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Ep. 16: Transforming Inherited Pain into Care and Courage · Wellness in Today's World

• 0:05
  Welcome to "Wellness in Today's World," the podcast where we talk about psychology, wellness, and everything in between.
• 0:12
  I'm your host, Debra Kawahara, and today we're joined by Satsuki Ina, psychotherapist, writer, activist, filmmaker, and co-founder of Tsuru for Solidarity.
• 0:27
  Born while her family was incarcerated in Tule Lake during World War II,
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  Satsuki's life and work has been devoted to understanding how historical injustice and trauma lives on in our bodies, families, and communities.
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  Through decades of clinical practice, community healing work, and activism, and most recently in her memoir, "The Poet and the Silk Girl," she invites us to consider healing
• 0:58
  not only as an individual process,
• 1:01
  but as a collective and ethical act.
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  Our conversation today explores intergenerational trauma, community-based healing, storytelling, and what it means to transform inherited pain into care, courage, and
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  responsibility.
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  A note to the listeners: We are going to be talking about some content that may be uncomfortable or triggering.
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  Please do what you need to do to take care of yourself.
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  If you need to pause, if you need to step away, please do so.
• 1:37
  With that, I'd like to welcome Satsuki to the podcast.
• 1:41
  I really want to thank you for being here today.
• 1:44
  Thank you, Debra.
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  It's a pleasure to be here.
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  I have been so looking forward to our conversation and you know, like I talked about in the intro about you, you hold so many different roles.
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  You know, psychotherapist, writer, activist, someone that was born into incarceration.
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  So I wanted to start off with you describing how your journey has evolved over time.
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  Well, that's a big question.
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  I think the legacy of having been born doing time has always kind of haunted me.
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  Maybe unconsciously I was drawn to the whole area of trauma and particularly interested in studying and understanding childhood trauma.
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  Because it was not just me or my family, but it was my entire community.
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  So it was a collective form of trauma that led to our removal and the consequences following that.
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  So I've been very immersed in the Japanese American community, where I was raised in San Francisco.
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  And then later on, wherever I went as part of my career.
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  Was the subject of my two documentary films and my recent book.
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  And I found that in the clinical work in my private practice that
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  trauma based on racism, oppression, and trauma as a result of
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  people suffering unjustly required more than just the one-on-one practice of psychotherapy.
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  I found that working with groups of children, groups of individuals, working with broader communities and eventually across communities,
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  that there was a power of healing, being in a collective, being with others, not feeling so isolated by the trauma.
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  So that's been my area of work and of interest.
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  It's clear that it's emerged from my own experience of parents who raised children.
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  There's my brother and I in the prison camps
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  in this particular setting and that it set the tone for how my parents transmitted to me elements of their trauma; level of anxiety and need to consciously and constantly be aware
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  of ways in which people are reacting to me and how to fit in so not to
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  bring more animosity towards me or my family.
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  So there was this haunting of having been unjustly incarcerated that followed me around, that felt complicated and deep and unspoken.
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  You know, as I was preparing to talk with you, and I've followed your work ever since I knew about the "Children of the Camps" video and seeing your work in terms of bringing
• 4:59
  together groups of those persons that had been incarcerated and their family and the impact on the community.
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  But as I followed your work over, since that came out in 1999, I think.
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  Over the course of time, I've seen how you have, throughout your career, how this has evolved for you in terms of understanding trauma, collective trauma, and targeted
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  collective racism.
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  You know, one of the things that I think we are
• 5:33
  being able to more clearly understand is how intergenerational trauma...
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  And now they're even finding epigenetics for intergenerational trauma.
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  So it's not like these people have this thing that they can't get over.
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  So I wanted you to talk a little bit, because you were at the forefront of this whole intergenerational trauma phenomenon.
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  How would you describe it for maybe some of our listeners that this is a new concept that they're hearing about?
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  How would you describe that
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  intergenerational trauma as you have learned over the course of your career?
• 6:12
  Yeah, thank you for that question.
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  It's been an important part of my research and learning.
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  When I was a kid growing up in the Japanese American community after the war, the message that the children got was that you were too young.
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  You weren't aware of what was going on.
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  You didn't understand the racism.
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  You didn't understand the losses.
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  So, you were just a kid.
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  So,
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  the message was that my siblings and my cohort shouldn't bother with concern about our origins.
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  But it never sat right with me.
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  It never sat right with me.
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  Especially just when I reflected on myself, going to school, getting training, and doing all of that.
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  It's an important part of being a therapist to reflect on your own direct experience and knowing yourself.
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  So, as I try to lay out for myself, what was it that was this
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  unspoken anxiety in my family?
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  I began to research, study, and then evident in the therapy work that I did was this element that continued.
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  And so when I try to explain it to people, I tell them my parents
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  tried to protect me from the trauma of being imprisoned, of being underfed, of being targeted.
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  And then even after we were released from the prison camp, the racism that was rampant post-war was that children learn from the way their parents interact with you, interact
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  with each other, interact with the larger society.
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  There was this level of caution that was ever-present in my household.
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  The way I describe it to people is the unspoken message has so much power because you can't exactly name it, but you're very sensitive to it and respond to it.
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  And for us, it was because our incarceration and the suffering my parents experienced was not
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  because of anything they did.
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  It was this threatening power source that stigmatized us, that would lead to decisions that robbed us of our freedom, of our agency.
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  So, the message my parents gave us through their actions and even in holding us in their arms, the message was, this is a dangerous world.
