Student Question
How does life at Manzanar in Farewell to Manzanar reflect the interned people's Asian background?
Quick answer:
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir of her and thousands of other Japanese American families’ internment in prison camps offers numerous first-person descriptions of the indignities to which these Americans were subjected due solely to their Asian heritage. Loyal citizens of the United States were suddenly treated as hostile foreign elements, their lives forever changed by racial animosity.
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir of her and her family’s years in an internment camp during World War II provides important insight into the Japanese American experience and the role of racism in undermining the values upon which the United States of America was founded.
As a direct response to the surprise attack by the Japanese Imperial Navy on US possessions in the Philippine Islands and, most important, in the Hawaiian Islands, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment of American citizens of Japanese heritage. Japanese American farmers and business owners along the nation’s western seaboard were systematically rounded-up, put on trains, and deposited in fenced-in enclosures for the duration of the war. Despite being loyal American citizens before the outbreak of the war, Japanese Americans came under immediate suspicion of serving as a fifth column of sorts for the Japanese government. Wakatsuki’s memoir Farewell to Manzanar is her description of...
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the indignities to which her family and thousands of others were subjected solely on the basis of their ethnicity.
Japan is a maritime nation, and the consumption of seafood is not only a physical necessity given the absence of meat, but fishing is also a part of Japanese culture. The affinity for commercial fishing, even on the micro-scale common among lower-class Japanese fishermen, extended to Japanese communities residing among the west coast of the United States. Wakatsuki Houston’s description of her family and her father’s vocation, therefore, reflects the Asian cultural and economic milieu in which she and her brothers were raised—until, that is, the chain of events that provided the basis of her memoir. Note in the following passage from early in Farewell to Manzanar the author’s description of her father’s affinity for the sea and for his role in providing for his family:
Papa’s boat was called The Nereid—long, white, low-slung, with a foredeck wheel cabin … (T)he Nereid was his pride. It was worth $25,000 before the war, and the way he stood in the cabin steering toward open water you would think the whole fleet was under his command.
The “whole fleet” to which Wakatsuki Houston refers is the collection of small fishing boats operated by other Japanese Americans similarly employed in the service of their families and community. This particular morning, however, the ritual is interrupted by news of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. What follows goes to the heart of the book’s emphasis on Asian ancestry in perceptual conflict with fealty to an adopted country when the two come into conflict:
The night Papa burned the flag he had brought with him from Hiroshima thirty-five years earlier … He burned a lot of papers, too, documents, anything that might suggest he still had some connection with Japan. These precautions didn’t do him much good.
As the author notes, within weeks the family’s life was irrevocably changed. The federal government had begun its measures to contain Japanese American families out of concern for any perceived threat the latter could pose to a country now at war with Japan.
As Wakatsuki Houston’s family is relocated, along with the others, to internment camps hundreds of miles inland and their land and businesses taken from them, the role of their Asian ancestry becomes all-consuming. No longer productive members of society, they were now treated as enemy agents, deprived of their freedom and their culture. The author relates stories of white assumptions regarding Japanese tastes and culture that conflict with reality, as when camp greeters and food servers reflect ignorance of Japanese traditions. Farewell to Manzanar is replete with descriptions of the injustices to which the camp’s inhabitants were routinely subjected, even by well-meaning white camp officials. As the “prisoners” struggle to adapt to their new surroundings, they are forced more than ever before to observe how a nation to which they had emigrated and called their home treated them like foreign, hostile subjects.