Manzanar War Relocation Center

Manzanar War Relocation Center is the wartime incarceration site where Jim Shimada spent part of his adolescence with his parents, and the place whose effects recur across generations of the Shimada family. In the Owens Valley northeast of Los Angeles, the camp held Japanese Americans removed from California during World War II. For Jim, Manzanar contained both the routines and social life of a camp community and the losses imposed by incarceration: his education was interrupted, his family lost its livelihood, and a government loyalty test helped precipitate his transfer to a harsher prison camp.

Setting and Establishment

In the fall of 1942, Jim and his parents were sent to Manzanar after the United States government incarcerated Japanese Americans living in California. Jim had hoped to attend UCLA on a scholarship and had been interested in making Western films. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he had tried to enlist, but was turned away because of his Japanese ancestry. His confinement thus followed an earlier denial of the opportunity to serve the country he had sought to join.

The first months at Manzanar did not immediately distinguish Jim’s experience from that of other people in the camp. The site gradually acquired limited communal amenities: young people could attend weekend dances, residents received permission to grow vegetables, and librarians from cities brought donated books. Those provisions did not undo the fact of confinement, but they formed the setting in which families and young people tried to organize ordinary routines.

Jim Shimada and the Loyalty Oath

In the spring of 1943, the government introduced a loyalty oath that asked incarcerated people whether they would serve in the U.S. Army if permitted and whether they would renounce loyalty to Japan. The second question prompted fear that answering yes could be treated as an admission of prior loyalty to Japan. Rumors and uncertainty intensified amid violence by a small, pro-Japan gang at Manzanar. Outside the camp, anti-Japanese commentators used the unrest and the oath-related panic to argue that Japanese Americans posed a threat; Pauline’s grandfather amplified that view through editorials in his newspapers.

Jim was not previously a political person. During the dispute over how to answer the oath, members of the pro-Japan gang attacked him. Before he had made any declaration on the questions, an administrative security detail took him from the scene and transferred him away from his parents to the newly established Camp for Incorrigibles in the northern Cascades. Manzanar was therefore both his family’s place of confinement and the point from which another institution removed him, without allowing him to resolve the oath’s demand on his own terms.

Family and Community Life

Manzanar’s limited social life coexisted with losses that reshaped the Shimada family. While they were incarcerated and unable to work, Jim’s parents fell behind on mortgage payments and lost both their home and the produce stand they had recently opened. Jim also heard his mother crying at night. These changes made the camp more than a temporary interruption to his education: confinement reached beyond its boundaries by depriving his family of property and economic security.

Years later, Jim recalled the dances and the intensity of being a teenager in the camp. He remembered a girl he liked and the sense that camp life had abruptly removed the usual authority of parents, making young people feel older than they were. But that apparent independence had another side. At a family workshop in Mess Hall 16, Jim’s parents were told that their son was a stranger to them. They reacted with anger, then left the meeting and walked back toward their barracks. The episode exposed an estrangement shaped by language and circumstance: Jim and his parents spoke different languages, and they had not formed the easy, conversational closeness the workshop expected them to display. The camp’s forced rearrangement of family life could not simply be repaired by calling a meeting about it.

Return and Historical Memory

Decades later, Jenny travels with her father, Jim, to a Manzanar reunion. The approach crosses a desert landscape where a green patch marks land watered for crops during the camp’s operation. Cars are gathered near the site, and people are preparing a stage and tables for food. A hand-painted sign on a school bus announces the reunion; a young attendee carrying a taiko drum welcomes them and invites them to help set up or take in the view. Jim is already looking around, and does not appear to notice the greeting. Jenny recognizes that the young man welcoming them is about the age Jim was when he was brought there by force.

The reunion places an organized act of remembrance against the remains of an abandoned prison site. Its setting connects Jenny’s present to her father’s confinement without making their experiences interchangeable. The family’s history also reaches into a later, distinct carceral system: Jenny’s imprisonment is marked by treatment that makes her feel like a token, while the legal and public narratives surrounding her and Pauline distribute punishment and stigma unevenly. Together, these episodes show how Manzanar persists in the novel not only as a location Jim once inhabited, but as part of the historical inheritance through which the next generation encounters state power, family memory, and the unequal terms of belonging.