One evening in October 2004, about one hundred miles east of Fresno, California, 79-year-old Mary Kageyama Nomura returned to the concentration camp where she had been illegally imprisoned as a teenager, and to the stage where she had earned the moniker “the songbird of Manzanar.” Now an elder in the Japanese American community, Nomura had returned to the site of her imprisonment to perform the popular songs of her youth once more, this time as a cast member of the touring musical revue Camp Dance. For a few short hours, the auditorium at Manzanar was once again a dance hall.

Manzanar National Historic Site, which is now a museum and national park, was constructed as a concentration camp where over 10,000 Japanese American people were illegally incarcerated by the United States government.1 It was one of ten such sites that, all told, imprisoned over 120,000 Japanese Americans from...

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