Farewell to Manzanar: Themes of Family and Internment

Introduction: The Lasting Impact of Relocation

This essay analyzes several themes in Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, and examines the experience of living in the Japanese American relocation camps during World War II internment. Life in the relocation camps changed Japanese Americans forever. They learned to distrust the government and white society, and discovered that their families could be torn apart with startling ease. Jeanne's father was a broken man after his experience in the camps, and Jeanne herself became distanced from her family. The memoir stands as a powerful testament to the human cost of unjust government policy.

Family Disintegration at Manzanar

Families fell apart during their stay at Manzanar and other relocation camps. The Wakatsuki family had been tight-knit and loving before they were relocated. The father and sons operated a fishing business in Long Beach, and the family was comfortable financially. However, after Pearl Harbor was bombed, Mr. Wakatsuki was taken away, charged with being an enemy, and the family was forced to move twice. Already, they were beginning to fall apart. The author notes, "Papa had been the patriarch. He had always decided everything in the family. With him gone, my brothers, like councilors in the absence of a chief, worried about what should be done" (Wakatsuki Houston, p. 15–16). With Mr. Wakatsuki gone and the family relocated to a remote camp in central California, the stress on the family only continued to mount.

Jeanne writes that the living conditions in the camp were brutal. The barracks were little more than shacks thrown together with one layer of wood and tar paper. Numerous people shared tiny rooms, and often they were complete strangers. She writes, "Our two rooms were crowded, but at least it was all in the family. My oldest sister and her husband were shoved into one of those sixteen-by-twenty-foot compartments with six people they had never seen before" (Wakatsuki Houston, p. 21). The camp experience literally tore families apart. People lived separately from one another, and as they grew apart, they changed from loving families into individuals just trying to survive. Jeanne's sister and her husband left the camp to pick sugar beets in Idaho because it was better than life in the camp, and other families suffered similar losses. Life was so hard at the camp that many people gave up any semblance of regular family life simply in order to endure.

The first rift in the Wakatsuki family at the camp arose because of the tiny living quarters. All meals were served in a mess hall, and there was no opportunity for the family to share the intimacy of eating together. Jeanne writes, "Before Manzanar, mealtime had always been the center of our family scene" (Wakatsuki Houston, p. 35). The mess halls encouraged diners to eat with friends, and many did. Jeanne continues, "My own family, after three years of mess hall living, collapsed as an integrated unit. Whatever dignity or feeling of filial strength we may have known before December 1941 was lost, and we did not recover it until many years after the war [...]" (Wakatsuki Houston, p. 37). Her family eventually recovered, but many others did not. The camps changed the entire lifestyle of Japanese Americans and created a new, fractured social reality.

The Destruction of Papa's Dignity

Jeanne's father was a proud, successful man before the war. She writes, "About all he had left at this point was his tremendous dignity" (Wakatsuki Houston, p. 8). Unfortunately, his experiences at Manzanar robbed him of that dignity and turned him into a broken man. She continues, "He was not the same man. Something terrible had happened to him in North Dakota" (Wakatsuki Houston, p. 45). He came back an alcoholic and a bitter loner who no longer harbored dreams — and that is perhaps the saddest effect the war had on Mr. Wakatsuki. Before the war, he had been a dreamer who pursued everything he attempted with determination. The family was further torn apart by his drunken rages; his son Kiyo was forced to strike him once to stop his threats and violence. The family was no longer a family — it had become separate units, each attempting to survive under adverse conditions. This once-close family was ruined, and so were their lives when they returned from the camp.

Mr. Wakatsuki tried several different jobs after the war, but he could not make any of them work. He was no longer the patriarch, and in fact his family was scattered around the country rather than close as they had been before the war. Mrs. Wakatsuki became the provider, working at a fish cannery, while the only work Mr. Wakatsuki could find was growing berries outside San Jose — a job he held until his death. He was no longer the commanding man who could carve a whole pig with flair; he was a broken figure who had stopped dreaming and had lost respect for the country in which he had spent most of his life. He represents the many people whose ambitions disappeared in the detention camps and who were treated so unjustly by their government and their neighbors. Before the war he was strong, proud, and full of hope. After the war, he had nothing but his fractured family, and the task of starting over was simply too much for him to bear. As the author reflects, he really died at Manzanar — he died when he lost control of his family and lost his dignity, and it is a terrible thing to witness.

References

Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, and Houston, James D. Farewell to Manzanar. New York: Bantam Books, 1995.