Manzanar: A Site of Conscience On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Mary Tsukamoto abruptly stopped practicing the piano for her church's upcoming Christmas program when she heard the news: Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, the U.S. naval base in Hawai'i. "The whole world turned dark," she recalled. At the same time, Tom Kawaguchi left a public library in San Francisco. On the way home, Tom feared that bystanders were "ready to pounce" on him. In the days that followed, all people of Japanese ancestry living in the U.S. came under suspicion. Many politicians, military leaders, and ordinary citizens believed that Japanese Americans would side with their country of ancestry, Japan, rather than their country of birth, America. Mary Tsukamoto and Tom Kawagachi were just two of nearly 112,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast whose lives would be forever altered. President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan the next day and on Germany and Italy three days later. Then, on February 19, 1942, he signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the U.S. military to carry out the exclusion and detention of American citizens and resident aliens. Many people had been persuaded that collaboration from within was responsible for Japan's success at Pearl Harbor. California Attorney General Earl Warren and other politicians claimed that the proximity of Japanese-owned farms to airstrips, harbors, and rail lines was proof of intended sabotage, even though these farms had been established decades earlier. In mid-1942, all of California's congressmen stated their unequivocal support for removal and internment. Although Executive Order 9066 did not specify any ethnic group by name, in practice it applied to German and Italian aliens on an individual basis—and to all people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast. The U.S. government thus ordered over 110,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry to leave their homes in California and parts of Washington, Oregon, and Arizona. Under the guise of "military necessity," the U.S. Army established ten military-style camps to house the people in remote areas, under guard, for the duration of the war. One of the camps was at Manzanar, in the Owens Valley of eastern California. At Manzanar, more than ten thousand people spent up to three years behind barbed wire simply because of their ancestry. The Owens Valley Reception Center became the Manzanar War Relocation Center on June 1, 1942, and reached its peak population of 10,046 in September of the same year. With food, housing, health care, and a clothing allowance provided by the War Relocation Authority, family life continued, albeit under stark conditions. Room assignments kept families together, but they were often required to live with strangers to achieve a total of eight people per room. Privacy was scarce. Rosie Maruki Kakuuchi, a teenager at Manzanar, found using the latrines and showers with no partitions particularly "embarrassing, humiliating, and degrading." Manzanar changed substantially between the day it opened in March 1942 and the day it closed in November 1945. The incarcerated transformed the landscape with ponds and gardens. Families welcomed babies and mourned deaths. Schools educated students, internal security helped prevent crime, and the fire department extinguished fires. Japanese Americans even organized recreational activities at Manzanar. In its first anniversary issue, the Manzanar Free Press published an anonymous poem about the complexity of life at Manzanar: "Out of smiles and curses, of tears and cries, forlorn; Mixed with broken laughter, forced because they must . . . Out on the desert's bosom—a new town is born." After the war, some Japanese Americans protested the internment by pursuing court cases. But the vast majority did not want to "make waves" as they rebuilt their lives. Much later, in 1981, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) listened to over 750 individual testimonies of survivors of the camps. The CWRIC recommended that the U.S. government make monetary reparations and issue a formal letter of apology. Nearly forty years after the forced relocation and internment of Japanese Americans, the CWRIC concluded, "Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity. . . . The broad historical causes that shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." Adapted from the National Park Service, "Manzanar: A Site of Conscience"