40 Fun Facts About Farewell to Manzanar

In Farewell to Manzanar, what does Jeanne's mother smash rather than sell to a dealer for fifteen dollars?

Her china dishes, a treasured set she could not carry when the family got 48 hours to move. Insulted by the offer, she broke every piece in front of the dealer.

In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne's father is falsely accused of delivering what to a Japanese submarine?

Oil, a local newspaper reported, supposedly carried out to sea on his sardine boat. He was held for months at an enemy-alien camp before rejoining the family, visibly aged and leaning on a cane.

The Spanish name of the camp in Farewell to Manzanar recalls the valley's old orchards of which fruit?

Apple orchards gave the place its name: manzanar is Spanish for one. The farm town that grew them was abandoned by 1929, after Los Angeles bought up the valley's water.

Which all-American hobby does Jeanne learn at camp in Farewell to Manzanar and later use to join a Boy Scouts band?

Baton twirling, practiced for months at Manzanar, makes her the majorette of a drum and bugle corps after the war. She soon senses that the boys and their fathers mostly enjoy seeing girls in short skirts.

Which president signed Executive Order 9066, the 1942 order behind the removal described in Farewell to Manzanar?

Franklin Roosevelt signed it on February 19, 1942, authorizing the removal of anyone deemed a threat from the West Coast. Two-thirds of the roughly 125,000 people displaced were American citizens.

In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne's father Ko takes fierce pride in his family's descent from which class of old Japan?

Samurai forebears explain why he swings his cane like a sword and refuses work he thinks beneath him. His relatives lost that rank after Japan opened to the West, and he left the country at seventeen.

In Farewell to Manzanar, which title does Jeanne win at her San Jose high school after campaigning in a sarong?

Carnival queen is hers only because a friend, Leonard Rodriguez, catches teachers trying to rig the ballot against her. Her father is furious at how she won, and the crown leaves her feeling like an outsider still.

In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne's brother Woody visits his great-aunt Toyo in 1946 near which Japanese city?

Hiroshima was his father's home, and Woody arrives in American uniform less than a year after the atomic bomb. Toyo receives him with such dignity that he finally understands his father's pride.

Two weeks after Pearl Harbor in Farewell to Manzanar, who comes to arrest Jeanne's father as a suspected spy?

FBI agents take him away, and he walks out ahead of the two men, tall and dignified. His sons cannot find out where he is held until a letter finally arrives from a distant camp.

On the night of Pearl Harbor in Farewell to Manzanar, what keepsake does Jeanne's father burn along with his papers?

A Japanese flag he had carried from his homeland decades earlier goes into the fire, with any document tying him to Japan. It does not save him: as a non-citizen with a fishing license, he is arrested anyway.

In Farewell to Manzanar, which of Jeanne's brothers punches their drunken father in the face to protect their mother?

Kiyo, still a boy, springs from the bed and hits him as the cane is raised over their mother. He hides at a sister's for two weeks, then returns to ask forgiveness, which his father grants.

In Farewell to Manzanar, which Japanese word for dog do camp gossips use to brand Jeanne's father an informer?

Inu, literally dog, was the slur for anyone thought to be collaborating with the authorities. He earned it by being freed from Fort Lincoln earlier than other men, which looked like a reward for informing.

After military police fire on the December Riot crowd in Farewell to Manzanar, what sounds all night until noon?

Mess hall bells toll across the camp until noon the next day, a memorial to the dead. Two inmates died and others were wounded when the military police fired into the crowd.

Asked who he wants to win the war, Ko Wakatsuki in Farewell to Manzanar compares Japan and America to what?

His parents fighting, he tells the Fort Lincoln interrogator: a son would not want either one killed, only for the quarrel to stop. The reply shows a man born in one country and settled for decades in the other.

At seventeen, Ko Wakatsuki in Farewell to Manzanar leaves Japan on money borrowed from an aunt and lands first where?

Hawaii was a letdown: the job he bought a new suit for turned out to be cutting sugar cane. He soon moved to the mainland as a houseboy in Idaho, and from there to university.

In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne's father spends months at Fort Lincoln, a camp for enemy aliens in which state?

North Dakota's Fort Lincoln, just south of Bismarck, held Japanese men seized after Pearl Harbor. He comes back from it aged and thin, favoring his right leg and leaning on a cane.

Which Japanese phrase, meaning it cannot be helped, gives a chapter of Farewell to Manzanar its title?

Shikata ga nai, also heard as it must be done, is how the internees explain boarding the buses without protest. Jeanne hears the phrase again once camp life settles into routine.

In Farewell to Manzanar, how do Jeanne's father and her brother Woody answer the two loyalty oath questions of 1943?

Yes to both: her father expects America to win and fears being shipped to Japan. Defending that Yes Yes stand at a block meeting, he ends up brawling with a man who calls him a traitor.

After her husband's arrest in Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne's mother moves the family to which cannery ghetto?

Terminal Island is the first place Jeanne lives among other Japanese, and its tough local kids frighten her. The government clears the whole community out on 48 hours' notice in February 1942.

On the Wakatsukis' first night at camp in Farewell to Manzanar, what do the cooks pour over the rice?

Canned apricots land on the rice because the cooks do not know it is a staple the Japanese never eat with sweet foods. The meal is an early sign of how unready the camp is for the people sent to it.

In Farewell to Manzanar, which faith does young Jeanne hope to join until her father forbids her baptism?