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  This is a world in which you have to be cautious, you have to be aware, you have to be reading other people all of the time.
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  So there was this other-oriented way of growing up.
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  Did this satisfy teachers?
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  Did this piss off a neighbor?
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  Did this, you know...
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  Was very, rather than the very traditional American individualistic perception of self, it was reflected, mirrored
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  back to us that to be safe, you had to toe the line.
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  You had to fit in.
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  You had to do and make the right answers and choices and decisions.
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  It wasn't just that straight up, but it was also fraught with anxiety.
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  There was this unspoken danger that if you didn't get all the best grades, if you didn't
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  do everything that was expected of you in school or by others, that something really awful, horrific could happen.
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  Now, current research on epigenetics is saying that the messaging about trauma is conveyed through genetic interaction and the chemical reactions to that, so that it becomes
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  ingrained in part of the nervous system.
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  Now, there's lots of
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  controversy about this and there's still lots of research that needs to take place.
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  But with that in the background, just talking to people about what guided their perception of themselves.
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  And mostly what are the things that inhibited your creativity, your excitement, your initiation of things?
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  It would often boil down to this need to meet the expectations of the outer world.
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  We had to be the model minority.
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  We needed to be the best in math.
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  We had to- whatever the stereotypes were, they formed kind of a limiting force for who we are.
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  So today,
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  my generation of third-generation Japanese Americans, many of us who were children in the prison camps.
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  We have very few Creatives in our world.
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  We don't have a lot of actors and singers and performers and poets and musicians; they are starting to show up in the next generation, in my children's lives, but for us it was
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  instead of being an artist, you need to be an engineer.
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  Or instead of being a singer or even a comedian or something that was really self-expressive, if it didn't meet the safety zone, it was something that we didn't
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  challenge.
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  It was so strongly communicated.
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  I think it starts from in utero, the amount of anxiety that
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  the mother is carrying, and my mother was inside of a prison camp without knowing what her future was going to be, how long they were going to be punished and why.
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  She was pregnant and gave birth to both me and my older brother.
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  I think when you think about the chemistry of always being in an anxious state, the amount of cortisone and adrenaline that was running in my mother's body while she was pregnant
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  with us
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  set a certain limit of anxiety symptoms in us, chemicals that made us hypersensitive to any threat or criticism.
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  And then once born, then we learned from how our parents held us in their arms, anxious arms, I'm sure my mother and my father had.
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  My mother would often say,
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  "We didn't know if today was the day they were going to line us up and shoot us." So she lived with that.
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  And then when we were finally freed after four and a half years, we were poverty-stricken and lived in neighborhoods that were fraught with violence and threats and racism.
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  And so we grew up as small children having to be cautious and not provoke any
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  negative response from people around us adults and other kids even.
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  Then when you grow up in a community where the whole community, everybody, the neighbor- because we were so poor and we're not allowed right after the war to even rent housing in
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  other districts or go to school in any
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  district of our choice and neighborhoods.
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  We grew up in our community transplanted as a whole into Japantowns on the West Coast, particularly where I grew up in San Francisco.
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  So it wasn't just my family, but it was the neighbors, it was the aunties, the uncles and others who were also trying to guide us and model for us.
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  And, you know, I watched my mother turn the other way when somebody spit on her at the bus station or somebody shortchanged my father or ignored us at a restaurant.
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  Did they speak up and protest?
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  No.
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  They modeled for us that we needed to turn the other cheek.
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  We needed to, in some ways, absorb the message that we weren't
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  wanted, that we didn't belong.
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  And then in school as children, reading history books and participating in general education and no mention of our history, of our identity had ever been brought up.
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  So there was this isolation, this feeling of longing to belong
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  and yearning to be accepted, but always cautious that it was up to us, it was up to me how I placated others and how I accommodated others in order to be safe.
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  Yeah, you know, I had so many different thoughts going through my mind as you were talking.
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  I mean, my own research on the generational impact on children of incarcerees, it made me go back to any group that's having to deal with a collective trauma.
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  And so very much, my research was guided by the research that was done on
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  Holocaust survivors and their children.
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  And what it really made me think about is, you know, they talk about the anxiety, they talk about the survivor guilt that their parents had, how the children felt like they had
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  to live their life as kind of making up for what their parents were not allowed to do.
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  And then the assumptions that you were talking about the
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  the world being unsafe or dangerous, right?
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  That this isn't a just world, that justice is not gonna prevail.
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  But the one thing that I guess for the Japanese and Japanese American community that I think, Donna Nagata was someone that- her influential research made me wanna study this
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  more, but that silence,
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  and what you talked about, that invisibility.
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  But I also think that hypervisibility.
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  So you're very much visible when they are targeting and attacking, but very silent and invisible in terms of having voice and having agency, you know?
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  Yeah, and I think in addition to that is, you know, I was growing up in a household that had been traumatized.
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  And in that way, my parents didn't talk about what happened.
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  And many of the Japanese American families that I've interviewed had the same circumstance.
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  Most people my age will say,
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  "My parents never talked about it." Well, that's a consequence of trauma, that we compartmentalize what was overwhelming for us, that couldn't be coped with through
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  everyday living.
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  And so that silent part is what I realized that I always felt had been haunting.
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  Like, I didn't know how many secrets my parents had about what they had to endure.
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  I didn't know about the choices they were forced to make,
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  that were forced upon them by the US military and the government.
