JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 708 (Continuing #192) Blog Bookstore
For another project I’ve been reading through the Manzanar Free Press Newspaper
(volume 7, no. 12) and came upon this slight coverage of the bombing of
Nagasaki, printed 11 August 1945. What’s unusual here is that this
newspaper was published by the “internees” at the Japanese Relocation
Center (officially “The Manzanar War Relocation Center” and also called
a “relocation camp,” “relocation center,” “internment camp,” and
“concentration camp”,) at Manzanar, California. 110,000 people of
Japanese origin (including a large percentage of American citizens)
were forcibly removed and imprisoned via the U.S. Executive Order 9066,
issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on 19 February 1942. 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.
In this quick coverage, a report is made on the Japanese
accepting the terms of the Potsdam Ultimatum, putting an end to the
war. The next part is of the reporting is very subdued, announcing the
dropping of the second bomb, theorizing that as many as
200,000-300,000 people may have perished in the bombing of Japan’s
seventh largest city. And not much more than that. Two hundred words
were I’m guessing all that was allowed by the powers-that-be at
Manzanar.
Elsewhere in this same issue is a report on the meeting of the
Manzanar Boy Scout troop. And something on the graduating class of the
Manzanar High School (the high school yearbook for 1945, the last class
at Manzanar, was called “Valediction”). Familiar trappings in an
unfamiliar trap.
Manzanar is located near Lone Pine in the Owens Valley, which today
suffers terrible environmental problems brought on by water-dependent
LA sucking out all of the water in the region.