Japanese incarceration in the United States in Adams’ photos

Sunday marks the 81st anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the executive order that led to the mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans.

A rare set of photographs taken by Ansel Adams, one of America’s best-known photographers, documented those affected by the order. According to the U.S. Library of Congress, Japanese immigrants who were legally barred from becoming U.S. citizens and U.S.-born people living in California, southern Arizona, and western Washington been arrested.

“We lost everything, like I lost my heritage,” historian Hanako Wakatsuki told USA TODAY in a 2022 interview. “I had four generations of my family incarcerated in Manzanar,” one of 10 camps where Americans with at least 1/16th Japanese ancestry were confined.

Wakatsuki also had relatives incarcerated in Minidoka and Tule Lake.

Hanako Wakatsuki's grandmother, Chizuye, and her children Patty, Geroge, and Woody in Manzanar.

A man stands over a bus loading luggage into a rack as people are herded around a bus and forcibly transferred to a burial camp.

During the fall of 1943, Adams visited the Manzanar War Relocation Center in Inyo County, California, about 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

He mainly does portraits, but also captures the daily life of people, agricultural scenes, sports and leisure.

His family couldn’t talk about it:Now she is educating others about this dark point in US history

Adams presented a positive view of the incarcerated, a stark contrast to the actual upheaval of the evacuation and the grim conditions of the camps.

Collage of Japanese-American children who were sent to an internment camp in California during World War II.

An amateur baseball game in progress at the Japanese-American mass incarceration camp.

Ansel Adams documents Japanese mass incarceration camps.

Photographs by Ansel Adams of a Japanese-American internment camp.

Adams’ photographs of people have been largely ignored. Instead, he’s best remembered for his ability to showcase the natural beauty of iconic places like Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada.

When he donated the collection to the Library in 1965, Adams said in a letter that the purpose of his work “was to show how those people, suffering great injustice and loss of property, businesses and of professions, had overcome feelings of defeat and despair by building a vital community in an arid (but beautiful) environment.

“Overall, I think this Manzanar collection is an important historical document, and I hope it can be put to good use,” Adams wrote.

Japanese incarceration in the United States in Adams’ photos 11

Roosevelt unveiled the relocation program on February 19, 1942, after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, citing fears of a Japanese invasion and subversive acts by Japanese Americans as an excuse for such a order.

In the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, Congress said the incarcerations were “motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership”, and authorized a payment of 20 $000 to Japanese Americans who suffered “gross injustice” during World War II.