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Creative Teaching Ideas for

FAREWELL TO MANZANAR

by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston (1973)


Teach kids in hands-on,
thoughtful ways that engage and enspire!

About the story

Sometimes we break from our criteria of  "classic or vintage, fiction or play" to read and experience a book that meets our most stringent criterion:  helping kids understand and empathize. This true story does just that. Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven when the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor; shortly lafter, her family and over 110,000 other Japanese Americans were forced out of their homes on short notice, leaving pets and possessions, and sent to Japanese internment camps across the west.

With honest grace and touching eloquence, the author shares her memories of these events and of life at the Manzanar camp, set in a California desert, from 1942-45. The internment affected her as a child, a teen, and far beyond, more deeply than she knew.  It wasn't until decades later that she could finally write her story and say Farewell to Manzanar.
 
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Hands-on Activities

Making a plan . . .


There are many ideas in this Hands-on Activities section—don't feel you have to do them all! Go with whatever works best for you and your kids. If you want to focus on a particular teaching point, our Takeaway Topics section can help you narrow down the activity options. And you can enhance discussions during any activity with audiovisual aids from Learning Links or story objects from Prop Ideas.

In our workshops, we do all the activities on this page, in order of the story's narrative arc. You might find our narrative arc worksheet helpful for sequencing your activities, teaching the important concept of the arc, and helping kids learn how Jeanne Wakatsuki put Farewell to Manzanar together.

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Setting us Straight

A LitWits activity

On the surface level, Jeanne Wakatsuki's story is all about the disruption of her setting by forces beyond her control--being pushed from place to place by other people's fear.

Farewell to Manzanar opens In the Wakatsuki's Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica, where Jeanne remembers being the only Asians. When the Japanese military bombs Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, anti-Japanese tensions rise, so the  family moves near other Japanese on Terminal Island.  But that's a rough area, so they move again to the Boyle Heights ghetto in LA.  And in April, on President Roosevelt's orders, they're sent to the Manzanar Relocation Center in a California desert.

It's difficult to imagine the stress of moving so often, and losing so many possessions (even leaving pets behind!), and feeling so untrusted and disrespected--but we asked the kids to try. As we told them, feeling with someone who has suffered is different from feeling sorry for. Feeling with is about trying to understand from the inside out.  When we "get it," even a little bit, we can more easily grasp the wrongness of this decision, from the political powers that enabled it to the individuals who acted in hurtful, disrespectful ways.

To help kids visualize these moves and learn a little about the Owens Valley, we had them do our setting worksheet, included in our printables for this book.
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BookBites

Mess Hall Mess

A LitWits activity 

BookBites is the part of our literary experience when we get to “taste the story.”  We choose a food right out of the book, and it has to meet at least one criterion:

  • it’s important to a plot point
  • it has thematic significance
  • it’s unfamiliar for reasons of culture, era, or location
In choosing our BookBites for this book, we focused on the Wakatsukis' first meal at Manzanar because it so poignantly reflected the bewilderment, unfamiliarity and cultural misunderstandings that were to flavor their experience at the camp. Rice with stewed apricots? Vienna sausages from a can? Those unfamiliar foods and combinations, plus the confusion and indignity of being made to wait in line for them, made a big impression on young  Jeanne. We packaged our pre-cooked rice bowls and sausage cans in our own version of WWII field ration labels to give them a "government-issued" flair. 

While the kids were eating, we read out loud the description of Jeanne's parents' silver wedding anniversary meal and asked the kids: How do you think that first meal stacked up to Jeanne’s memories of her mom’s homemade food? 

If you have time, you might show your kids scenes of the evacuation (many in this article by Ansel Adams) or peruse a Manzanar park brochure with history snippets and photos.

Our field ration labels are included in our printables for this book.
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A Personal Anthem

A LitWits activity 

In Chapter 11, the author tells us that the Japanese national anthem is a poem that can also be read as "a personal credo for endurance" -- that the mossy rock can be seen as a either a kingdom or a life. So we had the kids think hard about a core value, and then asked them to rewrite the poem as a personal anthem. 

