The Wakatsukis move to Los Angeles but only stay there for a few months before the government orders them to move to an internment camp in Manzanar, a remote inland town.īy careful planning, Jeanne’s brothers make arrangements so that Mama, the ten Wakatsuki siblings, and their spouses and children are all assigned to the same camp. Soon, the government forces all Japanese-Americans to leave coastal towns, where they might be able to commit espionage. Meanwhile, Mama moves her family to Terminal Island to live near her grown son, Woody, in a larger community of Japanese-Americans. Along with many other Issei, or first-generation Japanese immigrants, Papa is arrested by the FBI and taken to a detention center at Fort Lincoln, where the family receives no news from him. Soon enough, the anti-Asian hysteria that has been brewing in the buildup to the war takes concrete forms. The family hurries home and listens to the news with anxiety, not sure what the new war with Japan will mean for their Japanese-American family. She is a seven-year-old standing with Mama at the Long Beach harbor, watching Papa’s fishing boat head out to sea, when news of the Pearl Harbor bombing arrives over the radio. Jeanne Wakatsuki’s memoir begins on December 7th, 1941.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |