Farewell to Manzanar Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  A Chronology

  Terms Used in This Book

  Epigraph

  Part 1

  “What Is Pearl Harbor?”

  Shikata Ga Nai

  A Different Kind of Sand

  A Common Master Plan

  Almost a Family

  Whatever He Did Had Flourish

  Fort Lincoln: An Interview

  Inu

  The Mess Hall Bells

  The Reservoir Shack: An Aside

  Yes Yes No No

  Part 2

  Manzanar, U.S.A.

  Outings, Explorations

  In the Firebreak

  Departures

  Free to Go

  It’s All Starting Over

  Ka-ke, Near Hiroshima: April 1946

  Re-entry

  A Double Impulse

  The Girl of My Dreams

  Part 3

  Ten Thousand Voices

  Afterword

  About the Authors

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 1973 by James D. Houston

  Afterword copyright © 2002 by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki.

  Farewell to Manzanar.

  1. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki. 2. United States. War Relocation Center, Manzanar, Calif. 3. Japanese in the United States. I. Houston, James D., joint author. II. Title.

  ISBN 0-618-21620-0

  E184.J3H63 940.54'72'73

  73-11267

  For permission to reprint copyrighted material the authors are grateful to the publishers and copyright proprietors.

  “Don’t Fence Me In” (from “Hollywood Canteen”) [>]

  Words and Music by COLE PORTER

  Copyright © 1944 (Renewed) WB MUSIC CORP.

  All Rights Reserved Used by Permission

  “Girl of My Dreams” [>] and [>]

  Words and Music by SUNNY CLAPP

  Copyright © 1927 (Renewed 1955) EMI MILLS MUSIC, INC.

  All Rights Controlled by EMI MILLS MUSIC, INC. (Publishing) and ALFRED PUBLISHING CO., INC. (Print)

  All Rights Reserved Used By Permission

  Excerpt from Viet Nam Poems, reprinted from Call Me By My True Names (1999) by Thich Nhat Hanh with permission from Parallax Press, Berkeley, California.

  www.parallax.org

  eISBN 978-0-547-52861-8

  v3.0215

  to the memory of

  Ko and Riku Wakatsuki

  and Woodrow M. Wakatsuki

  Foreword

  When we first considered writing a book about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two, we told a New York writer friend about the idea. He said, “It’s a dead issue. These days you can hardly get people to read about a live issue. People are issued out.”

  “I know it,” my husband said. “I’m issued out myself. The issue isn’t what we want to write about. Everybody knows an injustice was done. How many know what actually went on inside? If they think anything, they think concentration camps. But that conjures up Poland and Siberia. And these camps weren’t like that at all.”

  So we set out to write about the life inside one of those camps—Manzanar—where my family spent three and a half years. We began with a tape recorder and an old 1944 yearbook put together at Manzanar High School. It documented the entire camp scene—the graduating seniors, the guard towers, the Judo pavilion, the creeks I used to wade in, my family’s barracks. As the photos brought that world back, I began to dredge up feelings that had lain submerged since the forties. I began to make connections I had previously been afraid to see. It had taken me twenty-five years to reach the point where I could talk openly about Manzanar, and the more I talked, the clearer it became that any book we wrote would have to include a good deal more than day-to-day life inside the compound. To tell what I knew and felt about it would mean telling something about our family before the war, and the years that followed the war, and about my father’s past, as well as my own way of seeing things now. Writing it has been a way of coming to terms with the impact these years have had on my entire life.

  To complete this book we have had to rely on a good deal besides my own recollections. Many people helped make it possible, more than we can name here. We are especially grateful to all the members of the family who shared their memories, and to these friends: Jack and Mary Takayanagi, Don Tanzawa, and Mary Duffield. We are indebted to the numerous writers and researchers whose works have been indispensable to our own perspective on the period. And we thank the University of California at Santa Cruz for a research grant that made it possible to begin.

  Because this is a true story, involving an extraordinary episode in American history, we have included a list of dates and laws we hope will make it easier to follow. It needs some historical context. But this is not political history. It is a story, or a web of stories—my own, my father’s, my family’s—tracing a few paths, out of the multitude of paths that led up to and away from the experience of the internment.

  —Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Santa Cruz, California, March 1973

  A Chronology

  1869 The first Japanese to settle on the U.S. mainland arrive at Gold Hill, near Sacramento, California.

  1870 U.S. Congress grants naturalization rights to free whites and people of African descent, omitting mention of Asian races.

  1886 The Japanese government lifts its ban on emigration, allowing its citizens for the first time to make permanent moves to other countries.

  1911 U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization orders that declarations of intent to file for citizenship can only be received from whites and from people of African descent, thus allowing courts to refuse naturalization to the Japanese.

