Manzanar

On our route from Bishop, CA to Ridgecrest, CA today, we stopped at the Manzanar National Historic Site on our way south. This is a very important monument, reminding us of one of the most heinous acts ever taken by the USA (other than electing Obama).

It is a somber self-guided tour that takes the observer through the internment camp that housed over 11,000 Japanese Americans taken from their lives in America to serve time for what the Imperial Japanese did to foment WWII in the Pacific. The bombing of Pearl Harbor and other acts by the Japanese did nothing to warrant gathering the descendants of Japan ancestry and housing them, against their will, in this nightmare desert camp. Manzanar was the largest population center between Reno and Los Angeles, albeit it was a city of an unwilling population.

The image above is the saddest reminder of the sordid acts of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration; the graveyard at Manzanar with mostly unmarked graves other than one of Baby Jerry Ogata, an infant that died in captivity here who was as American as you and I.

We have been here before, but the sight of the residual camp always causes us to break out a tissue or two. Click on the image to enlarge.