YOU CAN GET THERE FROM HERE: At the start of World War II, the U.S. opened 10 camps that interred 120,000 people, including the most famous one, Manzanar, in Northern California.
THE DRIVE from the San Francisco Bay Area to Manzanar, the former Japanese-American internment camp in California’s remote Eastern Sierra region, takes about seven hours. There is no other way to get there, and there is no way to make the drive shorter. For most of the way, I listen to an audiobook: Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge, about the improbable rise of a B-movie actor to the presidency of the United States.
In 1988, the final full year of his second White House term, Ronald Reagan apologized to the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who’d been conined to internment camps during World War II, of which there were 10 around the nation, and of which Manzanar is the most notorious. The survivors of the camps also received reparations, a rare concession by the American government. “Here we admit a wrong,” Reagan said. “Here we reairm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.” The announcement was made in San Francisco, whose Japantown was cleared out by interment, which began in 1942, about three months after Pearl Harbor.