Jeanne's female role models, evolved from two previous generations, helped develop a sense of self, a concept deeply rooted in the Japanese separation of male and female roles. Prophetic of Jeanne's individualism, the Wakatsukis had met in Spokane, Washington, eloped, and married for love, defying an arranged engagement between Riku and a farmer. In an interview, she recalled the pier as a magical place, "my nursery school, the amusement attendants my sitters." She grew up admiring the strutting self-confidence of her father, a farmer and commercial fisherman, and her pragmatic, low-key mother, who worked in a Long Beach fish cannery.
Born in Inglewood, California, on September 26, 1934, to native Japanese parents, Ko and Riku Sugai Wakatsuki, Jeanne, the youngest of four boys and six girls, moved with her family to Ocean Park in 1936. The factual narrative follows her through three decades of silent denial to adulthood, when she is, at last, able to reveal the misery, the degradation of her family and race, and exorcise Manzanar with an act of public enlightenment.įor Jeanne Toyo Wakatsuki, childhood security flowed naturally from the loving, accepting kin who made up her household. Jeanne's reliving of intimate, painful details provides what no historical account can - a view of life for 30,000 Asian Americans in a stark, concentration-camp atmosphere on the rim of California's Mojave Desert. To some readers, the book is an introduction to a thorny era in their country's history, a time of deprivation of rights without due process for 120,000 Japanese Americans.
Houston, recount the Wakatsuki family's internment at Manzanar War Relocation Center, one of ten concentration camps devised by President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 following the Japanese surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In a straightforward, nonfiction memoir, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and her husband, James D.
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