and he never returned. Ogawa was 6. He says his grandfather, who spoke almost no English, did not leave with a heart full of hate.
"The inner belief of my grandfather is that people made mistakes, that the way you survive is not through hatred or getting even or revenge," he says. "The reason is because you believe in the goodness of other human beings."
Manzanar is so large that the Park Service maintains dirt roads so visitors can drive themselves through the camp. Ogawa, riding in a rental car with three traveling companions, arrives at a spot marked by a wooden sign.
Block 18. He is home.
The ground crunches underfoot as he explores the open space. In all the times Ogawa brought students to Manzanar, he never found it.
"The first years of my life, this is where I lived," Ogawa says.
To know this place as more than a story — to see it and feel it — is important.
"That’s a human thing," Ogawa says. "You need those things to hold on to so you don’t forget."
Before he leaves, Ogawa reaches for a talisman of the mountains. Inspiration he can grasp.
He scoops up a few small stones from Block 18. He plans to keep them in his Honolulu office beside a photo of his grandfather.
