Jeanne Jeanne, the youngest of ten children and the speaker of the book, undergoes the trauma of internment along with the normal ambivalence of children toward traditional parents. A tentative, fearful seven year old at the outset of the family's resettlement, Jeanne, born in Inglewood and raised in Ocean Park and Terminal Island, adapts to camp life by satisfying intellectual curiosity and staying active. A daddy's girl, she suffers a love-hate relationship with Ko and must cope with his alcoholism and his outrageous macho behavior. In adulthood, she patterns her own individuality after his rebellion and establishes herself as a majorette and beauty queen.
Ko (Papa) Wakatsuki A six-footer with a military school background, Ko, a former cook, laborer, lumberjack, and government translator, is possessed of dignity and pride in his Samurai background, his ten children, and a thriving fishing business. He precedes the agents who arrest him and returns from prison with a swagger stick and self-satisfied air, yet suffers his whole life from an inability to complete what he begins. When freedom comes to Manzanar, Ko is reluctant to return to predominantly Caucasian society, and so declines to join those of his children who settle in New Jersey. In Los Angeles, he pursues a pipe dream of building a housing project with Japanese labor and allows his wife to support the family on factory wages.
Mama A stereotypical partridge-shaped mother figure, Mrs. Wakatsuki, a Hawaiian-born beauty in her youth, attempts to hide wartime concerns from her children, but her temper explodes when a secondhand dealer tries to buy her china for $15, prior to the departure for Boyle Heights. Her decision to smash the twelve place settings indicates her doughty courage. At Manzanar, she puts to use her skill as a dietician. Returned to freedom, she locates a cannery job like the one she held at Long Beach before the war and takes Jeanne's side in family arguments about how young girls should behave.
Woody One of the two Wakatsuki sons who assist Papa on The Nereid, twenty-four-year-old Woody, Ko's second oldest child, serves as a cheerful, pragmatic surrogate father during the evacuation of Terminal Island and takes a job as a carpenter. The family bulwark in Ko's absence, Woody remains determined to prove his loyalty by serving in the military in 1944. His pilgrimage to the remnants of the Wakatsuki family still in Japan, conducted while he performs peacetime duty as provisions manager and deterrent to the black market, discloses an aspect of Ko's former life that Woody had been unable to appreciate in California.
Granny Mrs. Wakatsuki's mother, a sixty-five-year-old Japanese native who is nearly blind and too feeble to hustle for food in the mess hall, receives her food in the barracks. She never learns English and prizes the lacquerware and porcelain that came from her native land.
