Sue Kunitomi Embrey, 83; Former Internee Pushed for Historic Status of Manzanar

The first time she set foot on that stretch of desert land Sue Kunitomi Embrey was a 19-year-old with a dream of going to college.

It was 1942, World War II was on, and instead of starting freshman year, Embrey, like other Japanese Americans, was forced to live in an internment camp surrounded by barbed wire. She was sent to Manzanar War Relocation Center, off U.S. 395 in Inyo County.

Years later, after the war was over and the nation’s 10 camps were dismantled, many former internees were so traumatized they did not talk about the experience. But Embrey, who had become an activist, joined with younger Japanese Americans and in 1969 made a historic pilgrimage to Manzanar to publicly recount what happened there and the lessons it taught the nation.

“It’s important for children to learn that some things happened in America that we are not so proud of,” Embrey once told The Times. “It’s important to examine these things.”

Embrey, who launched a successful effort to have the Manzanar internment camp declared a national historic site, died Monday of kidney failure at a hospital in Los Angeles, family members told The Times. She was 83.

“She was a progressive activist who actually caused a change in thinking in the Japanese American community about the camps and revised history to reflect more accurately on the Japanese American internment,” said friend and biographer Diana Bahr.

Rose Ochi, a longtime friend and former internee, said Embrey “took the pain and the anger from the injustice she suffered and then channeled that into a lifetime dedicated to making certain that it never happened again.”

The pilgrimage to Manzanar is now an annual ritual for hundreds of Japanese Americans and others, who gather to remember the experience of Embrey and her generation.

Embrey was born Sueka Kunitomi in Los Angeles on Jan. 6, 1923. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which called for the internment of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, Embrey, her seven siblings and her widowed mother were forced to leave their home and the small market they owned.

Over the years Embrey recalled those times -- their dark-of-night arrival after a long train ride, their confusion and sadness -- sometimes with wrenching specificity:

“When we walked in, it was a little 20-by-25 foot [room] with canvas army cots and mattresses filled with hay,” she told an audience gathered at Manzanar in 2004. “My mother sat down on one of the cots and said, in Japanese, “Mm, a place like this?”

Embrey also remembered the apple orchard where her mother retreated to cry and be alone. She recalled the corners of the camp where guard towers stood and soldiers armed with machine guns and searchlights monitored the movements of internees.

After the shock of being forced to move, “people got together to build a community. We figured, we’re here; let’s make our lives better as long as we’re forced to stay here,” she told the St. Petersburg Times.

At the camp, Embrey became a reporter and then the editor of the Manzanar Free Press, the camp newspaper, a position that introduced her to progressive thought, Bahr said.

A friend encouraged Embrey to leave the camp and move to a region of the country where internment of Japanese Americans was not required.

She moved to Wisconsin and applied to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But campus officials informed her that a war-related project was being conducted and the school could not have a Japanese American on campus. Later she moved to Chicago and worked at a library, Bahr said.

At the end of the war, Embrey’s mother returned to Los Angeles, where Embrey joined her in 1948. She began a longtime commitment to political activism and worked with a group of nisei, U.S.-born children of Japanese immigrants, who supported the presidential bid of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace. The group, Nisei Progressives, later supported the United Farm Workers and the anti-Vietnam War effort.

Through her involvement with Nisei Progressives she met Garland Embrey and in 1950 the two were married. The couple would have two sons; Gary, who died earlier this year, and Bruce. The couple later divorced. Embrey is also survived by two brothers, Jack Kunitomi and Kimbo Kunitomi; daughter-in-law, Barbara; and two grandchildren.

In 1969, Embrey fulfilled her longtime dream when she graduated from Cal State L.A. Later, she received a master’s degree from USC and a state teaching credential. For 10 years, she worked for the Los Angeles Unified School District, teaching mentally disabled students, then kindergarten and first grade.

She pushed for United Teachers Los Angeles to hold workshops on how to teach about the plight of many Japanese Americans during World War II. Embrey also taught at Los Angeles Harbor College, UC Santa Barbara and USC and worked in curriculum development at UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center.

In April 1975, Embrey, Paul Tsuneishi and Phil Shigekuni formed E.O. 9066 Inc., one of many organizations created to campaign for redress and reparations for Japanese Americans interned during World War II.

Her work on the Manzanar issue earned Embrey praise and scorn.

She made the 1969 pilgrimage after she met a group of sansei, third generation Japanese Americans, who found a cause in Manzanar, Bahr said.

The event, which was reported widely, placed Embrey in the middle of a generational divide.

People of her age group wanted to be silent about the past. Younger Japanese Americans, some of whom had never heard their parents speak about the internment camps, told her, “You’ve got to be more vocal; you can’t be so soft,” said Juliet Wong, a friend of the family.

Later Embrey and Warren Furutani formed the Manzanar Committee and began a decades-long campaign to gain recognition for Manzanar, first as a state monument and then as a national historic site.

Outside the Japanese American community, resistance came from those who viewed the planned historic designations as a tribute to the nation’s former enemies, Ochi said.

The push to have Manzanar declared a California historic site, which was successful in 1972, “was very, very ugly,” Ochi said. The push for national historic site designation was delicate work that involved educating the public and Congress about the experience of Japanese Americans during World War II. Embrey and the committee once took a group of Japanese American World War II veterans with them to a meeting in Inyo County, where resistance was high.

When residents saw the veterans in their uniforms, wearing their medals, the assumptions about the camp being a tribute for the enemy unraveled, said Ochi, a lawyer and former member of the Los Angeles Police Commission.

Manzanar was declared a national historic site in 1992. For the next several years Embrey remained involved with the park, leading a commission created to advise the National Park Service on matters related to Manzanar and the history being preserved. Even as she looked back at the past, Embrey’s eye was on the future.

“I think having Manzanar named a national historic site is important for the whole nation, not just for those who were interned there,” Embrey said. “It’s part of American history and it gives the public an idea of what can happen if people don’t care.”