Pro-internment book for sale at historic site

MANZANAR NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE, Calif. -- Amid a landscape of brush and bleak-colored trees, a solitary watchtower stands guard, one of eight that once ringed this former World War II internment camp just south of the remote town of Independence.

Nearby, a wooden military-style barracks is also being replicated as a reminder of an ignominious chapter in the country's past, when people of Japanese descent were uprooted from their homes and sent by the busloads into one of 10 internment camps scattered across the West and Arkansas.

But as the National Park Service continues to develop and restore this former relocation center, a book offered for sale at this historic site's gift shop has startled some visitors and sparked a debate over whether the Park Service should pull the book, ''In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror" by Michelle Malkin.

''We've had a few people come up and ask, 'What's this book doing here?' " said Carrie Andersen, a park ranger who works at the bookstore, which is operated by the Park Service and sponsored by the Manzanar History Association.

The Park Service has received some 200 e-mails on the subject, some condemning the book as propaganda. Critics, including the Japanese American Citizens League, have accused the National Park Service of dishonoring the memory of the 11,000 people who were detained at the wartime facility. Some 110,000 were detained in similar camps.

But the vast majority of the correspondence, to the surprise of park officials, has been in support of the government's decision to carry the book, a former bestseller. The Manzanar bookstore has sold only a handful of copies.

Malkin's book justifies the internments of thousands of people with Japanese ancestry by drawing parallels to the current war on terror. Malkin, who writes a nationally syndicated column, says the government's World War II action was a reasonable action to thwart potential spies and subversives.

Malkin did not respond to a request for an interview sought through her column distributor.

The federal government has since apologized for the internment camps, in which more than 110,000 people were held until the end of the war, two-thirds of whom were born in the United States. In 1988, Congress authorized reparation payments of $20,000 to each surviving internee, for a total of $1.25 billion.

The Park Service has no plans to stop selling the book, said Alisa Lynch, head of interpretive services at Manzanar, located 200 miles north of Los Angeles in one of California's most isolated mountain-range communities.

The book is carried along with others more critical of the government's order to relocate Japanese-American citizens, including ''Personal Justice Denied," the official report on the wartime detainment."

To pull it off the shelf would undermine the whole education effort," Lynch said. ''It is not the Manzanar National Memorial; it is the Manzanar Historic Site. Our purpose is for education. But that said, we do want to honor the 11,070 people, men, women, and children, who were here. We're certainly not doing it to be disrespectful."

A small stack of letters explaining the rationale for stocking the book is kept behind the bookstore counter.

Not carrying the book, the letter says, ''could ironically be viewed as denying the First Amendment rights to free speech."

The Park Service said that ''presenting a variety of viewpoints, when appropriate, is essential" to create context and open dialogue.

''People aren't being forced to buy the book," Lynch said in an interview. ''I question the scholarship in the book, and it's not a book I personally agree with, but we try to carry relevant titles."

The first wave of e-mails arrived in April, but it is unclear to Lynch what might have generated it. Most of the e-mails urged the Park Service to ''keep the book."

A second wave of e-mails came in August, as the controversy spread more widely in the Asian-American community.

''If we had our druthers, we would not want the book at the site because it dishonors the memory of the people who were interned there," said Ken Inouye, national president of the Japanese American Citizens League.

''We certainly respect the First Amendment," Inouye said. ''But in this case, we have a government agency carrying that kind of book."

''In this day and age, censorship is very dangerous," said Marjorie Matsushita Sperling, who spent seven months at the Hart Mountain camp in Wyoming and who declines to criticize the Park Service for carrying the book.

Since it opened in April 2004, the historical site at Manzanar has had more than 140,000 visitors. All of the original 800 buildings, including some 500 barracks, are gone. The site features memorabilia and replicas of living quarters.