We hadn’t realized our own rights as citizens in this country, whose attitude at the time was pretty racist. “For years, we never talked about the camps because of the shame they made us feel,” says Wakatsuki Houston from her Santa Cruz home in spring 2020. Wakatsuki Houston became a celebrated writer, one of a generation who publicly shared the impact of the internment camps on their identities, their families and the nation. Wakatsuki Houston’s father was immediately sent to a federal prison in Bismarck, North Dakota, while she joined her mother and nine siblings on a Greyhound bus to Manzanar, one of 10 camps established to “contain” Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II. Wakatsuki Houston, ’56 Sociology, and her family were Japanese-American, members of a community that the American government determined threatening enough to issue Executive Order 9066 the following spring, forcing more than 100,000 people to relocation centers, internment and imprisonment camps across the United States. The 1973 memoir Farewell to Manzanar opens with a scene of seven-year-old Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston watching her fisherman father and eldest brothers floating off the shore of Santa Monica, Calif., on December 7, 1941-the day of the Pearl Harbor attack. Wakatsuki Houston, ’56 Sociology, and James Houston, ’56 Radio-Television, married in 1957.
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