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  And Donna Nagata describes this very well.
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  There was this distance between me and my parents because there seemed to be so much quietness in wanting to know them, wanting to know us.
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  It took many years afterwards that I would look back on my family and I could see why it started to make sense that my father never answered the door when someone knocked on the
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  door.
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  He refused to ever answer the telephone when a call came in.
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  And over time, you know, I would start wanting to have these conversations to try and make sense out of it.
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  And he never talked about it, but my mother said
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  she felt that he was ashamed that he still had a Japanese accent.
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  And if it was a white official or somebody calling regarding taxes or whatever, it could have been government-connected, that he didn't want to cause problems because his English
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  wasn't perfect.
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  My parents were "Kibei," so they were American citizens, but they were partly educated in Japan.
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  That silence, which is typical of trauma victims, because the nervous system and the brain holds these trauma effects in a different way from other memories.
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  People often lose connection with what has been fragmented and compartmentalized in order to survive, in order to not continue to be haunted.
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  It felt like there was a boundary which I could not cross in getting to know who my parents were.
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  Yeah.
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  You know, it's interesting because I also know within Donna Nagata's research what she said as she looked at children who knew their parents went through something difficult,
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  horrendous, but that they knew there was kind of this unsaid boundary that they didn't want to talk to their parents because they wanted to respect whatever
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  their parents had gone through.
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  They knew it was terrible.
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  They knew it was so deeply seeded in their parents, but they didn't want to cross to ask them about it.
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  Somehow they knew.
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  Right, it's kind of like we knew not to ask the questions.
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  And those are the kind of meta communications about, this is not okay for us to talk about, right?
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  But we all know that people are holding on to it.
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  Yes.
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  You know, one of the things you speak about is how trauma is held in the body.
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  And I know that when they've looked at data in terms of health conditions for the incarcerees in terms of these prisoners, that there is something in terms of higher rates
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  of health illnesses.
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  How does somatic awareness inform your therapeutic work?
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  Because I know that's a part of this.
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  Yes, it was Gwen Jensen's work.
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  She was a medical anthropologist who was the only researcher that actually collected data comparing Japanese American men who were incarcerated with Japanese American men who were
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  not.
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  That other group was Japanese American Hawaiians who lived in Hawaii.
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  Her results were astonishing.
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  The rate of suicide, reported depression, and then the health issues, that there was a higher rate of stomach cancer, of blood pressure issues, related to being anxious all of
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  the time, essentially, fearful.
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  Those studies helped me focus on ways in which trauma has impacted our families, the children growing up with the messaging that they got, and in some ways are recreating this
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  level of disturbance without being able to name it.
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  By the time I was
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  essentially finished with my graduate studies is when the whole field of somatic experiencing became so important.
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  I was intrigued by it and took some classes and was really interested in understanding and researching from it.
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  But I never became a practitioner doing somatic experiencing.
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  But my work involved using the whole person,
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  getting them to identify places in their bodies where they felt this anxiety or discussing in depth where the health issues are coming from, what kinds of health issues the person
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  has and how that is related to the psychology of the trauma.
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  You know, I think there are somatic experts that
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  may be able to answer that question in more depth.
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  I always wished when it was emerging as a field of study around trauma that I could go back to school and start over again.
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  Doing the therapy in groups, getting people to unlock the fragmented memories
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  by being in a group and making it safe enough that people could start to explore their inner world of the trauma, is what has inspired me and has opened so many more insights
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  for me to understand how this trauma impacted our entire community.
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  You know, as you're talking about that group work and I talked about "Children of the Camps," which I think is a beautiful film in showing the power of group processing.
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  I know you have spoken about the limitations of individual psychotherapy for historical or collective trauma.
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  Can you
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  talk a little bit more about what you found as limitations and then what led to more of your group community healing processes?
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  I think what I learned in the individual therapy, so it's not that I didn't do individual therapy, but I experienced
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  how the fragmentation, the trauma memories are often so fragmented that the person by themselves, without adequate mirroring or reflecting by a therapist or a friend or family
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  member, how difficult it was for people, particularly in the Japanese American community post-war, to label, to identify.
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  That's why I use the word "ghost" a lot, because it was something that
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  was intangible yet ever-present that people talked about.
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  I worked with individual clients who would come in and say, "You know, I've been at my job with the state for 20 years and I've never gotten promoted.
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  Younger people have come in and gotten promoted." And I would ask, "Did you complain?
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  Did you do anything to advocate for yourself?" And the answer often was, "No, I didn't feel like it was my place."
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  Maybe that's cultural to not impose yourself on others.
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  But also, I think it is this anxiety that if I step outside of my safety zone, something unpredictably negative could happen.
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  And then people I've talked to who actually
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  stepped outside of their safety zone, maybe protested because another person who was competing for a position with them used unfair practices to elevate themselves or that
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  they weren't as deserving, and suffered consequences, which they took personally.
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  And it was very difficult.
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  And I think this is part of it, is for
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  an individual by themselves to see the larger picture, to see that this was based on bias, racism, familiar policies and practices, and not necessarily the individual's fault.
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  And there were many different settings where that kind of individual work, where the person couldn't even be convinced
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  that this was something that was shared by other Japanese Americans, particularly post-war babies.
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  But when I gathered people together, and this was an interesting part of it too, Debra, was that initially, I wanted to start doing groups.
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  I wanted to do a community approach.
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  And so I invited to participate in group therapy, and nobody signed up.
