‘Farewell to Manzanar’ author tells the story behind the story

 

By George Toshio Johnston

SAN PEDRO, Calif. — A packed audience of more than 130 listened and interacted with “Farewell to Manzanar” co-author Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston at an event sponsored by the Friends of the San Pedro Library on Sunday, Jan. 31.

Originally published in 1973, “Farewell to Manzanar” recounts through the recollections of a then-7-year-old girl how the life of an American family in California was disrupted by a federal government-sponsored program to remove all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast to 10 remote inland “internment camps” in the months following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into WWII.

Houston, whose family was sent to the Manzanar encampment, told the gathering that the book came about in the decades following the end of the war when her nephew, who was born in an internment camp and had few memories of that time, began asking her about the camp experience.

Until that time, Houston said that in her family, the camp experience was either not discussed or dismissed with the Japanese phrase “shikata ga nai” (it cannot be helped). Her nephew’s questions and his incredulous reaction to the answers, however, led her to revisit that period of her life. The experience left her shaken, with Houston likening the reawakening of the memories of those times to what psychologists studying Vietnam War veterans would later call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

 “My feeling was like a person who had been raped,” Houston said, in answer to a question from the audience. “You’re the ‘victim.’ But you’re ashamed for attention to be drawn to it. Some people are going to blame you. Some of it is humiliating, and I think that’s the closest thing that I felt.”

Houston said she began discussing what had happened to her family during WWII with her husband, James Houston, who died last year. Although they had been married at the time for more than 15 years, the topic had never been discussed and he was astounded by what he learned. He convinced her that the stories, which they taped over the course of a year, deserved a wider audience that the mere family memoir project she originally envisioned. As they began writing and researching the Internment, the Houstons discovered that there were some 40 or so books written about the subject. They also discovered, however, that none of the books were written by a Japanese American who had directly experienced it.

Thus, with Houston’s husband as the co-author, that family memoir project became “Farewell to Manzanar,” which has sold more than 1.5 million copies and continues to be read by students nearly 40 years since it was originally published. In 2003, the state of California provided 10,000 copies on VHS tape of the telefilm adaptation of the book to public schools.

Still, despite the success of “Farewell to Manzanar,” Houston noted that to this day she still comes across people who never have heard of the Evacuation, Internment and Resettlement of Japanese Americans during and after WWII.

One of the unexpected highlights of the event was when an audience member who identified herself as Yae Marumoto introduced herself as a fourth-grade classmate of Houston’s at Manzanar. “We were in the same class,” she said. “When I saw your name, I just knew I had to come because I sat next to you.” Houston remembered her and recalled how their teacher was a no-nonsense Kentuckian named Miss Bailey.

Houston noted that her book was a piece of a bigger movement that re-examined what happened to Japanese Americans living along the West Coast during WWII, a movement that eventually led to 1988’s Civil Liberties Act, in which the U.S. government apologized for its actions and monetarily compensated the roughly 60,000 of the still-living approximately 120,000 people who were originally interned.

“This victory was not for Japanese Americans alone. It was a great victory for all Americans, because the Internment was a very important American issue, not just a Japanese American issue,” Houston said. “The Civil Liberties Act proved that our Constitution was not just a piece of parchment under glass in the National Archives. It is a living and vital contract that binds all of us together as Americans, and if that contract is broken, as in 1942, it is not just the rights of individuals that is threatened, it is the very fabric of this nation.”

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[Finansit7]

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