Manzanar Committee

Are you curious about the Guayule Rubber Project at Manzanar? Would you like to know more?

The Greater Los Angeles Singles chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League is sponsoring an event featuring Frank Akira Kageyama who will speak about the Guayule Rubber Project at Manzanar, one of ten concentration camps where over 110,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. The event will be held on Saturday October 18, at 1:00 PM, at Merit Park Recreation Hall, 58 Merit Park Drive, Gardena, California, 90247-3840 (parking is on 158th Street or at Pacific Square, a short walk to the Recreation Hall on Merit Park Drive).

Kageyama, who is the brother of Mary Kageyama Nomura, known as the “Songbird of Manzanar,” was among a group of several dozen Japanese American chemists, horticulturists, and machinists at Manzanar, who made a unique contribution to America’s war effort during World War II, despite being imprisoned at Manzanar. To alleviate America’s wartime rubber shortage, they worked under the guidance of Dr. Robert Emerson, in partnership with the California Institute of Technology, to develop methods of cultivating, harvesting, and extracting rubber from guayule, a desert shrub native to Northern Mexico and Southwestern Texas.

Kageyama, 92, is one of the few remaining members of the guayule project. After the war, he and Hugh Anderson, the business manager for the project, traveled the world promoting the production of guayule as an alternative source of natural rubber.

The event is free and open to the public.

To RSVP or for more information, please call Louise Sakamoto at (310) 327-3169 or send e-mail to lsakamoto@sbcglobal.net.

This announcement was provided by the Greater Los Angeles Singles chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League. It is published here for informational purposes only. No endorsement by the Manzanar Committee, either expressed or implied, should be inferred by its publication.