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4. “Manzanar, the Eyes of the World Are upon You”: Internee Performance and Archival Ambivalence
- University of Hawai'i Press
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120 C H A P T E R 4 “Manzanar, the Eyes of the World Are upon You” Internee Performance and Archival Ambivalence The Japanese people are known for their stoicism, and their characteristic of hiding their suffering or sadness with a smile or an emotionless face. It was disconcerting for the photographer [internee Toyo Miyatake] to make an appointment with a family in their barracks and find it neat and clean, and the family waiting in their Sunday best. We hope you will keep this in mind as you look at these photographs. Will we ever know the full story of this monumental tragedy in American history? —Sue Kunitomi Embrey, former internee at Manzanar Relocation Center1 Applause, distant but ongoing, is the first sound that greets today’s visitors to the Interpretive Center at Manzanar National Park in Inyo County, California. In National Park Service (NPS) lingo, the operation of such interpretive centers facilitates “the process of helping each park visitor find an opportunity to personally connect with a place.”2 On the same grounds where the U.S. government interned Japanese Americans behind barbed wire manned by eight machine-gun-equipped guard towers during World War II, since 2004 the NPS has been welcoming tourists in the “adaptively restored” community auditorium, which was constructed by internees to serve as their theatre and sometimes gymnasium in 1944–1945.3 These days, once visitors emerge from the air-conditioned Manzanar gift shop, which serves as welcome respite from California’s arid Owens Valley (250 miles northeast of Los Angeles ), a recorded loop of applause accosts their ears while numerous directional signs for different interpretive center “theaters”—as well as a prominent exhibition of the restored proscenium stage formerly used for internee perform- “Manzanar, the Eyes of the World Are upon You” 121 ing arts—crowd the visual field otherwise reserved for displays of historical facts and figures. Other than the two guardhouses, past which tourists may drive in order to reenact the wartime experience of entering the concentration camp, the internee-constructed auditorium is the only original building that survives at Manzanar.4 For the most part, only sagebrush interrupts the dust bowl landscape of what became a national historic site in 1992. In a real sense, then, a theatre is the only thing that remains of Japanese American internees’ habitation at Manzanar, and, indeed, this structure helped Manzanar edge out the other nine former internment camp sites as the most viable grounds upon which to preserve and “interpret” the internment experience in the form of a national park.5 The NPS’s strategy of interpreting Manzanar through the spectatorial arrangements of an auditorium and through the camp’s connections to the performing arts begs the question: what does such a spectacular lens tell us about the internment’s place in U.S. history? The recorded loop of applause emerges from the rear of the restored Manzanar community auditorium, where a display commemorating the 1988 passage of the Civil Liberties Act showcases a small television that endlessly replays archival footage of President Ronald Reagan signing the bill that provided redress and $20,000 in reparations to each surviving former internee. The “Great Communicator” Reagan’s soft-spoken speech is not audible unless visitors stand a few feet from the exhibit, but every two and a half minutes or so the jubilant applause of former internees, Japanese American politicians, and other audience members present at the historic signing permeates most of the Manzanar museum, lasting for nearly a minute each time. Such a triumphal soundtrack should not surprise anyone familiar with what Robert Hayashi calls the NPS’s “mission of retelling a progressive history.” Many have been impressed by the U.S. government’s willingness to memorialize a shameful, unconstitutional policy that flew in the face of all that America claims to stand for, but as Hayashi has noted, after redress was achieved in 1988, the Manzanar site “had lost much of its potentially controversial meaning. By 1991 [when redress checks had been distributed to surviving former internees] the nation had made amends to relocation survivors. That, too, was something that could be memorialized.”6 Moreover, the focal pointing of the former internees’ theatre has allowed the NPS a proliferation of meanings in reference to the internees ’ “overcoming adversity”; most center on Japanese Americans’ assimilative rituals and all-American recreational activities as performed at the community auditorium and elsewhere on the former camp’s grounds. As the NPS puts it in...