Farewell to Manzanar

In 1941, Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old, living with her family in Long Beach, California.  Her father, a successful and domineering captain, owned two valuable fishing boats while her two older brothers served as crew.  But the bombing of Pearl Harbor stunned America and swiftly led to the incarceration of 110,000 Japanese, many of whom had lived in the United States for decades.  Farewell to Manzanar is Jeanne Wakatsuki’s moving and thoughtful account of her own and her family’s experience of losing their home and belongings, their boats, and their freedom.  

From Jeanne’s young perspective, there were occasional light moments:

We drove past a barbed-wire fence, through a gate, and into an open space where trunks and sacks and packages had been dumped from the baggage trucks that drove out ahead of us. I could see a few tents set up, the first rows of black barracks, and beyond them, blurred by sand, rows of barracks that seemed to spread for miles across this plain. People were sitting on cartons or milling around, with their backs to the wind, waiting to see which friends or relatives might be on this bus. As we approached, they turned or stood up, and some moved toward us expectantly.  But inside the bus, no one stirred. No one waved or spoke. They just stared out the windows, ominously silent. I didn’t understand this. Hadn’t we finally arrived, our whole family intact? I opened a window, leaned out, and yelled happily, “Hey! This whole bus is full of Wakatsukis!”

Outside, the greeters smiled. Inside there was an explosion of laughter, hysterical, tension-breaking laughter that left my brothers choking and whacking each other across the shoulders. 

 For Jeanne, there were some disturbing experiences, but there were also some positive features to the camp.  But when the war was over and the incarcerated family members were allowed, or eventually compelled, to leave the camp and find a home, the adjustment to post-war American life was challenging.  

They wouldn’t see me, they would see the slant-eye face, the Asian. This is what accounts, in part, for the entire evacuation. You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals. Of course, for such a thing to happen, there has to be a kind of acquiescence on the part of the victims, some submerged belief that this treatment is deserved, or at least allowable.  It’s an attitude easy for nonwhites to adopt in America. I had inherited it. Manzanar had confirmed it. And my feeling, at eleven, went something like this: you are going to be invisible anyway, so why not completely disappear.

But another part of me did not want to disappear.  With the same sort of reaction that sent Woody into the Army, I instinctively decided that I would have to prove that I wasn’t different, that it should not be odd to hear me speaking English. From that day forward, I lived with this double impulse: the urge to disappear and the desperate desire to be acceptable.

Later, after marriage Jeanne takes her husband and family to visit Manzanar - which is almost gone, with only remnants of the barracks and guard stations.  Interestingly, the US Park Service has created a National Historical Site with reconstructed barracks and an excellent visitor center.   Altogether the book is a fine introduction to a young person's view of the events surrounding the incarceration and its effect on the loyal citizens who were treated so unfairly.

It is sobering to recall that though the Japanese relocation program, carried through at such incalculable cost in misery and tragedy, was justified on the ground that the Japanese were potentially disloyal, the record does not disclose a single case of Japanese disloyalty or sabotage during the whole war…

-Henry Steele Commager, Harper’s Magazine, 1947