User:Dima.Zk.

A Summary of the Community of Manzanar as it is Described in Various Chapters of the Novel, Southland: In the novel, Southland by Nina Revoyr, the community of Manzanar plays a crucial role in depicting the racial discrimination and segregation that Japanese Americans were subjected to during the World War II era. In fact, in response to the growing hatred and suspicion of Japanese Americans after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt transformed the community of Manzanar, located in the dust- filled Owens Valley, 220 miles north of Los Angles, California. He turned it into the first Japanese internment camp, formally called The Manzanar War Relocation Center. Consequently, in April 1942, the majority of Japanese Americans living in Los Angeles were sent into a frenzy of panic as government evacuation orders were sent to their homes. In fact, this coerced many of them to sell their possessions, homes, and even businesses for prices that were far below their true values. However, there were a few Japanese families that chose not to sell anything that they possessed. For example, Frank Sakai’s mother was adamant about keeping their family home that she and her husband, Kazuo had worked so hard over the years to purchase. As a matter of fact, Mary’s parents had also refused to sell their family restaurant at the time for similar reasons. But despite their unwillingness to be exploited by their fears, both Frank and Mary’s family would eventually join the thousands of other Japanese Americans that were also forced to relocate. They all were forced to leave behind the lives that they once lead. Uncertain of their returns, they journeyed off to Manzanar; a place that Revoyr describes in chapters four and ten of Southland as an overpopulated space, plagued with harsh climate, unsanitary living conditions, barbed wire fences, watch towers, armed guards, and above all, injustice. Nonetheless, to cope with the daily struggles that living in Manzanar presented, Japanese men, women, and children took long walks around the barracks, planted gardens, attended the Buddhist camp church, and found jobs within the camp. Children were even able to join the camp’s baseball team and were permitted to attend the camp’s high school. In fact, Mary’s teenage crush, Vince Tajiri, was the captain of the camp’s baseball team. But despite all these temporary coping mechanisms, life in Manzanar was anything but enjoyable. For example, in chapter ten, Revoyr implies that Frank and his fellow Japanese internees felt a sense of daily anxiousness due to their awareness that their every move was being carefully monitored by armed guards. As they walked around the edges of the camp, they could never seem to escape the eight tall watch towers that stood high above them. Life even became so intolerable to some young Japanese men that they did not hesitate to take the loyalty questionnaires that white soldiers distributed among them as World War II intensified. In fact, given their first opportunities, these young, desperate Japanese men signed away their lives to the mercy of the U.S. Army in attempts to escape their daily imprisonment and erase the negative, racial stigma that surrounded them. Meanwhile, they lost the tiny, remaining shreds of their boyhoods.