Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Incarceration

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston went almost twenty-five years without saying the word camp out loud — not to her husband of fifteen years, not even to the girls who had been behind the wire with her. She describes running into one of them, Akiko Shigetomi, in Long Beach after the war, and the two of them being too embarrassed to mention it. “We never mentioned camp,” she told a Japanese American National Museum interviewer in 2005. That silence, not the barracks, is what this memoir is about.

James D. Houston on SummaryShelf

Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Incarceration