  1913 Alien Land Bill prevents Japanese aliens from owning land in California.

  1924 Congress passes an Immigration Act stating that no alien ineligible for citizenship shall be admitted to the U.S. This stops all immigration from Japan.

  December 7, 1941 Surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese.

  February 19, 1942 President Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, giving the War Department authority to define military areas in the western states and to exclude from them anyone who might threaten the war effort.

  March 25, 1942 Evacuees begin to arrive at Manzanar Camp, in Owens Valley, California, the first of the permanent camps to open.

  August 12, 1942 Evacuation completed, 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry removed from the West Coast to ten inland camps.

  December 18, 1944 U.S. Supreme Court rules that loyal citizens cannot be held in detention camps against their will, the first major step toward the closing of the camps.

  August 14, 1945 Japan surrenders, ending World War II.

  November 21, 1945 Manzanar Camp officially closes.

  June 1952 Congress passes Public Law 414, granting Japanese aliens the right to become naturalized U.S. citizens.

  Terms Used in This Book

  Issei The first generation. The Issei were born in Japan. Most of them immigrated to the United States between 1890 and 1915.

  Nisei The second generation, the children of the Issei. American citizens by birth, almost all Nisei were born before the Second World War.

  Sansei The thir
d generation of Americans with Japanese ancestry, most of them born during or after the Second World War.

  It is sobering to recall that though the Japanese relocation program, carried through at such incalculable cost in misery and tragedy, was justified on the ground that the Japanese were potentially disloyal, the record does not disclose a single case of Japanese disloyalty or sabotage during the whole war...

  —Henry Steele Commager, Harper’s Magazine, 1947

  Life has left her footprints on my forehead

  But I have become a child again this morning

  The smile, seen through leaves and flowers, is back,

  to smooth

  Away the wrinkles

  As the rains wipe away footprints on the beach. Again a

  Cycle of birth and death begins.

  —Thich Nhat Hanh, Viet Nam Poems, 1967

  Part 1

  one

  “What Is Pearl Harbor?”

  ON THAT FIRST WEEKEND IN DECEMBER THERE must have been twenty or twenty-five boats getting ready to leave. I had just turned seven. I remember it was Sunday because I was out of school, which meant I could go down to the wharf and watch. In those days—1941—there was no smog around Long Beach. The water was clean, the sky a sharp Sunday blue, with all the engines of that white sardine fleet puttering up into it, and a lot of yelling, especially around Papa’s boat. Papa loved to give orders. He had attended military school in Japan until the age of seventeen, and part of him never got over that. My oldest brothers, Bill and Woody, were his crew. They would have to check the nets again, and check the fuel tanks again, and run back to the grocery store for some more cigarettes, and then somehow everything had been done, and they were easing away from the wharf, joining the line of boats heading out past the lighthouse, into the harbor.

  Papa’s boat was called The Nereid—long, white, low-slung, with a foredeck wheel cabin. He had another smaller boat, called The Waka (a short version of our name), which he kept in Santa Monica, where we lived. But The Nereid was his pride. It was worth about $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. Papa had a mustache then. He wore knee-high rubber boots, a rust-colored turtleneck Mama had knitted him, and a black skipper’s hat. He liked to hear himself called “Skipper.”

  Through one of the big canneries he had made a deal to pay for The Nereid with percentages of each catch, and he was anxious to get it paid off. He didn’t much like working for someone else if he could help it. A lot of fishermen around San Pedro Harbor had similar contracts with the canneries. In typical Japanese fashion, they all wanted to be independent commercial fishermen, yet they almost always fished together. They would take off from Terminal Island, help each other find the schools of sardine, share nets and radio equipment—competing and cooperating at the same time.

  You never knew how long they’d be gone, a couple of days, sometimes a week, sometimes a month, depending on the fish. From the wharf we waved goodbye—my mother, Bill’s wife, Woody’s wife Chizu, and me. We yelled at them to have a good trip, and after they were out of earshot and the sea had swallowed their engine noises, we kept waving. Then we just stood there with the other women, watching. It was a kind of duty, perhaps a way of adding a little good luck to the voyage, or warding off the bad. It was also marvelously warm, almost summery, the way December days can be sometimes in southern California. When the boats came back, the women who lived on Terminal Island would be rushing to the canneries. But for the moment there wasn’t much else to do. We watched until the boats became a row of tiny white gulls on the horizon. Our vigil would end when they slipped over the edge and disappeared. You had to squint against the glare to keep them sighted, and with every blink you expected the last white speck to be gone.

