Farewell to manzanar short summary

Chapter 1 →

Summary—“What Is Pearl Harbor?”

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, seven-year-old Jeanne Wakatsuki watches from the Long Beach, California, wharf as a fleet of sardine boats prepares to leave the harbor. Her father, whom she calls “Papa,” yells more than the other men. He barks orders at his two eldest sons, Bill and Woody, who act as his crew. Papa is aboard the larger of his two boats, the Nereid, which he pays for by giving percentages of his catch to the large canneries on Terminal Island, near Long Beach. Many other fishermen have similar arrangements with the canneries, and they often fish together. Jeanne and her family stand on the wharf and wave goodbye until the boats have nearly disappeared. Suddenly the fleet stops and floats on the horizon like white gulls. Jeanne’s mother, whom she calls “Mama,” and Woody’s wife, Chizu, begin to worry when the fleet turns back toward the port. The other women wonder whether there has been an accident. When the boats are still a half mile offshore, a cannery worker runs along the docks reporting that Japan has bombed Pearl Harbor. Chizu asks Mama what Pearl Harbor is. Mama does not know and shouts after the man, but he is already gone.

That night Papa burns the Japanese flag he brought with him from Hiroshima thirty-five years earlier. He also burns any documents that might connect him with Japan. He is worried because he is a non-U.S. citizen with a fishing license, and the FBI has begun arresting such people as potential spies. The family goes to stay on Terminal Island with Woody, but two weeks later, two FBI men arrest Papa. Jeanne thinks the FBI men look like characters from a 1930s movie. Papa does not resist arrest, but walks out tall and dignified ahead of the two men. The FBI interrogates many Japanese and begins searching Terminal Island for material that could be used for spying, such as short-wave radio antennae, flashlights, cameras, and even toy swords. The family learns that Papa has been taken into custody, but the sons are unable to find out where he has been taken. An article in the next day’s paper reports that Papa has been arrested for supplying oil to a Japanese submarine. Mama cries for days, but Jeanne does not cry at all. She does not fully understand Mama’s grief until she finally sees Papa again a year later.

Analysis

Wakatsuki begins her memoir with an idyllic portrait of prewar American life in order to foreshadow the suddenness of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II. In 1941, the war had been raging in Europe for over two years, but the United States had remained neutral, and Wakatsuki’s writing reflects the carefree point of view of the youngest child of a middle-class American family far removed from concerns of politics and war. Her father, who has just purchased his own fishing boat, is living the American dream: he has his own business, grown sons to help him, and a family of ten children who come down to the docks to see him off. Wakatsuki’s many references to the warm December weather, her father’s cooperative colleagues, and an ideal environment where the water is clean and the California air is smog-free leave us as unprepared for war as Jeanne and her family are at the beginning of the memoir. In Jeanne’s eyes, all is well with the world, and nothing seems to threaten her family’s harmonious existence.

In one of Farewell to Manzanar’s most dramatic passages, Wakatsuki recounts the news of the Pearl Harbor attack not through direct narration but through an image. The striking picture of the entire fleet of departing boats stopping suddenly and silently on the horizon creates an immediate sense that something has gone wrong. With her description of the slow, silent return of the boats and the worried questions of the family members, Wakatsuki creates a dramatic tension that is released, at least partially, when the cannery worker relays the news of the attack. This kind of tension is called dramatic irony, a literary technique in which the audience knows something that the characters do not. Wakatsuki combines our knowledge of the events at Pearl Harbor with the fact that Mama and Chizu do not even know what Pearl Harbor is to underscore the Japanese Americans’ innocence and sense of bewilderment upon hearing of Japan’s attack on what they consider to be their home. The naïveté of this bewilderment is touching, and it is sad that a place they have never heard of will soon be the cause of their unhappiness.

Wakatsuki establishes Papa as a dynamic and ultimately likeable character early on in order to show us how greatly the anti-Japanese prejudice in the United States destroys him. The picture she paints of Papa as a tall and brash “skipper” with rough manners and an independent spirit shows Papa in a very American light. His struggle to reconcile these adopted customs and characteristics with his true Japanese ancestry becomes one of the main threads of Wakatsuki’s story. She sets up this struggle in the first chapter by establishing Papa as both the most American and the most Japanese of all the characters. He is an alien without citizenship, but he seems to believe firmly in the American dream, and after learning of the Pearl Harbor attack, he even goes so far as to burn his Japanese flag and documents in order to distance himself from Japan. The tragedy of Papa’s story is that his sacrifice is for nothing: the very United States that he calls home and for which he has forsaken his homeland accuses him of spying and betrayal. The last image of him in this chapter is of a dignified prisoner striding confidently ahead of his accusers, enduring his fate with the same quiet patience with which his family and people endure theirs. It is his last moment of real dignity in the memoir and marks the beginning of bad times for both the Wakatsuki family and the Japanese Americans in general.

