The two stone gate guard house are among the most recognizable and enduring landmarks of the Manzanar War Relocation Center. They were built in 1942, shortly after the camp was established. While the rest of the camp’s hundreds of wooden and tarpaper structures were dismantled or auctioned off after World War II, these stone guard houses (along with the camp’s auditorium) were left standing.
They were built by Ryozo Kado, an incarcerated Japanese-American landscape artist and master stonemason who was confined at the camp. Kado directed a crew of incarcerated Japanese-American workers who volunteered or took on construction roles to build infrastructure within the camp. The crew hand-collected local stones from the surrounding Owens Valley and the nearby Inyo Mountains to construct the gate houses. Though they served as the military sentry post and internal police checkpoint to monitor entrance and exit to the camp, Kado and his crew deliberately integrated subtle Asian architectural elements into the design, most notably visible in the flared, pagoda-like styling of the shingled roofs.
