Japanese-American Internment Camp (Location Key)

At the start of World War II the U.S. government created internment camps to which the Japanese-Americans living on the west coast were removed as a possible threat to the war effort against Japan. Requiem for a Nun refers to "a California detention camp for enemy aliens" (194), though almost two-thirds of the 110,000-120,000 people interned were American citizens, and though it's not clear that any were "enemies." Two of the ten camps on the U.S. mainland were in California; Japanese-Americans from northern California and further north were interned at Tule Lake, but it's likely that Faulkner was thinking of the camp at Manzanar, opened in March, 1942, as the first camp, and where Japanese-Americans from the Los Angeles area were taken. About a quarter of the people who were interned were in these two California camps.