General
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, 90, Dies; Her Internment Inspired a Memoir
In “Farewell to Manzanar,” she wrote about the more than three years she and her family spent in a camp for Japanese Americans. It became the basis for a TV movie.
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, whose memoir about living as a child in an internment camp during World War II put a personal stamp on the hysteria that led the United States government to imprison some 120,000 Japanese Americans, died on Dec. 21 at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 90.
Her son, Joshua Houston, confirmed the death.
In March 1942, Jeanne, then 7, along with her nine siblings, her mother and her maternal grandmother, were forced to leave their home in Santa Monica, Calif., for the Manzanar War Relocation Center, a detention camp that had been hastily built on 5,000 acres in the Mojave Desert.
It was one of 10 camps, mostly in Western states, established under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which he signed in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The order resulted in the military evacuation of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast on the largely unsupported suspicion that they represented a threat to national security.
Jeanne’s father, Ko Wakatsuki, a commercial fisherman from Hiroshima, did not go with his family. The F.B.I. arrested him soon after Pearl Harbor, accusing him of using his 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, N.D. His family says that the accusation was false.
He rejoined his family at Manzanar nine months later. During that time, one of his daughters had given birth to his first grandchild at Manzanar, and two other daughters were pregnant. The family saw a changed, somewhat broken, man in his 50s step off a bus.
“He had aged 10 years,” Ms. Houston recalled in “Welcome to Manzanar” (1973), written with James D. Houston, her husband. “He looked over 60, gaunt, wilted as his shirt, underweight, leaning on that cane and favoring his right leg. He stood there surveying his clan, and nobody moved, not even Mama, waiting to see what he would do or say, waiting for some cue from him as to how we should deal with this.”