Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston - Revisiting Manzanar

The Kitchen Sisters Present

The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia

Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1981 The Kitchen Sisters interviewed Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston for a story about life on the homefront during World War II. Jeanne told stories of her childhood growing up in Manzanar, a hastily built detention camp surrounded by barbed wire and armed guard towers in the midst of the Owens Valley in the Mojave desert, where Japanese Americans were incarcerated for 3 years during World War II.

Jeanne was 7 years old when her father, a commercial fisherman, was taken away with no explanation by the FBI and imprisoned in Bismarck, North Dakota. The family had no idea where he had been taken or why.

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's book, Farewell to Manzanar, written in collaboration with her husband James D. Houston, has become a curriculum staple in classrooms across the nation and is one of the first ways many are introduced to this dark period of American history.

In listening to this interview recorded 44 years ago we are struck by how Jeanne's memories of those years — the sense of fear, of families being separated, of innocent people being terrorized, hunted — resonate with what is happening in our country today.

Jeanne died last year at the age of 90.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Radio Topia.
0:02.2	Welcome to The Kitchen Sisters present.
0:04.0	From PRX.
0:05.6	We're the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson, and Nikki Silva.
0:09.9	Before we start today's show, we want to shout out to another show in the Radiotopia family,
0:15.0	one of my very favorites, Radio Diaries.
0:17.6	For over 25 years, Radio Diaries has been creating sound-rich, personal stories on
0:23.8	history and beyond. They have a new mini-series called Making Waves, stories about three
0:29.3	controversial broadcasters in American history. They each used the microphone in different ways,
0:35.0	one to warn, one to rile, one to preach. There's the black preacher
0:39.6	who reached millions on the airwaves before the civil rights movement, the woman who tried to warn
0:45.2	the public of Hitler's rising power, and the talk show host who first proved that outrage
0:51.6	sells. Sometimes we get people on there who disagreed with him and
0:56.1	fight with him. Actually, he liked that. I mean, if you were a Broadway play, you'd be a flop.
1:01.1	I'm not a Broadway play. But you're a flop. The New Yorker calls Radio Diaries a venerable
1:06.3	and remarkable audio documentary project. We so agree. Listen to all three episodes of making waves on the
1:13.8	Radio Diaries podcast, available wherever you listen. You up for talking about this era?
1:24.6	Sure. Just, you know, let's get into it one way or the other.
1:28.0	Yeah.
1:28.2	Just you have any questions. I thought I'd begin by asking you how old you were when Pearl Harbor
1:35.8	was attacked. Let's see, I must have been seven. Do you remember hearing about the attack?
1:54.0	I think I probably saw that people were nervous and upset, but what stands out in my mind because it was such a powerful thing, you know, my father was burning up all these things in the fireplace, the Japanese flag that we had,
	...

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