Papa Timeline and Summary

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• Japan attacks Pearl Harbor.
• Papa's about to go fishing with his sons, but he's forced to turn back his boats.
• For the rest of the night, Papa does his best to burn anything and everything that might link him to Japan, but it's of no use. The feds interrogate him and take him away—without notice—two weeks later.
• No one knows where he's been taken or when they'll see him again (a.k.a. if they'll see him again), and it's not until much later that we find out he's at Fort Lincoln—a camp for Issei men who have some connection to Japan.
• No one knows what really happens at Fort Lincoln because Papa doesn't really talk about it, but they do know that he worked as an interpreter there.
• He rejoins his family at Manzanar several months later as a changed man and a violent drunk.
• At Manzanar, Papa doesn't really do much except get into fights with the family and brew his own alcohol.
• When the Loyalty Oath comes around, he fights with Woody about how to answer and deal with the question regarding volunteering for the U.S. army; on the day he has to give his answers though, he decides to answer Yes Yes just like Woody does.
• He sobers himself up, wears his best clothes, and goes to a camp meeting to defend his answers.
• People call him inu though, which leads him to get into a fistfight with another man.
• The second year in camp goes a little better.
• The family moves to another barrack that's roomier, with pear and apple trees around it.
• Papa drinks less, tends to the trees, and creates a rock garden.
• He puts his foot down and refuses to let Jeanne get baptized into Catholicism.
• Then the camps start to close down, especially after the A-bomb drops.
• His kids start leaving camp, but Papa doesn't want to go since he doesn't have anything to go to.
• He decides that the young kids, his wife, mother-in-law, and he will wait until the feds arrange a day for them to move out.
• But before their scheduled day, he leaves camp, buys a used sedan, and tells his family they'll be leaving early, by car.
• They move to a housing project in Long Beach, but he still doesn't have a job.
• He does, however, have an idea for an internee co-op, but it never gets off the ground.
• He tries a bunch of other job ideas, but they don't take off either.
• One day, he almost drinks himself to death.
• This makes him pull his life together, and he gets a job as a sharecropper on a strawberry farm in San Jose. More importantly, though, he stays sober.
• When Jeanne is voted to be carnival queen her senior year of high school, Papa is less than thrilled. He gets into a fight with her about the queenship and gets her to agree to take odori lessons.
• Although Jeanne fails the odori lessons and her father still doesn't respect the queenship, he shows hints of pride about her independence.
• Twelve years after getting out of camp, he dies.