Farewell to Manzanar

by

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Farewell to Manzanar makes teaching easy.

Papa Character Analysis

Ko Wakatsuki, Jeanne’s father. Headstrong and impetuous, Papa immigrated from Japan determined to make his fortune, but he never quite became economically successful in America, constantly changing his career plans and shifting his family from place to place. Papa is a deeply flawed character. He’s vain and quick to anger, he’s “absurdly proud,” and when the experience of internment drives him to despair, he expresses his feelings by showering abuse on his family. However, Papa’s dynamic personality makes him the vibrant and exciting center of family life, especially before internment—Jeanne recalls that during her early childhood, he always knew how to throw a party, even when the family had little money. While Papa holds the family together before the war, his breakdown during internment is the strongest manifestation of the family’s dissolution; it also shows his inability to maintain his personal dignity in the face of public stigma and suspicion. For many years, Jeanne shares Papa’s deep sense of personal shame, while feeling anger at his eccentric and volatile behavior. Papa dies twelve years after internment, and while his death isn’t directly connected to the experience, Jeanne says that his life “ended” there.

Papa Quotes in Farewell to Manzanar

The Farewell to Manzanar quotes below are all either spoken by Papa or refer to Papa. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Belonging in America Theme Icon
).
Chapter 2 Quotes

Mama took out another dinner plate and hurled it at the floor, then another and another, never moving, never opening her mouth, just quivering and glaring at the retreating dealer, with tears streaming down her cheeks.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 13
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

[Mama] would quickly subordinate her own desires to those of the family or those of the community, because she knew cooperation was the only way to survive. At the same time she placed a premium on personal privacy, respected it in others and insisted upon it for herself. Almost everyone at Manzanar had inherited this pair of traits from the generations before them who had learned to live in a small, crowded country like Japan. Because of the first they were able to take a desolate stretch of wasteland and gradually make it livable. But the entire situation there, especially in the beginning … was an open insult to that other, private self, a slap in the face you were powerless to challenge.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 30
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

My own family, after three years of mess hall living, collapsed as an integrated unit. Whatever dignity or feeling of filial strength we may have known before December 1941 was lost, and we did not recover it until many years after the war …

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

[Papa] didn’t die there, but things finished for him there, whereas for me it was like a birthplace. The camp was where our lifelines intersected.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Papa
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

But as badly as he wanted us to believe it, he never did finish law school. Who knows why? He was terribly proud, sometimes absurdly proud, and he refused to defer to any man. Maybe … he saw ahead of him prejudices he refused to swallow, humiliations he refused to bear.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:

He was not a great man. He wasn’t even a very successful man. He was a poser, a braggart, and a tyrant. But he had held onto his self-respect, he dreamed grand dreams, and he could work well at any task he turned his hand to …

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 52
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them to stop fighting?

Related Characters: Papa (speaker)
Page Number: 58
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

There had always been doors to keep some moments private. Here there were no doors. Nothing was private. And tonight [Papa] was far too serious—he seemed to have reached some final limit.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa, Kiyo
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:

I was proud of Kiyo and afraid for what would happen to him; but deeper than that, I felt the miserable sense of loss that comes when the center has collapsed and everything seems to be flying apart around you.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa, Kiyo
Page Number: 64
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

For a man raised in Japan, there was no greater disgrace. And it was the humiliation. It brought him face to face with his own vulnerability, his own powerlessness. He had no rights, no home, no control over his own life.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Papa
Page Number: 65
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

It 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.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Papa
Related Symbols: Stones
Page Number: 81
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

Three years of wartime propaganda—racist headlines, atrocity movies, hate slogans, and fright-mask posters—had turned the Japanese face into something despicable and grotesque. Mama and Papa knew this. They had been reading the papers. Even I knew this, although it was not until many years later that I realized how bad things actually were.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:

The physical violence didn’t trouble me. Somehow I didn’t quite believe that, or didn’t want to believe such things could happen to us. It was the humiliation. That continuous, unnamed ache I had been living with was precise and definable now. Call it the foretaste of being hated … At ten I saw that coming, like a judge’s sentence, and I would have stayed inside the camp forever rather than step outside and face such a moment.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Related Symbols: Barbed Wire
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

One of the amazing things about America is the way it can both undermine you and keep you believing in your own possibilities, pumping you with hope.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Papa
Page Number: 139
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

