Washington Visit - Day 2

Drove by Manzanar, the Japanese relocation camp in the Owens Valley of Eastern California. The interpretive center was very illuminating as to what happened to more than 120,000 Japanese Americans once Japan bombed Pearl Harbor during WWII. Appalling is the only way to describe what was done to these people, these America citizens.

As stunning as the interpretive center was, the auto tour of the grounds was even more meaningful. The monument pictured here is located at the camp cemetery which is reached after passing through acres and acres of hot, dusty land that once contained 36 blocks of 14 tar-paper barracks each. Each block held about 300 men, women, and children, which came to about 10,000 people who were uprooted from their homes and sent to Eastern California.

The interpretive center said it best: "For more than six decades, the large concrete obelisk in the Manzanar cemetery has memorialized not only the 150 internees who died here, but all 120,313 Japanese Americans confined by their own government during World War II. The monument's Japanese Kanji characters read 'Soul Consoling Tower' on the front and 'Erected by the Manzanar Japanese, August 1943' on the back."

This is the front side of the monument with the Sierra Nevada Mountains providing the background.