Houston (a novelist), 1957 children: Corinne Houston Traugott, Joshua D., Gabrielle Houston Neville. Having found it, I can only say what you can only say when you’ve truly come to know a place: Farewell.Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki 1934- (Jeanne Toyo Wakatsuki Houston) PERSONAL:īorn September 26, 1934, in Inglewood, CA daughter of George Ko (a fisher and farmer) and Riku (a homemaker) Wakatsuki married James D. Now, having seen it, I no longer wanted to lose it or to have those years erased. “Much more than a remembered place, it became a state of mind. Houston, her husband and the co-author of Farewell to Manzanar, and their three young children: Houston describes her visit to Manzanar twenty-five years after World War II with James D.

No matter how uncomfortable and how inconvenient the truth is, we as a society cannot ignore it.Īs a younger reader, I do not remember reading the beauty of the last pages of Farewell to Manzanar. As the older reader, it was a gift to read Houston’s last pages of the book again. To prevent such another mass incarceration of the country’s populace, we must be vigilant. Houston replied that the same hatreds that were rampant in World War II still reside in the country but given the advancements in technology and communication-tools of communication meant to expose threats of mass incarceration to the rest of the country and to the world. She answered a question from a Santa Monica reader, “Do you think that what happened at Manzanar can happen again?”

And then produced the false narrative that such incarceration was for the Japanese Americans own safety-for their own well-being. The Santa Monica Reads audience knew that we were in the presence of a great woman: the writer whose personal search for her family’s history and her struggle to find her place in the world, has given the world a memoir that does not flinch from depicting the worst of humanity-how this country’s society lost their humanity when they chose the scapegoating of American citizens (78% of those incarcerated at the Japanese American Internment camps were native-born, with the rights and privileges inherent to every American citizen) and then incarcerated them. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, at eighty-three years old, is a graceful and elegant woman. I wanted a good seat: I wanted to be close to the writer that I had been in respect and gratitude of for forty years.

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston autographs her classic storyĪt the Santa Monica Reads opening day celebration on May 12th, I came early.

Jeanne wakatsuki houston