Catholicism draws her through two Japanese nuns whose tales of saints and martyrs fill her afternoons. Her father refuses, saying she is too young and would never be able to marry a Japanese boy.

Rather than leave by bus when the camp closes in Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne's father walks to Lone Pine to buy what?

A used car, a midnight-blue Nash sedan, lets him take the family out in style. It breaks down about every hundred miles, and he needs three trips over four days to move everyone.

After camp in Farewell to Manzanar, the Wakatsukis move into the Cabrillo Homes housing project in which city?

Long Beach gives them a kitchen and a toilet of their own for the first time in three years, in an apartment found with Quaker help. Jeanne's mother takes a cannery job that her father is too proud to do.

In Farewell to Manzanar, which sixth-grade classmate is amazed that Jeanne speaks English, then becomes her best friend?

Radine, a girl from a poor white Texas family in the same housing project, makes Jeanne see she will always be taken for a foreigner. In high school Radine is welcomed into clubs and dances that shut Jeanne out.

Which hit song does Bill Wakatsuki's dance band, the Jive Bombers, perform at camp in Farewell to Manzanar?

Don't Fence Me In is among the hits Bill sings with his band, which is pictured in the camp high school's 1943-44 yearbook, Our World. One of the yearbook's last two photographs shows a guard tower.

Jeanne Wakatsuki wrote Farewell to Manzanar with which novelist, the husband she had met at San Jose State?

James D. Houston first heard the full story when a relative's questions made his wife open up, and he saw it was more than a family keepsake. She began by talking her memories into a tape recorder.

In 1976, NBC brought Farewell to Manzanar to a national audience by adapting the book in which form?

A television film, directed by John Korty from a script he wrote with the two authors, aired in March 1976. An NBC executive had suggested making the lead a white schoolteacher, and the writers refused.

Which Japanese term describes Ko Wakatsuki in Farewell to Manzanar, an immigrant barred from American citizenship?

Issei means first generation: people born in Japan, whom American law barred from naturalizing however many years they stayed. His American-born children, the Nisei, were citizens from birth.

The camp in Farewell to Manzanar stood between the towns of Lone Pine and Independence in which part of California?

Owens Valley land for the camp was leased from the City of Los Angeles, whose aqueduct had drained the ranches there decades before. Jeanne wakes on the bus to billowing yellow dust.

The camp in Farewell to Manzanar sits at the eastern foot of which mountain range, where Jeanne later hikes?

Sierra Nevada peaks rise just west of the camp, and once the rules relax, Quaker youth leaders take Jeanne's group camping in the hills. Her father is later pictured staring at the mountains to calm his thoughts.

On the night of the December Riot in Farewell to Manzanar, what is Kaz's reservoir crew issued for protection?

Ax handles were handed out in case rioters caught the crew working for the administration. Instead they alarm four military police, who burst into the shack and hold the men at gunpoint as suspected saboteurs.

In Farewell to Manzanar, what does Ko Wakatsuki tell his Fort Lincoln interrogator the two drums on his boat held?

Fish guts, he says, tipped overboard to draw mackerel into the nets. The interrogator had produced a photograph of the two fifty-gallon drums on deck as evidence against him.

In Farewell to Manzanar, the beating of which Japanese American Citizens League leader touches off the December Riot?

Fred Tayama was attacked in his barracks on December 5, 1942, by men who saw him as a collaborator. The arrest of a popular cook for the assault brought some two thousand people out in protest.

Which December 1944 Supreme Court ruling, noted in Farewell to Manzanar, said loyal citizens could not be detained?

Ex parte Endo was unanimous, and the Army, expecting to lose, had announced the camps would close within a year. Mitsuye Endo had refused an offer of release so that her case could go on.

As the camp empties in Farewell to Manzanar, most of Jeanne's older siblings relocate to cannery work in which state?

New Jersey, at the Seabrook Farms food plant, is where they find work once families may resettle away from the West Coast. Their father will not go east, so the younger children return to the coast with him.

In Farewell to Manzanar, what had Ko Wakatsuki's relatives in Japan done after nine years without word from him?

Put up his gravestone, dated 1913, in the family plot: they had given him up for dead. His great-aunt shows the marker to his visiting son in 1946 and says the news that he lives outweighs all the war cost her.

At a wedding anniversary party in Farewell to Manzanar, what does Ko Wakatsuki carve with swift strokes of a cleaver?

A roast pig, split in a few strokes while he stands in a double-breasted suit, is Jeanne's picture of her father at his peak. She calls the party the high point of the family's years at Ocean Park.

After brawling over the loyalty oath in Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne's father weeps while singing which Japanese song?

Kimigayo, the national anthem, takes its words from a poem over a thousand years old in which pebbles grow into mossy boulders. Jeanne ties it to a stone lantern his family kept wet so that moss would grow.

Which federal agency preserves the camp from Farewell to Manzanar as a historic site, established by Congress in 1992?

The National Park Service was handed the site in 1992, when little stood but two sentry posts, a cemetery monument and the old school auditorium. An annual pilgrimage to the site had begun in 1969.

Which relative's questions about the camp where he was born spurred Jeanne Wakatsuki to write Farewell to Manzanar?

Her nephew, a Berkeley student, came to her around 1971 because his own parents would not talk about the camp. When he asked how she had felt about it, she let herself feel it for the first time, and it was devastating.