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  Mmm.
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  Because therapy meant something was wrong with you and you don't want to be identified as somebody that has something wrong with them.
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  After I interviewed a few people and realized what was the inhibiting factor, I then started talking to people about educational workshops to come together to educate
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  themselves about what the war experience had- how it had impacted them and their families and our community.
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  Educational was a safer ground in which to do the work.
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  Then I had more volunteers.
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  I mean, they didn't knock my door down, so many people, because this whole diving into the trauma wasn't something people were comfortable with.
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  But in the collective setting, where people were familiar with circumstances of camp,
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  and how the different events that took place in camp had impacted their families, they started sharing bits and pieces.
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  That it was in some ways possible to weave together a more holistic picture and to ask the question, "What was your part in causing that outcome?" And for people to begin to
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  identify
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  the fact that they were victims of this powerful force.
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  In our case specifically, because Japan was identified as the enemy and therefore, anyone that looked like the enemy was subject to removal.
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  I think it took these bits and pieces from other people's history because parents didn't talk about it,
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  the next generation like myself didn't have connected stories about what happened.
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  And when you have fragmented stories about your family and your community history, you have a sense of fragmentation in your own self-identity.
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  So powerful for people to come together and weave together these fragments into a meaningful whole where they could see from a broader perspective
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  how they have accommodated because they still feel like there's danger and threat.
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  In my case, for example, I felt like it was really important in raising my two sons that it is a very overt part of our conversation about what are the limitations that I might
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  unconsciously be communicating to them.
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  My practice, which I encourage other parents too, is what would it be like if you followed your bliss?
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  Which was something I never had offered to me.
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  My job was, in many ways, to take care of my parents, to protect them from the trauma that they suffered.
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  And that that required not self-initiation, but more external
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  consciousness, awareness outside.
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  In that way, I think many people's creative energies got staunched.
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  You know, as you were talking, I know people have said, you know, for the the incarcerees, the camp prisoners, it was so hard to understand.
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  It didn't make sense.
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  They didn't understand what was happening, and yet they had no way of talking about it.
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  And it wasn't until reparations and redress that they finally
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  got from the government- I have heard that it's not so much the token money that they got for whatever losses and the emotional distress.
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  It was more the apology from the government that the government did wrongdoing that meant so much more to them.
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  Right.
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  Yeah, my favorite story about that with my mother was
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  first, she was so shocked that Japanese Americans were demanding acknowledgement about what they suffered.
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  In the beginning, she didn't have much hope it was gonna go anywhere.
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  Then when she got her check, she called me on the phone 'cause I said, "Call me, 'cause I wanna see the money, show me the money."
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  The money, of course, was very symbolic.
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  $20,000 was a drop in the bucket for the losses that people suffered.
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  My parents were incarcerated for four and a half years, and there were others that were held for six years.
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  But when I went to her apartment and I said, "Okay, where's the check?" And she said, "It's over there on the desk." And I went over to the desk, which was piled with papers,
• 29:45
  and wherever that check was, it was buried underneath.
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  But on the wall,
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  above the desk, she had already framed the letter from President Reagan.
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  It was framed and hung.
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  So I asked her, I said, "What did this mean for you?" And she said...
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  I get choked up when I think about this, because she said, "I feel like I finally got my face back."
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  Mm.
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  Mm.
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  Because she had internalized so much shame.
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  Japanese culture is very collective.
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  To be cast out is full of shame, whether it was your fault or not.
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  There was something that was inadequate about you that you couldn't belong to the larger community.
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  So yeah, I think that was true.
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  I think that many people felt that it was that apology that freed them from thelabeling that they had done something shameful.
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  That concept of "face" for Japanese Americans...
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  It's often talked about that "loss of face," when you feel shame, when you feel like you've let your whole family and not just your immediate family, but all of your extended
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  family from generations before to generations to come, that you have just done something that has brought shame
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  to the whole family legacy.
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  And so when you said "face," it's like, wow, that's
• 31:16
  huge. That's
• 31:18
  huge. You know, one of the things that I did want to talk to you about, because I
• 31:22
  know... Well, I'm currently getting trained to be a healing circle
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  facilitator. Oh, wonderful, I'm so
• 31:28
  glad! Yeah, that you
• 31:30
  developed. And so I want you to talk
• 31:34
  about how it has now led to these healing circles.
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  Because I think, I do think that reparation and redress was a critical juncture in then being able to, you know, people doing oral histories, for pilgrimages to be well-attended
• 31:54
  and people talking about their experiences and coming together and how we know that that's so important
• 32:02
  in terms of the healing process for these historical and collective traumas.
• 32:07
  So I want you to talk about the healing circles that you've developed, the model.
• 32:12
  Yeah, and you know, it's not a complicated process and it is a collection from the whole concept of group therapy.
• 32:22
  It started out because we would show up, my organization, Tsuru for Solidarity, is a social justice organization that recognized at one of our pilgrimages
• 32:34
  the reverberation to us about other people, other communities being targeted and incarcerated, mass incarceration like we were subjected to.
• 32:45
  So, we organized to go protest and, you know, this is 2019 and we were mostly elders, white hair, wheelchairs, walkers, hearing aids.
• 32:57
  And we would show up at these detention sites to tell our story and to talk about how it is a repetition of our history and our demand that the government stop repeating history.
• 33:09
  And people had said, "Never again." And now we were saying, "Never again is now." And we realized that we needed to work cross-community.
