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

The summary

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.

The question she could not answer

The book exists because of one question. Around 1971 her nephew Gary — born inside Manzanar, unable to get his own parents to discuss it — came to see her after a Berkeley sociology class mentioned the camp’s name. She gave him the family version: bad mess-hall food, the windstorms, we played baseball. “I just made it look like it was really some recreational camp,” she said. Then he pushed back. You’re talking about a prison like it was nothing — how did you feel about it?

“And for one moment, I allowed myself to feel,” she recalled. “No one ever asked me how I felt about that incident. And I just broke into tears and I just became hysterical.” She thought she was having a nervous breakdown.

She started talking into a tape recorder, meaning it only for the family’s nieces and nephews — seven of whom had been born in camp and knew nothing about it. Her husband, the novelist James D. Houston, heard the real story for the first time and told her it wasn’t a keepsake. Houghton Mifflin published it in 1973.

Two words for the same barbed wire

Which word you use for Manzanar is itself an open argument. Densho, the leading archive of this history, holds that “internment” is a legal term for detaining enemy aliens in wartime and becomes a euphemism when applied to citizens jailed by their own government — two-thirds of those held were US citizens by birth. Densho prefers “concentration camp.” The 50th-anniversary edition’s cover copy says “incarceration camp,” where the original 1973 subtitle said “Internment.”

The Wakatsukis are the rare family in which both words are literally accurate. Jeanne’s father, an Issei immigrant barred by race from ever becoming a citizen, was arrested as an enemy alien and held in a Department of Justice camp — internment in the strict sense. His wife and children were removed under Executive Order 9066, signed 19 February 1942, and held by the War Relocation Authority at Manzanar: 3,900 feet up in the Owens Valley, 10,046 people at its peak on 22 September 1942, closed on 21 November 1945. Nationally, the Park Service says over 110,000 people were ordered from their homes; Densho cites the WRA’s tally of 120,313.

What the camp did to Papa

Ko Wakatsuki was a commercial fisherman, accused of supplying oil to the Japanese. An FBI sweep took him to Fort Lincoln, the Justice Department camp outside Bismarck, North Dakota, where more than 1,100 Issei community leaders — Buddhist priests, language-school teachers, newspaper editors, heads of immigrant business and cultural organisations — arrived in February 1942. The hearings there went badly enough that an internal immigration-service inquiry found Issei had been unjustly abused.

Jeanne was seven. Her father, she said, was the powerful centre of a tight family of ten children, a proud man who spoke English with a British accent picked up studying in Japan — “you felt safe with him and then suddenly he’s gone.” He was gone about a year before rejoining them inside Manzanar, and the man who came back was not the same one. In her words: “it wasn’t an issue until after he came back from Bismarck and after Manzanar and you know, he began drinking and, oh, it was like total change. And he never spoke to a Caucasian after that. He was quite bitter. Quite bitter.”

That is the book’s real subject. Her own verdict: “He didn’t die there, but things finished for [my father] there, whereas for me it was like a birthplace. The camp was where our life lines intersected.”

The damage outlasted the camp

Houston is unusually good on the small mechanics of how confinement takes a family apart — a mess hall replacing the family dinner, until the household stops assembling at all. The camp’s wider history runs underneath without taking over: the December 1942 uprising, when military police fired into a crowd and killed 17-year-old James Ito and, days later, 21-year-old Jim Kanagawa; the 1943 loyalty questionnaire, whose Question 28 asked Issei to forswear allegiance to the Emperor when American law already barred them from any other citizenship.

The frame stays at child height. After release the family lived in a Long Beach housing project, her mother in a cannery, her father never re-establishing himself. Jeanne spent her school years working to be accepted and to put the whole thing behind her; it took three decades to find out she hadn’t.

She resisted calling it a camp story: “This is a human story.” She was right about why it travels: kids call her up and write to her about their fathers being alcoholics. Official acknowledgement came much later: a congressional commission blamed “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership,” and Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act in August 1988, granting $20,000 and an apology to each survivor. The book came fifteen years earlier, when Kirkus could report a friend calling the subject “a dead issue.”

The bottom line

The camp lasted three years for the Wakatsukis; the silence afterwards lasted almost twenty-five, and the silence is what Houston set out to write about. It’s the story of a father broken over a Dakota winter and a daughter who needed most of her life to notice.

Read it for American incarceration at human scale, or alongside Anne Frank’s diary, which it has long been compared to. Short, unsentimental, and much harder than its reading level suggests.