In 1969, a group of Japanese Americans, mostly Sansei and Nisei,1 visited Manzanar. Located about 225 miles from Los Angeles, Manzanar was one of the War Relocation Authority detention centers used to incarcerate Japanese Americans during World War II. In the Tadaima 2021 Opening Ceremony, Carrie Morita explained this 1969 journey as an attempt to find “camp.” This was a search for a physical place, the actual site of the Manzanar War Relocation Center, but it was also a search for meaning, an elusive thing that happened to Morita’s family that she could not access. Morita tied this first journey to a longer history of Japanese American redress, a movement that resulted in an apology, individual monetary compensation, and collective educational funds from the federal government, to individuals and their families the United States government had incarcerated. Morita also positions this first journey as the origins of community pilgrimage....
University of California Press