Jeanne Houston's self-directed psychotherapy initiated a full career. She and James joined with producer-director John Korty to script the TV screenplay "Farewell to Manzanar" for Universal and MCA-TV. The film version premiered as the NBC "Thursday Night at the Movies" feature on March 11,1976, the year that James earned a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing grant. Well received for its historical accuracy, the film featured the Houston twins, actor Lou Frizell in one of the few Caucasian speaking parts, and Japanese-American employees and internees of Tule Lake, Heart Mountain, Minidoka, and Topaz internment camps. Most of the Asian-American cast, including Jimmy Nakamura, Akemi Kikumura, Nobu McCarthy as Mama, and Yuki Shimoda as Ko Wakatsuki, brought to their jobs a sincere interest in an historical event which impinged on their race. Shimoda remarked, "I felt that the role of Ko was the role I have been preparing for all these years. . . . The feeling on the set is like no other picture I have worked in."
Designer Robert Kinoshita recreated Manzanar 400 miles northwest of its location at Tule Lake, California, at the only extant internment facility, where he used tarpaper and lath over pine planking to emulate temporary, substandard quarters. In the scene in which Ko enters Manzanar, Nobu McCarthy, unable to separate herself from the character she portrayed, grasped Shimoda and sobbed into his chest. He comforted her with an understanding embrace. Jeanne was so moved by the scene that she wept for "the pride of my father—the humiliation, the stubbornness, the shattered dignity."
The movie won a Humanitas Prize, a Christopher Award, and an Emmy nomination for best dramatic script adapted from another medium. Judith Crist, critic for TV Guide, lauded the movie as a "deeply moving examination of family relations under stress and of the scars that remain." Time's Richard Schickel, in his March 15, 1976, review, described the movie as "modest and touching and refreshingly free of melodrama." More philosophical was Newsweek's comment that same week: "The cruelties that men visit on one another can, at least in retrospect, help them to perceive their common humanity."
The Houston duo continued their probe of multicultural themes with back-to-back books, Beyond Manzanar and Other Views of Asian-American Womanhood and One Can Think About Life After the Fish Is in the Canoe and Other Coastal Stories (1985), and Barrio, an eight-part miniseries for NBC. On their own, the Houstons function as solo writers and lecturers. Jeanne fills her days with writing articles for Mother Jones, California, West, California Living, Reader's Digest, and the New England Review and by speaking at West Coast, Hawaiian, and Asian campuses. James has produced a composition text, biography, essays, novels, and stories in Playboy, Michigan Quarterly Review, Yardbird Reader, Unknown California, Bennington Review, Honolulu, Manoa, Rolling Stone, and Mother Jones, as well as articles for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. His best-received nonfiction, Californians: Searching for the Golden State (1982), earned a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award.
Jeanne's contribution to the reclamation of the Asian-American past has netted her recognition from the National Women's Political Caucus. In 1984, after meriting Warner Communications' Wonder Woman award for "the pursuit of truth and positive social change," she and James, on a tour of Japan, the Philippines, Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia, visited refugee camps. More recent honors include the East-West Center award from the 1989 Hawaii International Film Festival and a U.S.-Japan Cultural Exchange fellowship in 1991, during which the Houstons spent six months in Japan. Although close enough to visit Hiroshima, Jeanne chose not to view the place where members of the Wakatsuki family were incinerated by an atomic bomb.
Actively pursuing their trade, Jeanne and James Houston, their children grown, still live in their Victorian house in Santa Cruz and work out of separate office spaces. An upbeat, positive woman, petite and graceful next to Jim's tall, lanky good looks, Jeanne, despite her family's sufferings, rejects a hostile, anti-American stance in favor of a humanistic embrace of democracy. Like Jim, she defines herself as a "philosophic Buddhist," attuned to peace, harmony, and nonviolence.
In a recent interview, she acknowledged that it took years for her to forgive her father for his pomposity and the violent episodes which allowed him to submerge his shame in alcohol and inappropriate outbursts. Fortunately for the family, he quit drinking after physical symptoms indicated that he was shortening his life. He died in 1957. Jeanne, along with her surviving six siblings, treasures the positive images of Ko Wakatsuki, particularly his faith in the American dream. In her lectures, she emphasizes "how far, as a country, we have come in our understanding and practice of human rights. My discussion neither lays guilt nor attacks. In the final analysis, it is an affirmation of what America really is."