• 33:17
  We needed other communities of color who had suffered
• 33:21
  mass incarceration, loss of privilege and freedom, to join us in these protests.
• 33:27
  So after the protest, we used to shout and part and everyone would go their separate ways.
• 33:33
  But one day we decided, let's stay together.
• 33:36
  The protest is over.
• 33:38
  Let's sit down on the grass right here and let's just share our stories with each other.
• 33:44
  That first one, we had members from Black Lives Matter.
• 33:48
  We had from Bend the Arc.
• 33:50
  We had people from Detention Watch Network.
• 33:53
  We had Native Americans that joined us, Brown Berets from the Chicano community.
• 33:58
  It was an amazing collection of protesters.
• 34:02
  And we sat for hours, going one by one, sharing our stories.
• 34:07
  We cried, we held hands, we realized that there was a very powerful healing in gathering together and just simply sharing our stories and being heard and feeling safe.
• 34:22
  So it was magical almost, incredible.
• 34:28
  I had never experienced that, being in a community of other people
• 34:31
  where we found this connective thread about being discriminated against, about being considered less than, how the oppressive forces robbed us of our dignity and our
• 34:43
  independence.
• 34:44
  And so we continued to do that after other protests that we did following that.
• 34:51
  There was so much demand for healing circles that I felt like it was important.
• 34:57
  And in order to train facilitators who weren't therapists, who hadn't had training in group facilitation, but to develop a simple process that we could train people quickly,
• 35:10
  they didn't have to be psychologists, they could understand concepts of creating safety and empathy.
• 35:16
  And so...
• 35:18
  I wrote this up.
• 35:20
  People gave me feedback.
• 35:21
  We revised it and called it Healing Circles for Change.
• 35:26
  I think it was inspired because we had experienced our own healing.
• 35:31
  Two things happened when we showed up to protest.
• 35:34
  One was, as we were chanting and demanding and talking to press and
• 35:41
  making our posters and hanging our Japanese folded paper cranes on all the barbed wire fences, that we were laughing and crying and we were laughing and crying and that there
• 35:53
  was a healing that was going on in the moment that we were protesting; that we had the voice that we didn't have back then, that our parents didn't have, and to share that
• 36:04
  across communities but
• 36:06
  also within the Japanese American community.
• 36:10
  We brought our Taiko drummers, we folded thousands of paper cranes, we used the strength and our love for our cultural heritage as part of our protest.
• 36:18
  We didn't know how to name it, but once we started talking about it, we're saying, "I feel better.
• 36:23
  I feel somehow freed up from the chains of the trauma that we suffered."
• 36:28
  It was clear that we needed to continue the process and help people to process it after the actions, but also just for people who weren't even protesting, but people who felt
• 36:41
  chained back, held back.
• 36:43
  It was primarily focused on Japanese Americans at first.
• 36:47
  It has grown bigger now and we have trained people outside of our J.A.
• 36:51
  community.
• 36:51
  Now, organizations are contacting us and asking us to train.
• 36:56
  You know, we're clear.
• 36:56
  We don't charge for it.
• 36:58
  We don't make it anything about monetary benefit.
• 37:00
  So we've done lots of training.
• 37:02
  I'm glad you're part of the training.
• 37:05
  I'm glad you'll be facilitating.
• 37:06
  We've continued to get really good feedback, positive feelings that people had never experienced before.
• 37:12
  There's a level of intimacy that is wired into the process and underscores the need to be able to be heard.
• 37:21
  So empathy, powerful.
• 37:24
  Empathy then leads to safety.
• 37:26
  People then disclose more and become more real with each other and the intimacy is profound.
• 37:33
  You know, one of the things you talk about, and I'd like you to talk about more, is compassionate witnessing, which I believe is all part of this healing process.
• 37:45
  How important that is.
• 37:46
  Yes, compassionate witnessing.
• 37:49
  I learned from Dr.
• 37:50
  Judith Herman, the power of the compassionate witness, and experienced it many times.
• 37:59
  The idea that someone from the outside of the immediate trauma that we're talking about or that is happening, who stands up for us, who speaks out, who uses
• 38:11
  their platform or their position to point out the injustice, the harm that's being caused, and to hear.
• 38:21
  Because when you're the victim of oppression, you lose the power to be able to see what's just.
• 38:28
  This is the line that the compassionate witness holds.
• 38:31
  So when someone from the outside says, "This is not fair, this is wrong," it affirms that small part of ourselves that believe that and know that, but afraid to live it.
• 38:43
  There's a recent lovely story about Rachel Maddow, who is a very renowned influencer.
• 38:51
  She's a journalist and she's spoken against
• 38:55
  the president and the policies that have come out of the White House in these past years.
• 39:00
  And she did a whole podcast called "Burn Order" from the perspective of a compassionate witness.
• 39:07
  It was so powerful.
• 39:08
  She's a white woman with power and influence.
• 39:13
  But she took on our story and built this incredible podcast.
• 39:18
  She was so respectful because she included voices of people in our own community sharing their stories about what they experienced to validate the points that she was making.
• 39:30
  And she was so outraged when she was learning about this that it comes across in her podcast, the outrageousness, the
• 39:39
  incredible belief that 125,000 people, based on their race, were forced to leave their homes and be incarcerated for years.
• 39:48
  We're feeling so grateful to her because that was a national broadcast.
• 39:53
  There was a TV screening of some of us who were part of that project.
