Farewell to Manzanar

I recently got reacquainted with "Farewell to Manzanar" by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston - possibly the quintessential memoir of life during the Japanese Internment camps through the eyes of the author as a young seven year-old girl. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor during WWII, over 110,000 Americans of Japanese decent on the West Coast were forced to leave their homes and bused to camps like Manzanar in California. Two of those people were my parents.

This book has helped me understand what they, my grandparents, and uncles and aunties went through. My father and his family were shuttled to Heart Mountain, WY. My mother and her family were sent to Poston, AZ. As they have recounted for me over the years, the only things they could take with them were whatever could fit in a suitcase. That meant both sides of my family leaving behind homes, land, businesses, and possessions - all of which were gone when they returned.

Although neither the Doi nor Hirata families have talked about their camp experience all that much over the years, I've tried to piece together what I've could growing up - whether through family history, by reconstructing stories of Nisei's whose funerals I've officiated, and by visiting the JANM in Downtown LA and the Manzanar memorial near the Sierra Nevadas most recently. My parents and uncles and aunties would talk about the bitter cold of winter and the scorching sun of summer. Of the sports leagues and sock hop dances.

But still some of the most vivid images of the camp experience emanate from Wakatsuki's story. She has managed to paint the most complete picture of what camp experience was like - both inside and outside those terrible barracks.

Two of my most treasured possessions of my Japanese heritage are a weathered wooden baseball trophy my dad won as a little league third baseman at Heart Mountain; the other is a 1973 first printing hardcopy of "Farewell to Manzanar."