Farewell to Manzanar
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40 free Farewell to Manzanar trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Farewell to Manzanar is one of the most widely read accounts of the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven when her family was sent from the California coast to a camp in the high desert, and the book follows them through the war years and long after, as she works out what the experience did to her father, her family and herself. This quiz moves through the whole story: the day the fishing fleet turned back, the first night in the barracks, her father's return from detention, the December Riot and the loyalty oath, the slow emptying of the camp, and Jeanne's school years afterwards. A good share of the questions come from chapters 6 to 10, where her father's past, his interrogation and the riot are told, and a few cover the authors, the history behind the book and its screen adaptation. It is written for students reading the book in class, teachers who want a ready check on the reading, and anyone revisiting the story. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches you something.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Farewell to Manzanar, what does Jeanne's mother smash rather than sell to a dealer for fifteen dollars?
Her china dishes
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.
Q 02In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne's father is falsely accused of delivering what to a Japanese submarine?
Oil
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.
Q 03The Spanish name of the camp in Farewell to Manzanar recalls the valley's old orchards of which fruit?
Apple
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.
Q 04Which all-American hobby does Jeanne learn at camp in Farewell to Manzanar and later use to join a Boy Scouts band?
Baton twirling
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.
Q 05Which president signed Executive Order 9066, the 1942 order behind the removal described in Farewell to Manzanar?
Franklin Roosevelt
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.
Q 06In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne's father Ko takes fierce pride in his family's descent from which class of old Japan?
Samurai
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.
Q 07In Farewell to Manzanar, which title does Jeanne win at her San Jose high school after campaigning in a sarong?
Carnival queen
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.
Q 08In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne's brother Woody visits his great-aunt Toyo in 1946 near which Japanese city?
Hiroshima
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.
Q 09Two weeks after Pearl Harbor in Farewell to Manzanar, who comes to arrest Jeanne's father as a suspected spy?
FBI agents
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.
Q 10On the night of Pearl Harbor in Farewell to Manzanar, what keepsake does Jeanne's father burn along with his papers?
A Japanese flag
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.
Q 11In Farewell to Manzanar, which of Jeanne's brothers punches their drunken father in the face to protect their mother?
Kiyo
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.
Q 12In Farewell to Manzanar, which Japanese word for dog do camp gossips use to brand Jeanne's father an informer?
Inu
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.
Q 13After military police fire on the December Riot crowd in Farewell to Manzanar, what sounds all night until noon?
Mess hall bells
Q 21In Farewell to Manzanar, which faith does young Jeanne hope to join until her father forbids her baptism?
Catholicism
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.
Q 22Rather 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 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.
Q 23After camp in Farewell to Manzanar, the Wakatsukis move into the Cabrillo Homes housing project in which city?
Long Beach
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.
Q 14Asked who he wants to win the war, Ko Wakatsuki in Farewell to Manzanar compares Japan and America to what?
His parents fighting
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.
Q 15At seventeen, Ko Wakatsuki in Farewell to Manzanar leaves Japan on money borrowed from an aunt and lands first where?
Hawaii
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.
Q 16In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne's father spends months at Fort Lincoln, a camp for enemy aliens in which state?
North Dakota
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.
Q 17Which Japanese phrase, meaning it cannot be helped, gives a chapter of Farewell to Manzanar its title?
Shikata ga nai
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.
Q 18In Farewell to Manzanar, how do Jeanne's father and her brother Woody answer the two loyalty oath questions of 1943?
Yes to both
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.
Q 19After her husband's arrest in Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne's mother moves the family to which cannery ghetto?
Terminal Island
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.
Q 20On the Wakatsukis' first night at camp in Farewell to Manzanar, what do the cooks pour over the rice?
Canned apricots
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.
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.
Q 24In Farewell to Manzanar, which sixth-grade classmate is amazed that Jeanne speaks English, then becomes her best friend?
Radine
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.
Q 25Which hit song does Bill Wakatsuki's dance band, the Jive Bombers, perform at camp in Farewell to Manzanar?
Don't Fence Me In
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.
Q 26Jeanne Wakatsuki wrote Farewell to Manzanar with which novelist, the husband she had met at San Jose State?
James D. Houston
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.
Q 27In 1976, NBC brought Farewell to Manzanar to a national audience by adapting the book in which form?
A television film
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.
Q 28Which Japanese term describes Ko Wakatsuki in Farewell to Manzanar, an immigrant barred from American citizenship?
Issei
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.
Q 29The camp in Farewell to Manzanar stood between the towns of Lone Pine and Independence in which part of California?
Owens Valley
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.
Q 30The camp in Farewell to Manzanar sits at the eastern foot of which mountain range, where Jeanne later hikes?
Sierra Nevada
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.