Former internment camp detailed in WWII museum

The list of internees nearly reaches the 17-foot-high ceiling of the center.
MANZANAR NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE, Calif. (AP) -- Like many Japanese-Americans interned in the wind-swept Owens Valley during World War II, Towru Nagano remembered the desert sun, swirling dust and glare of searchlights that kept prisoners awake at night in cramped barracks behind barbed wire.
Mostly, he recalls the realization that his country didn't want him.
"The worst part of camp was the psychological effect of being rejected by the public as an American citizen, as an equal," Nagano said Saturday while visiting his former internment camp under happier circumstances.
Nagano, now 78, was among hundreds of former detainees and their descendants who traveled to the Manzanar National Historic Site for the opening of a National Park Service museum that preserves a bitter memory for many Japanese-Americans.
Manzanar, a Spanish word meaning "apple orchard," is the best preserved of the camps where thousands of Japanese-Americans and citizens of Japan were held during World War II.
What's included
The center features photos, films and documents that record the roundup of men, women and children amid racial prejudice and fears of sabotage and espionage after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The $5.1 million museum is set amid the backdrop of the peaks of the eastern High Sierra about 220 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Its entrance features a wall-size photo of the Manzanar prison camp and an American flag whipping in the desert wind.
The exhibits take visitors through the background behind the government order to detain about 110,000 people. It details life at the detention centers and tells of the gradual release and the official apology signed by President Reagan in 1988.
Saturday's opening coincided with the 35th annual pilgrimage to the site by Manzanar inmates and their families. Many visitors searched for their names and those of their parents and grandparents on a list of internees that stretches nearly to the 17-foot-high ceiling of the museum.
Louis Watanabe found the name of his grandfather, who worked as a stonemason and handyman while detained.
"I think it's important to talk about history so maybe we don't repeat mistakes of the past," Watanabe, 47, said as visitors milled about before a ceremony that sought to blend patriotism and an embrace of Japanese culture. Featured were a Taiko drum group and the presentation of the colors by the Veterans of Foreign Wars from the nearby town of Lone Pine.
The museum, and plans to restore portions of the camp, reflects the National Park Service's effort to appeal to what it calls "heritage tourism," or sites that may evoke painful memories.
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