Chapter 2

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Summary—Shikata Ga Nai

Soon after Papa’s arrest, Mama relocates the family to the Japanese immigrant ghetto on Terminal Island. Mama feels more comfortable in the company of other Japanese, but the new environment of Terminal Island frightens Jeanne. It is the first time she has lived among other Japanese, and she traces her fear to an earlier time, when Papa threatened to sell her to the “Chinaman” if she behaved badly. Mama and Chizu go to work for the canneries that own the island, and the family takes up residence in a barracks alongside the other migrant workers. Jeanne feels uncomfortable around the rough youth who proudly call themselves yogore (“uncouth ones”) and pick on outsiders and people who do not speak their language. The other second-graders tease Jeanne for not speaking Japanese, and both she and her ten-year-old brother, Kiyo, must avoid the children’s ambushes after school.

The family lives on Terminal Island for two months, and on February 25, 1942 the government decides to move the Japanese farther away from the Long Beach Naval Station. The family, including Granny, Jeanne’s sixty-five-year-old maternal grandmother, is given forty-eight hours to leave. Mama has to sell her china because it will not fit in Woody’s car. When a secondhand dealer insults her by offering only fifteen dollars for the china, she angrily smashes the entire set in front of him.

The family settles in the minority ghetto of Boyle Heights in downtown Los Angeles. President Roosevelt has signed Executive Order 9066, which authorizes the War Department to remove persons considered threats to national security from military areas on the West Coast, and rumors begin to circulate about relocation. Mama finally receives a letter from Papa, who is being held at Fort Lincoln, a camp for enemy aliens in North Dakota. The Japanese both comfort themselves and excuse the U.S. government’s actions with the phrase “shikata ga nai,” which means both “it cannot be helped” and “it must be done.” Kiyo and Jeanne enroll in school, but Jeanne does not like the cold, distant teacher, who is the first Caucasian from whom she has felt hostility.

The public attitude toward the Japanese soon turns to fear, and a month after the Wakatsuki family settles in Boyle Heights, the government orders the Japanese to move again, this time to the relocation camp at Manzanar, California. Many Japanese accept the move because they are afraid of Caucasian aggression, but some simply see it as an adventure. A bus picks up the Wakatsukis at a Buddhist temple, and each family receives an identification number and tags to put on their collars. Jeanne falls asleep on the bus, nearly half of which is filled with her relatives, and wakes up to the setting sun and the yellow, billowing dust of Owens Valley. As they enter the camp, the new arrivals stare silently at the families already waiting in the wind and sand.

The bus arrives in time for dinner, but the Japanese are horrified to learn that the cooks have poured canned apricots over the rice, a staple the Japanese do not eat with sweet foods. After dinner, the Wakatsukis are taken to a wooden barracks in Block 16, where they receive two sixteen-by-twenty-foot rooms for the twelve members of the family. They divide the space with blankets and sleep on mattress covers stuffed with straw. The younger couples have a hard time adjusting to the lack of privacy, and six months later Jeanne’s sister and her husband leave to help harvest beets in Idaho. Jeanne does not mind the tight quarters, because it means she gets to sleep with Mama.

Analysis

Jeanne’s instant sense of alienation among other Japanese creates an initial picture of her as more American than Japanese. As a Nisei, or second-generation Japanese American born to immigrant parents, Jeanne is a U.S. citizen by birth. She has grown up in a Caucasian neighborhood, and she feels awkward now when plunged into the immigrant community of Terminal Island. Her description of the rough and tumble immigrant community as “a country as foreign as India or Arabia would have been” shows her inability to relate to other native Japanese. Her western name and fear of Asian faces do not help her fit in, but her greatest obstacle is her inability to speak Japanese, which the tough Terminal Island kids insist on speaking. Her comment that the Japanese children despised her for speaking English establishes the theme of ethnic prejudice that runs throughout the memoir. This harsh treatment at the hands of her own people contrasts with the pleasantness of her earlier life—her family’s big, American-style frame house in the non-Japanese neighborhood of Ocean Park, for example, and her grandmotherly non-Japanese teacher who cried the day Jeanne had to leave. This kind America is all Jeanne has ever known, and she presents herself here not as a Japanese thrown into solidarity with her people but as an American forced to live among an alien race.

