Farewell to Manzanar
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We would then have to explain the difference. And it is a profound difference, which takes a lot of explaining. But it goes to the very heart of the matter. Most of the Americans interned in the Philippines were military personnel captured in an oversea combat zone, prisoners of war being held by enemy troops. Most of those interned in the United States were native-born American citizens; they were all civilians, imprisoned inside the borders of their own country, without a trial, and their captors were other Americans.
Since this book came out, more than a quarter of a century has passed. World War Two is that much further behind us, and such comments aren’t heard so much anymore. For new generations of readers this story is often their first exposure to the wartime internment and its human costs. And as our society becomes ever more diverse, more and more people bring their own immigrant experience to the reading. We have found that for many young readers this book offers more than a window into a telling episode in American history. In Ko and Riku Wakatsuki they often see something of their parents or grandparents, who had to contend with great challenges to reach the United States and, once they arrived, struggled to find a place in a new land.
In recent years Jeanne has visited many dozens of schools, from California and Oregon to Texas and Washington, D.C., and she has discovered that, for readers of many backgrounds, the story of a young girl who finds herself separated from the larger society for reasons she does not yet understand can have a strong contemporary resonance.
Manzanar was the first of the ten main camps to open. This new edition comes out just sixty years after the first internees began to arrive there by bus from southern California in the spring of 1942. It comes out fifty years after Congress passed Public Law 514 in 1952, which overturned restrictive federal policies, finally making it possible for immigrants of Asian ancestry—like Ko—to naturalize as U.S. citizens.
This new edition also comes out while the events of September 11, 2001, are still fresh in the national memory. Those events seem to have given Farewell to Manzanar a new timeliness. In the wake of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York, described by some as “our new Pearl Harbor,” we saw an unfortunate readiness, on the part of many, to assume that all Americans of Middle Eastern background were suddenly suspect and should somehow be held accountable for these crimes. It was a hauntingly familiar rush to judgment. In the early months of 1942, this is what preceded the unlawful evacuation and internment of 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry.
The big difference, sixty years later, was the response of the media and the federal government. In 1942 the flames of racial blaming were fueled and fanned by radio broadcasters and major newspapers. The president of the United States signed the executive order authorizing the forced confinement of an entire ethnic group. The reason given was “wartime necessity.” In 2001 the widely scattered threats and acts of reprisal against Arab Americans had no encouragement from national or local media, nor any support from any level of government. Indeed, the president expressed strong disapproval of such behavior, as did the major networks and large metropolitan papers.
That’s a huge change, one in the best spirit of our democratic ideals. And for this we must all be thankful. At the same time, the events of September 11, 2001, made it clear that this readiness to overreact along ethnic lines is still with us, and close to the surface. We can never afford to forget what happened at Manzanar and the other wartime camps. Those events remind us that this lesson must be learned and learned and learned again.
—Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston,
Santa Cruz, California, October 2001
About the Authors
JEANNE WAKATSUKI HOUSTON was born in Inglewood, California. She studied sociology and journalism at San Jose State University, where she and her husband first met. For their teleplay for the NBC television drama based on Farewell to Manzanar, they received the prestigious Humanitas Prize. Jeanne’s widely anthologized essays and short stories were first collected in Beyond Manzanar: Views of Asian American Womanhood. Her works have earned numerous honors, including a United States-Japan Cultural Exchange Fellowship; a Rockefeller Foundation residence at Bellagio, Italy; and a 1984 Wonder Woman Award, given to women over forty who have made outstanding achievements in pursuit of truth and positive social change.
JAMES D. HOUSTON was born in San Francisco. In seven novels and several nonfiction works he has explored the history and cultures of the western United States and the Asia/Pacific region. Jim’s works include Snow Mountain Passage, Continental Drift, In the Ring of Fire: A Pacific Basin Journey, and The Last Paradise, which received a 1999 American Book Award for fiction. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Jim has received a National Endowment for the Arts writing grant, a Library of Congress Story Award, and he has twice traveled to Asia lecturing for the U.S.I.S. Arts America program. He and his wife live and write in Santa Cruz, California.
Footnotes
1. At the time this move was widely condemned, and inu charges escalated. That was, in fact, one of the causes for Tayama’s beating. Since then history has proved the JACL was right. Mike Masaoka, who pushed the resolution through, understood that the most effective way Japanese Americans could combat the attitudes that put them in places like Manzanar was to shed their blood on the battlefield. The all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team was the most decorated American unit in World War II; it also suffered the highest percentage of casualties and deaths. They were much admired, and the JACL strategy succeeded. This was visible proof that these 110,000 people could be trusted.
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2. Caucasian.
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