Farewell To Manzanar Research Paper

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, ordering all Japanese American citizens to be put into internment camps while on the other side of the Pacific, Japanese soldiers would soon capture and imprison American soldiers into POW camps. The American’s Japanese internment camps and The Japanese POW camps were both terrible conditions for a world at war, but the conditions and the lasting effects on the prisoners were starkly different. The books Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand show the stories of the Wakatsuki family in America’s Japanese internment camp Manzanar and Louie Zamperini in the Japanese POW camps (despite Zamperini being sent to multiple camps, Naoetsu
In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne tells of how she had troubles adjusting to life after leaving Manzanar; she “hadn’t been at all prepared for…” what she “truly had to deal with” (Houston 156) while away from the camp, and in Unbroken, when Louie returned, it seemed as if “he got hit real hard..and he was trying to shake it off” (Hillenbrand 539) when he returned to the outside world from Naoetsu. That being said, the effects of Naoetsu manifested more violently than the effects of Manzanar. Oftentimes, Louie found himself in “the actual experience-the glaring and grating and stench and howl and terror of it” (Hillenbrand 562). He and the other soldiers who experienced Naoetsu and the other camps often had severe PTSD, psychoneurosis, nightmares, flashbacks, and anxiety from their horrid experiences because they feared being beaten by their former captors or getting killed by harsh labor. For some, “the war would never really end” (Hillenbrand 557), and the war would haunt them for the rest of their lives in their thoughts and nightmares. In contrast, for former prisoners of Manzanar, life went on; “Shikata Ga Nai” (it must be done) was their mindset. As dismaying as Manzanar was, it was made into a livable place, and most could live with the memories of it. When they left Manzanar, most wanted to prove that they could go on, that they were worthy of society. In Jeanne’s case, she tried to prove herself by twirling with the boy scouts’ band in parades, showing she could speak perfect english, and attempting (and getting) the position of carnival queen at her school. In some cases, a person’s life ended there, while in others, their life began there. In a way, Manzanar tended to bring both life and death of the body, mind, and soul, but Naoetsu tended to bring only death of the body, mind, and