“Enduring the Unbearable”. A reflection by filmmaker Ann Kaneko.

Over the years, driving home from Mammoth or other spots in Northern California, I have stopped at Manzanar several times to visit the educational center and the historic site with my parents and friends. However, I had never attended the pilgrimage because of my own mixed feelings of being separate from the Japanese American community. Because I had had this initiation to Manzanar, I was not expecting to have such a visceral experience when I went on the pilgrimage this year.

The Eastern Sierras painted a majestic backdrop to the historic site as we drove up in our tour bus. The wind was strong, the air was dry, and the sun was relentless as it darted around the dark clouds that filled the sky. I kept reminding myself to drink water since I knew that the altitude, although mild, could affect me adversely if I was not careful. As we approached the cemetery where the program was occurring, I saw hundreds of other people gathering for the event.

Exhausted and tired from responsibilities in my everyday life, I knew that I felt overwhelmed, in general. Seeing the throngs of people and hearing the same story reiterated through the public program, I wanted to run the other way. I felt the weight of trying to portray Manzanar differently than it had been in so many documentaries over the years. I had become numb to the story, and I had to step away from the suffocating reiteration of the themes of gaman, the act of enduring what seems unbearable, the suffering, sacrifice and the need to speak out. I wanted to have my own experience of Manzanar that scratched away the layers of what had been said about it.

The day after the Pilgrimage, I woke up feeling sick. I had a pounding headache, and I was nauseous. My stomach was unhinged, and I knew if I wasn’t careful everything I had eaten would end up on the floor. I drank water, tried to practice Qigong and took some Advil to quell the uneasiness.

As soon as we reached the site again, I felt worse, and although I wanted to participate in the interviews with the National Park Service that day, I couldn’t. I could hardly focus on anything. When David offered to cleanse me with sage, I knew it would probably make me throw up since I am sensitive to smells, but I wanted to accept his gesture of help.

I flashed back to another moment when I had taken a long bus ride to Lake Titicaca with friends in Bolivia. My friend’s Aunt Delia insisted that we attend a mass to pay respects to the Virgen de la Candelaria as soon as we arrived at the lake. The overwhelming fragrance of the sweet-smelling frankincense combined with the altitude and windy bus ride had made me feel violently ill in the same way I was that day in Manzanar. Although I was in a sacred space, it was definitely not the way I would have liked to experience spiritual transformation.

When David waved the sage over me, I began to heave, and I could not stop. I figured I would feel better, but I did not really—just empty. After I had rested awhile, I began to walk around on the site. Of course, I was thinking about what images I thought I should be recording of the picturesque mountains and the details of the dusty twigs blowing in the wind, but I physically couldn’t. I let go of the idea that I was going to be filming that day.

As I sat on the soil, picking at the rusty nails and shards of pottery left as relics of internment, the voices from the Nisei interviews that I had been editing came back to haunt me. I felt the overwhelming sadness and uncertainty of being forcibly trapped with thousands of other people in the middle of a vast, harsh landscape that seemed to stretch forever. The painful irony of this contrast struck me deeply, and I realized that this land still held these stories if we listened.

As a Sansei, both of whose parents were incarcerated during World War II, I have grown up with this story. Over the years, this narrative has transformed as my understanding of the experience has changed. My first encounter was through my parents who talked about “camp,” glazed with the nostalgia of the friends and community that they had there. This contrasted with the section of my fourth grade social studies book about an unjust imprisonment of a people, that I was called upon to talk about. Now as an adult having completed A Flicker in Eternity, a short film based on the diary and letters of Stanley Hayami, a Nisei teenager who had been incarcerated at Heart Mountain, and edited several historical pieces for Densho, an organization devoted to the documentation of this experience, I was steeped in this story and understood the incredible effect that it had had in shaping the Japanese American community, its identity and history.

I didn’t expect the need to purge myself in such a violent way. Yet the body is a powerful vessel and belies our emotional and psycho-spiritual reactions in a more physical and direct way. In the final scene of The Act of Killing, a documentary about the genocide in Indonesia, the main character who had killed over a thousand people almost 50 years ago, wretches uncontrollably when he revisits the site where the killings had occurred. The process of making the film had forced him to confront what he had done, and the ghosts of those he had tortured and killed still lurked in his body and in the space where they had died. In the same way, the spirits of this community of people—their hopes and disappointments in an incredibly uncertain phase of their lives–still inhabit Manzanar.

As a filmmaker, one is a kind of medium for deep-held stories that often get pushed aside. I have always struggled with my ability to separate myself from the trauma and anxiety of those whose stories I must translate into films. Over the years, I have come to accept that dealing with the feelings of the work I do needs to be given its own space and worked through so that I don’t harbor these things in my body. I have to respect myself as a vessel that has its own reactions while at the same time attempting to convey these stories. In a journey to understand more about the body-mind, I began practicing Qigong, which has taught me how deeply held emotions are manifested in the body. As I look back at my physical reaction, I can attribute it to the weakness in my lung and liver meridians and the profound sadness that resides in that space. The wind, sun and dryness all weakened my immune system so that I felt sick and more susceptible to that past.

As I have been contemplating how to reframe and re-contextualize the story of Manzanar in a space and time that is not bound by the needs of the Japanese American community to deal with its own trauma, I have been drawn to the story of the lands that these places of incarceration had been built. Many of them were constructed on what had traditionally been tribal lands and two camps in Arizona, in particular, were built on reservations. I find this very striking in terms of the ongoing battle for resources that continue in the Owens Valley over water and solar energy.

I found that hearing Jeremiah talk about the continued challenges that he and tribal members face now and his disconnection to the history of the incarceration of Japanese Americans to be so interesting. In my mind, there are many common threads in this history, but the fact that there has been acknowledgement and apparent closure to this chapter of the Japanese American story is in sharp contrast to the continued struggles that Native communities face on this land. This is where I plan to put my efforts as I explore the ghosts of Manzanar.

As I have been dealing with the health and welfare of my aging Nisei parents, I realize that they are a living link to this history, and it pains me to think that they will be gone soon. I wonder how this story still has relevance and meaning after this generation of Nisei passes away. Working with the Japanese American community as I crafted and shared these stories about the incarceration experience, I have a first hand understanding of how this experience has and continues to impact this community in very complicated and traumatic ways. I guess the profundity of this realization propels me to continue to think about how these kinds of historical narratives can be reshaped and retooled to continue to have resonance and relevance to younger generations and other communities.