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PW: The Sansei Legacy is kind of legend for me, hearing about it from other Sansei. I don't know if other congregations or other groups like that were being formed around the country. Do you know?

MY: So, Sansei Legacy convened, I convened that with a friend of mine who is an Episcopal priest, Diana Akiyama. We had met in seminary, and we had talked about this question of trauma, and we convened the Sansei Legacy project in 1990, I think it was 1990, just called Sansei together that we knew might be interested as we kind of formed a mailing list of people that might be interested to come together. And we convened in the social hall of Buena Vista, so it was not specifically church members, although church members were part of it as well. And people came together, and the very first meeting we had, we said we were creating a safe space for people to talk about how you feel about the legacy of the camp experience in your families and different things that you'd like to explore around that to create a safe and inclusive space for us to talk about whatever we bring. And it took us two hours to just go around the room for people to have introductions and to share the things that they wanted to talk about. And so we decided to continue to do that on a monthly basis. And we ended up hiring Jill Shiraki from Southern California, she was part of the Methodist church down in Southern California, I can't remember the name. West L.A. United Methodist, yeah. And I had met her at one of our Japanese caucus meetings, and she was interested in what we were doing. So she came up, we got a grant, she started working with us part time, and she really took the project to its fruition so to speak in many respects. And then Audrey Shoji was another person -- Audrey was from Central Valley, and she took the helm after Jill, I think. Jill left to go the Japanese Community Center in San Francisco. But because we were connected in the Methodist church and we had a caucus, we would share with other churches what we were doing out of Buena Vista. And I don't know if others started similar things per se, but I think I know that there was conversation about what did this mean for us to work on transgenerational trauma. And I think different pastors would take different approaches in terms of how they wanted to look at that as a tool for helping what we would call healing ministry. So I think there were times where we'd have caucus meetings, our national caucus would meet with representatives from all the churches, and we'd make some presentations about, "Here's what we're doing," and have dialogue about how you can think about how you want to use that yourself in your own congregation.

PW: You spoke to this right now, which was the need for intergenerational healing, but maybe go a little bit more into why Sansei? Not everybody thinks because they weren't in camp or they were babies in camp, I'm just kind of curious what your response to that is or your thoughts?

MY: I think I can speak from a personal standpoint, being a Sansei myself and growing up and not having very comfortable conversations about camp with my parents, or not having much conversation at all. And I think I learned about the experience in junior high when there was some discussion at school from somebody who was part of Junior JACL. And I came home and asked my parents about it, and there was, like, it wasn't like it was a comfortable conversation, and I could feel that there was something uncomfortable for them, and that stayed with me for a long time. And then I realized, too, that that was the case out in the community, that there were people not talking about this. And so when the redress movement started, I really was drawn to that, because there were people there who were being proactive about speaking about it and then organizing to address the reparative justice issue around it. But then at the same time, I recognized that in many places where Japanese Americans were, there still was not conversation about this, it wasn't prominent. So it wasn't until the hearings took place that I was floored by the number of people that came out to the hearings in San Francisco, and just that we were all there for this one particular purpose. And I think what was happening was, as I would talk to other Sansei about their feelings about it, we felt a lot of things in common around the feelings that we had. My testimony to the commission was about that emotional feeling and the psychological losses that I felt that were there implicit in the camp experience that we hadn't talked about. That's what I testified about, and others that I would meet along the way would verify that, too. And that's the conversation I had with Diana in seminary where we were feeling this similar kind of feeling that there were things we needed to unpack, and things we needed to understand or learn about this for ourselves. And I think that was the, kind of the framework for, the draw for people who also needed space to kind of talk about things. So that we could check in with each other and say, "You know, what I'm experiencing is normal." It's part of what our collective experience is, and that, "I'm not an oddball in this, but there's something to this."

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