  But this time they didn’t disappear. They kept floating out there, suspended, as if the horizon had finally become what it always seemed to be from shore: the sea’s limit, beyond which no man could sail. They floated a while, then they began to grow, tiny gulls becoming boats again, a white armada cruising toward us.

  “They’re coming back,” my mother said.

  “Why would they be coming back?” Chizu said.

  “Something with the engine.”

  “Maybe somebody got hurt.”

  “But they wouldn’t all come back,” Mama said, bewildered.

  Another woman said, “Maybe there’s a storm coming.”

  They all glanced at the sky, scanning the unmarred horizon. Mama shook her head. There was no explanation. No one had ever seen anything like this before. We watched and waited, and when the boats were still about half a mile off the lighthouse, a fellow from the cannery came running down to the wharf shouting that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor.

  Chizu said to Mama, “What does he mean? What is Pearl Harbor?”

  Mama yelled at him, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

  But he was running along the docks, like Paul Revere, bringing the news, and didn’t have time to explain.

  That night Papa burned the flag he had brought with him from Hiroshima thirty-five years earlier. It was such a beautiful piece of material, I couldn’t believe he was doing that. 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. He was not only an alien; he held a commercial fishing license, and in the early days of the war the FBI was picking up all such men, for fear they were somehow making contact with enemy ships off the coast. Papa himself knew it would only be a matter of time.

  They got him two weeks later, when we were staying overnight at Woody’s place, on Terminal Island. Five hundred Japanese families lived there then, and FBI deputies had been questioning everyone, ransacking houses for anything that could conceivably be used for signaling planes or ships or that indicated loyalty to the Emperor. Most of the houses had radios with a short-wave band and a high aerial on the roof so that wives could make contact with the fishing boats during these long cruises. To the FBI every radio owner was a potential saboteur. The confiscators were often deputies sworn in hastily during the turbulent days right after Pearl Harbor, and these men seemed to be acting out the general panic, seeing sinister possibilities in the most ordinary household items: flashlights, kitchen knives, cameras, lanterns, toy swords.

  If Papa were trying to avoid arrest, he wouldn’t have gone near that island. But I think he knew it was futile to hide out or resist. The next morning two FBI men in fedora hats and trench coats—like out of a thirties movie—knocked on Woody’s door, and when they left, Papa was between them. He didn’t struggle. There was no point to it. He had become a man without a country. The land of his birth was at war with America; yet after thirty-five years here he was still prevented by law from becoming an American citizen. He was suddenly a man with no rights who looked exactly like the enemy.

  About all he had left at this point was his tremendous dignity. He was tall for a Japanese man, nearly six feet, lean and hard and healthy-skinned from the sea. He was over fifty. Ten children and a lot of hard luck had worn him down, had worn away most of the arrogance he came to this country with. But he still had dignity, and he would not let those deputies push him out the door. He led them.

  Mama knew they were taking all the alien men first to an interrogation center right there on the island. Some were simply being questioned and released. In the beginning she wasn’t too worried; at least she wouldn’t let herself be. But it grew dark and he wasn’t back. Another day went by and we still had heard nothing. Then word came that he had been taken into custody and shipped out. Where to, or for how long? No one knew. All my brothers’ attempts to find out were fruitless.

  What had they charged him with? We didn’t know that either, until an article appeared the next day in the Santa Monica paper, saying he had been arrested for delivering oil to Japanese submarines offshore.

  My mother began to weep. It seems n
ow that she wept for days. She was a small, plump woman who laughed easily and cried easily, but I had never seen her cry like this. I couldn’t understand it. I remember clinging to her legs, wondering why everyone was crying. This was the beginning of a terrible, frantic time for all my family. But I myself didn’t cry about Papa, or have any inkling of what was wrenching Mama’s heart, until the next time I saw him, almost a year later.

  two

  Shikata Ga Nai

  IN DECEMBER OF 1941 PAPA’S DISAPPEARANCE didn’t bother me nearly so much as the world I soon found myself in.

  He had been a jack-of-all-trades. When I was born he was farming near Inglewood. Later, when he started fishing, we moved to Ocean Park, near Santa Monica, and until they picked him up, that’s where we lived, in a big frame house with a brick fireplace, a block back from the beach. We were the only Japanese family in the neighborhood. Papa liked it that way. He didn’t want to be labeled or grouped by anyone. But with him gone and no way of knowing what to expect, my mother moved all of us down to Terminal Island. Woody already lived there, and one of my older sisters had married a Terminal Island boy. Mama’s first concern now was to keep the family together; and once the war began, she felt safer there than isolated racially in Ocean Park. But for me, at age seven, the island was a country as foreign as India or Arabia would have been. It was the first time I had lived among other Japanese, or gone to school with them, and I was terrified all the time.