News Release

Manzanar National Historic Site to Host Gardens for Peace Events, September 28, 2024

NPS, Jeff Burton

News Release Date: September 6, 2024

Contact: Ed Standefer, 817-781-0385

Manzanar National Historic Site to Host Gardens for Peace Events, September 28, 2024. Manzanar National Historic Site invites the public to a day of special events to celebrate the United Nations’ 2024 International Day of Peace. With its large collection of Japanese gardens, Manzanar NHS is one of only 20 places across the continent selected to take part in the North American Japanese Garden Association’s signature event, “Gardens for Peace,” to promote world peace and understanding. Manzanar’s gardens were created by Japanese Americans who were incarcerated at the World War II prison camp as symbols of hope and resilience in the face of racism and wartime hysteria. Abandoned after the war, the gardens were obscured by sediments and vegetation, but since 2007 over 20 have been uncovered through Manzanar’s award-winning Community Archeology Program. Manzanar’s 2024 Gardens for Peace events will begin at 9 a.m. with presentations by noted scholars Kendall Brown and Keiji Uesugi at the Visitor Center. At 10:30 a.m. there will be tours of two restored gardens, Arai Pond and Merritt Park, followed by a BYO brown-bag lunch and discussion at Merritt Park. During lunch, the public can participate in a Toro Nagashi paper lantern commemoration. After lunch there will be a tour of the Block 34 mess hall garden, the hospital garden, and the Children’s Village. The afternoon tour will end at the historic Lydston Orchard where participants can pick Comice pears. 

Saturday, September 28, 2024 Event Schedule

09:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.: Introductions, presentations, and discussion at Manzanar’s Visitor Center (West Theater), Kendall Brown and Keiji Uesugi

10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.: Arai Pond and Merritt Park tour (meet at Arai Pond parking area)

12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.: BYO lunch at Merritt Park, discussion, decorate and float a lantern

1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.: Block 34 mess hall garden, hospital garden, and Children's Village tour

2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.: Pear Harvest at end of tour (bring a cloth bag) 

Toro nagashi (灯籠流し) Toro Nagashi, which literally means "flowing lanterns," is an opportunity to commemorate loved ones. During the lunch break, visitors who wish to participate will have time to get a lantern, write their dedications or decorate their lantern with pictures and wishes, and then set their lantern afloat.  

Presenters:

Kendall Brown is emeritus Professor of Asian Art History at California State University Long Beach. A former museum curator, he publishes actively in several areas of Japanese art and has organized exhibitions for several American museums, exploring topics from modern woodblock prints to Art Deco and, most recently, “Songs for Modern Japan, Popular Music and Graphic Design, 1905-1950.” In the study of Japanese gardens in North America, he published the books, Japanese-style Gardens of the Pacific West Coast (Rizzoli, 1999), Quiet Beauty: The Japanese Gardens of North America (Tuttle, 2012), Visionary Landscapes (Tuttle, 2016), and various essays on the social history of these gardens. In 2011, he co-founded the North American Japanese Garden Association.

Keiji Uesugi is a licensed landscape architect and principal of TUA, Inc., with over 20 years of Japanese garden design experience, which includes the Japanese Friendship Garden San Diego, Roosevelt High School Garden of Peace, Coachella Valley History Museum Japanese garden, and the Huntington Japanese Garden centennial renovation. He is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at Cal Poly Pomona University where he teaches design, construction, and Asian gardens history. He focuses his research on Japanese American cultural landscapes such as the Japanese gardens of World War II confinement sites. In 2021, he created the first ethnic studies and landscape architecture course titled “The Japanese American Experience and the California Landscape.”

Logistics:

Meet at the Visitor Center at 9 a.m. Participants will be able to drive along the tour road to parking areas near the gardens; the tours will entail up to half a mile of walking. Chairs, water, a washing station, and a porta-potty will be provided at Merritt Park. Bring your own brown bag or picnic lunch and beverage. Bring a cloth bag if you wish to take some of Manzanar’s historic pears home. The Manzanar National Historic Site was established by Congress to preserve the story of the incarceration of over 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry solely because of their ethnicity; this history touches on many topics, including how a government can perpetuate racism, the harsh treatment of immigrants, and the abrogation of civil rights. In their gardens, the Japanese American incarcerees asserted pride in their heritage in the face of prejudice, hope and action in the face of forced confinement, and community and family ties in the face of imposed institutionalism. Thus, Manzanar’s gardens are not solely places of serenity and beauty, they also represent how individuals and small groups can work against the tyranny of divisiveness and war.

Manzanar National Historic Site is located at 5001 Highway 395, six miles south of Independence and nine miles north of Lone Pine, California. Learn more on our website at https://www.nps.gov/manz or explore “ManzanarNationalHistoricSite” on Facebook and “ManzanarNPS” on Instagram and YouTube.