I couldn’t understand why [Papa] was home all day, when Mama had to go out working. I was ashamed of him for that and, in a deeper way, for being what had led to our imprisonment, that is, for being so unalterably Japanese. I would not bring my friends home for fear of what he would say or do.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 149
Explanation and Analysis:

He was unforgivably a foreigner then, foreign to them, foreign to me, foreign to everyone but Mama, who sat next to him smiling with pleased modesty. Twelve years old at the time, I wanted to scream. I wanted to slide out of sight under the table and dissolve.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 151
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Papa
Related Symbols: Stones, Barbed Wire
Page Number: 172
Explanation and Analysis:
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Papa Quotes in Farewell to Manzanar

The Farewell to Manzanar quotes below are all either spoken by Papa or refer to Papa. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Belonging in America Theme Icon
).
Chapter 2 Quotes

Mama took out another dinner plate and hurled it at the floor, then another and another, never moving, never opening her mouth, just quivering and glaring at the retreating dealer, with tears streaming down her cheeks.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 13
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

[Mama] would quickly subordinate her own desires to those of the family or those of the community, because she knew cooperation was the only way to survive. At the same time she placed a premium on personal privacy, respected it in others and insisted upon it for herself. Almost everyone at Manzanar had inherited this pair of traits from the generations before them who had learned to live in a small, crowded country like Japan. Because of the first they were able to take a desolate stretch of wasteland and gradually make it livable. But the entire situation there, especially in the beginning … was an open insult to that other, private self, a slap in the face you were powerless to challenge.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 30
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

My own family, after three years of mess hall living, collapsed as an integrated unit. Whatever dignity or feeling of filial strength we may have known before December 1941 was lost, and we did not recover it until many years after the war …

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

[Papa] didn’t die there, but things finished for him there, whereas for me it was like a birthplace. The camp was where our lifelines intersected.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Papa
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

But as badly as he wanted us to believe it, he never did finish law school. Who knows why? He was terribly proud, sometimes absurdly proud, and he refused to defer to any man. Maybe … he saw ahead of him prejudices he refused to swallow, humiliations he refused to bear.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:

He was not a great man. He wasn’t even a very successful man. He was a poser, a braggart, and a tyrant. But he had held onto his self-respect, he dreamed grand dreams, and he could work well at any task he turned his hand to …

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 52
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them to stop fighting?

Related Characters: Papa (speaker)
Page Number: 58
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

There had always been doors to keep some moments private. Here there were no doors. Nothing was private. And tonight [Papa] was far too serious—he seemed to have reached some final limit.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa, Kiyo
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:

I was proud of Kiyo and afraid for what would happen to him; but deeper than that, I felt the miserable sense of loss that comes when the center has collapsed and everything seems to be flying apart around you.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa, Kiyo
Page Number: 64
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

For a man raised in Japan, there was no greater disgrace. And it was the humiliation. It brought him face to face with his own vulnerability, his own powerlessness. He had no rights, no home, no control over his own life.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Papa
Page Number: 65
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

It 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.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Papa
Related Symbols: Stones
Page Number: 81
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

Three years of wartime propaganda—racist headlines, atrocity movies, hate slogans, and fright-mask posters—had turned the Japanese face into something despicable and grotesque. Mama and Papa knew this. They had been reading the papers. Even I knew this, although it was not until many years later that I realized how bad things actually were.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:

The physical violence didn’t trouble me. Somehow I didn’t quite believe that, or didn’t want to believe such things could happen to us. It was the humiliation. That continuous, unnamed ache I had been living with was precise and definable now. Call it the foretaste of being hated … At ten I saw that coming, like a judge’s sentence, and I would have stayed inside the camp forever rather than step outside and face such a moment.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Related Symbols: Barbed Wire
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

One of the amazing things about America is the way it can both undermine you and keep you believing in your own possibilities, pumping you with hope.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Papa
Page Number: 139
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

I couldn’t understand why [Papa] was home all day, when Mama had to go out working. I was ashamed of him for that and, in a deeper way, for being what had led to our imprisonment, that is, for being so unalterably Japanese. I would not bring my friends home for fear of what he would say or do.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 149
Explanation and Analysis:

He was unforgivably a foreigner then, foreign to them, foreign to me, foreign to everyone but Mama, who sat next to him smiling with pleased modesty. Twelve years old at the time, I wanted to scream. I wanted to slide out of sight under the table and dissolve.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 151
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Jeanne (speaker), Papa
Related Symbols: Stones, Barbed Wire
Page Number: 172
Explanation and Analysis: