Owens Valley

Owens Valley is both a physical landscape and the setting of a defining family history: the wartime incarceration of Jim Shimada and his parents at Manzanar War Relocation Center. When Jenny and her father return to the site years later, the valley’s recognizable terrain makes a suppressed past present without making it easier to remember.

Geography and Setting

The valley lies in the desert northeast of Los Angeles. On the drive south from Bishop, Jenny watches the landscape change from dark ground, green vegetation, and snow to brown hills dotted with sagebrush. The Owens River runs beside the road, while the Sierra Nevada forms a distant wall. Her father remarks that the landscape looks exactly as it did before, linking the present journey to his earlier life there.

At the former camp, the setting is marked by the contrast between the surrounding mountains and a patch of green ground. Water had been diverted to grow crops for the camp, and fruit trees were said to remain on the site. Jenny sees the location as the remains of an abandoned prison, while its open desert surroundings make the camp’s history inseparable from the region’s geography.

Wartime Incarceration and Jim Shimada

In the fall of 1942, the federal government sent Jim Shimada and his parents to Manzanar War Relocation Center. Jim had tried to enlist after Pearl Harbor, but was not allowed to do so because of his Japanese ancestry. Before the incarceration, his parents had saved money through truck farming and opened a produce stand in Los Angeles; while they were confined and unable to work, they failed to make their mortgage payments and lost both their home and the stand.

In the spring of 1943, the government administered a loyalty oath asking internees whether they would serve in the U.S. Army if allowed and whether they would renounce loyalty to Japan. Rumors that the second question was a trap intensified fear in the camp. Pro-Japan gang violence and anti-Japanese newspaper coverage further exploited that panic. Jim, who had not previously been political, was beaten by a pro-Japan gang over how he would answer. An administrative security detail took him away during the assault and transferred him, separated from his parents, to Camp for Incorrigibles.

Return to the Former Camp

Years later, Jenny and her father turn off Highway 395 onto a dirt track leading to a Manzanar reunion. Cars are parked across the scrub-covered ground; people are setting up a stage and tables for food, and an old school bus bears a reunion message. A young man carrying a taiko drum welcomes them and offers them a chance to help. Jenny recognizes that he is about the age her father had been when he was brought to the camp.

Her father tells the young man that he once lived there. The statement makes his connection to the site explicit: the reunion is not simply a visit to a historical landmark but a return to the place where he was incarcerated. The gathering’s preparations and welcome coexist with the knowledge of the camp’s former function, without resolving the distance between present-day commemoration and his experience.

Landscape, Memory, and Family History

The drive through Owens Valley brings Jenny and her father near a past that he does not readily discuss. When she asks whether he remembers anything, he initially resists the question; after a pause, he describes the landscape’s austerity and acknowledges that many people would find it lonely. On the journey, he also recalls that a hike during his confinement took place under guard, with rifles pointed at the internees. His recollections resist any simple account of the camp as an ordinary place to have grown up.

For Jenny, returning with her father joins family history to a wider history of Japanese American incarceration. The valley’s enduring terrain and the traces of the former camp provide the setting for that encounter, while her father’s recognition of the place shows how the past persists in personal memory even when it is difficult to speak about.