Day 3 - Manazanar National Historic Site Interpretive Center
After visiting Tule Lake, and the small exhibition space of the Eastern California Museum, walking into the large, air-conditioned Manzanar National Historic Site Interpretive Center was a shock. There were National Park Service rangers, large audio-visual displays, and a host of interactive exhibits.
The interpretive center even has a small exhibit in the men’s room of bath-related prose and tanka poetry.
There were two auditorium spaces, one in the open central hall showing a loop of “home movies” of camp life, and another, enclosed theater, showing a documentary film: “Remembering Manzanar.”
The home movies of children playing in a camp schoolyard and for a Thanksgiving pageant were particularly haunting. I had seen black and white stills of some of the films before, but I wasn’t prepared to see them colorized and in movement. Many of the children are very young. They smile and laugh as if they were in any other elementary school playground. In some frames, you can see barbed wire in the distance.
By the exit to the interpretive center, there is a gift shop.
While I recognize the need to have a gift shop to help defray the costs of maintaining the site, there were a number of moments when I felt uncomfortable with some of the items for sale in the shop. I had no problem at all with the gift shop providing postcards or prints of internee artwork, or books about internment or regional history or Japanese-American culture. (In fact, I bought several of these). However, keychains, refrigerator magnets, polished semi-precious stones, replicas of 40’s era wooden children’s toys, etc. seem like inappropriate objects to sell at the site of a former internment camp. While these kinds of souvenirs seem like perfectly fine things to buy and sell at an ordinary National Park Service gift shop, Manzanar is not an ordinary site.
Ryan Yokota wrote an excellent op-ed for Rafu Shimpo that describes how visiting Manzanar has changed after the federal government recognized it as a national historic site.