At the end of the chapter, Jeanne remembers that at her father's house in Japan, someone used to pour water over a stone lantern "with four stubby legs and a small pagodalike roof" every day, and that eventually the stone grew moss.  We happened to have such a lantern, so we used it to make yet one more point:  this story is proof that what’s hard and ugly can grow into something softer and lovelier, especially with daily attention to making a difference.  

If you'd like the worksheet for this activity, it's included in our printables for this book.
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Questions of Loyalty

A LitWits activity 

Jeanne's father decides it would be best for young Japanese men to vote "yes-yes" to questions 27 and 28 of the Loyalty Oath.  Many disagree, and when he goes to the meeting to share his views, he's accused of being a traitor and gets in a fight. 

When Jeanne's father comes home, he plays the samisen and weeps as he sings Kami ga yo, the Japanese national anthem. We asked the kids to think about why he might have been crying, and to try and name what he might have been feeling.  There were many thoughtful replies, including these:

  • he missed the old country he remembered

  • he was angry that he was being called "inu" (an informer) 

  • he was mad that they had to answer those questions at all 

  • he was sad and angry that his own people would beat him up

  • he was frustrated that he couldn't make the others understand his argument

  • he was scared about what might happen to the young men if they didn't say yes-yes

  • he was scared about what might happen to the young men if they joined the war

  • he was sorry he was too old and injured to put up a better fight against the men (or maybe even go to war)


These are emotions we've all experienced ourselves, and reasons we can all understand.  After this thoughtful conversation we had the kids stand (per US protocol) as we played a beautiful rendition of the Japanese national anthem.  Here are a few YouTube  options:

Sung in Japanese by a young girl without accompaniament
Played on the shamisen with English lyrics onscreen but no images
Played and sung in Japanese, without the shamisen but with gorgeous images of Japan
Orchestral version with traditional Japanese dancers

Hearing this beautiful but melancholy anthem, especially on the heels of our discussion, brought tears to everyone's eyes.

In our session for older kids, we asked them to try to imagine having to make such a difficult choice.  We talked about the potential repercussions, and unfairness, and had them fill out a similar questionnaire, giving reasons for their decisions.

The "If That Happened to Me" creative writing worksheet is in our printables set.

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Between a Rock and a Hard Place

A LitWits activity

The internees worked hard to make Manzanar more livable, in keeping with the motto Shikata ga nai.  The idea of enduring wasn't about giving up, or giving in, or nurturing bitterness, but it was about more than mere survival. It was important to hang on to a sense of family, culture, and self. Chances to be creative certainly helped.

One way of enduring internment  was to create gardens. Jeanne's father, in fact, creates a rock garden outside their door, "with succulents and a patch of moss."   

Gardens had sprung up everywhere, in the firebreaks, between the rows of barracks--rock gardens, vegetable gardens, cactus and flower gardens.  -Ch. 12 

To honor the spirit, creativity, and coping skills of the Japanese at Manzanar, and in memory of Jeanne's father, we gave the kids a chance to create a small succulent and/or rock garden of their own. As they worked, we reminded them that though gardening may have been enjoyable for the internees, it was done in a captive environment--not their own homes or yards, or a classroom. It was done as a way to cope with their circumstances, outside and insdie. As Jeanne writes:

The present, the little bit of busywork you had right in front of you, became the most urgent thing.  In such a narrowed world, in order to survive, you learn to contain your rage and your despair, and you try to re-create, as well as you can, your normality, some sense of things continuing.  -Ch.. 12
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A View from Manzanar

A LitWits activity

As life in Manzanar goes on and on, Jeanne's father begins spending time outdoors, carving driftwood furniture, building rock gardens, and, much to Jeanne's surprise, painting watercolors.  He loved to sketch the mountains, especially Mt. Whitney, whose beautiful peaks inspired him.  They "represented those forces in nature, those powerful and inevitable forces that cannot be resisted, reminding a man that sometimes he must simply endure that which cannot be changed" (Ch. 12).  

