Gene Wakatsuki's memoir of his childhood in a concentration camp during World War II leaves a personal mark on the hysteria that led the U.S. government to imprison some 120,000 Japanese Americans.・Mr. Houston passed away on December 21st at his home in Santa Cruz. California, she was 90 years old.
Her son, Joshua Houston, confirmed the death.
In March 1942, then seven-year-old Jeanne, along with her nine siblings, mother, and maternal grandmother, were forced from their home in Santa Monica, California, and taken to the hastily constructed Manzanar War Relocation Center. Ta. Located on 5,000 acres in the Mojave Desert.
It was a group of 10 camps located primarily in western states established under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, signed shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It was one of those. This order resulted in the withdrawal of troops. Raised largely unfounded allegations against Japanese Americans living on the West Coast that they were a threat to national security.
Jeanne's father, Wataru Wakatsuki, a fisherman from Hiroshima, did not go with his family. The FBI arrested him shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor on suspicion of using a fishing boat to smuggle oil to Japanese submarines off the coast of California. He was sent to a military prison at Fort Lincoln in Bismarck, North Dakota, but his family claims the charges were false.
Wakatsuki was reunited with his family in Manzanar nine months later. During that time, one of his daughters gave birth to his first grandchild in Manzanar, and two other daughters were pregnant. The family saw a man in his 50s, a changed and somewhat disfigured man, get off the bus.
“He looked 10 years older,” Ms. Huston recalled in “Farewell to Manzanar” (1973), which she wrote with her husband, James D. Huston. “He looked to be over 60 years old, haggard, as wilted as his shirt, thin, leaning on a cane, favoring his right leg. He stood there looking around his clan. But no one moved, not even Mom, just watching what he would do or say, waiting for some signal from him as to how we should deal with this.”
Furthermore, she added: “I thought I should laugh and welcome him home. But I started crying. By this time everyone was crying.”
The book details the more than three years Houston and about 10,000 other Japanese Americans endured in internment camps until the end of the war. Given our location in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, the weather can be blisteringly hot or freezing cold. Strong winds blew through the area, kicking up dust. She was often sick, first from typhoid vaccinations and then from food that had gone bad due to improper refrigeration.
A book provided by a charity organization came to Jeanne's rescue. Before libraries were opened in the barracks, books were stacked outside with a small mountain for children to climb. However, Jeanne became fascinated by what was inside their covers. She discovered the joys of Andersen's fairy tales, James Fenimore Cooper's historical novels, and Nancy Drew mysteries.
In a 1992 essay for the bibliography Modern Writers, Huston wrote, “Books were my chief pastime, a channel to the world outside the closed, monotonous routine of camp life.'' ” he wrote.
The family left Manzanar in October 1945, about two months after Japan surrendered to the Allies.
For years, Ms. Houston refused to tell her story.
Jeanne Toyo Wakatsuki was born on June 26, 1934 in Inglewood, California. Her father was a farmer as well as a fisherman, and her mother Riku Wakatsuki (Sugai) supervised the household.
Jeanne knew she wanted to be a writer from the seventh grade, when she lived in an apartment complex in Long Beach, California. For my school's essay contest, I wrote an essay about hunting grunions, small silver fish, with my family. I took a journalism class and then ended up editing my junior high school's newspaper.
She also wrote for her high school newspaper and spent two years majoring in journalism at San Jose State University (now University). But when the head of the journalism department told her that Asian women had no hope of working at a newspaper, she turned to sociology and social work.
She graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1956 and began working as a group counselor for teenage girls in a juvenile detention center. A year later, she married Mr. Huston, who became known for his novels depicting the promise, harshness, and beauty of California.
Her memories of Manzanar remained hidden. Her family did not want to talk about the trauma and humiliation of being imprisoned.
“When I was a kid, being Japanese was not only bad, it was almost criminal,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2001. “My self-image was damaged and I felt like I had bombed Pearl Harbor.”
But one day in 1971, her nephew Gary Nishikawa, a Manzanar native who was taking a college class where the topic of camping had come up, asked her to talk about it. When she suggested that she talk to her parents, they were reluctant.
So she spoke. She told him about movie theaters, baseball games, rock gardens, bad food, and sandstorms.
But he pressed her to go further and tell him how she felt about being trapped.
“Feel? How did I feel?” she recalled in an essay for Modern Writers. “For the first time, I took off the protective cover of humor and nonchalance. I let myself feel. I started crying. I couldn't stop crying.”
He “opened a wound that I had long denied existed,” she wrote.
The following year, Houston recorded her memories on tape. She and her husband talked with other internees, including family members, and scoured the library for information. She said “Farewell to Manzanar” was a personal healing and a record for her many nieces and nephews, seven of whom were born there.
A New York Times review called the incident “taken as a whole, it dramatically illustrates one of the most reprehensible episodes in the history of America's treatment of minorities.” According to publisher HarperCollins, “A Farewell to Manzanar'' has sold 1.6 million copies domestically.
In 1976, Ms. Huston and her husband, John Corty, turned the book into a television movie called “A Farewell to Manzanar,'' directed by Mr. Corty.
The television play was nominated for an Emmy Award for its exploration of the human condition and won the Humanitas Award.
In 1985, Ms. Huston published Beyond Manzanar: An Asian American Woman's Perspective, a collection of essays and short stories. She also collaborated with Paul G. Hensler on Don't Cry, It's Only Thunder (1984), a book about his work with Vietnamese orphans in the 1960s.
In 2003, she published The Legend of the Fire Horse Woman, a novel about a Japanese woman who came to the United States in an arranged marriage in 1902 and was imprisoned in Manzanar with her daughter and granddaughter 40 years later.
In addition to her son, Ms. Huston leaves behind two daughters, Corinne Riku Huston and Gabrielle Huston-Neville, and a younger brother, Nozomi Wakatsuki. Her husband passed away in 2009.
Although Houston was reluctant to attend commemorative events at Manzanar (now a national historic site managed by the U.S. National Park Service), she went to Watsonville, Calif., to reenact the roundup of Japanese Americans in 2002. He was among the 1,300 people who visited the event. . They turned themselves in to a government building, took an old bus to an area and were “locked up” behind a metal gate, the Associated Press reported.
“I don’t want to say it,” she said at the time. “We, the internees, are on the verge of extinction. Let's continue for the sake of those who still remember.”