• 39:59
  You know, it went wild.
• 40:00
  People were discussing our trauma in ways that had never been held broadly across the country.
• 40:09
  That is the power.
• 40:11
  And I feel like, you know, as an activist, an important part of our work is to have compassionate witness have a voice in our work with us.
• 40:21
  Not because we can't do it ourselves, but because it helps to validate something about ourselves that had never been validated.
• 40:32
  I mean, I think about, you know, kind of other names that it's called, "allyship," "co-conspirators," but it all comes down to those other people that are willing to stand
• 40:44
  up and say, "This is wrong.
• 40:47
  Even if I'm not part of this group, I can see this is wrong." And, you know, I know I'm going to give a little bit away of the book, how you talked about your mom and the
• 40:59
  blanket,
• 41:00
  and how important that was to her because someone outside saw her.
• 41:07
  And I think saw her as a human, as someone carrying a baby in her body and felt for her.
• 41:16
  I think what was so powerful was the fact that the presence of that person stayed with my mother through her lifetime.
• 41:24
  So that was her statement when I said, "Okay, that blanket is so ratty now.
• 41:30
  Let's get you a new blanket." And she refused.
• 41:33
  I knew the story that this woman from the American Friends Service Committee while my mother was in the prison camp in Tanforan
• 41:40
  had tossed over the fence this quilted blanket to her that she was still holding onto when she was failing.
• 41:48
  She said, "No, don't take this blanket away." And I asked her, "Well, what does this blanket mean for you?" And she said, "This blanket helped me to remember that somebody
• 41:58
  outside cared." And that was the inspiration for our protest.
• 42:04
  You know, there were parts of us that wanted to just break into those detention sites and free the people kind of thing.
• 42:09
  But we had to deal with the reality of that.
• 42:11
  But we wanted the children and the mothers and the families inside of these detention sites today to know that there were people outside who cared.
• 42:20
  That's why we brought our Taiko drums, so they could hear the drums.
• 42:23
  That's why we hung these multicolored folded paper cranes so that the children could see out the window
• 42:30
  that there were people out there,
• 42:32
  Yeah.
• 42:32
  telling their stories and demanding their freedom.
• 42:35
  You know, we continue that fight today.
• 42:38
  Tsuru for Solidarity, you co-founded this organization.
• 42:43
  And I know that the organization is doing various things, the one being going to these detention centers and protesting the separation of families, these people being detained,
• 42:56
  these children that are being held.
• 43:00
  So I wanted you to talk a bit about your co-founding of it and how this extends your work and activism.
• 43:09
  Yeah, you know, I've never thought of myself as an activist.
• 43:14
  People started using that word and it started out not with the intention of it being as broad and as strong as it is today; it was Mike Ishii and myself and Nancy Ukai.
• 43:28
  We're just friends, you know, really provoked by what the Trump administration was doing,
• 43:36
  separating families, tearing children from the arms of their parents.
• 43:39
  And when we were at the Tule Lake pilgrimage where I was born; a pilgrimage that happens every two years we gather together.
• 43:49
  In 2018, it was announced that this mass deportation was going to start taking place.
• 43:53
  And we so identified with what was happening: families being separated, mass deportation,
• 44:00
  placed in prison camps, being targeted.
• 44:03
  We started gathering together and started talking about, what do we do?
• 44:07
  We need to do something.
• 44:08
  This is outrageous.
• 44:09
  We can't let this happen again.
• 44:13
  I remember this, it was as simple as Mike and I sitting together in a coffee shop in San Francisco
• 44:18
  saying, okay, I guess we got to write a grant because we got to find some money so we could travel.
• 44:22
  We had no idea how to write a grant.
• 44:25
  We had no idea how we were going to show up.
• 44:27
  It just seemed like the timing was right.
• 44:29
  And the people were in the right place, who said, "Yes!
• 44:33
  We want to be a part of this." So we're saying, okay,
• 44:36
  we need the people inside these detention facilities to have hope.
• 44:40
  We need them to know that there are people outside who care.
• 44:43
  Someone said, "Well, we should fold paper cranes." And this simple act of folding a paper crane took off.
• 44:50
  I said, "Okay, we should have at least a thousand paper cranes." And I was thinking we could all fold those, the five of us or whatever.
• 44:57
  And then Mike Ishii,
• 44:59
  who's the visionary said, "No, we need 10,000 paper cranes." So then we contacted family, friends, neighbors, and it's an activity that we all learned as children.
• 45:10
  So there were generations of people who knew how to make these paper cranes.
• 45:15
  And by the time we arrived at the detention site in South Texas, 30,000 paper cranes had been sent to us.
• 45:23
  We had boxes and boxes in the storage unit that we had to unpack and recruit as many people as possible just to hang the paper cranes along the barbed wire fence.
• 45:35
  So it took on a life of its own and other people from other communities wanted to learn how to fold paper cranes.
• 45:41
  And so we were on the side teaching people how to fold paper cranes as the rest of us were hanging them on the fence.
• 45:47
  And paper cranes are a symbol of hope and peace.
• 45:51
  So, it is now our moniker.
• 45:54
  It is our organization called Tsuru for Solidarity.
• 45:58
  And Tsuru is the paper origami crane symbolizing peace and hope.
• 46:02
  Powerful, powerful.
• 46:04
  Yeah, it tapped into our cultural heritage and our connection to being Japanese, which we had shed.
