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MC: Lori, this is about the second or third time that you've described sort of a disjuncture between your parents' and grandparents' experiences in camp and how that was conveyed to you as children growing up. And I'm also thinking about sort of the disjuncture between their experiences in camp and how you were raised in Gardena, not only without very much knowledge, but also in a, a very sort of all-American sort of a way. Have you ever thought about that contradiction and what that means?

LB: Yes, I have thought about it. I look at this coming from like two difference places. One is very much a human reaction. I think generally, we talk about Posttraumatic Stress Syndrome and perhaps different reactions to traumatic incidents. And I think it's only natural to react to a situation like that by sublimating or by denying. And I think very much the community left that experience and just put it behind them as best as they could. "We need to get on with our lives, we need to establish, re-establish our communities, we need to raise our children in a way that this will never happen to them again." And I think that number one, it's a natural reaction from anybody regardless of your ethnic background, to go into somewhat of a denial. I think also, two, particular to the Japanese American community, there's a real feeling of shikata ga nai, "it just is. What will be will be. There's nothing we can do about it. We need to just go on. That's just life." And I think a lot of this sublimation comes from that. "There's nothing we can do about the fact that we were in camp now, except for getting our lives back together again and just forgetting about it. It was a terrible thing. We don't need to think about it. We don't need to talk about, and we don't need to tell our children about it because they don't need to be burdened with it." But I think at the same time that sublimation is going on, that repression has to come out in some way. Certainly as a result, I think that not only was the camp experience sublimated, but also the culture was sublimated. I think there's very much a feeling that we wanted to be as American as possible. We wanted to have our kids grow up Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. We wanted to have a nice house with two-car garages, wanted to be involved in Lions Club and you know, all of these different, very classically American dream-type of activities, and try to avoid being really, really Japanese. And although I grew up with a very strong sense of Japanese culture, I did not grow up with the language. Most of us didn't learn the language, and it wasn't spoken at home. And there was probably, I would say, much more of an emphasis on becoming more all-American rather than Japanese American. And you can really see this, you really were able to see this repression and the sublimation once the redress movement started and people started to be able to tell their stories. There was such a tremendous outpouring of emotion from the community as people felt that they could finally tell their stories. It came out in a tremendous gush, an emotional release.

AI: Well, now at this time, you had mentioned also that some of the issues, of political issues that you had increased awareness of through your Asian American Studies classes, you also, earlier you mentioned what a shock it had been to come onto campus with such a huge proportion of Caucasians. It was very different from the community you grew up in. And I'm wondering what was happening for you in regards to your sense of identity, your personal sense of identity, having grown up, as you say, more all-American than Japanese American in some ways?

LB: I think that the experience of number one, getting involved in Asian American Studies, taking Asian American Studies classes, and number (two), through those classes, getting more involved with other Japanese Americans and Asian Americans on campus certainly really gave me a much more heightened sense of my own identity as a Japanese American. We talked about identity issues, read the literature going on in the community around issues of identity in class, and so we were all able individually to look at ourselves and say, "Well, who am I, and how do I fit into all of this?" And all of that certainly made me much more aware of myself as a Japanese American woman because growing up in Gardena, I wasn't so aware of being a Japanese American woman as much as I was aware of being in this community that just had a bunch of Japanese Americans, but not in the context, not being Japanese Americans in the context of a larger society.

So certainly through the classes and through hanging out, if you were, with other Asian Americans on a college campus, I became a lot more aware that I came from a very unique, special culture that had overcome enormous adversity. And in that learning, I was able to put a lot of my experience growing up into a context. I started to understand, again, more about how Japanese Americans were discriminated against after the war, and it was hard to buy property, and so perhaps that was really the reason why Japanese Americans concentrated in Gardena. I started to understand issues of discrimination in the workplace, why Japanese Americans perhaps weren't in positions of success in corporate America or high-level government positions. And so I was able to start seeing my little experience, if you were, in Gardena, in a much broader context, and started to understand that it was not necessarily this simple, idyllic little growing up in a small town in LA, as much as it was a product of a whole history of Japanese Americans in this country.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.