Colors of Confinement

Colors of Confinement

Edited by Eric L. Muller, Photography by Bill Manbo
4.5 stars
Reviewer: Nichole 

 

In 1988 I was 15 years old, and I knew that my grandmother was supposed to be getting a check from the US government because they put her in a Japanese internment camp during WWII.  I have since learned that her family had been living in Beverly Hills, and they ran a fruit market up until 1942, when they were rounded up and confined in the Manzanar Internment Camp in California.  She was 19 at the time, the youngest of 6 children, and when she was released in 1944 and had nowhere to go, no family business to go back to, she joined the US Army, the very military that took from her family their possessions and livelihood, and put them in a camp.  The idea of it boggled my mind until I read the book Colors of Confinement.

Upon first glance, the photos in this collection are all shot in Kodachrome, which if you know anything about film photography, you know that this film was a little special, a little more colorful, a little brighter than the average film of the time.  And the oddness of the colors contrasting with the subjects being shot, are what makes this book fascinating even to someone who is not a descendant of an internee.  There are beautiful smiling faces in fancy dress, squinting into the bright Wyoming sun, standing in front of their barracks, surrounded by barbed wire fence and a barren land beyond that surrounded the Heart Mountain Internment Camp.  These were not Japanese loyalists.  These were Boy Scouts and children wearing American fighter pilot uniforms, holding onto their American dream.  There are photos of prisoners who made an ice rink and taught their children to skate, toiled away at digging a massive hole deep enough to create a summer swimming hole, and stood in long lines to watch patriotic American films at the theaters in the camp.  There were schools and sports teams, and people tried their best to live their lives with hopes of one day regaining their freedom, and these pictures depict that hope and sadness in every shot.  One particular photo caught a rainbow, which comes down and ends at the building on the camp that functions as the latrine and laundry.  Among the contrasting photos are outright bleak shots of the camp itself, desolate and utterly robbed of humanity.  Manbo captured it all.

Bill Manbo himself is a character worth knowing.  In one photo you can see him showing off the model cars he and his friend made, sitting on the porch he built a shelter around, whereupon he wrote the family name “Manbeaux”, as if it were French, and therefore more acceptable to Americans.  

Some of the more stunning photos are peeks into the lives of the Japanese, such as the Buddhist dance ritual, Bon Odori and a sumo wrestling event.  Occasionally, on work release, there are photographic peeks outside of the Heart Mountain camp, where Bill Manbo (and occasionally his family) were allowed, such as a trip to Yellowstone.

When you read this book, and you see the vitality and patriotism that runs so deep in the prisoners, you can understand why some panicked when they were released and refused to leave camps.  You can also understand why, when they had lost everything and lived in barracks for 2 years, they gravitated toward a military career.  And you can also understand why, post-WWII, Japanese-Americans stopped marrying and having children with Japanese, and in unprecedented numbers and unbelievable gusto, began marrying only Americans and abandoning their own culture.  Somehow that $20,000 reparation check in the 1980s just doesn’t seem like justice, but Colors of Confinement brings clarity to an era that most Americans don’t even bother thinking about anymore.  It’s a long overdue tribute that will give you smiles and pangs, and I challenge you not to find Mr. Manbo’s young boy, Billy, the ultimate symbol of wrongful incarceration, wearing his American pilot jacket while playing on a barbed wire fence.