JF Ptak Science Books Post 2829
The Manzanar Free Press is a remarkable publication, issued by the “internees” of the Japanese Relocation Center/Concentration Camp, Manzanar, near Lone Pine, California. It was located in a beautiful and desolate-mountainous AnselAdams-scape made of the Inyo and Sierra Nevada mountains, and was one of 10 camps (plus another two dozen other facilities including isolation centers, temporary camps, and other smaller areas managed by the Department of Justice and U.S. Army) that held nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent (62% of them U.S. citizens) who were forcibly removed and imprisoned via the U.S. Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on 19 February 1942. The area covered by the evacuation decree was quite large: half or so of Washington and Oregon states, all of California, and the bottom third or so of Arizona.
Manzanar was a semi-dead town 220 miles NE of Los Angeles, located in high desert with huge swings of temperature and unrelenting and challenging weather—semi-killed by the city of Los Angeles, which purchased the water rights to the region in 1929, forcing out the remaining inhabitants. Manzanar had a peak population of about 11,000 before the Japanese were returned to what remained of their previous lives. And it was here that thousands of the unfortunate people of Japanese decent lived for several years.
What struck me on this go-round with the camp newspaper were the advertisements, which for reasons unknown didn't register with me in the other times I went browsing. (There are many of them available online via the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84025948/1944-01-29/ed-1/?sp=3&st=text.) It has the feel of a small town daily, with all of the trimmings—except this was a concentration camp (U.S. Style), so it was hardly an “average” publication, though it was filled with basic/domestic/social/small-town "average" news from camp baseball to the newest shipment of non-rationed goods. And again, like any small town newspaper, there they were, the ads, usually a dozen or two in the newspaper's twelve pages (the first half in English, the second in Japanese).
Who advertised what? It just seemed extraordinary, and contrary, to see the ads in there, all of which combined gave the enterprise a feeling of everyday normalcy to a decidedly not-normal situation, with people gathered up,completely uprooted, losing businesses and property and of course freedom. For the issue of January 29, 1944, we have the following advertisements:
- The Los Angeles Fish & Oyster Company was there (“supplying fresh fish to the canteen”);
- The Utah Nippo (which is one of only four Japanese newspapers published in the Continental U.S. through the course of WWII. http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Utah_Nippo_(newspaper)/ Does that mean that people received copies of the newspaper in the mail, or was it just posting its name because it made monetary contributions to the Manzanar paper?)
- LB Woolens and Trimming (from L.A.);
- Showa Shogu Brewing Co. (Glendale, Arizona);
- Dorfman Hat & Cap Co. (Oakland);
- Lone Pine Lumber and Supply (an ad for ready-pasted wallpaper), Lone Pine, CA.;
- Sears (for delivery of canned goods and such);
- Josephs Lone Pine (a general store “orders taken for non-rationed items”);
- Freeman, Los Angeles Barber & Beauty Co. offering “Southern California's Leading Pomade”):
- Hotel Montezuma (Santa Fe, NM--I have no idea what this one was all about);
- Western Trunk Line, Lone Pine Depot;
- Hand-Knit Yarns (Peter Pan Yarns, NYC)';
- and interestingly, Audiofilms Co., advertising their next film, Boy Slaves (starring. Anne Shirley, Alan Baxter Roger Daniel. According to IMDb "A runaway follows the leader of a gang of boys, and they all wind up working in a turpentine camp". Oddly enough, the tagline for the "b" film was "SOLD - Human Beings, In This Modern Age, Actually Sold Into Slavery!")
And there was Blossom Girl, of Hollywood (pictured at left).
There was one ad placed by one of the internees: Mastercraft Cleaning and Laundry, located at “Ironing Room 10”.
And then there was this small placement, simple, but powerful in it innocence:
The Japanese people at Manzanar and the other camps made extraordinary efforts to create a society and civility and reasonableness in the depths of an unreasonable situation in which much of their society had been ripped apart. Superb effort. As Charlie Goodnight inscirbed on Bose Ikard's tombstone; "splendid behavior".
"Manzanar" means "apple orchard" in Spanish; there were no apples here in 1944.
Comments