Farewell to Manzanar: Review and Analysis of a Commonly Untold Tale

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar is a tale of ethnicity and identity in the throws of war and ethnic tensions in the United States during WWII. The book has been critically acclaimed, as it highlights the lived experiences of Japanese people in the United States, who are under current watch, treated as suspects, and ultimately treated as the enemy due to a war that rages on through no direct fault of their own. The book takes us through a journey of the lived experiences of a young girl subjected to horrors no young person should be subjected to, while ultimately triumphing in family and in life. The book does justice, as Wakatsuki highlights experience in a matter-of-fact way, using language and discourse that evokes an emotional response. The book has implications not only for the lived experiences of Japanese migrants and second-generation people but also has implications for a worldwide phenomenon: prejudice and blaming the victim.

The book starts out on the morning Pearl Harbor was bombed. Jeanne’s father, upon hearing of the bombings that have taken place in Pearl Harbor and shaken the nation, burns the Japanese flag, destroys identity papers, and ultimately is arrested. Jeanne notes that he foresees this event, stating “These precautions didn’t do him much good. He was not only an alien; he held a commercial fishing license…it would only be a matter of time” (6). The family subsequently relocates to a ghetto in the heart of Los Angeles while living in fear of being relocated by the military as the president has given authority to the military to relocate suspicious individuals, and the Wakatsukis are moved to Manzanar, a location in which living conditions are atrocious, which drives the family apart and some of them to the brink of insanity.

Mr. Wakatsuki, while at camp, discovers that his daughter has been abandoned by her family and begins studying religion and Confucianism, and subsequently becomes delirious due to sickness and imagination. This incidence exemplifies the need for outlets in the wake of horrible experiences, and education, by any means, can be a healthy outlet, or it can become an obsession. Throughout the first years, Jeanne and her father forged an important relationship, and she is the only one that openly welcomes him upon his return after being arrested once again. Mr. Wakatsuki is a changed man upon his return. His experiences being interrogated and insulted while being arrested multiple times and assumed a spy has affected him physically and emotionally, and he cannot cope with what has become of his psyche. This exemplifies how mistreatment due to something one cannot change can, in fact, breed ill feelings towards a particular ethnicity, driving others to misconstrue what is perceived as natural, which can justify mistreatment by those in authority positions.

The other Japanse men at the detention camp begin to riot, exemplifying the absolute breakdown of self and psyche when placed in conditions in which you are suspect and expected to live like animals in poor living conditions. The police end up shooting innocent camp dwellers, killing 2 and injuring 10. After all of this is said and done, the government issues a loyalty oath and the camp is then divided. Why would they be loyal to a government and a country that has ignored their loyalty and ultimately exposed them to cruel and unusual punishment simply for being born into a specific ethnic group?

Eventually, the living conditions at Manzanar improve, and the family, while still broken, experiences some positives, events, such as the birth of a grandchild, which brings Jeanne’s parents closer while she becomes more distant from her father. Eventually due to a long time coming, the Supreme Court rules that the internment camp policy is illegal and unethical, and they begin to close camps. This incidence demonstrates the longevity of atrocious treatment and the postponement that can occur during times of war, frustration, and fear. When horrific living conditions are allowed to persist for so long, the consequences they reap on the human psyche often cannot be repaired. However, through the struggles and the detachment from American life, many attempt to postpone departure as long as possible. The family subsequently moves to a housing project in Long Beach.

The irony behind what they experience upon moving back is that prejudice is not always seen on the surface and is often subliminal. Subliminal prejudice is a concept that continues to permeate American culture. Eventually, the family relocates again, and Jeanne is nominated as a candidate for her school’s annual carnival come spring, while the instructors fight her ensured victory. Jeanne is then enthralled in a whirlwind of attempting to appease her father while also representing her assimilated self: she is an American. The case of Jeanne’s triumph to win the title exemplifies how traditionalism (namely, school instructors attempting to rig the ceremony so a minority girl won’t win) can breed prejudice, and ultimately, ignorance.

Much later in her life, after having been married with children, Jeanne returns to camp and finally understands her father’s take on culture, his Japanese pride, and the life that she lived there as a child and how that formed her identity, and how she cannot forget what happened there. In closing statements of the book, Jeanne admits that her father’s life as he knew it, his family and his culture, symbolically ended. He was a changed man after the war, and she finally started to understand why. However, her experiences there would shape who she would become: a famous writer and an advocate for social change and ethnic acceptance.

The book highlights an important injustice that is seldom talked about in the annals of American history. Wakatsuki’s tale highlights this injustice. The emotional roller coaster that brings to the forefront the life of a Japanese family inside an internment camp, the past and culture of Jeanne’s father, and the feelings she had admittedly attempted to submerge about the realities she faced for so many years during and after, causes the book to be critically acclaimed. 110,000 Japanese people were removed from the West Coast and faced similar discriminatory experiences. This is only one tale, implying that discriminatory experiences such as these will continue to go unheard of and will disappear like history itself unless they are acknowledged.

At the onset of the book, it is not as if prejudice against the Japanese did not exist. They knew they were aliens in a foreign land, which was highlighted by Papa’s acknowledgment that he, although a family man and loyal, would be arrested regardless of the fact of his innocence. This is not accepted prejudice, it is only acknowledged prejudice, and the strategies employed to navigate this prejudice placed upon a people are highlighted in the book. Only ignorance could mask prejudice if you are a minority, as Jeanne finds out about the subtleties of discrimination after returning to school.

Additionally, building on the theme that prejudice is not accepted by those that are discriminated against, Mama’s decision to move to the Japanese ghetto rather than be isolated racially in Ocean Park, highlights this need for a collective identity in the wake of prejudice and mixed equality, which ironically, made them an easier target for eventual internment. They lived under a “reign of fear” even though most of the population on Terminal Island was “American-born” (12). Therefore, if one looks different, that can be enough to cause fear, which in this case, was justified fear and not irrational.

Additionally, the lack of respect and lack of anything close to what American-born Japanese citizens were used to living in was completely absent. However, endurance characterized Manzanar, proving that, even under the worst of living conditions, hope persisted and eventually materialized. As Jeanne puts it, “The entire situation there…was an open insult to that other, private self, a slap in the face you were powerless to challenge” (30). The consequences faced when the men of the camp did challenge the authorities brought them down and humbled them quickly, proving that those with guns have the authority at all times in history: those with the power to injure or kill.

Wakatsuki’s Farewell to Manzanar brings to light a lost tale of Japanese internment camps during World War II with humility and will continue to open the minds and hearts of American people. While employing powerful imagery, Wakatsuki embodies endurance, acceptance, and the effects that prejudice can have on a family internally as well as externally in American society not only in the 1940s but today as well.

Work Cited

Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki., and James D. Houston. Farewell to Manzanar. Austin: Holt,Rinehart and Winston, 2000. Print.