My earliest childhood memory is of a train ride. Standing in the aisle, barely able to reach the worn armrests on either side, I lift myself, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the moving train. The air is hot and musty. My brother Kiyoshi is curled asleep, his head across my mother’s lap. The man beside her is a stranger to me. My mother has told me to call him Otō-chan, Daddy. When I cry, he says to me softly, “Shikkari shina-sai. Nakanai de.” Be strong. Don’t cry.
The Manzanar War Relocation Center, 1942
I was born on May 25, 1944, in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security prison camp in Northern California, during World War II. When I was a year old, my father was taken from us and held in a separate prison in North Dakota. Finally reunited, after more than four years of prison life for my parents, we were leaving the Crystal City, Texas, family internment camp by train on July 9, 1946. Our destination held an uncertain promise. I had only known life surrounded by barbed-wire fences.
Almost eight decades have passed since that defining moment of American history when over 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry, citizen and immigrant alike, living on the West Coast of the U.S., were forced from their homes and imprisoned in American concentration camps, euphemistically referred to as “relocation centers.” By executive order, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would deny citizens the civil liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, to be considered innocent until proven guilty.
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Someday my grandchildren will learn that their great-grandparents, Shizuko and Itaru Ina, were taken from their home in San Francisco and forcefully held in six different prison camps from 1942 to 1946. Sadly, they may also hear that their great-grandparents were “disloyal” to America. It’s a message I heard in muffled voices when people learned that I was born in the prison camp for “traitors and troublemakers.” My father’s frozen silence about our time “in camp” added to the shame that I unwittingly absorbed.
When I asked my parents why people would say those things, my mother deftly put the problem aside and said, “Just say that you were born in Newell, California.” It wasn’t a secret that we had been in camp, but my parents hardly spoke about their wartime experience. Somehow, I knew it was best not to ask questions, thus joining not only my family and my community but society at large in keeping the story of our incarceration stowed away out of awareness, a festering wound, never to heal. Fear, rather than hope, seemed to drive my parents’ desire for us to be successful in the world—to be good students, to behave, to excel in whatever we undertook, and not to bring shame to the family. There was frequently a sense of foreboding when one of us kids would step off the mark and go in a direction that wasn’t part of the plan—foreboding so present that all three of us, my brothers and I, would quickly reverse course, avoid risks, and, above all else, seek safety and approval. Something kept my parents, and possibly my entire community, from speaking about “the camps.”
This something, I believe now, had to do with a deep sense of shame. Shame so choking that it would prevent my mother and father from speaking up when they were shortchanged in a store, spoken to rudely, ignored in restaurants, called racist names, spit on. Shame that was passed down to us children about who we were, how we looked, and what we deserved in life. We learned not to complain, to avoid being vulnerable, and to bear a never-ending need to strive for approval. Mental and emotional toughness was what it would take to endure whatever life brought our way. Looking back now, I realize how my father’s repeated message to me, “Be strong. Don’t cry,” reflected the fortitude that made it possible for my parents to survive the trauma of their incarceration. For me, it would become both the strength and the weakness in my ability to cope with my own life challenges.
Learning about my parents’ wartime experience would lead me on a healing journey that would change my life forever. After my father passed away in 1977, my mother and I were sorting through his large, weathered oak desk, where he often sat to compose his poetry. When I reached into the back of the bottom drawer, I discovered a large packet of letters, neatly stacked and tied together with rough brown twine. My mother seemed stunned when I handed the packet to her. As she slowly shuffled the letters in her hands, tears formed in her eyes. She sank to the floor beside me. “I didn’t know Daddy saved my letters from camp,” she said. She circled her finger around the room, “Somewhere around here are the letters he sent to me.”
In the moment, I felt a rush of excitement about the discovery, but when my mother, without hesitation, handed the small bundle back to me without untying the string, I realized that the letters held more than just reminders of past times. They were artifacts of ghostly memories suddenly brought to life. Like the silence that haunted our home, they represented a door she chose not to reopen. She never said what she thought I should do with the letters, but within days, she had unearthed the corresponding mail she received from my dad during that same time period, put both bundles in a neatly wrapped box, and never mentioned them again.
This essay is adapted from The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest (Heyday, 2024, 312 pages).
I carried this box around with me for more than 20 years, moving it from place to place, packing and unpacking it, often forgetting it even existed. The letters were mostly written in Japanese, and I sometimes wondered what it would feel like to be able to just open and read each one. But not being able to read or write in Japanese was in some ways a protective guard against knowing what my parents might have endured during their incarceration.
In 1994, I joined a pilgrimage to the Tule Lake prison site to commemorate my 50th birthday, and as if waking from a decades-long hibernation, the questions came back to life with a fury. What silenced my parents? What secrets were so painful they had to be suppressed? What choices did my parents make? Why am I so haunted by these questions?
The intergenerational transmission of trauma has been the subject of great controversy. How does one tie symptoms of emotional distress to events that occurred in a previous generation? What behaviors and messages were passed on to me, consciously or unconsciously, that I have internalized yet cannot make sense of from within my own life experience? Is there more than just my own direct experience with racism that could explain my reactivity to shame, exclusion, and “othering”?