We showed our kids images of Mt. Whitney as seen from Manzanar, and of Mt. Fujiyama in Japan (just do a Google image search for more of those). Then we had them paint Papa's view of Mt. Whitney, keeping in mind that while it was lovely, he had no other while at Manzanar.

The art template is included in our printables.
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Supplies 

  • template (in our printables) printed on cardstock, OR plain art canvases
  • pencils for sketching
  • watercolors & brushes
  • Option:  we mounted the template on a pocket folder for worksheets as shown; if you'd like to do that, you'll also need folders and glue.

While the kids were painting, we showed some photographs of this period taken by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and others, especially focusing on #35 of Mr. Hibino, a mural artist at Manzanar.
Then we played some straight-from-the-story songs, all childhood favorites of ours:

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Patterns of Expression

A LitWits activity

When the Wakatsukis move to Block 28, they double their living space--to four rooms, instead of two, for 12 people. Ceilings and sheetrocked walls made the barracks more livable, and the floors were covered in a maroon linoleum. Jeanne explains that there were three color choices--maroon, black, and forest green, and that

some families would vie with one another for the most elegant floor designs, obtaining a roll of each color from the supply shed, cutting it into diamonds, squares, or triangles, shining it with heating oil, then leaving their doors open so that passers-by could admire the handiwork. -Ch. .12

This is yet one more example of shikata ga nai--getting through what must be gotten through without losing who you are.  Collaborating to create gorgeous floors from boring linoleum is an admirable example of making the  most of a bad situation, so we had our kids do something similar.  First we had them close their eyes and imagine the families at their kitchen tables, sketching out their unique designs, deciding on colors, cutting shapes, then installing and polishing their floors.  

Then we gave them strips of maroon, black, and green paper and asked them to do a small version of this themselves. (We've made a template for placing the squares or for coloring them in--it's in our printables.)

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BookBites

Wishbook Wonders

A LitWits activity

We also wanted to make sure our young readers got to try those special dried apricots Jeanne craved so badly from the Sears catalog, even though, as she writes below, they never actually came. 

I asked God for some dried apricots. I wrote this on a piece of paper, dropped it into the prayer box, and began to fantasize about how they would arrive, in a package from Sears, Roebuck. I knew how they would taste, and feel in my hands. I said my rosary, thirty times a day, for nine days, and for nine more days after that I waited. The dried apricots never came. My faith in God and in the Catholic church slipped several notches at that time.  - Ch 16

This mailing label is also available with our printables for this book.
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A Stopping Stone

A LitWits activity

The very idea of endurance is getting hard to endure, right? It's hard for us--for anyone who didn't live through it--to imagine what life at Manzanar was like day to day, moment to moment. But Jeanne and her family did it. Like the mossy rock in the Japanese anthem, they endured.

Rocks represents everyone's ability to stand strong, weather the forces beyond our control, and grow.  Rocks LAST -- but they’re changed by their environment, whether it's gentle or harsh. Erosion and pressure can shape rocks into even more beauty, from individuals to communities who stick together.

When Jeanne returns to Manzanar as an adult, she notes that the rock gardens are what survived:

These rock gardens had outlived the barracks and the towers and would surely outlive the asphalt road and rusted pipes and shattered slabs of concrete.  Each stone was a mouth, speaking for a family, for some man who had beautified his doorstep. --Ch. 22

We want to believe that won't happen ever again, and to that end, we read books like this.

With the goal of "never again" in mind, we decided to end our workshop with a symbolic project that literally ties together some big ideas.

A tied rock, or tomeishi on a path in a Japanese garden means "this way is closed." It's a quiet way of barricading, of saying "don't go here."  Remembering Papa's rock garden, and with strong hopes for the future, we painted a rock with the Japanese character that means "never again."  To emphasize that intention, we tied the rock. 

