Jeanne Wakatsuki Quotes

The reason I want to remember this is because I know we'll never be able to do it again.

When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them to stop fighting?

You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals.

I instinctively decided that I would prove that I wasn't different, that it should not be odd to hear me speaking English. From that day forward I lived with this double impulse:the urge to disappear and the desperate desire to be accepted

Who do you want to win this war?' 'I am interested to know where you will be going when you leave.' 'Mr. Wakatsuki, if I have repeat each one of these questions we will be here forever. Who do you want...?' 'When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them to stop fighting?

In the wake of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York, described by some as “our new Pearl Harbor,” we saw an unfortunate readiness, on the part of many, to assume that all Americans of Middle Eastern background were suddenly suspect and should somehow be held accountable for these crimes. It was a hauntingly familiar rush to judgment. In the early months of 1942, this is what preceded the unlawful evacuation and internment of 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry.

You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals. Of course, for such a thing to happen, there has to be a kind of acquiescence on the part of the victims, some submerged belief that this treatment is deserved, or at least allowable.

In court, the racial bias was challenged again. Why were no German Americans evacuated, it was asked, or Americans of Italian descent? Weren’t these nations our enemies too? Due process had been violated, Korematsu claimed,

From that day on, pay of me yearned to be invisible. In a way, nothing would have been nicer than for no one to see me. Although I could not have defined it at the Tom me, I felt if attention were drawn to me, people would see what this girl had first responded to. They wouldn't see me, the would see the slanted - eye face, the Oriental.

If anything made that country habitable it was the mountains themselves, purple when the sun dropped and so sharply etched in the morning light the granite dazzled almost more than the bright snow lacing it. The nearest peaks rose ten thousand feet higher than the valley floor, with Whitney, the highest, just off to the south. They were important for all of us, but especially for the Issei. Whitney reminded Papa of Fujiyama, that is, it gave him the same kind of spiritual sustenance.

When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them to stop fighting?

Now she wanted for me the same thing I thought I wanted. Acceptance, in her eyes, was simply another means for survival.

One of the amazing things about America is the way it can both undermine you and keep you believing in your own possibilities, pumping you with hope.

The reason I want to remember this is because I know we’ll never be able to do it again.

That continuous, unnamed ache I had been living with was precise and definable now. Call it the foretaste of being hated. I knew ahead of time that if someone looked at me with hate, I would have to allow it, to swallow it, because something in me, something about me deserved it.

It had taken me twenty-five years to reach the point where I could talk openly about Manzanar,

Writing it has been a way of coming to terms with the impact these years have had on my entire life.

Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). A memoir that follows seven-year-old Jeanne Wakatsuki and her family’s journey as they are forced into the Manzanar internment camp. Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, edited by Linda Gordon, Gary Y. Okihiro (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). A collection of images taken by photographer Dorothea Lange, originally censored by the US Army. Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps, by Mary Matsuda Gruenewald (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 2005). Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience, edited by Lawson Fusao Inada (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2000). An anthology of poetry, prose, documents, drawings, and photographs.

It’s a dead issue. These days you can hardly get people to read about a live issue. People are issued out.

The times I thought I had dreamed it were one way of getting rid of it, part of wanting to lose it, part of what you might call a whole Manzanar mentality I had lived with for twenty-five years. Much more than a remembered place, it had become a state of mind. Now, having seen it, I no longer wanted to lose it or to have those years erased. Having found it, I could say what you can only say when you've truly come to know a place: Farewell

He had become a man without a country. The land of his birth was at war with America; yet after thirty-five years here he was still prevented by law from becoming an American citizen. He was suddenly a man with no rights who looked exactly like the enemy.