• 46:11
  Many of us had tried to disconnect from the source of what led to our forced removal.
• 46:18
  We didn't want to be identified as Japanese, many of us afterwards.
• 46:21
  But we felt it was really important for our healing to reclaim our cultural heritage.
• 46:26
  And that's why we brought in
• 46:27
  the Taiko drummers and we did an Obon dance and we sang Japanese children's songs and we learned Spanish children's songs to sing to the children while they were watching from the
• 46:38
  windows at the detention site.
• 46:41
  How very wonderful.
• 46:42
  All right.
• 46:43
  I'm going to switch gears a little bit and I'm going to talk about your most recent book, "The Poet and the Silk Girl." I just kind of wanted to talk first about what prompted you
• 46:54
  to write this book and why was now the right time to do it.
• 47:00
  I think what prompted me was nothing that came from me.
• 47:03
  It was a discovery of my parents' letters.
• 47:08
  They were separated and put into two different prison camps.
• 47:11
  And after they passed, I found 182 letters that they had exchanged.
• 47:17
  These are all censored letters because correspondence was read by military folks.
• 47:23
  Huge portions cut out.
• 47:25
  And then also,
• 47:26
  I found my mother's diaries.
• 47:28
  She kept a diary from the day she was married all through camp.
• 47:33
  And my father kept- he was a poet and he kept a haiku journal of his incarceration.
• 47:40
  When I discovered all of these pieces, I realized that big parts of it were in Japanese, 'cause that was the language that they had gone to school with.
• 47:47
  So I couldn't read it.
• 47:48
  It's one of the greatest losses of our incarceration; our survival afterwards was to have as much proximity to whiteness as possible.
• 47:59
  So we lost our language and we lost sight of our cultural heritage in many ways.
• 48:04
  So I couldn't read these letters.
• 48:06
  I knew that eventually I'd have to find the right translator.
• 48:09
  And it happened while I was teaching that I had a graduate student from Japan who was a psychology major who had the sensitivity to pick up nuances.
• 48:19
  Because she was training as a therapist, she was very dialed into the subtext of the messages as well.
• 48:25
  She and I worked together for three years.
• 48:28
  You know, it was like a side job because I was teaching, raising my family and doing all of that.
• 48:33
  But she needed me to be a co-translator because sometimes the language didn't really capture what was happening.
• 48:40
  So she would say things like, We went to the dining room for our meals, and then I'd have to correct it and say, these were mess halls.
• 48:49
  These were mass
• 48:50
  areas where people walked by and got food dumped into their tin plates.
• 48:55
  It wasn't a bathroom, it was a latrine, you know, things like that.
• 48:58
  So it took us a while to do the translation and she was amazing and wonderful.
• 49:03
  So the motivation was there all along, but I think there was some of my own anxiety about really learning
• 49:10
  what my parents went through.
• 49:11
  And it wasn't until the convergence of all of these elements came together to decide that I'm going to write a book.
• 49:18
  But the book I had intended to write was going to be primary resource only.
• 49:23
  It was going to be my parents' letters, their journals, their diaries, because I thought this would be great for researchers, scholars, educators to use as primary resource so
• 49:35
  they could
• 49:36
  further the information about what happened in the prison camps.
• 49:40
  So to have a diary meant that you could have first-person in the moment describing what's happening.
• 49:46
  Very rare documentation.
• 49:47
  I don't know if my parents kept that because they intended that it would eventually somehow become a resource to people, but they were meticulous.
• 49:56
  So I always felt the pressure that I needed to do that.
• 49:59
  When I decided to publish it, it was a 700-page document with all the letters and the translation.
• 50:04
  I took it to a couple of editors who weren't interested in the subject matter.
• 50:09
  And then Heyday Press, the company that finally published the book, the
• 50:13
  head guy called me up and he said, "You know, we want to publish your book, but we need to talk to you first." So we had a meeting with Steve Wasserman and the chairman of the
• 50:23
  English department at UC Berkeley.
• 50:25
  They said, "You have here an incredibly beautiful, meaningful piece of granite."
• 50:34
  [Laughing]
• 50:34
  "And all you need to do now is to carve out the shape of it." Meaning you have to use your voice as the daughter to tell this story.
• 50:45
  You have to create the context, discuss the inner relationships, give the historical background.
• 50:53
  I carried those documents around for 15 years and it took me another five years to write my part because I was reluctant.
• 51:00
  I didn't feel like my voice was needed.
• 51:02
  It's another one of those inhibiting forces.
• 51:05
  I didn't feel entitled to have a voice about their story.
• 51:09
  So they were compassionate witnesses who were saying, "No, your voice is important." It took me a while to really realize and accept that.
• 51:16
  So it took me 20 years to finish the book.
• 51:18
  And it was part of my life journey, part of
• 51:21
  discovering more about myself, about my relationship with my parents, my relationship with my siblings.
• 51:27
  It has been worth every drop of blood, I have to say.
• 51:31
  Because the writing didn't come easy for me, I had never thought about writing a book, so it was really a challenge.
• 51:38
  Yeah, and I had great help from Heyday Books.
• 51:41
  I had a wonderful young editor who guided me to trust myself, and it's been very rewarding.
• 51:47
  People are appreciating the book and acknowledging it.
• 51:50
  Some college professors are using it as a textbook.
• 51:53
  I just gave a talk at a high school and students were clamoring to learn more about how to get the book.
• 52:00
  And that's how Rachel Maddow found me.
