This horizontal 20-by-40-inch panorama documents the monument at Manzanar Relocation Center—the obelisk bearing Japanese characters reading “Monument to console the souls of the dead” that has become the most recognized icon of Japanese American incarceration. The monument, constructed by internees and dedicated in 1943, marks the Manzanar cemetery where those who died during imprisonment were interred.

Created in 1995, the work documents the community’s early effort at commemoration—a memorial constructed during incarceration itself, before the war’s end revealed the full scope of constitutional violation. The monument’s Japanese characters represented quiet resistance: marking death in the language the government attempted to suppress, maintaining cultural identity through commemorative inscription.

The monument’s survival across decades of abandonment demonstrates its construction quality and community significance. When Manzanar became a National Historic Site in 1992—the first camp to receive such designation—the monument had already served fifty years as focal point for annual pilgrimages organized by former internees and their descendants.

The horizontal format captures the monument within its landscape context: the Sierra Nevada’s eastern escarpment rising beyond, the desert setting that both imprisoned and inspired. The mountains’ permanence contrasts with the temporary structures that once surrounded the monument, geological time dwarfing the human catastrophe the obelisk commemorates.

The cemetery monument represents one of several memorials internees constructed at Manzanar, their investment in commemoration demonstrating understanding that memory required physical anchoring. Gardens, monuments, and markers created during incarceration prepared for the forgetting that followed, the physical memorials enduring when official memory preferred erasure.

The work documents community determination to mark trauma even during its occurrence, the monument serving generations of pilgrims who return annually to the site where their families were imprisoned.