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Professor Robert Nakamura was 6-years-old when his picture was taken as an inmate at Manzanar. Ye

One of Robert Nakamura’s earliest memories is standing in line for food at the Manzanar internment camp for Japanese Americans.

“We were incarcerated for no other reason than we had the face of the enemy,” said Nakamura, a UCLA film and television professor.

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces on Dec. 7, 1941, the U.S. government ordered the relocation of over 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent to internment camps all over the country.

On Saturday, Nakamura went back to visit the camp at Manzanar, California, 220 miles north of Los Angeles, to film the grand opening of the interpretive center built on the grounds of the old interment camp.

Nakamura plans to use footage from the ceremony as part of a documentary film he is working on.

This documentary project is organized by several different groups, among them the Center for Ethno-Communications at the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA and the Downtown Community Media Center, a community media organization.

The project is partly funded by the UCLA Center for Community Partnerships, which supports projects that link the community to academia.

“We are going to be driving parallels between the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, and the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 strikes, in terms of treatment of people who had perceived ties with the ‘enemy,’” said Nakamura, who is the executive director of the documentary project.

Nakamura has a personal reason for his interest in seeking similarities between the fate of Japanese Americans during World War II and Muslim Americans following the 2001 terrorist attack.

“On that day in September, I was still in my bed when my wife woke me up and told me to turn on the television, and later when I was watching the news I felt really guilty (because) I felt relieved that the suspected attackers were not Asians,” Nakamura said.

“Then, of course, I totally reversed myself, and worried about what will happen to Arab Americans, and to other people from the Middle East. But my first reaction was, ‘Thank God (they) weren’t Asians, we don’t have to go through that again,’” he said.

Nakamura spent three years in the Manzanar camp during World War II, from ages 6 to 9, and has subsequently visited the camp on many different occasions.

“I have been going on a pilgrimage to Manzanar for over 30 years, so I was actually on the first pilgrimage. But the one Saturday got a little more publicity because of the opening ceremonies,” Nakamura said.

The pilgrimage, organized by the Manzanar committee, is a yearly event which brings together Japanese Americans who were held in the internment camps.

“We do the pilgrimage every year with a visit up to Manzanar, where we pay homage to the people who were there,” said Sue Embry, chairwoman of the Manzanar committee and a speaker during the opening ceremonies.

Richard Popashin, a park ranger at Manzanar, said the road to securing funding and recognition for the park was long and difficult. But due to efforts of community activists such as Embry, Manzanar was declared a national historic site in 1992.

Nakamura went to Manzanar this year with his wife, his mother-in-law and his wife’s aunt. He spent most of his time behind the camera, but still found time to locate the Japanese rock garden his mother-in-law’s father constructed when he was imprisoned at Manzanar.

With more than 50 years already gone since his time at Manzanar, Nakamura still feels a strong connection to the camp.

“It’s always very moving when I go there. I spent a very traumatic part of my life there, so I always have an emotional tie to the place,” Nakamura said.

In 1989, people incarcerated in the Japanese American internment camps received an official letter of apology from the government and $20,000 each in symbolic redress fees.

Nakamura was among those who received these items, but said they are only token actions that cannot redress the full scope of what his family endured. His father lost the family’s produce market when he was imprisoned, and worked the rest of his life as a gardener as a result.

For Nakamura, Manzanar is also an ongoing theme for his movies. In 2002, he won an award for a documentary portraying the life and career of Japanese American photographer Toyo Miyatake.

Miyatake was most famous for his photograph of three boys standing behind a barbed wire fence, a picture that has come to symbolize the injustice of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

“We tend to use art as a catharsis, and in the beginning I think my earlier films were just that,” Nakamura said.

As a student at the UCLA film school, the first movie Nakamura ever made was about his childhood in Manzanar.

“I tried to recapture childhood memories of the camp, trying to work through everything,” Nakamura said of his first movie.

His subsequent films were somewhat less cathartic, focusing more on trying to bring life to the issue of interment camps for Japanese Americans.

“In the 1950s and 1960s the camps were never mentioned in history books, and the inmates themselves didn’t want to talk about them, and it was really the Sensai in the 1960s and 1970s who tried to bring attention to (the camps),” Nakamura said.

The Sensai are the third generation of Japanese Americans. Nakamura’s generation is referred to as the Nisei, or second generation, and Issei is the term for the immigrant generation.

“For a lot of the Nisei, the fact that the camp has been preserved and has gotten funding kind of validates their experience,” Nakamura said.

“Our experiences will not be forgotten.”

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