Phyllis Tajii and Henry Kaku had distinctly different experiences growing up, hearing about their families’ time imprisoned in internment camps during World War II. For Tajii, the details were left mostly untold and masked in silent trauma. Kaku’s childhood, conversely, was marked by an incessant stream of angered recollections from his father.

What unites them, both born shortly after the war and now married and based in Petaluma, is how their families’ stories, along with those of countless others, have been largely obscured in the larger American imagination. “Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams,” a traveling exhibition at the Museum of Sonoma County, can be seen as an education and a corrective, albeit a small one, to this oversight in U.S. history.

The show opened in Santa Rosa on Feb. 19, the 80th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The order, triggered by the paranoia in the weeks following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, authorized the rounding up of some 120,000 Japanese Americans into what Tajii, co-president of the Sonoma County Japanese American Citizens League, describes as “concentration camps.”

“We’re using the word camp, because that’s what our parents called them, but really these are prison camps,” says Kaku, chairman of the Speakers Bureau of the Sonoma County JACL.

“Manzanar,” which made stops most recently at Fenimore Art Museum in New York and Upcountry History Museum in South Carolina, provides a glimpse into the experience through a collection of 50 little-known photos that renowned San Francisco photographer Ansel Adams took while visiting the Manzanar incarceration camp in Central California. The exhibition juxtaposes those images with photos and artifacts organized by the Sonoma County JACL depicting the internment experiences of Japanese Americans from Sonoma County. Through Adams’ images, imprisonment is embodied by snapshots of quotidian life and quiet dignity amid harrowing circumstances: children in Sunday school, farmers working in the potato field, men in their U.S. military uniforms.

“你可以看到它的照片,这是something that’s been talked about in the past — that maybe his lens on it is a little too positive,” says Eric Stanley, the museum’s associate director and curator of history. “There are people who are smiling and productive and working and playing baseball. But I think there’s a goal in mind there, that the depiction is going to show people who are loyal: they look like Americans doing things that anyone would be doing.”

While Adams more explicitly condemns the incarcerations in his writings about the photographs in his 1944 book, “Born Free and Equal,” the photos indeed contrast with those taken, for instance, by fellow San Francisco photographer Dorothea Lange, whose work is also featured in the show. One of a few photographers commissioned by the U.S. government to capture a propagandist version during the early period of the incarceration of Japanese Americans, Lange instead documented the horrors of families being rounded up in photographs that were ultimately impounded by the state.

Adams’ photos, then, exist in an ambivalent state. They make more real and tangible this dark period of life that Kaku’s parents described to him over the years. Yet, Tajii says, “there are things that aren’t shown in the photos, like the experience that they went through with my grandfather.”

Tajii’s grandfather was one of the first Japanese Americans taken by the FBI and separated from his family. After they were reunited in the Poston Camp in Arizona, he attempted to end his life.

“This story never came out when the redress hearings were going on,” Tajii says, referencing the testimonies that preceded the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which offered a belated apology and reparations to surviving Japanese Americans. “There are stories like this that I’m sure never came out.”

Tajii’s mother told this story about her father a year before she died in 2012, a rare occurrence for someone who could never bear to detail her time in the camps.

“She could never really talk about it when we would ask her questions,” Tajii says. “She would just go silent, and she’d start to cry and leave.”

The silence that Tajii’s parents maintained was common.

“In all these years, I’ve found that probably more than half of the families did not speak about the experience during the war,” Kaku says. “For many, they felt very ashamed of being taken away, ashamed of losing everything, ashamed of being unable — and (this is) the first generation — being unable to take care of their family and provide for their family … they wanted to erase that history.”

Kaku’s family spoke frequently about their incarceration, partially because of his father’s resentment over his treatment as a “no-no boy” – someone who, in protest, answered “no” to the loyalty questions that the War Relocation Authority forced Japanese Americans to answer. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, he was kicked out of the U.S. Army, imprisoned, and eventually deported with his family back to Japan. It wasn’t until years later, with the help of a civil rights attorney, that he and his family regained their citizenship and were allowed to return to their the U.S., where they settled in Palo Alto.

If Adams’ photos do not capture these indignities, it does document the resilience and humanity that persisted, Kaku and Tajii say.

“I think what (Adams) was trying to show in his photographs was how the people were trying to cope and make life as normal as possible in such an un-normal situation,” Tajii says.

While “Manzanar” attempts to assess a distant history, it is shadowed by its tragic relevance to the contemporary rise in anti-Asian sentiment and the spate of random violence against Asian Americans during the pandemic.

“It just shows that it hasn’t gone away,” Kaku says. “Different circumstances may have caused it, but the hatred toward Asians and hatred toward basically, in my opinion, all minorities (and) people of color that exists in this country … it is repeating itself.”

Even if it only scratches the surface of this ugly period of American history, the exhibition, Kaku and Tajii hope, will educate about a history that is ever present.

“The more people that we educate with this knowledge,” Kaku says, “hopefully they’ll be one of the few that will speak up when it happens again — tomorrow, or next year or in 10 years.”

“Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams”:Photography. Through May 29. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday. $7-$10; free to members and children 12 and younger. Museum of Sonoma County, 425 Seventh St., Santa Rosa.museumsc.org