page_title: Manzanar Children's Village
section_title: During the war
hierarchical_section_title: Manzanar Children's Village / During the war
caption_attribution_description: Scope and content: The full caption for this photograph reads: Manzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California. Street scene of barrack homes at this War Relocation Authority Center. The windstorm has subsided and the dust has settled.
context_page_description: The Manzanar Children's Village was an orphanage for children of Japanese ancestry incarcerated during World War II as a result of Executive Order 9066, under which President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast of the United States. Contained within the Manzanar concentration camp in Owens Valley, California, it held a total of 101 orphans from June 1942 to September 1945.
context_section_description: Orphanage board and staff members attempted to dissuade authorities from sending orphans to camp without success. . Col. Karl R. Bendetsen, "determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must all go to camp," gave the order to begin removing children from orphanages on April 28, 1942. The Assistant Director of the Shonein, Lillian Iida, a 29-year-old Nisei woman, fought against the Army plan to divide the orphans equally amongst the staff and send each staff member, with orphans, to an internment camp as a new family unit. The result of her opposition to the Army's plan was the building of the Children's Village at Manzanar. Lillian and her new husband, Harry Matsumoto, then ran the Children's Village for the early years of the war.  The nuns of the Maryknoll Home managed to find foster homes outside the exclusion zone for 26 of the 33 orphans in their charge. The 61 remaining children in Maryknoll, Shonien and the Salvation Army Home were slated for removal. On June 23, 1942, they were bused, under armed guard, with several adult caretakers from Los Angeles to Manzanar. Over the next few months, approximately thirty more children from Washington, Oregon and Alaska, mostly orphans who had been living with non-Japanese foster families, would arrive in Manzanar. Infants born to unmarried mothers in other WRA camps were also sent to Children's Village over the next three years.
  Children's Village consisted of three barracks — one for staff apartments and communal areas, and two that contained the children's dormitories — located across from barracks 28 and 29, near the hospital, at the northwest end of the Manzanar complex. With running water and independent kitchen and bathroom facilities, the orphanage was largely self-contained and operated separately from the rest of the camp. Harry and Lillian Matsumoto, social workers who accompanied the Shonien orphans and served as superintendents of Children's Village, led the children in a daily schedule of breakfast, a Christian service, school, homework, recreation, and dinner. Younger children went to bed at 7:30 p.m., and a curfew of 9:00 p.m. was enforced for the rest of the Village.
  The children had very little interaction with other Japanese Americans in Manzanar. Because the orphanage facilities were more self-sufficient than the family barracks, there was little need to leave the Village. They ate inside the orphanage with their caretakers, separate from other camp inmates, who ate their meals in communal mess halls assigned by block. Additionally, they were ostracized by other children, who had been told by their parents not to play with the orphans. This isolation, and the fact that many orphans came to Manzanar together and had known each other and their staff guardians for years, made the closure of Children's Village at the end of the war especially difficult.
caption: Barracks at the Manzanar concentration camp. ("Barracks with Mt. Williamson" by Dorothea Lange)
exif: {}