Because we want our future adults to always remember never again.
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Write What's Right

A LitWits activity

One of the things that makes this book special is that we learn about history and ethics—even though that wasn’t the author’s goal. As she says in her introduction, even though this story is 100% true, her purpose wasn’t to teach political history. She says “It is a story, or a web of stories--my own, my father’s, my family’s—tracing a few paths, out of the multitude of paths that led up to and away from the experience of the internment.”

But she did  teach us history and ethics, by sharing her  story. To write the truth of her own experience, she didn't focus on the facts she wanted to share; she focused more on her experience  of them. This works! Those who might tune out when they hear "biography" or "history lesson” or “laws and facts” will tune in for feelings and descriptions of what that was like  for a human being.  And they’ll learn the other things while they’re absorbed by the writer's experience. 

To help our older kids grasp this  "show-don't-tell" and "share-don't-lecture" concept of creative nonfiction, we had them work with a partner to find a scene in the book that "showed" each historical event on our history handout. Then we suggested each pair do deeper research on that event, starting with our Learning Links on this page.

It was enlightening for them to see how Jeanne Wakatsuki showed  history through personal experience, and got readers to feel with  her, while sharing what might otherwise have seemed dry textbook facts.

Our history handout, "A Brief Overview," is included in our printables. 

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Printables previews

The worksheets and printables used for our activities are sold as a complete set.
Common Core State Standards Alignment for the comprehensive use of our teaching ideas and materials is also included for grades 3, 4, 5 and 6.
DETAILS

Takeaway Topics

Why we chose this book for a "field trip"
We were introduced to Farewell to Manzanar in elementary school, as were so many California students, and we've never forgotten how it made us feel as kids--the shock, the indignation, the urge to try and make up for what had been done--and the history we learned because the book grabbed our hearts first.  Remembering the education and empathy this book inspired, we wanted to "bring it" to kids . Plus, the author is a Santa Cruz local! 

So we chose her well-written account of her experiences for one of our experiential workshops.  It's  packed with great takeaway topics, which we're sharing below. In our workshops, we did our best to make these teaching points tangible, meaningful, and memorable in the kids' hands.   

Happy teaching!
Becky and Jenny

Takeaway 1

Firsthand history & ethics

History isn't just a collection of facts; it's events that have an impact on people. So what better way to learn history (besides living through it yourself) than to read a person's experience of it? Jeanne Wakatsuki's eloquent, thoughtful writing does more than share what happened to the Japanese in America during World War II. It brings us a first-hand, close-up view of the impact of those events on one family, as seen through the lens of a child but layered with decades of residual effects. It's also a great lesson in what fear can make people do, and why we need to not let fear get the better of us--individually or as a nation.

Hands-on connections in this guide:  BookBites activity, creative writing worksheets, A Stopping Stone project, A View From Manzanar project, Between a Rock and a Hard Place project, Write What's Right activity, Setting Us Straight activity, Questions of Loyalty activity, history handout, props related to historical events
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Takeaway 2

Endurance, put to the test

Throughout the book we see the Japanese focusing on enduring.  Shakata ga nai, or it must be endured, was the ever-present phrase, spoken or unspoken, that held them together. To get through their indignities, loss of freedom, and other hardships with as much dignity as possible, they made the best they could of a terrible situation. Throughout this story, the Japanese put to beautiful use what they had around them--and within.

Hands-on connections in this guide:  A Personal Anthem activity, Between a Rock and a Hard Place project, Patterns of Expression project, A View From Manzanar project, props that symbolize difficulty and endurance (eg mossy rock, cane, army blanket, broadside)
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Takeaway 3

A model of creative nonfiction

For Jeanne Wakatsuki, writing a book about what she went through was a way of putting negative experiences to positive use. The writing was cathartic for her, and it has been enlightening for thousands of schoolchildren (and adults) ever since it was published in 1973. 

But beyond those more important results, Farewell to Manzanar, co-authored by her illustrious husband, author James Houston, gives us a model of the art of creative nonfiction.  It's a solid example of the skills needed to tell a true story--what to include, and why, and how to mingle internal experience with external facts.--to make a difference in the world.

