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Manzanar by Jan Haag I ran from the car, turned over pieces of white and beige crockery, and found what I was looking for. TEPCO, read one piece: U.S.A. china... Click to read Essay Profile of Author Bio of Author from ETG Essay, Late-breaking Developments Author's Comment on the ETG Experience Updated Bio Click to Purchase Send email to the author (The copyright on this essay is held by the author.  For permission to duplicate: copyright@cunepress.com)

Manzanar
In 1944, Ansel Adams made one of his most famous scenic photographs—it’s of Mt. Williamson, a neighboring peak of California’s highest, Mt. Whitney, in the Sierra Nevada. Adams, still a young man but already making a reputation as a premier nature photographer, set up his tripod on his car’s rooftop platform. From the floor of the Owens Valley, he shot west toward the mountains, but he also turned his camera east into the Manzanar War Relocation Camp.

A friend of camp director Ralph P. Merritt, Adams was one of the few outside photographers allowed to document the lives of the ten thousand ethnic Japanese kept behind barbed wire by government decree. As the United States battled Japan during World War II, many of Manzanar’s residents lived for more than three years surrounded by eight armed-guard towers.

Adams was not allowed to photograph those guard towers or give any hint that the people there were, in fact, prisoners. His book documenting Manzanar, Born Free and Equal, made an eloquent statement against the imprisonment of innocent people. In that book, he also envisioned life after the war.

"When all the occupants of Manzanar have resumed their places in the stream of American life," Adams wrote, "these flimsy buildings will vanish, the greens and the flowers . . . will wither, the old orchards will grow older, remnants of paths, foundations, and terracing will gradually blend unto the stable texture of the desert."

I traveled to Manzanar, one of ten such relocation camps, fifty years after the camp closed. I was accompanied by a photographer who wanted to find the site of Adams’ photos. I hoped to see what was left of those temporary residents who made the inhospitable land home for a time.

Here is what I saw:

Two stone sentry houses at the entrance, with names painted on the wooden frames over the doors and windows. One said: Haji Moto/Blk. 26-6-3/1-1-86—a former internee’s barrack and the date he returned. Inside, more names were scratched into the rock walls: Tsukumura, Kitabayashi, T. Hazama, E. Segawa, Fukura, Hashimoto. . . .

Near the front of the camp, a round stone wall that perhaps once surrounded a tidy garden. Now partially covered by thistles, words neatly carved into concrete read: Built by Wada and Crew, June 10, 1943 A.D.

A well-kept cemetery with only a few marked graves and a white obelisk constructed by camp residents in 1943 that reaches twenty feet into the sky. Black kanji (Japanese characters) declare: Memorial to the Dead.

The photographer and I drove past the cemetery, past the camp’s barbed wire, and toward Mt. Williamson. Where did Ansel Adams place his tripod to catch the mountain under winter storm clouds? Now summer clouds, high and fluffy white, showed no signs of rain. We kept our eyes to the west, looking for the huge boulders in the foreground of Adams’ picture.

Then, I spotted a gully running north. "Stop!" I yelled. I saw something in the hollow, something that gleamed bright white. I rolled down the window.

"Their dishes?" I asked the desert.

"Can’t be," said my companion.

I ran from the car, turned over pieces of white and beige crockery, and found what I was looking for. TEPCO, read one piece: U.S.A. china. I knew that name; the TEPCO company made china for restaurants well into the 1960s. My mind flew to Sacramento, hundreds of miles away, where identical 1930s and 1940s dishes rested in my china cabinet. It was—it had to be—remains of their dishes.

We stepped carefully over the shards, picking up pieces and handling them like antiques. A piece read: USQMC, Jan. 6, 1936—from the Army Quartermaster’s Corps. One fragment with a medical insignia proclaimed in red: United States Army Medical Department. One read, with quiet irony: Made in Japan.

"Who dumped the dishes?" we wondered aloud as we kept driving. Eventually we found the Weld of boulders where Adams made his famous photo.

The next day in Independence, a few miles from Manzanar, we visited the Eastern Sierra Museum and found other camp memorabilia—paintings and furniture made in camp, a reproduction of the camp sign, a record player. A cardboard box cradled a square-shaped piece of wood. A handwritten note identified the square as the pitcher’s plate for Manzanar’s baseball diamond: "found in 1985 by Hank Umemoto in its original place after forty-three years."

And encased in glass were white dishes—a cup and saucer and dinner plate. I peered through the case to look at the undersides. TEPCO, they said, all of them.

I fondled the small piece of crockery I’d saved from the pile, Adams’ views of Mt. Williamson and the camp residents in my head. I could not leave without a piece of their dishes—my dishes—pieces of those lives alive in my hand.

Profile
I remember a brief trendy period in Jan Haag’s life. She was the editor of Sacramento Magazine. Hair streaked blonde, she wore dark hose and pumps with her red wool suits and went networking.

Jan had all the flashy skills of a practicing journalist, editor, and writer, so why not try the look? And a great look it was. But it lasted less than a year. Before long the blonde streaks grew out. Her jeans and crepe-soled shoes came back. By then she was teaching—but still networking, raising funds for Susurrus, the literary magazine she’d started at Sacramento City College. She was writing Louie, Louie, her novel-in-progress. Last week we met for coffee at Greta’s in midtown, a building painted blue on the outside, mustard yellow walls and dusty trees inside. The afternoon sun poured in on us, long after the lunch crowd had come and gone. In that hazy golden afterlight, I knew that the look might change again, but not the lady behind the look. She’ll write the novel. She’ll produce the magazine. The phrase for Jan Haag? She just does it.

—Constance Warloe

Bio
Jan Haag
Place of residence: Sacramento.
Birthplace: Long Beach, California.
Grew up in: Roseville, California.
Day job: Teaching journalism and writing at Sacramento City College.
Education: B.A. in journalism and creative writing; M.A. in English and journalism, California State University at Sacramento.
Serial publications: Sacramento Magazine. Sacramento News and Review.
Anthology: I’ve Always Meant to Tell You: Letters to Our Mothers (edited by Constance Warloe, Pocket Books).
Awards: Fellowship for Literary Artists in Arts Education, Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Council (1996). First Class Girl Scout (1975). Most Improved Percussionist, Oakmont High School, Roseville, California (1972).
Current projects: A novel, Louie, Louie. Raising funds for Susurrus, a literary journal at Sacramento City College.
Favorite book: Psmith Journalist by P.G. Wodehouse.
Craving: Mrs. Field’s chocolate/macadamia nut cookies.

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