• 52:02
  I had given a talk at the Manzanar Pilgrimage and my book was for sale and one of her producers went there to look for people and then they contacted me.
• 52:12
  So, many ways in which writing this book has been incredibly rewarding.
• 52:17
  One of the things as I was reading it, I know it blends memory, history, and then your voice, you know, which I...
• 52:27
  as we talk today, kind of that important piece of getting that voice and having that agency to be out there, to be visible, to be heard, to be respected, you know?
• 52:41
  Thank you.
• 52:41
  I feel it's a gift that you gave us, and being able to read it and think about it, but also to have your parents' voice in your book as well, that you were able to then do that
• 52:58
  also.
• 52:59
  So I am working now, that's what these boxes and things are back here.
• 53:03
  I'm working on my father's haiku collection, the poetry that he wrote while he was in prison.
• 53:10
  It's very powerful.
• 53:11
  I have worked on it over the years getting
• 53:13
  beautiful translations of his work that were written in Japanese.
• 53:17
  So I'm hoping that that book gets published next year.
• 53:20
  Wonderful.
• 53:21
  So more to share.
• 53:24
  And the third book...
• 53:24
  too.
• 53:24
  Oh, a third book!
• 53:26
  ...is a children's book
• 53:27
  called, "My Name is Not Sandy." Because when we were freed from camp and went to public school in Cincinnati, Ohio, the teachers told my parents, "If you want your children to be
• 53:39
  real Americans, they need to have real American names.
• 53:42
  So we're going to call her Sandy.
• 53:44
  We're going to call him Kenny."
• 53:46
  It wasn't until many years in my adulthood that I reclaimed my name.
• 53:50
  So I wanted to write this book, which I've already written, have not taken it to any publishers yet, but I want to speak to the children who have unusual names or what they
• 54:01
  call foreign names or international names to feel proud of their names and to claim them because this little girl who claims my name is not Sandy,
• 54:10
  is my alter ego, who wasn't constrained by all the inhibitions of being Japanese American and who refuses to respond if someone doesn't use her true name.
• 54:25
  I really appreciate that because we know that role modeling and for kids to see people that look like them, that can show them how they can be themselves, right, is so
• 54:40
  important.
• 54:41
  And so I appreciate you doing that.
• 54:44
  It's important work and it needs to be out there.
• 54:48
  Yeah, thank you.
• 54:49
  So I'm going to wrap us up with our last question.
• 54:53
  You know, we've gone through intergenerational trauma and activism and memoir and all of those things.
• 55:03
  So, you know, I generally like to end with from you, if listeners could take one thing or one or two things from
• 55:14
  you know, what we talked about today, what would be some of those key takeaways that you would want them to either remember or to do based on our conversation today?
• 55:28
  Yeah, thank you for this opportunity, Debra.
• 55:30
  I really appreciate it.
• 55:31
  If you're a listener who has experienced the trauma of the World War II incarceration, my hope is that you will have the courage to speak out, to share your story, to learn your
• 55:46
  story.
• 55:47
  If you're a younger person who is a descendant of someone who was incarcerated, to ask the questions before we're all gone.
• 55:54
  Mm-hmm.
• 55:55
  And to take pride in the fact that we are survivors.
• 56:00
  We survived what could have destroyed us and um we are a vibrant community and it's safer now to speak out than ever before.
• 56:10
  If you're not a part of the Japanese American community who dealt with this trauma directly, the role of the compassionate witness is always
• 56:18
  possible.
• 56:19
  It could be standing in line at a supermarket where the conversation comes up and a particular community of people are being targeted or someone is being stigmatized, to
• 56:31
  speak up, to not be a bystander, to stand up and speak out.
• 56:39
  The compassionate witness means that it's somebody who gets
• 56:44
  what's happening in this moment about unfairness and injustice and to name it.
• 56:52
  And for all people who happen to be listening to this podcast,
• 56:54
  to join the effort to protest nationally across the country.
• 56:58
  That mass mobilization, we at Tsuru for Solidarity really believe that it is an important element and pathway to making a change in our government structure, to stop going down the
• 57:11
  path of authoritarianism and fascism, to reclaim democracy and the right to be
• 57:18
  who we are without stigma.
• 57:20
  Whether that means making sure you vote, whether you go through your neighborhood asking people to make sure they vote, whether it's making a poster, whether it's educating
• 57:30
  somebody that doesn't know about the issue, in so many ways to start turning the corner on what is happening today that has
• 57:40
  really stopped almost every constitutional right that we have treasured in our lifetimes.
• 57:47
  It's because we're a democratic nation that the government was able to apologize and provide redress after a horrible, horrible criminal violation of the constitutional rights
• 57:59
  when we were incarcerated.
• 58:00
  And we need to reclaim that.
• 58:02
  Never forget, never forget.
• 58:06
  Satsuki, thank you so much for being willing to be a podcast guest.
• 58:12
  And thank you for sharing your lived experience and your wisdom with us today.
• 58:17
  I just feel like it's an absolute honor and privilege for us to hear you and your story.
• 58:25
  So thank you.
• 58:26
  Thank you for the invitation and the opportunity.
• 58:29
  I really appreciate you.
• 58:31
  Thank you.
• 58:32
  And for our listeners, thank you for being with us today.
• 58:36
  And as always, remember: Wellness is a journey, not a destination.
• 58:41
  Please take good care of yourself, and we'll see you the next time.
• 58:45
  Thank you.