Jane Harada Tochi was only 10 years old when she and her family were forced out of their home by the US government. Jane was one of the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in inland camps. Told they only could bring clothing and essentials, Jane’s family packed their most precious mementos into a trunk. These included all the photographs of Jane’s mother, who had immigrated to the US from Mexico and passed away when Jane was six. They expected to retrieve it from storage after the wartime exclusion ended. Instead, the trunk was lost. “When you have pictures, you recall memories,” said Jane, 81 years later. “I couldn’t even tell you what my mother looked like. The connection is there in pictures.”

The government incarcerated the Harada family in Manzanar with over 11,000 other people, most of whom were US citizens. When they arrived on April 28, 1942, they found themselves assigned to a cramped barracks room they shared with strangers. Their circumstances improved once they were transferred to another block. Jane began attending school, playing sports, and making friends with other incarcerated children. Jane recalled one day in the autumn of 1943 when she was leaving a volleyball game, carrying her leather ball, and encountered Ansel Adams.

Jane was one of many incarcerated people Adams met and photographed during his visits to Manzanar in 1943 and 1944. Adams’s intent was to capture the faces and spirits of the people there, believing “We must strive to understand the Japanese Americans, not as an abstract group, but as individuals of fine mental, moral, and civic capacities, in other words, people such as you and I.” He saw this as his contribution to the war effort. To help achieve this goal, Adams created a book of photographs — Born Free and Equal (1944).

The following are oral history excerpts and archival images from Adams’s time at Manzanar.

Oral history interviews help us understand what those looking into Adams’s lens remembered of the experience and what it meant to them over time. These life histories also give insight into conditions and experiences omitted by Adams’s photos. By the fall of 1943, conditions at Manzanar had changed dramatically. Japanese Americans had transformed bare swaths of blowing dirt into breathtaking ponds and gardens. At the same time, the government had quashed protest and unrest through policies of isolation and segregation, disrupting many relationships for decades. What Adams did not see and did not photograph at Manzanar is as important as what he did. Oral histories reveal what’s beyond the frame, giving voice to lives only hinted at through the photographer’s lens.

Today, Jane Harada Tochi is grateful she was photographed by Adams. “When you lose the past . . . photos secure your memories,” she said — a lesson she learned through the disappearance of her mother’s mementos. For Jane, the title of Adams’s Born Free and Equal still resonates. When asked what she hopes someone might learn from a visit to Manzanar — a place where she lost more than three years of her freedom, she pointed to the book and said, “That book title tells it all.” 

Resources

The Manzanar Oral History Program started in 1999 and today preserves an ever-growing collection of 700 oral history interviews. Watch or listen to interviews from the collection. 

Many other organizations also collect oral histories of the Japanese American incarceration. We recommend Denshō’s expansive repository of interviews and archival documents, as well as the grassroots oral history project Tessaku.