January 10, 2025
Densho mourns the loss of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, a key figure in sharing the story of the wartime incarceration in the 1970s.
Farewell to Manzanar, her camp memoir co-written with her husband, James Houston, and first published in 1973, was a pioneering work that was one of the first of the Nisei memoirs and certainly the most widely read, becoming a frequently assigned book for California middle and high school students. It was later adapted into a made-for-television movie in 1976.
Densho Content Director Brian Niiya writes, “I still recall seeing the movie highlighted on the front page of the local TV listings and recognizing it as being significant even if my teenage self couldn’t quite articulate why. Though the book and movie were not universally embraced by the Japanese American community, they were important works for their time, and I actually think they hold up fairly well today, even acknowledging the issues raised by their detractors. Though less well known, her 2003 novel The Legend of Fire Horse Woman, a three generation family saga set in part in a fictionalized Manzanar, is also well worth the read.
“I got to know Jeanne a bit in the 2000s, when she took an interest in efforts to identify and preserve the Honouliuli detention camp site on O`ahu, since she spent significant time on the islands in her later years. She and James were early visitors to the site, and her appearance at an early event in Honolulu helped raise money and attention for Honouliuli efforts.”
Though she is no longer with us, Jeanne’s books and other writings will continue to be important entry points to the Japanese American incarceration story for many.
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[Header: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston during a 2012 Cal Humanities interview.]