<Begin Segment 15>

KL: I picked up on your talk with Richard, too -- this is jumping subjects -- but he said, or you said there that you had gone over to Jeanne and John Houston's house as they were writing Farewell to Manzanar. And I had not heard that they had, I just don't know very much about their process in writing that book, and I wondered if you guys would talk about your conversations with the Houstons.

MJT: Well, they came over and interviewed us, because we knew Jeanne well when she was a little girl in Manzanar, and her family. And so when she was writing this book Farewell to Manzanar, she and her husband came to...

MT: Jim.

MJT: ...came over and interviewed us about Manzanar.

KL: What did they ask you, do you remember?

MT: Some of our feelings.

MJT: Yeah, pretty much like we're doing now. And our feeling about Manzanar.

MT: She did give us credit in the first part of the book, and so we met a lot of people who know us after the fact, and they were surprised that we were interviewed for her. But she was seven years old and we were nineteen and twenty, eighteen and nineteen when we were there, and so we were quite a bit older than she was. But then we connected again when we moved to Santa Cruz, California. She lived there, so that's when she interviewed us.

KL: Did they interview other people, do you know?

MT: I think so. I think they did interview a few people. And her children or her siblings, she was the youngest of about six or seven children, and so her brothers and sisters were our age.

KL: Did they talk in that evening or at other times about what it was like to write that book or why they were writing it?

MJT: No, I haven't seen her. Although when I see Jeanne Wakamatsu, I say, "Oh, hi." We haven't seen her for a long time.

MT: She died.

MJT: Did they?

MT: Yeah, they both died.

KL: James did. I think Jeanne?

MT: James did and Jeanne did, too, a couple of years ago.

MJT: James just died recently. Last year?

KL: He died about two years ago, but she's still living, but she, I think, just didn't go out for a year or more after his death.

MT: I think my daughter said that she did, she did die. I'll ask her when I, our daughter's going to call us soon, so I'll ask her. She was going to send me the obituary, but she didn't, so I know that, I'm quite sure she died.

KL: Oh, wow. I'll have to look at the news, too.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.