Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston
Farewell to Manzanar
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973)
Jeanne (Toyo) Wakatsuki Houston was born September 26, 1934 in Inglewood California. She is the daughter of first and second-generation Japanese American parents. Her father Ko, a fisherman, was born in Hiroshima while her mother Riku was born in Hawaii. Jeanne and her family were detained at Manzanar, a Japanese internment camp, during World War II. After their release from the camp in 1945 Jeanne's brothers and sisters moved to the East Coast while Jeanne and her parents moved back to California. Several years after the war Jeanne entered the University of San Jose. While attending the University, Jeanne studied sociology and journalism. During her college years Jeanne met her husband James D. Houston. The couple married in 1957. Between 1955-57 Jeanne worked as a group worker as well as a juvenile probation officer in San Mateo, California. Soon after leaving her job Jeanne left for France where she studied at the Sorbonne as well as the University of Paris. During this point in her life Jeanne started to focus on her writing. In 1973 her book Farewell to Manzanar was published. The screenplay for the book was written in 1976. In 1984 she wrote Don't Cry, It's Only Thunder with Paul G. Hensler. She published Beyond Manzanar and other views of Asian-American Womanhood in 1985. Jeanne is also the author of the teleplay "Barrio" with her husband James D. Houston. Jeanne has won a number of awards including the Humanities Prize and the Christopher Award both for the screenplay Farewell to Manzanar as well as an award from the National Women's Political Caucus and the Wonder Woman award both in 1984. She currently lives in Santa Cruz, California with James and their children Corinne, Joshua and Gabrielle.
During World War II over 110,000 Japanese Americans were interned in camps set up by the United States government. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and her family spent three and a half years in one of those camps. The Wakatsuki family, along with ten thousand other Japanese Americans, were shipped to Manzanar. The Manzanar internment camp was located in the desert between Los Angeles and Reno, Nevada. In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne explains how she and her family were one of the first families shipped to the internment camps and one of the last to be released. Jeanne's family, being fishermen, were seen as a threat to national security (the government believed they would smuggle oil to the Japanese navy).
Jeanne's memoirs are not only her story but also the story of her family. Her father was deeply affected by the experience. This event seemed to strip him of his spirit. Although Jeanne was only seven when she arrived at the camp, the experience dramatically changed her life. She struggled for years to find peace within her own identity. Jeanne has compared the incident to a rape. According to her, "You feel you must have done something. You feel you are part of the act."1 It took her almost twenty-five years to talk about the experience. Jeanne's visit back to Manzanar in 1972 helped her come to terms with her experience; she no longer felt ashamed of what she had gone through. She realized the experience made her who she is. According to Jeanne, "Papa's life ended at Manzanar, though he lived for twelve more years after getting out. Until this trip I had not been able to admit that my own life really began there."2
Notes:
1James G. Lesniak and Hal May, Contemporary Authors 29 (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1990), p 207.
2 Jeanne Wakatsuki and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), p 140.
Further Readings:
Catherine Lavender and Lillian Schlissel, eds., The Western Women's Reader (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000)
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Beyond Manzanar and Other Views of Asian-American Womanhood (Capra Press, 1985)
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and Paul G. Hensler, Don't Cry, It's Only Thunder (New York: Doubleday, 1984)
Lauren Kessler, Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese Family (Plume Press, 1994)
Elaine Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and their Social Context (Temple University Press, 1984)
Susan Cahill, Writing Women's Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical narrative by 20th Century American Women Writers (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994)
Page Smith, Democracy on Trial: The Japanese American Evacuation and Relocation in World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
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