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PW: Going back to Sansei Legacy, though, you alluded to the things that other members of this group were sharing and saying, "This is normal," reasserting the same patterns. Can you tell me a little bit about those patterns or things, needing big groupings of things that you were learning and seeing as a group together with more specifics?

MY: Well, I think one key thing was people feeling this commonality around having this gap in our family histories, the personal histories. Because if our parents didn't talk about that period in their lives, then we did not have understanding of it. And so we would feel -- and here's the thing that I began to understand, too. This was not universal among all Sansei, but that, in a family systems perspective in terms of psychological framing, that oftentimes there may be a particular person in the family who's carrying that feeling, that maybe they had three or four siblings, and none of the rest of the family members are feeling that at all. And that's another common thing that we would discover, that we might be ones in our families who are carrying this sense of painfulness or gap in our family history, but that we might be carrying that on behalf of the whole family. Because as we would raise the question, that it would change the family dynamics and family conversations, sometimes not comfortably initially, but eventually what we learned over time was that, as we poke around the edges, then stuff begins to come out. But we had to understand. I mean, we had to have spaces to understand, too, what were the dynamics for our parents, and what were the multiple layers of why they may not have talked about things. And I think now there's been many studies that have been done that people can understand a little bit better what happens when people go through collective trauma, and then also how does it play out in a cultural way in a particular group of people so that, say, today when we talk about what's going on with Black lives and with folks in a legacy of slavery, how African Americans have transmitted the legacies of slavery in different ways, where certain conversations haven't taking place within their families and where the legacies still continue to manifest themselves, they are doing so within the African American culture. For us who were dealing with it within the Japanese American culture, which is definitely clear differences in that experience.

So kind of a process of discovering and learning, and doing it in a way where we're naming it for ourselves. So we're not asking some other person to come in and name it for us, but we were kind of taking ownership for ourselves about experiences that we've had collectively. And I think from there, then things began to open up into all kinds of other conversations. Because people would come, folks who were, say, LGBTQ identified, and saying, "I've always felt marginalized in the Japanese community and I need to talk about it," so we'd create space for that. People who were mixed race, hapa, would say, "I've always felt marginalized in the Japanese community because I'm, quote, 'not pure,'" and we would create space for that as well. So it became a place where there were multiple experiences that people were having that we were trying to have a safe, inclusive space for people to talk about different things that people were carrying.

PW: And the two support groups and this whole thing around redress, this is maybe a five year process, roughly?

MY: You mean after redress?

PW: Yeah, I don't know. I'm just trying to imagine...

MY: Well, for me personally, so the redress act was passed in '88, we started Sansei Legacy in 1990. Jill and Audrey came on board somewhere in there, and we were actively doing work for several years. For me, I had to start pulling back on that project, but particularly as others were staffing it and running with it. Because other things were going on, for me and a lot of the congregation, but I continued to support the work. I can't remember how long it continued on, but I think probably for that whole decade in the '90s at least. There was strong participation, because new people were coming to find the project at the same time. And then I would always be checking in with folks about where is it going, because we were kind of operating under the 501c3 of the church.

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