Hands-on connections in this guide:  Write What's Right, Setting Us Straight/creative writing worksheet, history handout, historical props (eg broadside)

Photo:  TradingCardsNPS, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Farewell to Manzanar  is full of other subjects to explore, too--from the artists of Manzanar to the political history of Asians in America.  Scroll down to see our curated Learning Links for more tangential teaching opportunities, and to see how we brought this book and its history to life. 

Learning Links


Story Supplements

Setting

Events

Documents
 

Beyond the Book


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Prop Ideas

When choosing props for our live workshops, we always try to focus on two important categories: props that are unique to the setting, because they help kids understand “what that was like,” and props that are symbolic of themes, because they make big ideas visual and tangible. Both kinds of props generate those wide-eyed, “aha!” moments.

Below is an overview of the display we put together for our live workshop, and under that we've given more details. You could easily have your kids contribute items to a table over time, as the book is being read. Sometimes we create a printable prop; check the list for this book.
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Fishing net

The way [Papa] stood in the cabin steering toward open water you would think the whole fleet was under his command.[...] He liked to hear himself called "Skipper."  -Ch. 1

Broadside

Executive Order 90667 had been signed by President Roosevelt, giving the War Department authority to define military areas in the western states and to exclude from them anyone who might threaten the war effort.  -Ch. 2

Sausages & canned apricots

[The servers] plopped in scoops of canned Vienna sausage [and] steamed rice that had been cooked too long, and on top of the rice a serving of canned apricots [...] Few of us could eat such a mixture. [...] I was horrified when I saw the apricot syrup seeping through my little mound of rice.  -Ch. 2

Army blanket

We were issued steel army cots, two brown army blankets each, and some mattress covers, which my brothers stuffed with straw. [Blankets used to partition the two rooms.]  -Ch. 2

Cane

The door whished open, and the first thing we saw was a cane--I will never forget it--poking from the shaded interior into sunlight, a straight, polished maple limb spotted with dark lidded eyes where small knotholes had been stained and polished. | Then Papa stepped out, wearing a fedora hat and a wilted white shirt. [...] He had aged ten years. He looked sixty. -Ch. 5

Stone lantern

In Japan, before the turn of the century, outside my father's house there stood one of those stone lanterns, with four stubby legs and a small pagodalike roof. Each morning someone in the household would pour a bucketful of water over this lantern, and after several years a skin of living vegetation began to show on the stone.   -Ch. 11

Mossy rock

[The Japanese anthem] is a patriotic song that can also be read as a proverb, as a personal credo for endurance.  The stone can be the kingdom or it can be a man's life. The moss is the greenery that, in time, will spring even from a rock.  -Ch. 11

Makeshift baton

The first class I attended was in baton twirling [...] In the beginning I used a sawed-off broomstick with an old tennis ball stuck on one end. When it looked like I was going to keep at this, Mama ordered me one like Nancy's from the Sears, Roebuck Catalog. [...] Baton twirling was one trick I could perform that was thoroughly, unmistakably American.   -Ch. 13

Rock garden

even in North Dakota, [Papa . . . ] would gather small stones from the plain and spend hours sorting through a dry stream bed looking for the veined or polished rock that somehow pleased the most. -Ch,. 22

Great Quotes

The reason I want to remember this is because I know we'll never be able to do it again.
*
You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals. 
*
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. 
*
“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.
*
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? 
*
Now she wanted for me the same thing I thought I wanted. Acceptance, in her eyes, was simply another means for survival.
*
[Mama] would quickly subordinate her own desires to those of the family or the community, because she knew cooperation was the only way to survive. At the same time she placed a high premium on personal privacy, respected it in others and insisted upon it for herself.
*
I smiled and sat down, suddenly aware of what being of Japanese ancestry was going to be like. I wouldn’t be faced with physical attack, or with overt shows of hatred. Rather, I would be seen as someone foreign, or as someone other than American, or perhaps not be seen at all.
*
Papa’s life ended at Manzanar.… Until this trip I had not been able to admit that my own life really began there.
*

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LitWits teaching ideas and materials for Farewell to Manzanar  by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
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