In my quest, I have turned many times to the work of Dr. Judith Herman, whose writing and research have informed and inspired my own work on the impact of collective historical trauma. Dr. Herman’s words in her 1997 book, Trauma and Recovery, have helped me to stay committed to the task at hand: “Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.”
I spent most of my career as a psychotherapist applying the traditional “micro” approach of individual therapy. More recently, in the past 10 years, I have—out of frustration over seeing the constant and massive impact of chronic states of trauma inflicted by personal and systemic racism—shifted to a more “macro” approach to intervention, joining other social justice therapists whose “clinical interventions” have shifted to “community interventions.” No longer able to ignore the societal context in which many of my clients, particularly clients of color, suffer common psychological symptoms of distress, I have found it essential to examine and bring into the therapy exchange the systems in which the trauma has been perpetrated. This expanded perspective has led me from my comfortable private-practice office to prisons where Central American women and children have been indefinitely incarcerated.
Sadly for people of color today, the threat of being unjustly targeted has far from passed—and today there are millions of families experiencing exactly what mine did. The U.S. continues to enact racist policies of incarceration, deportation, and travel bans, accelerated this year to the point of catastrophe by President Trump. It is his stated goal to detain and remove 11 million immigrants. Not unlike our experience as people of Japanese descent over 80 years ago, his administration is promoting threatening stereotypes to influence public opinion to support racist policies targeting immigrants of color.
During the second world war, we were characterized as threats to national security, criminals with intent to rape and pillage. Our men were caught up in sweeps and removed from their homes and jobs, separated from their families. Babies with 1/16th Japanese blood were taken from orphanages in California and held inside the Manzanar concentration camp. Today’s mass removals, indefinite detentions, extraction of citizenship, incarceration of children, and, ultimately, deportation are all too familiar to us.
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In 1942, as we were disappeared, there was no mass protest, petitions, marches, outcry. America had essentially turned its back on us. So today Japanese Americans are speaking out, educating and rallying others to demand today’s administration to Stop Repeating History! We’re not alone. We’re joining many others, all around the country. There is a movement against Trump’s policies, of people who have learned from stories like the one I have told.
A 2019 protest at the federal immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, launched what has grown to become a national Japanese American social justice organization, proudly channeling our cultural heritage into a mission of solidarity. Tsuru for Solidarity would become our moniker, which combines “tsuru,” the Japanese word for cranes symbolizing peace and hope, with our commitment to reach out to work together across communities to bring social change.
An important component of Tsuru for Solidarity’s work today is to conduct Healing Circles for Change. This group process was inspired by a precious moment we experienced while visiting a service center in Laredo, Texas, near the Mexican border. Through our allies in South Texas, we had heard about the Laredo Immigrant Alliance, where families recently released from both Karnes and Dilley detention facilities could find temporary shelter while awaiting their asylum hearings or searching for family members in the U.S. Providing care on a shoestring budget, volunteers, including undocumented students, offered food, shelter, and information to families, mostly mothers with young children.
Our intention was to bring a small donation collected from our group to cover the cost of a washing machine so that families could wash diapers and clothing. There were 20 of us, a Buddhist minister and several survivors and descendants. We parked our rented cars and walked along wooden fences with laundry hung to dry in the sun. As we entered the worn and modest building, we could hear the laughter of children playing games and the gentle sounds of mothers quieting crying babies. They had all just been released after weeks or months of incarceration. Among the women, worn and anxious, and the men, silent and sullen, we were afraid of being seen as intruders. Grief weighed heavily in the room.
Volunteers welcomed us warmly, and in an impromptu attempt to connect with the families, we created a circle of chairs around the room. Curious about the motley crew of Japanese Americans who had traveled from California, mothers with children in their arms joined the circle along with volunteers. We brought strands of colorful paper cranes that lit up the faces of the children. Often when Tsuru for Solidarity members debriefed after a protest action, we would sit in an informal circle to share our experience. Now, that process magically unfolded in a room full of strangers.
One of the volunteers served as translator. We began by briefly sharing our stories and our purpose for being in Texas. My brother Kiyoshi, usually quite shy and reticent, stood up to speak. He talked about having been incarcerated as a child for four years; deeply moved by the situation, he offered these words of hope: “I’m almost 80 years old now. I want you to see that I survived, that I’m OK. You must be strong. Do not give up hope. You too will be OK.” The woman beside him, carrying a toddler in her arms, stood up to speak. Black strands fell from the rubber band holding her hair back; her clothes were rumpled and faded, and tears streamed down her face.
As she spoke, the translator struggled to keep her own composure. “I have just spent four months in a terrible place,” she said. “I feared for my children. We were hungry and afraid every day. When I hear that you were in prison for years, my heart aches for you. I cannot imagine your suffering.”
It was an incredible moment of connection. She was crying for us. Her empathy knew no bounds. I had never felt so seen. An ocean of love seemed to fill the room as we sat side by side, quietly letting the tears flow. We were crying for them. We were crying for ourselves.