The U.S. government’s increased manipulation of the Japanese people strengthens the Japanese community. This sense of community is largely a response to the tension that develops between Japanese and Americans as American soldiers impose their will upon the Japanese. The contrast between the family’s initial move to Terminal Island, which Mama initiates, and their relocation to Boyle Heights, which the United States government requires, shows how fighting against oppression unites the Japanese. Upon arriving at Terminal Island, the family does not immediately befriend the other Japanese people. However, when the government orders a relocation, the Japanese band together in their fear and uncertainty as they wait for the inevitable order to move from Terminal Island. Wakatsuki describes a communal sentiment with the Japanese phrase “shikata ga nai,” the sense that there is nothing one can do. Even Jeanne, who thinks of herself as American and of the Japanese as an alien people, experiences this feeling of resignation when her new white teacher treats her coldly. In a critical time, Jeanne, like other Japanese Americans, finds her people a source of comfort.

Wakatsuki sees pride as a defining characteristic of the Japanese people and explores it as both a liability and a strength. The rough Japanese kids of Terminal Island are proud of their derogatory nickname, “yogore,” and of their ethnicity and culture, even to the point of excluding one of their own who does not speak their language. While Wakatsuki initially casts this pride in a negative light, she also shows how it can become a powerful tool when the Japanese are faced with prejudice and the prospect of relocation. Jeanne’s mother’s decision to smash her china rather that sell it to the scheming secondhand dealer demonstrates that money is not as important to her as her integrity. Similarly, the Japanese people’s refusal to eat apricots with their rice is their small, dignified way of signaling to the American government that while they cannot resist forced relocation, they will not accept a slap in the face. These small, pride-won victories keep the Japanese grounded in their culture, which helps keep them unified as a people.

Chapters 3

Summary—Chapter 3: A Different Kind of Sand

The Wakatsukis wake up early the first morning in Manzanar covered in gray dust that has blown through the knotholes in the walls and floor. They have used their clothes as bedding for extra warmth, and nearly everything they own has been soiled. Jeanne and Kiyo find their predicament funny, but Mama does not. Woody calls through the wall, jokingly asking if they have fallen into the same flour barrel as him. Kiyo replies that they have not, joking that theirs is “full of Japs.” The children dress quickly, and Woody instructs Jeanne’s brothers Ray and Kiyo to cover the knotholes with tin can lids while Jeanne and her sister May sweep the floor and fold laundry. Woody threatens to make the boys eat any sand that comes up through the knotholes. When Kiyo asks about the sand that comes in through the cracks, Woody jokes that it is a different kind of sand and, mimicking Papa’s voice, says he knows the difference. The wind continues to blow dust through the floor. Mama asks Woody to cover the cracks. He promises to patch the cracks with scrap lumber, but she is not satisfied, decrying the horrid conditions. Woody promises to make the repair job better and goes out to see what is for breakfast. Kiyo jokes that it will be hotcakes with soy sauce, but Woody says it will be rice with maple syrup and butter.

Analysis—Chapter 3
Although Farewell to Manzanar is part of the genre of childhood memoirs of war and war camp life, which includes Night, by Elie Weisel, and Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, it is primarily a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, that deals with the transition from childhood innocence to adult knowledge. Wakatsuki begins her memoir from the humorously naïve perspective of her seven-year-old self so that we may see more clearly the changes the camp causes in her over the course of her three years there. Her carefree attitude upon arriving at Manzanar rubs off on her siblings, and their jokes the first morning (about the dust, among other things) reflect their view that the camp is more an adventure than a hardship. the joy that infuses the Wakatsuki children this first morning in the camp barracks is both comforting and disturbing. Ten-year-old Kiyo’s assertion that he has fallen into a flour barrel “full of Japs” shows his easygoing nature but also reveals how greatly he fails to realize the gravity of his family’s new circumstances. Uninformed for the moment about the war and the biased motives behind the internment, the younger Wakatsuki children view the camp as something of a game. Only when they are mature enough to understand the prejudice against them do their impressions of the camp change.