Title: Farewell to Manzanar
Authors: James D. Houston and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
Type of Book: Non-fiction
Characters: Jeanne, Mama, and Papa
Main Ideas:
The main idea of this story is Jeanne’s family unit, and how its starts to crumble after Papa was taken to Fort Lincoln. The authors lead us up to the main idea by first setting the story at Ocean Park before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States decided to put all Japanese-Americans in internments camps. Papa was suspected of bringing supplies to Japanese submarines like many other Japanese fishermen, so he was the first to be put in an internment camp in Jeanne’s family. Later Jeanne and the rest of her family were sent to Manzanar. I didn’t
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After Manzanar was shut down and her family was forced to go out into the world and live their lives like before. Most Americans saw Japanese people as the antagonists, so Jeanne and her family had to learn to live with that. When Jeanne was in high school she made a best friend, Radine. She didn’t treat Jeanne any differently. Jeanne asked Radine if she could join Girl Scouts since Radine’s mother lead it. Many other adults in her school didn’t want Jeanne to join their after school activities. This booked worked well for me because it’s a primary source about Jeanne Wakatsuki, and her struggles through WWII. It gave me a new perspective of the war. In 2003, Jeanne wrote The Legend of the Fire Horse. It’s about a woman named Sayo who came to America from Hiroshima to get married, but she forced to go to Manzanar when she came here. Farewell to Manzanar, and The Legend of the Fire Horse, both stories of people having to live through Japanese internment camps just from different people. While reading this story I noticed that the recurring themes taught me that we should embrace our backgrounds, and ethnicities. It had also taught me that you shouldn’t treat someone differently because of their race.The themes are very effective because it lets us know that it’s very hurtful to be discluded from high school activities. This book appealed to me in a logical way, because it consisted of real facts of what it was like for Japanese-Americans during